Extra-Vehicular Activity

by alamais

Fear of Failure

TOO MANY LEGS! GET AWAY!!

It's on your helmet, it has a lot of legs, and it's all squishy and gross against your faceplate, and there's something wrapping around the neck of your suit, too. You frantically try to push it off, but it won't budge.

You try to calm down—it's fine, you're safe in your suit, protected by—

You see the squishy bits start secreting some sort of fluid, and suddenly your overlay is DANGER flashing CORROSIVE SUBSTANCE red warnings REPAIR SYSTEM OVERLOAD all over.

You struggle with whatever it is, trying to push it off again, trying to get at whatever is around your neck, but it's not moving, it's just getting tighter!

FACEPLATE INTEGRITY CRITICAL. REPLACEMENT MATERIALS REQUIRED.

RIGHT THEN. You shake your head, and blindly key in a sequence on your PDA. 'Charged' flashes in one of the few empty spots in your overlay, and you slam the black bands on your fetlocks against your faceplate.

There's a bluish flash, and the grip around your head and neck loosens. You shove the limp creature away from the faceplate.

REMOVE HELMET IMMEDIATELY.

Okay, okay! You pull the thing's tail from around your neck, and quickly crack the latches on the helmet. Air rushes out, the pressure outside still low, and the melted faceplate starts to sag, so you push the helmet off, chucking it away.

You gasp for air. It's thin, and terribly cold, but you've survived on thinner air at high altitude. Of course, that was Equus air.

It's fine. You grab at one of the pockets on your suit, but then you see it. The…spider creature. It's still moving, despite having taken a full-power zap that would have killed some ponies. Its legs flick weakly, and the tail starts to move.

You glance around frantically, then gingerly grab the thing by its tail. Floating over to one of the small lockers, you fiddle with the latch until it opens, and chuck the little monster inside. You curl the tail up after it, then slam the locker door closed, latching it. Ha ha! Nice try! Rainbow Dash won't be beaten by some creepy little space spi—

Your ears quiver as you hear a noise you recognize now, even without your helmet on, even at a distance: the forward pressure door being pried open. You lightly kick off the floor, until you're hovering near the ceiling, over the lockers. You're getting a little lightheaded from the foreign atmosphere, but you shake it off, and crawl over top of the rows of lockers and cryotubes until you reach a spot, surrounded by broken lights, where you can peek over, towards the door. You can just see the forward door, through the aft. The yellow lights are still flashing, providing the only real light in the other room, apart from the flickering shadows being cast from the distant light behind the opening door.

The door is moving hesitantly, in jerks. You get the feeling whoever is opening it has plenty of strength, but isn't really sure what they're doing. It opens a crack, then a hoofwidth, then a bit more, but then it stops. You squint into the dim flashing, looking for…for what?

Its movement is slow—so slow you almost miss it at first. Predatory, like a hunting griffon. Two long digits—maybe better described as claws—reach around the door frame. The skin—if that is skin—is all greys and blacks, and shiny, looking either polished or wet, and you can't tell which. The claws are knobbly, looking like they contain bones and sinew, just without any sort of fat or other padding. The claws grip onto the frame, and then something pushes against the door, smoothly sliding it open. It crawls into the room, clinging to the wall.

Between the shadows, the flickering lights, and the darkness of the alien creature, you only perceive it in parts. Much of it is like the claws, seeming emaciated. There are ribbed regions, looking even more skeletal. In contrast, there seems to be a smooth, bulbously rounded head, though you can't see any eyes. It swivels this, and you're not sure if it's testing the air, or looking around, or hearing, or all of the above—

Then it opens its mouth, and there are so many teeth.

Your heart is beating so fast, from fear and the lack of proper air, and you instinctively push yourself away from the monster in a near panic. Your hoof slips off your perch, and slaps into a locker, making a hollow, metallic bang. The corner of your eye sees the creature's head point your way, even as you're jerking around, kicking from locker to locker, trying to put more distance between you and it.

