First Contact
“Only one thing is certain - that is, nothing is certain. If this statement is true, it is also false.”
-Ancient Paradox
It was about mid-day, the sun was shining, a few clouds in sight, just another great day. The weather Ponies had already finished their daily work, although I could see a select few still in the sky toying with the clouds. All was calm, and my mind was like a serene paradise. But then I saw something. Something farther, much farther away was flying through the sky. It appeared to be very high in the sky, and very dark colored. As I looked harder and focused your mind on what that object could be, you pondered as the object continued its descent, yet you couldn’t even imagine what it could be. Surprisingly, as I was watching, the object suddenly jerked to the side and started to leave a trail of black smoke behind it, while a few pieces flew from the object. The object thundered through the sky and started to tilt, and then seemingly turn, to plummet through the clouds into the forest beyond the safe town I’ve started to call home, Ponyville.
Location: Planet Codename Eximius
Time: 1400 Hours
GPS: -error-
Suit Temperature 25 C
Exterior Temperature: 49 C
Oxygen Level 99%
Battery Level 99%
WARNING! HIGH EXTERIOR TEMPERATURE LEVELS!
*-EEP* *BEEP* *WARNING! HIGH-TEMPERATURE LEVELS DETECTED! * *BEEP* *BEEP*
"Guh, wha, what happened?" As my eyes slowly opened, I felt a train wreck of a headache hit home. I couldn't help but cringe in pain, but I pushed through it as my memories started to flow back to me right behind a headache. I was Petty Officer 1st class Wells. Engineer on the U.S.F.S. Bravery. I've been on the vessel and awake for 13 months now, with another 16 months of cryo-sleep. The mission of the vessel and its crew were to explore systems near the edge of United Space and report back our findings for future missions. Bravery was on its last few systems when the ship's sensors started to go crazy. There was were weird readings coming from this system and thus, the ship approached what appeared to be the origin of the interference. Everything seemed like a standard, by the books, recon that would be put in the records for anomalous activity. That was until a surge overloaded the sensor relay including some subsystems causing some damage to the main reactor. While the systems were being repaired, the Captain ordered a recon mission down to the surface of the planet to find the source of the interference and possibly shut it down. Whenever their shuttle had entered the atmosphere of the planet, all contact was lost with their mothership. That's just when things started to roll downhill. Upon re-entry, the pilot found control of the ship to be harder and harder through the atmosphere, and flew through some thick cloud cover. With no GPS or any other type of external sensor support, navigation was difficult. That's when the pilot tried to dodge a visible object and graced off it. What no one noticed was that something then got shoved into the compressor of one of the turbojets, so when the ship switched to atmospheric flight, the jet jammed causing the ship to become unstable. The G-forces started to get intense, and that’s where the rest went dark. As my memories caught up with me, I snapped back to reality.
"Thomas! Joseph! Anyone respond!" I called out. I fumbled with my harness and after some whispered cussing, I got to my feet, then I took another look around me. There was flashing red lights barely illuminating the interior of the shuttle. Temperature warnings were blaring on my screen as I looked around me to find the source. That was when I saw a small fire just to my rear coming from an exposed panel in the wall. I swung my head around looking for the fire extinguisher, to find it partly secured to the wall near the ramp at the end of the shuttle. I moved quickly and grabbed it, rapidly returning to the fire before it got any bigger. Once I finished off the small fire that was heating up the small shuttle, I turned on my exterior light to start the search for my comrades. Two of them were still in their seats, which I approached and looked at their forearms. On each forearm was a screen with data including a heart rate monitor. Thankfully both monitors showed they were just knocked out. I walked up to the front of the ship to open the cockpit door. When I did, I instantly closed my eyes with my helmet automatically tinting from the bright light. After about 5 seconds of letting my eyes adjust, I stepped into the cockpit to see the pilot and copilot, both seemingly okay. I walked over to the pilot and tried to shake the suit awake. I could see the back of his helmet which said in big, bold letters 'THOMAS'. Then the helmet jerked and started to turn towards me.
"What the hell..." I heard chatter through the comms, and the helmet turned towards me. "Wells? What happened? Please tell me this isn’t the afterlife." I couldn't help but chuckle even in a tense moment like this.
