[Forlorn Ascension]|[Rites of Dominion]

by Desrium

The Unforeseen Consequences

The low frequency hum that accompanied the firing of the Iopteryx's weapons ran through the ship as the multitude of small turrets and large midway cannons undoubtedly met the monster outside with an unforgiving barrage.

"I modified those guns myself! They pack a punch that is .00390 percent stronger and the cannons can double their efficiency if given time to charge up their blasts!" Phineas thought as he ran through the hallway. It was an odd thing to cross his mind since he was running for his life, but anything was preferable to delving into spiraling madness and panic. The flickering lights and crackle of electricity were constant reminders that the ship's energy reserves were frightfully finite now that the Spell-core was gone. Backup generators and battery stores were most likely being used powering the ship's defensive systems, if not destroyed by the initial strike by the space beast.

Every so often, the ship would quake and list to either side from the blows against its metal hide but the mechanical counterpart to its cosmic enemy continued to fight even though it was crippled and at a serious disadvantage. Over the comm-link Phineas heard the others on board rallying with their fellow crewmates of their designations to get to the escape pods. Phineas checked his PDA and frowned as he saw system after system go offline or was otherwise unable to work properly. The uneven distribution of power his device conveyed to him was a sign of spell reflux, in which the improper disconnection of the Spell-core was causing the active systems to rapidly gain surges of energy -well more than they can handle at once. The fact the engine and several other integral components were destroyed only made a bad situation that much worse. Evacuation of the vessel was the only way for its crew to get out of this alive.

***

"Star Commander-!?"

"I'll do my best to keep the Iopteryx's attention. You make sure everyone else gets to those pods and disembark safely," said the unicorn to Captain Novashot. Star Commander Astartex sat at the helm of the starship, her forelegs in a rubbery sleeve connecting directly to the instrumentation panel. All around her were orange projections and holograms, the one immediately in front of her was an outline of the monstrous marauder.

"But... but!" Shirley stammered. She clearly did not want to leave her station and she certainly did not want to abandon Astartex at this time of tribulation.

"No buts!" Astartex replied, grimacing when the ship took another devastating blow thereafter. The screens arranged in a half circle around her chair became a scrambled jumble of light; shooting sparks from their paneling and having bolts of electricity jump into the air.

"We both know how this is going to end, Novashot. The best thing we can do is make it end on our terms!" she said continued through clenched jaws and gritted teeth. The guns she controlled pummeled away at the Iopteryx but the beast seemed unfazed, stabbing into the hull with one of four pincers at a time.

"I'd... I'd never forgive myself if I left you here!" Shirley exclaimed suddenly, her body trembling as she fought back her tears.

"Everyone on this ship was under your care from the beginning, Captain Novashot. I was just here to watch... and now I'll do whatever it takes to make sure you and your crew make it out alive. They will need you if they are to have any hope of getting back home," Astartex said with an eerie calm, in stark contrast to her expression which ranged from unshakable determination to excruciating pain every time the guns experienced a reflux and the uninhibited power flowed directly into her. It was amazing that her heart had not stopped.

"I... I..."

"Go; while you still can."

With a somber salute and clouded eyes, Shirley Novashot turned and ran from the bridge with the orchestra of the ship's guns firing off into space sounding off no matter where she went.

***

Phineas' PDA beeped loudly. Habitually he raised his leg to look at its green screen, resorting to an awkward three-point trot as he made his way to the nearest evac-center. There the notice flashed with big, bold red letters.

HULL INTEGRITY COMPROMISED: OBSERVATION DECK. BULKHEADS INACTIVE. DECOMPRESSION IMMINENT.

He envisioned the reinforced glass cracking with a brutal impact from the Iopteryx's giant pincer, the structural weakness spreading out from a central point like a jagged web to the outer edges of the screen, where it then shattered into huge shards, flying out into space on the herald of a transient gale. He imagined the curved decks bending further with the impossible claws tearing through the metal of the hull, the on board greenery cast out in the void, freezing and shriveling.

Phineas put his leg back down and cursed under his breath. Was it tempting fate to name a starship after a nigh mythical phantom of space? He thought back to what Amethyst told him about the emaciated pony -about what they had done in the last moments of their life.

"It was unlike anything I've heard before. What it chanted was something you'd expect to hear from a Zebra's spell book... no. That's not quite right. A Zebra's spell just sounds... different; foreign. What that pony 'said' just sounded... wrong. There were sounds that weren't like vowels or consonants... sounds that a pony shouldn't be able to make."