You can hear it making its own way closer, and fast. You force yourself to slow down, your vision now edged with black streamers, and you move another few rows more silently. Finally, you spot one of the sets of larger lockers.

Glancing over your shoulder, you quickly but carefully unlatch it, and find it not empty, but with enough room for a terrified, spacesuited pony, sans helmet. You slip inside, and gently close the door.

Your breaths are coming in desperate pants now, and it feels like your heart is going to explode. Before you can try to take action, you hear the sound of crumpling metal. You bite your hoof, and slow your breaths down around it, the blackness now crawling inwards. As the sounds draw closer, you peer with narrowing tunnel vision through the slits in the door of the locker.

Finally, it's right on top of you. You feel the walls of your hiding spot shudder, and those teeth appear, as the creature's head sweeps into view. You're sure it will hear your heartbeat any moment, and you wonder if it would be better to be eaten by this thing, or just silently die from the bad air. It raises a claw, and—

A loud, frantic metallic banging sounds from the other end of the room. What the...?

The creature pivots away, and then you hear and feel it pounce off of the lockers, heading towards the new noise.

You wait a single moment, then drop your hoof, gasping desperately. You fumble at the suit pocket, and try to let training take over. A small bundle of rubber and plastic tubing falls out, and you pull it apart. Loop around the muzzle, behind the mouth. Tubes deep in the nostrils—it should hurt, but you can't feel anything at this point. The other end of the tubes run down, into the neck of the suit, and press against the forward wall. Finally, you jab almost blindly at the PDA. Emergency. Open-air breather. Commit.

The tubes pull tight down your neck as the suit absorbs the ends. Moments later, you feel a light pressure in your sinuses, and you breathe through your nose, forcing yourself to take slow, deep breaths. In.........out. In.........out. In.........out. Slowly at first, then faster, the darkness recedes. You start to feel how much your nose hurts from you jamming the tubes in, and it's a good pain.

You give yourself a moment—only one—to stabilize. You can still hear the banging at a distance. Gingerly, you open the locker, and peek out, left, right, up. Nothing. You step out. As you move to close the locker, you look inside again, and pause.

Reaching out a hoof, you grasp at a photograph, printed on thick paper. Two of the biped aliens are there, holding each other, looking at the camera. They look like they're grimacing, but maybe that's a normal smile for them. You stare at them for a long moment, then shake your head. Obviously you're not quite over almost asphyxiating. You squint at the photo, then on impulse slide it into the pocket the breather tubes came out of. You notice a small cloth bag that was under the photo, and you grab that and stuff it in your saddlebags. Another glance at the locker's contents, and you close it.

You're looking around, trying to decide what to do next, when—bang—a louder, slower banging sounds from where the original noise drew the monster away. With a wince, you—bang—look around, then up. There, on the ceiling, you notice a metal grating—an air duct? How cliched. It looks—bang—just barely big enough for one of the natives of this ship, and so fairly roomy for you. With a hop and a flick of your wings, you drift up towards the ceiling. You keep an eye on the—bang—direction of the noise, but you can't be seen from there.

You—bang—reach the grate, and wedge your pry bar into it. You close your eyes, and with a—bang—jerk, you pull the grating off, any sound from it covered up nicely. You slip into the air duct, then pull the rectangular grate in after you, setting it aside so it won't fall anywhere.

The metal of the duct is flimsy and light, so you avoid putting much force on it, using your wings to drift your way around. After a couple of turns, you find yourself closer to the noises, which have switched to the sound of claws on metal. You look down through a grate, and see the creature clawing at the same locker you had shoved the spider thingy into. Finally, it claws the latch right off, and the locker pops open, the freaky space spider jumping out at the freaky space monster. The spider grabs onto its face, and scuttles around, lightly wrapping its tail around the monster's shoulders. The monster turns, and crawls off, back towards the locker you hid in.

A shudder runs down your back as you continue down the ducts, finally making your way into a junction that you're pretty sure lies right over the airlock room. There's no additional vertical space, but it widens up a little, the duct walls seem thicker, and there's a large fan blowing air through the chamber, out both forward and aft. To one side of the fan is a vertical duct with a ladder, presumably connecting to the adjacent decks.

