Lightning Dash to the Rescue
I don't think I could have imagined easy-going Soarin angry before I saw it for myself, but the glare he gave Wind Rider could have brought winter. "The Crystal Mountains are too far for anypony to make it there and back before the royal garden opening!" He looked at me, clearly embarrassed at his earlier loss of faith. "Rainbow Dash, we need you to fly in Spitfire's place!"
This was not how I imagined premiering as a Wonderbolt, profiting by someone else's misfortune. Twilight had warned me so many times about being bullheaded that I could recognize my own expression as I compressed my lips and frowned. "Spitfire shouldn't have to miss this! I'm gonna get her!"
"But you'll never make it in time!"
Twilight also liked to say, "Look before you leap," and, "Stop and think". But my intuition was also powered on. Instinct insisted I could do this. Failure was not an option. "Then there's no time to lose!"
I inhaled sharply, and kicked myself into the air. Pumping my wings as if I were trying for a sonic rainboom, I leapt through the open door and into the rain scheduled for the morning of Celestia's Royal Garden Opening. Still wet from minutes ago, only the sting of water hitting my squinting eyes slowed my ascent. In a minute, I zoomed into the gray clouds and quickly rocketed into the blue sun-drenched skies above them. Cumulonimbus towers formed a canyon that rose about me, throwing enormous shadows. I pushed myself and felt the joy of flight flow into me, through my heart and lungs, and pour out from my wings. My speed increased as I beat my wings harder. I felt not exhaustion but exhilaration. I tapped flight the way Twilight tapped magic.
Soon I could see the weather front, a long line of clouds stretching for miles to the left of clear weather to the right. Surface ponies thought that Pegasi could just make and move clouds, which they could in a limited way, but to make climate and weather, one had to move warm and cold air. Putting hot and cold together made wind; some winds became stronger than others. As Ponyville's weather pony, I knew a lot about winds.
And the nomad city of Cloudsdale had a machine for that. Which meant that Cloudsdale had to be at the apex of the front.
"Ha!" I leveled myself into a downward glide toward rainbow arches and cloud coliseums.
I didn't come to a halt until I skid into Lieutenant Flight Path's office. Luckily the door was unlocked. Unfortunately, he was talking to another recruit, a lavender mare. He put up a hoof and pointed with his cleft chin to the corner. He kept talking while I stood there, adrenaline making me shake as if I were about to explode.
Even after the recruit left, the grey stallion with a close-cropped grey mane and mustache wrote notes for a half-minute before looking up from his desk. "Cadet Captain Rainbow Dash, how may I help you?"
I launched into the whole story about Wind Rider's dirty tricks that got Spitfire headed to the Crystal Mountains, finishing with, "If I can fly high enough, I can fly in the northbound jet stream. By the time I find her, I can catch the opposite side of the front and ride it south. I could make it past the Crystal Empire and back in one afternoon."
Unlike Spitfire, Flight Path didn't wear tinted glasses. His steel-gray gaze pierced me. "And to do this, you will need a high-altitude breathing potion?"
"Yes, sir."
"Soarin was right. You should have remained in Canterlot for the aerial show."
"But—"
"But this is the type of initiative that Spitfire likes to drill into her cadets." He wrote a note on a pad and ripped the sheet loose. "This sounds like a good search and rescue drill to me. Take this to the new SR assistant team leader. If she agrees, you have my permission. I think you already know her."
"Sir, yes, sir!"
When I skidded into the Search and Rescue post, my shock at finding a minty-green mare, with a yellow- and orange-striped mohawk mane, made me brake insufficiently and careen into a wall with a loud whump. "Lightning Dust?"
Her orange eyes had followed my entrance and collision, but as I fell over, she looked back to her cork board. A map of Equestria had been painted across the wall-sized thing. Isobar lines of red and blue string, with pointy flags, were pinned in curves across its surface. Cloud symbols where tacked west of the line that had a circle-C for Cloudsdale on it. She glanced at a report, then tacked on white clouds she held in her teeth. She wore a kaki uniform with a red CRC insignia (Civil Rescue Corps). She glanced at the clock, then at me as I dusted myself off. "And you want?" she asked coldly.
My face burned. This was almost certainly a mistake! Or perhaps Flight Path had remembered our spectacular flame-out during my first week at the Wonderbolts Academy, especially since he had witnessed Spitfire dressing-down Lightning Dust. I remembered seeing him escort her from the academy.
She'd apparently made a four-point landing.
Twilight had always warned me about my pride. And… I had Spitfire to think of. I launched into the entire story—
"Spitfire?" she said when I got to that part.
I finished by dipping my head into my saddlebag and spitting out Flight Path's note onto her table.
Her eyes darted back and forth and she said, "Jet stream surfing?" Then her voice rose. "A search and rescue drill?"
