Chapter Two

Unknown location

Michael came to with his face still pressed hard against the forest floor, his vision filled with nothing more than grass and dirt and insects that had grown accustomed to his presence. He was still wearing his armour, which meant he hadn't been found and stripped of everything of value, and he was still breathing which meant the atmosphere was human friendly.

He had no idea how long he had been out but guessed over an hour, perhaps more, which was far beyond the fifteen minute capacity of his suit's internal supply which was designed to kick in when the air quality grew too low, or lacked the necessary gasses for continued human survival. That puzzled Michael a little, given how rare it was to find planets with just the right mix of oxygen and nitrogen to sustain Earth-normal life, but he was mostly thankful for it.

Dying from asphyxiation wasn't much better than digging his own grave on a combat drop.

The lone ODST pushed himself up and wobbled to his knees, happy to note that both the migraine was gone as well and his combat capabilities were pretty much restored, especially when his battle rifle was back in its rightful place. Now he could focus on assessing his situation more properly and be able to fight back against any and all hostiles.

His first step was to check himself over for any kind of injury or wound, coming up clean, then visually confirm his battle rifle held the correct amount of rounds in its thirty-six round magazine, slapping it back into place when the glint of brass winked up at him.

Good.

Michael shouldered his rifle and moved in a half crouch back towards the cottage he had left, diverting fifty metres west and going from cover to cover, stopping and listening each time for any indication there were patrols in amongst the trees with him but there was nothing, just rustling leaves and the whisper of wind and the call of birds.

Bad.

Despite the very little he had seen, Michael knew that someone or something lived very close to the cottage, itself showing clear signs of recent habitation, but there was nothing at all searching the immediate area for anything out of the ordinary. Or, if they had, they weren't very good at it due to missing an unconscious ODST a scant thirty metres from the cottage. If that were the case, might they have mistaken his very unnatural drop pod as a naturally occurring phenomenon that just happened to land on their planet?

He couldn't be sure. Nobody was that stupid but anyone who didn't conduct a thorough search of the surrounding area certainly wasn't very bright.

Michael shook his head minutely and crept ever closer to the edge of the trees, slowing to a halt behind a fallen log when he heard the first sign of intelligent life, a smattering of conversation too faint to properly listen in on, provided it was even a language Michael knew or his helmet could translate. He figured there were about three or four speakers, maybe more, based on the different intonations and pacing of the mumbled words as he dropped to his stomach and began crawling forwards, inch by inch through the thicker patches of grass that littered the floor until, and to his shock, the conversation became audible and understandable and without his helmet's translation suite kicking in to offer an oddly monotone rendition of whatever language it was he was listening to.

'Any idea, Twi?' a drawling voice asked, drifting through the gnarled trees to reach the lone trooper who stopped and listened. It was feminine, definitely, and in possession of a southern twang that made Michael think of the plantations of old in America's southern regions during the early years.

Why his mind had brought up that image, he didn't know. It just had.

'Not yet, Applejack,' a second voice said. This one was more refined, or at least didn't have a drawl that didn't make the letter I sound like a drawn out Y, with a mixture of curiosity and uncertainty as they no doubt assessed the situation that was the crashed HEV in the small cottage. Why else would they be out here? 'It's clearly artificial, not natural, and there's space inside for something to fit inside it, so it's some form of transport for whoever created it, but beyond that? I've no idea.'

'It's a pretty cool idea for a transport thing,' a third voice put forward, exuberance and enthusiasm for the unusual situation readily apparent alongside what Michael could only classify as self-confidence on a massive scale, which made him frown. He wasn't particularly a fan of braggarts and egotists. If you were good at something, great. If you made a massive deal about it, bad. 'Falling from the sky in a ball of fire and crashing into the ground like that? That'd be so cool to do!'

'Unless your house is in the way,' a fourth person muttered, so quietly in fact Michael was sure he was imagining things. 'Then it's not so cool, is it?'

'Sorry, Fluttershy. I didn't mean-'

'If it's supposed to be transport for something, then where's the person who sits inside it?' another asked, abruptly cutting in either on purpose or without realising it, their accent possessing an air of sophistication that sounded straight out of a World War Two movie, all prim and proper, though Michael fixated on the fact he had yet to hear a male voice. Every single one so far was female.