You sigh, and sink down on the other side of the fan. The breeze from it is warm, so the ship's life-support systems are really kicking in now. Another, full-body shudder runs through you, and you rub your face in your hooves and try to shake the terror of the last few minutes. Why was that spider thing going for your face? How could it secrete acid like that, strong enough to eat through a laminated single-crystal faceplate with a magical repair system backing it? And it's in league with that monster?

You let yourself unravel for a moment, quietly, then pull back, pushing your panic down. A few deep breaths…a few more. Okay. You'll scream and bawl like a foal for a few days when you get somewhere safe, but not now.

How are you doing physically? Self-assessment time… You think you're reasonably recovered from breathing too much alien air. Your wings are fine. You're…hungry?

You blink, and realize you don't even know how long it's been since you ate something. You ate on the Frond, right? Once or twice? The rations were awful though, so you put it off…and you didn't bring anything along, because you'd only be out here for about four hours…right? You facehoof…and feel a grimy mix of dust and grease rub off your hoof, onto your face. Ugh. You rub at the spot, and look at the shiny metal wall next to you, seeing a dark smear on your forehead.

Before you start cursing at stuff, you pull out the bag you got from the locker, and check out the contents. It's a bunch of random stuff. There's a metal tool that would probably be really neat if you had hands or claws instead of hooves. A tablet computer. A little rectangular metal thingy with some detailed etching on the outside. Another rectangle, this one with a tiny (dead) screen—a wire is plugged into it, which ends in what looks like almost like headphones, but the position…oh duh, alien ears. Some sort of radio or music player, then. Your nose wrinkles as you pull the cap off an oblong tube—it's filled with something waxy and pungent. Gross. There's a little tin, and when you pop the top of that off, it has some dark grease that doesn't seem to smell at all. A comb with two broken teeth. A book, with a soft, worn binding, and dried out, fragile pages. The faded cover shows one alien holding another as they stare into each other's eyes, and the background looks like a…sailing ship? Weird. The last item is a hat. You blink. It's…nearly identical to a typical baseball cap from back home. It even has a logo: a partial circle, open to the right, with a stylized creature that looks kinda like a bear inside.

You glare at the small pile of stuff, then look up at your 'mirror' again. Hmm… You put most of the stuff back into your saddlebags, then open the tin, and dip a hoof into the stuff inside. It's not terribly thick, and seems just a little gritty, but barely reflects any light at all. You take a closer sniff, and just get a vague smell of some sort of oil you don't recognize.

With a shrug, you smear some of it onto your face. It spreads pretty well, and doesn't leave you feeling too awful, although you doubt you'll feel the same way if you end up having to wear it until a rescue ship arrives. You spread it over your entire face, and down your neck, using your improvised mirror to try to be as thorough as possible. Finally, you tuck as much of your mane as you can together, and trap it under the baseball cap, brim tilted backwards, as is the way of your people (The Cool). You smear a little more of the grease onto the bit of your mane that's still visible between hat and suit neck.

A final perusal in the mirror confirms it: you look like a complete mess. You'll also be a heck of a lot more stealthy in dark places. You can't put the grease on your wings without seriously killing your flight control, but at least now you can look around corners without standing out so badly. You wipe the residue off on some of the shinier areas of your suit, then ponder the suit itself. A few taps of the PDA and the suit surface ripples, and fades from off-white to a brownish grey pretty similar to the goop you just smeared yourself with. Good thing a function designed to make you more visible in an emergency can do just the opposite. You're just starting to feel accomplished when your stomach growls at you.

"Well, I just have to dodge an unknown number of alien monsters, find materials to repair or replace my helmet's faceplate, find some cabling that doesn't suck, and get it back to the ship. Then I can have some…nutritious, chalky mud for dinner."

You pout, and take a long pull of orangey water from your suit. With a sigh, you pocket the last of your stuff, and then stretch a little. Onward!