It was a hunch and he couldn't hope to substantiate the theory, but the suspicion that the stranger might have had something to do with this disaster was unavoidable. A part of him wanted to dismiss it, for blaming misfortune on something one didn't understand was all too easy. Another part of him knew that in the vast gulf of space, the unimaginable distances between one point and another meant odds were so incredibly high that coincidences were rarer than rare. The possibility that dark magics had summoned the horrors of space however, was not something the silver stallion took too lightly.

Another alert sounded and Phineas cursed again. Of course systems were going critical! There was nothing he could do about that! He was seconds away from shutting off the alert function when he realized just what it was that had been knocked offline. An entire line of escape pods were without power. The stallion's heart sank.

"Only one survivor."

***

The thought hit him like a ton of bricks. Suddenly his interest was not getting to his own safety. No, his priority had shifted to the wellbeing of those ponies stuck in their launch chutes or unable to get into a pod and save their lives. He wasn't sure what he could do in his current state, but anything would be better than nothing. In no time at all he had found one of the secret entrances and was rushing down the maintenance passage. It was nearly pitch black inside and Phineas' PDA light was invaluable for traversing the many intersections and access points leading to various locations.

He had to pry open another door with his crowbar to get on the afflicted evac-center. There he saw the cigar shaped vehicle half-deployed, its rear end sticking out of the tube it was supposed to blast off into space through. Phineas tapped away at the buttons on his PDA, establishing a comm-link with those inside.

"Stay calm! I'll have this sorted out in a jiffy!" he told them and immediately he got to work inspecting the launch mechanism.

"What about you!?" he heard Prancer implore amidst the voices of many others. Phineas did not reply and stopped transmitting his signal.

From his short survey, he deduced the loading unit had seized up, the struts meant to guide the pod on its exit effectively locked it in place. "Not a problem. Not a problem at all," he mumbled There weren't any terminals he could take apart or put a command into that could solve the problem. He had to deal with it manually... and it was going to be both incredibly strenuous and dangerous.

Manually disabling the guiding struts meant disconnecting them from the ship's tattered power mainframe so that the spell surges did not effect them any longer. By even attempting to do such a thing, the silver stallion risked severe electrocution and death. Fate, luck or both had been on his side however, and when the last wire had been cut, he chanced taking a breath of relief. The danger had not subsided and his life was still very much in peril, but at least he hadn't gotten himself killed yet.

Phineas grunted with the strain of having to push the pod up through the launch tunnel. He had reared up and was now forcing his front hooves against the strut connecting to the pod's left side as if it were a crank. Instead of turning though, it slowly slid up the railing it would have followed had the launch system not malfunctioned. He might have been physically adept through his time at the academy, but he still had a more than difficult time pushing the pod into launch position. He felt Amadeus would have been more able... but at the same time hoped that the minotaur was already long gone from the doomed Iopteryx.

When he had pushed the pod up a considerable distance in the chute, Phineas turned and delivered an especially powerful buck to the strut, sending it up the rest of the short way it needed to go before its thruster activated. In that time, Phineas broke into a sprint and dove out of the chute, feeling the heat of of the exhaust spew forth from behind not long after he had cleared it, the purple flames scorching the metal rim. He narrowly avoided being horrifically incinerated by the last of the ship's lifelines. His goal now was to escape death by suffocation, as in his nightmare. The secondary doors to close off the launch ports, like the bulkheads, were inactive. Now that the obstruction that was the escape pod was absent, the launch deck was quickly depressurizing.

The heat disappeared and Phineas felt a wintery nip at his cheeks, just as he felt when the engine block was destroyed. The cold kiss of space... and death. They were mutually exclusive. Before that same sensation could be felt in his lungs, Phineas darted back into the maintenance tunnel and made his way for a section of the ship that was hopefully still structurally intact. His PDA was once again invaluable, the environmental scanner making the search for a habitable haven that much easier, even if it was temporary in the end.

That habitable haven came in the form of a hallway successfully blocked off by two thick bulkheads on either end of it. Phineas forced the entrance panel open, the section of the wall identical to the rest of it, the green line that ran across it disappearing into the doorway when it had been opened fully. The pony clad in black and orange stepped out and then promptly sat on his haunches with his back bracing against the wall. The last of his life would be spent here in this hallway; with him looking out of the line of windows available to him. The screen was an uninterrupted stretch of light in an absolute darkness as stars twinkled and shined. Beautiful diamonds so far away, surrounding formations of gas and debris; the presence of which seemed so... right. They appeared to be unmoving set pieces upon the expanse of space and time and they were serene because of it. A serenity broken by the ghostly tendrils which ran past the windows, their sheer girth obscuring much of the cosmic scenery. Following them were parts of the Iopteryx that had been cleaved off, entire sections which cantered weightlessly after being tossed aside by the cosmic creature. The sight mirrored that of the gas giant's rings, except the remains of the Iopteryx would not fall into the orbit of a planet and become a mystery for the next band of Starfleet explorers. In the dark space between stars, the ruined ship was destined to drift aimlessly forever.

