War is Boring

by totallynotabrony

Chapter 3

In the Air Force, everything is well organized and well run. Everypony, to include both pilots and mechanics, is groomed to meet high standards for knowledge and professionalism. The aircraft are top-notch. The facilities are excellent. The maintenance guys are the brightest and the best trained. You always know what to expect and you'll be given the training and resources you need to meet those expectations. You will never be put in a situation over your head. Over a long career, you will be home for most important family events. Your Mom would want you to be an Air Force pilot and so would your spouse.

For Naval Aviators, you have to share space and resources with salty sailors. Nothing is ever the same anywhere you go. Your squadron is your home, and it may be great, average, or awful, sometimes simultaneously. You will spend months preparing for deployment and even longer actually doing it. The quality of the aircraft varies directly with the availability of parts and mechanics. Said parts are hard to get in the middle of the ocean. Said mechanics vary from terrific to the troubled kid the judge made join the service. No matter if you’re one of them or an elite pilot with a Top Gun patch, you’ll probably have to get your hooves dirty. The quality of your training will vary and sometimes you will be in over your head, even as a pegasus. You will miss many important family events due to being stuck on a boat. You will fly in very bad weather and at night, and you will be scared many times.

But hey, there’s something about summer whites and wings of gold that make the hottest mares in the bar want to meet a Naval Aviator.

And then my alarm clock wakes me up. I’m lying in my tiny bunk. Above my head, I can hear deck ponies dragging around chains and towing jets back and forth while somepony cycles the catapults for practice. Funny how reality can seem more surreal than anything my mind could dream up.

I grumble as I get out of bed, but at least I’m not alone. Rainbow and I are both on this early morning flight.

We go through the morning motions together, cleaning up, dressing, surveying the breakfast offerings before deciding to go hungry, heading to the ready room, and getting coffee. The first sip opens my eyes and the entire world seems to get more vivid. Maybe it’s the heart palpitations.

The mission this morning is check flights for our jets that broke yesterday. Incredibly, the mechanics have already managed to patch up anything that went wrong the day before and been have presented us with two perfect aircraft. Or so they claim. It’s up to Rainbow and me this morning to take our jets for a spin and find out if that’s actually true. If it’s not, we could die. I decide to have another cup of coffee.

A check flight, aside from the “testing to make sure the plane won’t kill you” aspect, is a pretty good deal. There’s no need for a boring intel brief and you’re basically given about an hour to fly around and put the jet through its paces.

I can practically hear Rainbow’s hooves vibrating across the deck with excitement as we gear up and make our way to the flight deck. To be fair, I’m excited, too. It’s not every day you get to burn gas and goof off with your best friend.

“So you think I'm gonna make it off the deck this time?” Rainbow asks.

“I’m more concerned if I’m going to make it off the deck,” I reply.

"Well, if I do make it off the runway and my jet doesn't fall apart, I'm gonna push this baby and see just what she's got. Mechanics said they did a complete overhaul on the engines. Something about an upgrade for the afterburner system. I can’t wait to see how she handles now!”

I grin. If that’s true, it’ll mean her jet is almost as good as mine. Of course, she’ll never admit that.

We strap in and spin up the engines. I don’t notice anything out of the ordinary with the jet, and you can be positive that I’m paying attention. They hook us up and fire us off the front of the ship, Rainbow a second ahead of me. The cat shot is as exhilarating as always.

“Monochrome one-one,” Rainbow says as we form up.

“Monochrome one-two,” I reply.

We do a FOD check. I have a moment of panic, but then relax as I remember that I’ve been watching Rainbow closely since the day before. Sure enough, I don’t discover any unexpected presents left in my cockpit.

Oh, but I still owe Rainbow for that. I’m already trailing her after the staggered launch. I turn on my radar and lock her up. She instantly knows the game is on and is more than willing to play.

She rolls her jet and breaks off in a different direction. I pull the stick hard to follow her. We have to be a little careful, don’t want to overstress the airframe or run out of altitude, but most fighters are built to take more g-forces than most pegasi.

Of course, I’m not most pegasi. Neither is Rainbow. If there wasn’t a g-limiter, we’d definitely break the jets before we’d admit defeat in a mock dogfight.

“That all you got?” Rainbow calls over the radio.

“The fun is in the pursuit. And you haven’t managed to ditch me yet.” My last few words came out grunting, due to g-load.

“What if I don't wanna ditch you?” Rainbow replies in similar grunts. “Maybe I want you to chase me down and take me by force... If you want it, all ya gotta do is lock-on!"

“Oh, I will... surrender your booty and prepare to be boarded!” I radio.