'Not here,' Twi said. 'Obviously, but they can't have gotten too far, can they? It's only been an hour since it came down, and we didn't see any tracks leading away from the cottage, so whoever, or whatever, walked away.'

'Unless they can fly,' a sixth voice said. Where the boastful one sounded enthusiastic, this one verged on hyperactivity. Michael could practically sense the energy being given off by the speaker when the talked, imaging a person hopping from foot to foot or twitching with a nervous kind of energy, and figured they must be on some sort of amphetamine.

'If they can fly, why would they need a vehicle to get down here?' Twi shot back.

'Why would they need to crash a pod into the ground in the first place?' World War Two asked. 'So barbaric, and unsafe.'

'Who knows? Applejack said. 'Whatever came down in the pod, it ain't here now. Ah reckon we should be worrying less about how it got here and more on why it's arrived, and where it is.'

'You don't think it's in there, do you?' the braggart said, a hint of fear in her voice as she pointed to some unknown location, probably the forest given it was the only major geographical feature around. All Michael had seen in the opposite direction was rolling hills and plains, somewhere unsuitable for hiding out in.

'If it is, let's hope it can look after itself,' Twi said.

There was the same trill of trepidation in her voice as the braggart's, like the forest was regarded as so dangerous a place that the mere mention of it was enough to instil fear in a person. It made Michael frown and think, glancing up at the trees surrounding him and trying to gauge the atmosphere.

Sure, the trees were twisted and gnarled and draped in vines but they weren't scary. Wraiths and Elites were scary, especially when they were charging at you and spewing bolts of superheated plasma, but not trees, unless it wasn't the flora that gave the speakers pause but the fauna. Animals had a scary factor all to themselves, either due to a lumbering size or by way of a ferocious savagery that caused them to obliterate everything in their path, or die trying.

That gave Michael pause, enough of one to cast his eye across the terrain again in search of a potentially hostile creature that might want to do him harm but saw nothing, just swaying trees and shafts of sunlight breaking through the canopy overhead.

He shook his head and focused back on the direction of the voices, resuming his slow and methodical crawling through the undergrowth, only now with an uneasy feeling in the back of his head at the idea of some animal attacking him. He might have been a veteran ODST but that didn't mean he was infallible. This forest was some predator's home turf, a place it had grown up in and adapted to. It could be camouflaged and able to swing from branch to branch without making a single sound, or disguise itself as some shrubbery and be lying in wait for any hapless meal that came its way.

Not me, Michael thought. I'm not like most other things in this forest.

His grip on the battle rifle increased a little but he forced himself to stay calm, to think logically rather than emotionally, and banished the uneasy feeling to a dark corner of his mind.

'What are we going to do with the pod, Twilight?' World War Two asked as he edged closer. 'Surely, we can't leave it there.'

'No, we can't,' Twi said. 'Once I'm sure it's safe to do so, I'll remove it and take it back to my lab.' There was a sound Michael could only describe as two halves of a coconut being banged together several times, then, 'Who knows what I can learn from it! The metallurgy alone might help us create more heat resistant materials, and the overall design could revolutionise cart safety standards.'

'Sure, Twilight,' the braggart said. 'Because something that fell from the sky in a ball of fire was destined to make our carts safer.'

'There were the first two things that popped into my head, Rainbow Dash,' Twi said. 'I know we can learn so much more from this than that, but until I start taking it apart I won't know.' She sighed. 'If only the creature that came down in it was here to talk to us, we could learn even more.'

'Or we could be its first victims,' Applejack muttered darkly. 'We still don't know why it came here, or why it ain't sticking around its pod. It might not be as friendly as us.'

A pregnant pause descended over everyone at that, lasting long enough that Michael made it to the edge of the forest with nothing but the sounds of the trees and insects to fill his ears but when he finally made it, when he finally laid eyes on the six women who had been talking, he stopped hearing everything else.