"I can't make any promises." I leaned down and started to help him up and out of his seat, "come on, we gotta get the others." Once I lifted Thomas mostly out of his seat, he pushed my arm away from him and pushed himself up straight.
"Don't worry about me. Go get the others, I'll get turtleneck here." Groggily replied Thomas as he pointed to the co-pilot. 'Turtleneck' is a nickname we gave our co-pilot, who also happened to be our medic as well. Her nickname originated from her time during off-duty, where it seemed like she always would wear turtlenecks. It also may have been the fact we caught her stumbling around the ship drinking, while somehow using her turtleneck to stash her booze. Sort of ironic that a medic would have a small drinking issue, but no one really knows her past. Plus, she doesn't talk about it very often, so many just drop the subject and move on. Thomas made a move to grab turtleneck as I nodded in response to his last comment, and turned towards the others in the rear. When I walked through the cockpit door I saw that one of the others had already woke up and was helping the other passenger.
“You two okay there? Joseph? Selene?” It took a second, but eventually, the two responded.
“Yeah, I’m okay. What about you Selene?” Jokingly asked Joe.
“Oh, fuck off mate, I’m just goddamn jolly. Fukin’ asswipe…” Snapped Selene. Even though the dark and the helmets made it almost impossible to see faces, I could tell Selene was giving Joe a death stare and probably debated about smacking him around a few times. And not in a good way. Heh. Selene started to get up after being released from her shackles and shoved Joe a little bit to make him back up.
“I feel a bit off, but I’ll be fine. I’ve survived worse.” Continued Selene. I was about to say something else when someone pushed me from behind causing me to reach out and brace myself on the wall nearby.
“Coming through, make room.” Announced Thomas as he started to push me to the side as he was supporting Turtle. She wasn’t looking too good, and it looked like she could barely walk without pain.
“Joseph, drop the ramp. Then you and Wells start hauling the gear out of the ship a decent distance in case the fuel goes up.” Thomas, who just happened to be our commanding officer during this mission if you didn’t already notice, stopped and looked back at me and Joseph to make sure we heard him, then looked at Selene.
“Selene, I need you to scan the perimeter and make sure we’re safe at the moment. We couldn’t scan the planet before arriving here, so this mission is going to be a little more cautious than usual. Which means, NO SHOOTING. I don’t want any unnecessary attention from any natives. Understood?”
“Aye, aye. Captain.” Selene said with what sounded like a big fat shit-eating grin. Thomas acted like he didn’t notice, and thus started to leave the shuttle, hauling Turtle along with him. Joe and I started to grab some of the important crates inside the shuttle and quickly carry them out. A few of the crates were thrown about from the more than a soft landing, but it seemed like nothing was damaged too much, if at all. This probably had something to do with the magnetic locks on the crates, which too often came in handy with shipping, and in this case, hard landings.
After about twenty minutes of heavy lifting, Joe and I were already feeling exhausted. Even with the support from our recon suits, (which had both a layer of lightweight composite armor along with an exoskeleton built into the suit for additional strength) carrying all the heavy crates quickly a fair distance from shuttle had become tiring. At the end of the workout, which probably was worse from the side effects from the landing, the team of five was set up about 70 meters away from the shuttle. Turtle was sitting up against a crate, while Joe and Selene were looking through the other crates. I heard a little cheer through the comm before I saw Selene taking off from the camp. There were about 29 crates forming a circle around the group, and it was starting to look like a small camp. Even after the hard landing and the issues with Turtle, I felt like this was only the start. I also had a bit of curiosity growing inside me to go out and look around. It had been some time since my last planetary reconnaissance mission. But alas, our only ride off the planet was more important compared to satisfying my thirst for knowledge and discovery.
“Hey Wells, how does she look?” Beeped in Thomas over my comm.
“Honestly? Not that bad. The turbo compression fan has seen better days, but I should be able to do some tweaking to make it stable. There won’t be as much power, but we should still have the ability to reach Mach 4 and engage the SCRAMs.” I replied as I continued to look at the engine.
“How long?” Responded Thomas in my helmet.
“Depends. I should be able to get it stable enough to hover and travel short distances subsonic within a day or so. With reaching Mach 4, that is going to take a while, and a lot of testing before I would be confident to attempt it.” I paused, thinking of my next question, “Still no contact with Bravery?” I asked. There was a long pause, then an exaggerated exhale. I already knew what he was going to say.
