The Black Between the Stars

by Rambling Writer

13 - Into Thin Air

Stuck at the bottom of a pit. Only way out blocked by bloodthirsty aliens. This day just kept getting better and better.

“Can you stop ’em?” Applejack asked. She reached up to wipe the sweat from her forehead, but her leg bumped against her helmet.

“Okay,” breathed Trixie, “let me- No, the airlock’s on a closed system, I don’t have access. Maybe-” She fell silent.

“Lightnin’?” asked Applejack. “Y’got any ideas?”

Lightning looked up the reactor shaft, at the spinning lights that marked the airlock far, far above. “Yeah,” she said solidly. She checked to be sure her gun had a round chambered. “Fight.”

“You…” For a second, confusion overwhelmed Applejack’s terror. “You can’t be serious. There’s a dozen-”

“What? A dozen animals? I can take ’em. Just because you’re helpless doesn’t mean I’m not.”

Applejack didn’t bother being offended. “There ain’t no way you’ll make it! We oughta hide and-”

“Hide? That’s your plan, just hope they miss you?” Lightning barked out a laugh. “Go ahead and cower if you want. Me, I’m going down fighting.”

“I ain’t goin’ down at all.”

“You’re not gonna be saying that when they find you,” Lightning replied, grinning crookedly. “Best of luck.” She threw a mocking salute, then looked up the shaft. “Oh, BUUUUUuuuuugs… I’m over HEEEEErrrrre…” she singsonged.

A faint hiss, and countless shadows streamed into the pit.

Almost on reflex, Applejack bolted back towards the cargo bay. The main floor was too open; the bay, at least, only had one way in.

Or out.

She’d worry about that later.

Applejack slammed the button for the bay door. As it began slowly sliding shut, she looked up. Changelings circled over her like vultures, not descending. It wasn’t much of a reassurance, though, not with the way they stared at her with those blank eyes. “Trixie,” Applejack hissed, her leg twitching in anxiety, “are there any ways outta the cargo bay ’sides the door? Vents, fire exits, anythin’?”

“I, I don’t know,” said Trixie. “Working on it.” Her keyboard began tacking.

The changelings kept hovering and staring down. Chewing her lip, Applejack kept looking between them and the door, hopping from leg to leg. C’mon c’mon c’mon-

When the door was a foot from the floor, Applejack ripped out the wiring she’d fixed earlier and it shuddered to a halt. No way was she going to make it easy for them to open it again. She tapped the open/close button, just to be safe. Nothing. Perfect. “Lightnin’!” she yelled. “Last chance!”

But Lightning was screaming up at the changelings. “Oooo, lookit you!” she yelled. “All big and scary and staying out of shotgun range, cowards! PAAAANSIEEEES!” She glanced over her shoulder and roared at Applejack, “Well, go on, get!”

That settled that. Applejack squirmed into the crack. The edge of the door dug into her back, into her suit. For a terrified moment, she thought she was going to tear her suit open, then she was through, her legs still aching.

BANG. “I’ve got bullets and I’m not afraid to use ’em!” Lightning yelled. “Come on! Let’s get this over with!”

Okay. What was there to block the door with? Crates. Lots of crates. Not perfect, but they’d do. Easier to push than the other stuff in the room. Applejack ran over to a crate and gave it a good, hard shove. It was lighter than it looked and slid several yards across the floor, sending Applejack sprawling. She got back up and, this time ready for it, pushed until it was in front of the door. Leaving only a good dozen yards still open and exposed. She ran to the next crate.

BANG. “Ha! Gotcha!” Lightning bellowed. “Come on! Get down- Son of-” Several somethings buzzed loudly. BANG BANG BANG.

Thanks to their lightness, Applejack had soon blocked off half the gap with a line of crates. Thanks to their lightness, they could be pushed aside with effort by someone crawling through. Applejack wrapped her front legs around a mass of machinery on a pallet that looked like some kind of mechanical arm and heaved. The arm was awkwardly shaped and the metal groaned, but it was nice and heavy. She hauled it across the floor with an unearthly screech of metal-on-metal.

“Hey!” Thud. “You- get- off me!” yelled Lightning. Dull impacts sounded in the room on the other side of the door. “You’re not-”

Crunch. Applejack froze as Lightning yelped out a curse and a shotgun blast rang out. “Gaow! Take that, you son of a-”

Something shattered. Something ripped. And Lightning began screaming, a bloodcurdling sound Applejack could barely imagine. It was so loud, she could hear it through her helmet; the muffled clarity of the real world and the staticy closeness of the radio mixed together and turned Applejack’s stomach over and over and over.