When I typically jumped-in half-cocked and started shouting trying to convince ponies, Rarity inevitably told me that I "needed honey to attract bees." Though Wind Rider had victimized me, he'd victimized Spitfire to do it. I would not victimize in turn to get what I needed. I took a deep breath and went down on one knee. "Please."
Lightning Dust laughed so hard and so long, I thought she might fall over. "It's been just a few seasons since that week at the academy. I was expecting you to start going on about how awesome breaking an airspeed record might be, or some such nonsense. We've both changed, I guess."
"I realize Spitfire didn't treat you well—"
Lightning Dust raised a hoof, displaying a scuffed brass shoe. "No matter. I am the best flyer in Cloudsdale. Here I get to use my skills and rescue ponies at the same time. Beats a job being a show off."
"So you will do it or you won't do it? I mean, just give me the potion—"
"It's a search and rescue drill, or nothing. Guess you didn't think to read the note?"
"You will do it?"
"One condition."
I inhaled sharply and resisted the urge to roll my eyes. "What?"
"Remember that I am the lead pony; follow my orders to the letter."
My mouth dropped open. Think about Spitfire.
She walked close enough to elbow me in the shoulder with a smile. "Seriously. Stormy Weather has trained me to run SR missions in all kinds of weather, at all altitudes. The CRC directorship made me an assistant team leader because I push myself to my limits and can push others to find theirs, without breaking them or myself. I completed my 100th mission last week and I always bring them back alive, and that means you, hot-shot weather pony. Got that? No killing yourself on my watch."
"Uh, yeah."
"Good. Where do the ice irises grow?"
I tapped the northern mountains on the map. "Only there. I went picking last summer while visiting the Crystal Empire—"
"Irrelevant. What's important is that your forecast is right about the position and direction of the jet stream." She trotted to the other wall, lifted a glass box protecting a red button, then pushed the button.
The following minutes were a confusing maelstrom of ponies, gear, potions, and instructions. About fifteen minutes after my skid into Flight Path's office, Lightning Dust and I, as well as a stallion named Carrot Greens and a yellow mare, Pinion, launched ourselves into the sky. The breathing potion tasted like mildew and quinine. I tried scraping my tongue when nopony was looking, to no avail.
The temperature rapidly dropped as we flapped as hard as we could, which kept me from sweating up the starched kaki recruit uniform issued me. The whistle around my neck banged against my chest. The cloud deck receded, except for the tallest thunderheads that massed on our left going north. To the right, wet green plains glittered. Grassland ran all the way to the Neighagra Forest. In the blued distance, I saw a vague hint of mountains. Soon we were so high, I could barely make out the tracks of the Crystal Line Railroad.
But I could see enough to realize we had entered the jet stream. The meanders of the tracks moved swiftly behind us. Even Cadance's Bullet Express was left behind as a gleam on a straightaway track. Excepting an occasional clot of turbulence that was tantamount to being struck with an invisible hoof, it was smooth sailing below thin linear cirrus ice clouds that stretched like a road through the sky above. I was glad for my tinted goggles.
Within an hour, the plains turned brown, then to patchy snow, and then to a continuous featureless white under the sun. The Crystal Mountains' snowy peaks rose precipitously ahead of us while we passed the city of the Crystal Empire on our left. A spring shower washed the crystalline buildings and would likely melt the last of the snow heaped around them.
A combination of Lightning Dust's compass work and my memory for terrain got us into the mountainous country where the ice iris grew. Pretty much as the jet stream curved toward the west, we were able to descend. Snow still weighed down the pine and hemlock. An instantly recognizable series of dew-shaped high lakes looked still frozen over, though the river descending from them had broken free. I could see the ice-cold burbling flow as it sparkled in a deceptively inviting way.
My "adventure" with Tank in the Cloudsdale weather factory, in combination with serendipitously cold air aloft, had produced the deepest snow pack in a century. It would be difficult to find the silver-blue flowers of the ice iris that might have poked through the snow. It embarrassed me that Spitfire had to deal with extra snow, too.
"Spread out, team," Lightning Dust called to the green stallion with an orange mane and to the lemon mare. "This is a drill, but follow protocol. Keep in sight. The whistle should attract Spitfire's attention; she'll think we're performing an operation in the area and feel obligated to help out. You," she turned to me, "You take the right bank of the river valley. Keep me in sight and assure you can hear my whistle. Rapid whistles mean we've found her."
"Got it!" I saluted and peeled off to the right as fast as I could dive away. Lightning dust demonstrated her whistle. It was so shrill as to be deafening.
I reached my head down, got the big frosty silver monster in my mouth, and blew for all I was worth as I streaked across the sky. As Twilight had noticed, I had eagle eyes and tracked everything below me. I now flew just a hundred feet above the trees. Perhaps that was why I didn't see Spitfire until she was shouting at me from above.