“There’s still interference. Something about this atmosphere is still blocking our signals. Which is strange, because we can still use our short range comms in the atmosphere just fine. That only makes our job harder by finding out what is causing this.” I could hear the change in tone from Thomas’ voice. Our jobs were going to be a lot harder without help from our ship and her massive array of sensors. A new shuttle or some new parts would also make my job a lot easier.
“Selene, how is it around the shuttle? Any uninvited guests?” Thomas blankly questioned.
“Other than some small animals strangely like the critters of old Earth, nothing with an obvious threat. I’ve finished setting up the sensors and I’m heading back now.” Replied Selene.
“Sounds like something to add to the list to check out. How’s everyone doing on oxygen?” Asked Thomas. I stopped what I was doing and lifted my left forearm into my view. In the middle of my forearm towards my wrist was a small panel with information on temperature, (both interior and exterior), oxygen, pressure, (again both interior and exterior), battery levels, a heart rate monitor, and basic suit functions including our oxygen filtration system, and communications system. My tanks were still at 97%, which probably could last even longer if I activated the Oxygen Recycling system, although that uses a lot more energy, and we haven’t set up the base power supply yet.
“I’m at 97% Thomas,” I replied to then go back to my work at checking fuel lines and control components.
“91% Boss man.” Came Selene.
“95% over here.” Responded Joe.
“Oi, boss man. I found something very interesting over here. About 20 meters away from me is some sort of neon colored equine creature. Looks fairly small, around medium dog sized.” Sent Selene.
“So? Make sure your camera is recording and we’ll save it for the logs.” Shot back Thomas. I started to slow my work, as I started to start to listen a bit more.
“There’s something else, it almost looks… Scared. I can’t really explain it, but its body language is fearful. It looks like it’s almost shaking.” I heard Selene exhale, “just pull up my feed, will you? This just feels… off.” I pulled up her feed as well, and what I saw took my breath away. Selene’s description was spot on, but that didn’t affect how surprising it was. The creature looked so similar to Old Earth Ponies, just smaller. And colored. The creature had a light purple mane, with a teal body fur color. That wasn’t even the start of the strangeness, it appeared to have a small flower in the crook of its ear in its mane. It looked like it also had… I had to blink a few times to make sure I wasn’t seeing things. It appeared that the creature had wings! It is reminding me a lot of the mythological beings know as a Pegasus in Old Earth History. The resemblance was astonishing! But the flower in its hair looked intentional, could it be possible that this was a sentient species? It wouldn’t be the first sentient species Human Kind stumbled upon in our Journey throughout our galaxy, but there was still only a small few that showed true sentience. My thoughts were interrupted by what could only be recognized as a loud, low, growl. That’s when I saw some sort of creature made from what looked like sticks shaped into a body of a wolf. Now that’s what you call ironic. It started to creep out from a bush in a low, stalking stance. The sudden appearance caused the colored ‘pony’ to jump back, and start moving backward. That’s when another one of what you could call a ‘wooden wolf’ jumped out of a bush behind the pony, growling and snarling while slowly moving closer to the pony. It only got worse from there, in the camera I saw the picture shift and Selene’s two arms rising while getting into her proper stance, with her sidearm in between her hands.
“Selene! Stand down! I repeat! Stand down!” Loudly ordered Thomas. The camera shifted again, this time showing the gun pointing toward the nearest wolf.
“SELENE! THAT IS AN ORDER! DO NOT FIRE YOUR WEAPON!” Thomas was basically screaming at Selene at this point, almost making me cringe inside my suit from the increase in volume.
A second later, Selene pulled her trigger when a quick, bright flash emitted from her firearm hitting the nearest wolf, blowing a large chunk of its upper front leg off. Time seemed to slow down as everyone seemed to freeze, including the two wolves and the pony. The wolf who was luckily not chosen came out of its stupor and snapped its head toward Selene. Its glowing green eyes stared at Selene for a second, before Selene quickly snapped to her next target. With another flash of light, she sent a round towards her new target. The bullet landed off center of the wolf’s head and blew a third of it to smithereens. The wolf flew straight to the ground and slid across the green undergrowth. Selene turned back towards her original target and sent two more rounds into it, center mass. The wolf was thrown to the ground in a heap of wood, leaving now a very frightened pony. Its ears were pinned to its head and was trying to be as small as possible, huddling into itself on the ground. I could hear Selene’s heavy breathing, the adrenaline pumping through her body. She started to lower her gun, but not put it away, as she took a step towards the pony.