Then Lightning stopped screaming.

“Oh, Celestia,” whispered Trixie.

Static. And her radio cut out.

Swallowing, Applejack gave the arm a shove, bracing it against the crates. She jiggled them; not enough give to break through. She quickly slid another crate up against the door before-

A changeling worked its head through the crack right next to the crate, glared up at Applejack, and hissed angrily. She brought her gun up. BANG. No more changeling head.

“How’s it goin’, Trixie?” Applejack asked as she kicked the body back out. “Found anythin’?”

“Still looking,” Trixie said, her voice hushed. “But I don’t think-”

“The airlock,” Blueblood said. Blueblood said. “For the supply drones. Would, would it be possible to leave through that?”

“WHAT?” yelled Applejack. “That’s insane! That thing weren’t meant to be used by ponies. I’ll be blasted out like- No. It’s crazy!” She pushed a line of crates over.

“Enough to just might work,” muttered Trixie. Applejack could almost see her face. A few keyboard tacks, and- “Yes, Trixie can get in. And- Yes, the reactor’s atmosphere is completely separated from the rest of the station.”

A shotgun, still trailing restraints where it connected to a suit, slid through the gap beneath the door and bounced across the floor. Then another one, followed by a few shells. Applejack smashed them both with her wrench. The first one broke. The second one died. “I really don’t think-”

“Applejack, it’s the only way!” said Trixie. “The reactor module is SWARMING with changelings, and even if you get out of that room, they’ll get you as you’re waiting for the airlock to open.”

A changeling leg reached beneath the door; Applejack stomped on it and it withdrew. “And then what? Y’want me to come all the way back here?”

Trixie paused a fraction of a second longer than usual. “We can- Blueblood and me’ll go to the arboretum and that balcony off of the gardens. You know the one? There’s a maintenance airlock nearby. We’ll go there, and either you can wait for us or we’ll wait for you.”

One of the lighter crates was pushed as a changeling forced its way through. Applejack introduced the changeling’s face to the head of her wrench, repeatedly and enthusiastically. Her introduction was made more vigorous by the irate resignation that came by knowing that Trixie had a point; she’d all but backed herself into a corner and the changelings were threatening to overrun her before she’d even closed the room off. “How- d’you know- about- the airlock- anyway- Blueblood?”

“I had to spend HOURS listening to Twilight go on and on about this station on the way up. She was particularly taken with the reactor and made QUITE sure I knew how it was supplied.”

“As she should be!” added Trixie. “It’s a VERY clever design. See-”

One final wrench-on-exoskeleton thud. Applejack wiped ichor off her helmet. “Fine,” she panted. “Just open it up, will ya?” She ran for the back of the bay.

“Yes! Yes, on it.” The keyboard tacked. “Although… Ah… It was meant to connect directly to the cargo bay of a drone, so… There’s no pressure-equalization protocol.”

“I- What?”

“Once we open it, it’ll start venting atmosphere,” said Trixie apologetically. “So-”

“I don’t care.” Applejack’s heart was racing too fast for her to care. She looked over her shoulder. Two more changelings were through and in hot pursuit. “Just open it. Anythin’ else I need to know?”

“Probably no radio contact. Too far away. And here… we…”

A changeling dove on Applejack from above, sending her sprawling. They smashed into a forklift and broke apart from each other. It was only by pure luck that her helmet didn’t break.

“…go.”

An immense whirring started up as the changeling staggered to its feet. A high-pitched whistling filled the room for half a moment before dropping in pitch to a deafening howl. Wind began tearing at Applejack’s suit, higher than anything she’d felt on Equus and rapidly growing. Right next to her, the changeling began sliding across the floor, inch by foot by yard, in spite of its best efforts, before getting yanked away entirely. Struggling against the wind pressing her to the forklift, Applejack peeked after it.

A massive hole yawned in the side of the room, open to space, doors sliding back. The wind was unspeakably loud, drowning out everything like a jet turbine. Lighter objects were already getting pulled out; she couldn’t see the changeling at all. Trixie was yelling something inaudible, but Applejack could take a guess at what it was.

In for a bit, in for a bridle. Gulping, she threw herself away from the forklift and depressurization blasted her out into space like an artillery shell.

---

She was falling. She was falling and she didn’t have anything to hold onto and she was falling and she was going to die and she was falling and she was falling-

-and she wasn’t going to stop falling because you’re in orbit, dummy. She’d die of old age before she stopped falling. Earth pony old age.

Not that much better, all things considered.