"Rainbow Dash! What are you doing here?" She roared down from the foot of the mountains to the the northeast.
We circled one another as I shouted back, "Looking for you! Wind Rider sent that bogus note. Your mother is fine!"
"Thank Celestia! And never mind, I found an injured pony!" She banked right.
I immediately began the recall whistle of short tweets until I heard an answering burst, then flapped as hard as I could to follow Spitfire, who spoke as she glided down toward a thin plume of a campfire: "I think she escaped an avalanche. I only found her because she'd made it to the bank of a high altitude lake where I spotted a carpet of blue crocus in a sea of red witch hazel; I'd thought I'd gotten lucky."
As we flew below the trees—to a sparkling snow field dotted with amazing flowers of blue and red at the edge of a cracked frozen lake—I could make out the campfire. Beside it, I saw a sprawled pale pony in a bulky brown parka with brown and white cattail fluff lining the hood.
Spitfire continued, "I made her as warm as I could and was about to fly to the Crystal Empire for help when I heard you. She's delirious. Keeps muttering about Iris and Papyrus and Gyrus. About being hurt and too curt. Can't get anything out of her except to rhyme!"
When I saw her white and black striped face, chill air condensing in front of her muzzle as she breathed, I understood why. "Zecora!" It should have occurred to me that she harvested her own herbs.
The SR team arrived less than a minute behind me. Within ten, they'd gotten warm fluids into a rather dazed Zecora, splinted a broken front leg, and gotten a sling beneath her. The sling became a net hammock as we all grabbed five of the eight lift ropes. Pegasus magic did the rest so that as we flew, she pretty much became weightless, suspended between us.
It was mid-afternoon under a partly cloudy sky when the team's whistle attracted notice ahead from the city. Since few pegasi lived there, I wasn't surprised that Princess Cadance herself was amongst the trio of medics that flew up to greet us and guide us to the the hospital hidden in a complex of red and blue crystal towers.
As doctors whisked Zecora away, the princess embraced me. "So how is my favorite element of loyalty doing today?"
I smiled at the pink alicorn. "Pretty darn good, princess."
"And being exceptionally loyal," Spitfire interjected, before genuflecting. "Princess Cadance. I'm Spitfire."
"Ah, the Wonderbolt par excellence. We are well met." Cadance looked to me. "My sister-in-law says I should thank you for the extra long ski season we enjoyed this year."
I felt my cheeks glow ruby red. Celestia had already pinned me to the wall, like a bug, when she'd overheard me confess to Scootaloo what I'd done during a visit to the Cloudsdale weather factory. I'd been volunteering most of my free time ever since at Celestia's prodding; she'd neither prosecuted me nor told anybody.
It was still embarrassing. Tank had woken up a month ago.
"And how is Twilight?"
"Same old, same old. Nose in a book. Still annoyed at not going to Griffonstone, you know."
"I do know."
"We have to fly back to Canterlot for the Royal Garden Opening."
Cadance blinked a few times and tilted her head. "I think Celestia's invitation said six o'clock."
"It is. We have a jet stream to catch. May we?"
"Indeed." She waved as Spitfire and I trotted to the doors. Lightning Dust rushed up from the emergency department and walked out with us onto the second floor balcony. The westering sun sent glare off the facets of the crystal buildings around us and the ponies that thronged the thoroughfare below. Above I saw clear skies, except for lines of cirrus stretching south that indicated the second jet stream.
Spitfire looked from me to Lightning Dust then back to me. To Lightning Dust she said, "You've become quite a professional. Don't think I didn't notice." To me, "And you, following orders snap snap snap. Impressive in it's own way. Lightning Dash might have made an unstoppable team had I been paying closer attention to my cadets and made my limits clearer."
I elbowed Dusty. "Team Rainbow Dust, perhaps."
She elbowed me back, smiling. "Perhaps." She reached into her saddlebag and presented Spitfire with a vial of vile purple liquid.
Before taking it, Spitfire said, "I mean it. I apologize to you both."
Dusty and I looked at each other. Until I had hurt my wing in the flag hunt, and even pretty much until the tornado incident that had almost killed my friends, the two of us had gotten along famously. Not many ponies pushed for excellence. All she had lacked was compassion and empathy for others. Her mistakes had landed her in a job that required both—in gluttonous servings. She apparently thrived on it. It made my feel proud to know her. Maybe I could forgive. Lessons learned and all that. "How about we catch a hay burger and a cider sometime, Dusty?"
"Sure, Dashie. Why not?" she smiled, then motioned her head back toward the hospital and her team.
"Duty calls, eh?" I raised a hoof.
She reciprocated with a hoof-bump.