“Selene! Get your ass back here before any more of those creatures show up! Move!” barked Thomas. Selene stopped, and I saw the little pony poke its head out. It glanced around before looking up at Selene.
“Goddammit, Selene! Move your ass!” Barked again Thomas. The pony seemed to regain thought, to then jump up, and flee. Within a few seconds, the pony disappeared into the thick brush.
“On the way back, boss.” I could hear the hesitation in Selene’s voice. Hell, I don’t even know what I would’ve done in the moment. Although, I honestly couldn’t wait for the ass chewing Thomas was going to give her.
A Few Some Hours Later
Location: Planet Codename Eximius
Time: 0300 Hours
GPS: -error-
Suit Temperature 20 C
Exterior Temperature: 20 C
Oxygen Level 91%
Battery Level 97%
SYSTEMS OFFLINE
HELMET DISCONNECTED
NO USER DETECTED
The camp looked much different hours later. Not only was it much darker, but also had new structures in it. All of us had worked hard to get some small buildings up, even if the buildings were simple, and were pre-built, when all connected, made a decently sized camp. There was an airlock, living quarters, a small kitchen area with a small restroom, and a room for tools and equipment. Although this had taken a lot of work, it was a luxury that was worth it. It also reduced a lot of the weight of the crates and made us all feel more secure. Everyone but Joe had their suits off and were inside, while Joe was outside keeping watch with his standard Issue ‘Mosquito’. It was an SMG, with a stock and built in foregrip. A small reflex sight sits on top and the SMG includes an integrated suppressor. Inside, Turtle was out of her suit and laying in one of the roll out beds, in just her skin suit. She woke up not long after the ‘First Contact’, but to our dismay appeared to have a slight concussion. Also, a small hangover. Thomas was in the equipment room with me, checking stock. I was at the table in the corner of the room. I was setting up the long-range radio and some small servers from the shuttle. Thomas assumed we would be here for a little while, so we moved most of the important computer equipment into our little base. I was currently trying to send out some signals to our ship, and setting it to repeat. The servers were for all data we gathered, and automatically saved our data from our suits when we came into range of the base. It also gathered the data from the sensors placed around the base, and displayed them on one of my screens. I currently had the system running scans and collecting data of the environment around us, including pressure, composition, and even gravity. Although we could tell this planet had Earth-like gravity, maybe 90% of Earth Gravity, it was routine to grab all data and save to the drives for future study. The computer was also calculating data for my repair for the shuttle, all this while I was going through some of the manuals. It was obviously late, and I was starting to feel the effects of a vigorous day. I couldn’t help but yawn.
“Hey, Thomas. Is it fine I finish up here and head to the sheets?” I looked over at Thomas as he was still typing data into a small tablet while looking through some crates. He didn’t even stop what he was doing, just to respond with a neutral tone.
“Go ahead. I’ll wake you up in a few for your shift.”
I turned back to my screen, finishing up what I was doing. Only when I saw the motion sensors start to light up. Some light activity wondering in the southeast, but what got me was the rapid movement around the west to the northeast of our camp. It was so quick, that it seemed unreal. This only made me worry more about this planet. The last thing I want to see is a creature that can just step out of the way of a Magnetically accelerated round. That would make survival here much more difficult. Thinking this, I pulled up one of the cameras in the northwest and waited. I just wanted to see… something. Another yawn struck me, and I was about to turn it over to Thomas when a bright flash appeared on the screen. I blinked my eyes and zoomed in on the location that my infrared was glowing from. I switched over to enhanced light and saw something which can now be know known as the most horrifying thing of that day. In the middle of my screen, was what appeared to be a much larger creature of what I previously identified as a ‘pony’. It appeared to be lavender in coat color and appeared to have wings and a… horn. That wasn’t even the horrifying part. As I studied this creature, it looked around, and I swear, it looked straight at me. Like it could see me through the camera… I saw the horn glow, and then I turned to Thomas.
“Thomas, I think you should see this…”