The inside of her helmet had a glowing HUD that was doing more harm than good. The horizon was spinning like mad, around and around and around. A number in the bottom right corner that she assumed was distance from Golden Oaks kept rapidly ticking up. A dozen different statuses and gauges all screamed for her attention from every remotely empty place. Applejack could barely even see past them all. Which might’ve been a good thing, given the way the starfield beyond them was turning over and over. She could barely even make out where Equus was, let alone Golden Oaks. Disorientating vision plus weightlessness equalled severe nausea and Applejack wretched. She was lucky her stomach was empty.

But all CelesTech uniforms had simple EVA systems, just in case an accident left somepony adrift, and all employees had to know how they worked. It boiled down to some tiny, primitive mana engines on all four legs, but was enough. Applejack pointed her front legs opposite the direction she was spinning and triggered the telepathic controls. The engines firing jolted her legs like nothing else, but she slowed. A few more bursts, and she wasn’t spinning anymore.

Which meant she got a good, long look at the void.

The emptiness was more crushing than any claustrophobia she’d ever had. All around her was black, black, black, dotted with stars. Equus, a blue and green ball at this height, was so far away; nowhere looked like home. Even Golden Oaks, so close and so large, felt small, nothing but a miniscule ship trapped in an endless, hostile sea, completely at the mercy of whatever it encountered. And it was shrinking, soon to be lost to si-

Panicking, Applejack spun around and fired her engines full blast. The numbers on her HUD designating her distance from Golden Oaks slowed, stalled, stopped, spun back. Nearly half a mile (already?) wasn’t the greatest distance, but she could get back.

A few more bursts to get her speed up, a few more after that to face the station again so she would be sure she wasn’t going to smash headlong into it. Applejack didn’t know much of what Golden Oaks looked like normally, but this… wasn’t a complete disaster. She’d half-expected some of the modules to have huge, gaping holes in them, leaking atmosphere like a sieve. Nothing like that jumped out at her, but then, she was still a ways away. Maybe she’d see more when she was closer. Unfortunately.

But she didn’t. As time stretched on and she glided closer, no obvious damage to Golden Oaks presented itself. The two rings of the solar array and the magnetosphere projectors came into focus, and there was nothing obviously wrong there. No wreckage hung alongside the station. No shredded shuttles were drifting around. And it definitely wasn’t too dark to see anything; although it was still the middle of the night, station time/Canterlot time, at this height, the sun was well over the “horizon”, illuminating Golden Oaks like a beacon and casting long, harsh sha-

Something moved.

Applejack snapped her head around to see it, but whatever it was was already gone, slipped away into the infrastructure. The brief glimpse she’d gotten of it resembled nothing so much as an octopus, a bulbous center mass with tentacles growing outward. An octopus twice the size of a car.

Her spacesuit had never felt more like a cage before now.

“Trixie?”

Silence from her radio.

“Trixie, are… are you there?”

Nothing.

Applejack swallowed and slowed her approach.

Golden Oaks grew and grew and grew. It was hard to forget just how big the station was at times; Applejack hadn’t seen it from outside in ages, never at all from this perspective. The modules were huge, the smallest the size of multiple houses, most of them several times that. They were stacked over each other and each one sticking out from the central “trunk” like branches on a tree the size of several city blocks. On another day, it would’ve been awe-inspiring.

Then the radio spluttered with static. “Tha* tr*nsmi**ion, di* I *ear tr**? Pl**se ans*er me, I *eg of *ou!”

“Hello?” Applejack answered reflexively. “Somepony there?” The signal was weak and filled with distortion and whoever was speaking had a thick accent, but she could understand it, just barely.

“Oh, **ank the Qu**n’s celes*ial *o*ers! *’ve *een out *ere f*r *ountless h*urs!” The other person coughed. And now that Applejack was paying attention, their voice sounded awfully weak. “Th* ai**oc*s, to * one, *re **ut; I *annot *ake th*m o*en up! Y*u’ll fi*d me ne*r the shu**le bay, *ut-”

The signal dissolved into a haze of indecipherable hacking and static; the few letters Applejack could hear, she didn’t understand. She risked banging her helmet a few times, but nothing changed. Swallowing, she let herself keep drifting towards the station. She was pretty sure she’d heard “shuttle bay”; as good a place to start looking as any. Plus, there were airlocks near the shuttle bay. She could use them to get back in.

If whatever was out here didn’t find her first.

Comments

[Baineblade]

Oooh... Damn now things are gettin' even better! I can't wait to see what's next!

[KathAud]

I love the combination of Trixie and Applejack; they make a great team.