"You did good, Startrot. Damn good. You just saved a bunch of lives in a genuine display of selflessness... maybe they'll dedicate a memorial to you back on Earth. Maybe they'll put a medal on that memorial for good measure... they wouldn't take well to losing a pony like you!" he muttered to himself with a sense of finality.

His ears flicked under the black mat of his mane. The sound of the ship's guns... the ever present hum of its spellbound beams... they were gone. Silence took the place of the sound, disturbed only by the cries of the ship's hull. Either the power finally went out... or the one at the head of the counterattack had been bested. Either way, Phineas was not the only one to put his fellow beings above himself this day.

With a twinge of shame he looked to the floors of the once-great ship. When faced with adversity he took refuge in his pride. It always was his vice in life and it wasn't going to be any different on the threshold of his demise it seemed. It was only after the fact did he think about the ponies who escaped the wreck of his ship... and the ones that probably never made it as far as the escape pods.

He thought of his rival, friend, and acquaintances. One of them had developed romantic feelings for him over the course of a week and he was completely oblivious to it all. How he wished he could have known them better... to not walk away when they wanted to talk...

He frowned. This was no time to be feeling sorry for himself! Not after all that he just lived through! He was there to see a monster tear its way into the ship! He was on the wrong end of a spacecraft's boosters! And he survived both encounters with hardly a scratch to show for it!

He picked himself up and went through his PDA's displays. There had to be another way to get out of the wreck alive. If there was anyone - pony or otherwise - who could figure it out and pull it off, it was Startrot. Phineas Startrot, Chief Engineer; last one to depart the starship Iopteryx. He racked his brain for a solution. What other means were there for departing the ship?

"The exploration shuttles!" Phineas said breathlessly in the wake of epiphany. Of course! And with the entire aft portion of the ship missing...

"I could fly one out of here through the back end... damn, is there one still functional in the holding bay?" Phineas thought out loud, pacing a short distance about the entrance to the hidden passage. He had basic flight knowledge in thanks to his extraneous studies, flying a shuttle was not a concern of his, especially not now.

"I suppose there is only one way to find out!"

With that, the silver stallion disappeared into the corridors once again, speeding through the darkness with the aid of his light, toolboxes rattling as the tools inside jumped about in their cases. As he made his way down to the lower hold, he came across a utility closet and rummaged through its contents. He put on an air mask, the blue tinted visor large enough that his entire face was visible through it and the neck piece was ironically choking with how tight it wrapped around the pony's throat. The blue and white air tank was fairly small compared to his size and strapped onto his back with a tube feeding into the mask by a mouthpiece, as per scuba gear.

The hold was going to be devoid of oxygen and very cold. While the mask and tank solved the breathing issue, he hoped his uniform would suffice in ensuring he wouldn't cease to function due to the drastic temperature differential.

***

Another door had to be pried open when he did eventually reach the lowest level of the Iopteryx. The chill was absolute, but the skin-tight uniform and the neck-flap of the mask ensured that it was not outright crippling. Phineas couldn't stand around for long however. If the cold didn't kill him, the giant monster still ripping at the ship would. He looked around frantically, seeing overturned shuttles and shuttles crushed under the debris of the ship itself. Out of ten shuttles... only three looked like they were still in working condition.

"By the glory of the princesses!" Phineas thought, making great haste to the nearest shuttle. The craft was rounded with a blunt front end. It had small lateral wings with the boosters mounted on the ends of them and one retractable vertical stabilizer for atmospheric flight. It was white and black in color with an Equestrian Starfleet insignia on either side of its hull. He entered by crawling onto it and flipping the cockpit up, then working his way into the seat as best as he could with the air tank. He had to take it off of him without disconnecting the hose, so it simply stood upright on the floor while he strapped in.

When that was taken care of, he powered the ship up, the cockpit illuminated by the lights which came to life one by one. In the silence of space, the cockpit came down and locked into place. Holographic displays and readouts appeared on the domed screen. He felt himself warming up as temperature control and other life support systems initiated. Directly behind him, there was a supply locker.

Phineas remotely disengaged the ship's floor clamps, a puff of vapor marking the release, and then he swerved the shuttle around. With twin streaks of purple, the shuttle rocketed down the length of the Iopteryx in the wrong direction, heading towards the tail end, which was a straight exit out into the unknown...