“Not a chance, foul air-pirate!” she laughs.

Pirate actually wasn’t what I was going for. Everypony is after Rainbow’s plot. She knows that, but it might surprise her to discover just how inclusive “everypony” is. Like, the whole ship. Laundry is probably spreading rumors about how her flight suits fit her.

“Ha, you’ll be eating your words once I come inside!”

I hear Rainbow snickering over the radio before she responds, “Only if you can manage to get a clean shot at my plot!” She kicks in the afterburners and makes some distance before peeling off and corkscrewing away, leaving a nice double helix-looking contrail in her wake.

That engine upgrade may be better than I had anticipated, but I’m not gonna miss the opportunity to sink my rocket in Rainbow’s plot when I get the chance. I punch the throttle and feel my jet surge forward, the g-force hitting hard as I make a hairpin turn to follow Rainbow.

The dogfight goes on. We trade a few more insults of incredibly poor taste. It’s probably good that neither of us have actual weapons, lest we get overzealous. We duck and dive, pushing the equipment to its limits in a roar of afterburners and wailing lock tones. I win, of course.

Before we know it, we’re both low on fuel and it’s time to land. We dirty up, popping flaps, landing gear, and tailhooks. We both do a careful visual inspection of each other’s jets, just to make sure everything is working and nothing is leaking too badly.

Landing is much easier than the day before. I sneak into the pattern before Rainbow and go first. After catching the wires and coming to a complete stop, I lift the tailhook and fold the wings, turning out of the landing area to make room for Rainbow, who is a minute behind me.

Taxiing to where the deck ponies point me, I shut down the engines while they chock the wheels and start stringing tiedown chains. I’m sweaty as I climb out of the jet, but it’s a good kind of sweat, like after a workout.

Rainbow parks beside me and climbs out. The two of us walk back across the deck together. The jets are fine, the weather is great, and we’ve just had some fun. Lunch is next, and maybe it’ll actually be something edible. The day is definitely looking up.

After getting out of our flight gear, we head for the wardroom. We’re supposed to debrief after every flight, but nopony said we couldn’t do it over a meal.

The salad looks somewhat edible. I snag a plate. Rainbow always likes to smother hers in dressing, so she grabs a bowl instead. We pile the salad onto our respective dishes and take a survey of the room. We find an empty table and sit.

“Okay, mission debrief,” I say.

“Consider yourself debriefed,” Rainbow replies with a wink.

I wish. I grin. “You too.”

She looks around the room and returns my grin with a mischievous smirk of her own, then leans in conspiratorially and whispers, “Better save that part for later… We don’t want everypony in the wardroom getting all hot and bothered.”

We share a laugh, then decide to chow down on our heaping plates before the greens wilt.

“You know, the best part about these salads is that awesome, vinegary salad oil stuff.”

Rainbow has a habit of saying what she was thinking. She said that nearly every meal. She must really like the stuff.

Rainbow picks up the bottle of salad oil and pours it on her plate. It comes out black and thick. “What the buck…?”

She leans forward and sniffs it. “This is motor oil!”

My eyes go wide. “Then what did they put in the engines?”

---

---

“Really? And they say you’re supposed to be the smart one, LD. Obviously, they didn’t put salad oil in our jets. What they did do is slip us a bottle of motor oil, instead of the usual awesomeness, the bastards!”

I stand up and glare at the tainted remnants of the meal I was so looking forward to. I was having such a good day, too, what with the practice dogfight, which I won, of course.

But this, to borrow an old chestnut, was the worst possible thing. “This. Means. War. Nopony messes with my food and gets away with it!”

“What are we going to do about it? It’s not like we know exactly who was responsible.”

“Then that’s the first step, we need to find out who’s involved. This was no accident, somepony doesn’t like us. We need to do some recon, the salad tossers and the lube shooters are suspect. You can’t get used motor oil without going to the lubricant storage area, and you can’t get there without having a key… Which means this must be some sort of horrible collaboration!”

Lightning Dust picks up the bottle of motor oil and idly swirls it around. She has a look of deep thoughtfulness on her face, probably still trying to wrap her head around the whole scenario. “Why though… Why would the grease gobbers and the galley crew be out to get us? What did we do to deserve this? Not to mention, the mechanics… that is, if the incidents are even related. Though, if they were really trying to take us out, why wouldn’t they use something a little more subtle than motor oil?”

“Hmm, maybe somepony is trying to send us a message. Maybe they were trying to give us a clue, who would know about the mechanics’ activity better than the grease police?”

“You’d think they could come up with a more subtle way of communication. I mean, putting motor oil in a salad dressing bottle is not a very good way to say anything besides ‘buck off’.”

“Maybe, maybe not… There’s only one way to find out, we’ve gotta sneak in and gather intel.”

“Rainbow, how do you plan on sneaking anywhere? You’ve got the single most distinctive mane and tail in all of Equestria, and I’m damn certain that everypony on the ship would recognize your flank as soon as they saw it.”

Dammit, she has a point. Maybe posing for Fliers Illustrated: Flight-Suit Edition wasn’t such a good idea after all.

“You’re not exactly spy material yourself, LD. I imagine there are just as many ponies on this ship that would recognize you as me, we are kinda famous, after all.”

“Ha, more like infamous.”

I sit down at the table and motion for LD to get closer so nopony can overhear what I’m about to say. I lean in and whisper in her ear, “We gotta get disguises, something that covers our flanks and our wings.”

She looks at me with a raised eyebrow. “You wanna do what now? Are you serious? How do we cover our wings up without anypony noticing? I can’t think of any way we could do that without sticking out like a broken pinion.”

“How else are we gonna keep our cover?” I say. “There’s no way a couple of sexy pegasisters such as ourselves would be able to sneak in unnoticed, at least, not if we look like sexy pegasi.”

“So, what do you propose? I can’t really think of anything that wouldn’t attract unnecessary attention. We can’t wear anything that a normal lube squid wouldn’t wear below deck. Besides, I know you hate having your wings bound just as much as me. Not to mention, we’d have to be breaking at least a few rules. Are you sure you wanna risk it?”

“It’s the only way to find out what’s really going on here. What if one of the oil checkers actually was trying to tell us something?”

“Or what if they’re in on it, and this is all a plan to get us in so much trouble that we won’t be able to fly anymore? Maybe, since they failed at killing us, they’re trying to make us take ourselves out of the game by doing something stupid. It’s seeming like a pretty brilliant plan so far.”

Admittedly, I hadn’t thought of that at all. I suppose it’s easy to get caught up in the whole scenario.

“Well, we’ll have to do a bit of looking around to see what we can find…”

I take a good look around the room, partly to see if anyone looks like they are paying too much attention to us, and partly to see what all the ponies around me we were wearing. Admittedly, I’ve never really paid attention to what all the other ponies wear. I blame walking… if I could fly in the halls, I’d see everything. Just saying.

Mostly what I see is a bunch of salty, grumpy looking mudponies wearing blue jumpsuits. Hmm...

“LD, look around you. what do you see?”

She takes a big mouthfull of salad and looks around the room. After chewing her food thoughtfully, she replies in classic LD style, “Grumpy sailors…” then takes another bite. “And really bad food.”

I roll my eyes at her, “Okay smartflank, that’s not what I meant. Look at what most of them are wearing. Jumpsuits, blue jumpsuits.”

She looks around and takes a survey of the room. “Oh. I see. That could work. That takes care of the flank and wings, but we’ve still got to do something about disguising our mane and tail.”

“Yeah… that’s gonna be challenging, to say the least. Think we could use some type of food coloring or something? Whatever it is, we need to be able to wash it off without a trace, if anypony saw us with crazy hair we’d look suspicious.”

“Well, what do you propose?

“The only place that we could… uh, borrow a uniform without attracting attention is the laundry bay. We can snag a couple of blue jumpsuits from there and maybe look for some kind of dye or something we can wash out.”

“I don’t think dye is gonna wash out, Rainbow. And I don’t know what we’ll have to use to cover your mane, it’s not gonna be easy to hide all that awesomeness. Whatever we get, it’ll have to be water soluble, otherwise we’re gonna have problems.”

“I guess we can keep an eye out for anything like that while we’re in the laundry bay.”

“So we’re actually doing this, aren’t we?”

“Eeyup.”

Comments

[Seether00]

Maybe everyone hates them

[Samey90]

the opportunity to sink my rocket in Rainbow’s plot when I get the chance.

That sounds dirtier than it should

[Anonymous Assassin]

5897578
I'm certain it sounded exactly as it was meant to...

[Samey90]

5920425
Yeah. After all, armies in general are full of big boys who like phallic symbols...

[AJ Aficionado]

“Then that’s the first step, we need to find out who’s involved. This was no accident, somepony doesn’t like us. We need to do some recon, the salad tossers and the lube shooters are suspect.

Pffft! Hehehehehehe...

This is an underrated fic. I'm sure the reason it never got big was the esoteric jet-posting angle and the flat, deadpan it's delivered in, but it's all perfect for the setting. Liked and faved.