Working on the principle he could understand them and that he could breathe the atmosphere without keeling over dead, Michael assumed he was on some backwater colony somewhere that the UNSC had lost touch with, long enough in fact that the colonists had forgotten about ODSTs and their chosen method of entry, and some terrible catastrophe had occurred which forced technology to take several steps backwards if carts were in use.

He did not expect to see horses.

Well, ponies to be technically accurate given their sizes but for the moment, all Michael was able to focus his mind on was the fact he could understand these six creatures when he shouldn't have been able to. The chances these creatures/aliens/ponies had developed a language completely identical to English were so remote that it was more likely he could breathe in space with no suit on. It just couldn't happen.

Yet here it is, Michael thought. These six alien ponies are speaking English.

It wasn't possible, but it was happening.

This kept whirling around in his head, drowning out all other conscious thoughts that should have been occupying his mind like whether or not he should initiate contact with them or fall back and assess and evaluate, or draw them off somehow so he could scavenge his supplies from his crash drop pod.

It was so all encompassing that Michael failed to notice when a few globs of saliva dripped down from above, landing in the grass around him with soft whumps, finally looking up when a few strands landed on the scope of his battle rifle and kicked the trained ODST in him back into gear. He looked straight up into the branches above, not in the slow motion he should have used to avoid attracting undue attention but a sudden and instant movement, oblivious to the fact he was on the boundary between visible and invisible and any rapid motions on his part wouldn't be hidden by shadows and foliage.

What he wasn't oblivious to was a mass of brown fur hanging above him, a row of sharp and yellowed teeth visible in a gaping maw drawn back in a snarl, beady black eyes glaring down at the armoured interloper staring back with an impassive silver face. It looked like a baboon, only smaller and more dangerous as a result of the compression.

Whatever it was, it did not look friendly and it certainly did not look harmless.

Michael weighed his options up, wincing when he did.

He had no idea where he was, how he had gotten here or whether the local natives were friendly. Training and instinct told him to keep to the shadows to observe what he could and make an informed decision on what to do next, requiring him to avoid detection from these six impossible ponies, which would call for him to slip back into the forest as silently as he had crawled out of it.

The only problem was the mini baboon was getting ready to pounce judging by the tensing of its legs and fixation of its stare, and the damn thing was no doubt going to holler and scream when it did which would draw the attention of the nearby locals, alerting them to his presence before he was ready for them to know it.

He had no way of taking the mini baboon out silently before it could jump, his battle rifle and pistol both lacking a suppressor and even if they had one, they didn't entirely silence the gunshot, just quietened it down enough so that people from a mile away could hear it. The six ponies would hear it, come over to investigate and find a single ODST lying on his back in the grass.

The only truly silent weapon Michael had was his knife but that was a close range tool, useful only when the opponent was within arm's reach, and there was no guarantee the blade would find a vital location instantly enough to kill the beast quickly, and he still had to contend with it screaming as it jumped down at him.

One option was to just let it jump down and claw at him, hoping against hope his armour could protect him and that the six ponies would flee in terror at its primal screeching, giving him a chance to kill the mini baboon and run deeper into the forest unnoticed but only a small one. Hell, the six ponies could be professional baboon killers for all he knew, springing into action upon the mere sound of one.

No matter which course he took, no small amount of noise would be made and his position would be compromised, so Michael did what every Helljumper did when every path led to a fight: he jumped feet first into it.

He flicked his battle rifle into full auto and rolled onto his back, pointing the muzzle straight up at the mini baboon that jumped down when he moved, howling like a monster caught in a trap with its fangs bared and its claws out, a furry engine of destruction driven by primal instinct calling for it to drive out the intruder in its territory, but Michael was his own force of destruction.

The moment his rifle was aimed squarely at the animal his trigger finger was off, pulling down tight around the curved piece of metal that told the weapon it was time to fire and made it belch fire and spit lead, expending a third of a magazine before the beast slammed into him. Adrenaline flooded his system and ramped his senses up to eleven, reducing everything to a high speed, slow motion display where training and reflex took over as the mini baboon flailed on top of him, either scrabbling for purchase on his armour or recovering from the multitude of wounds it had suffered.

Whatever the reason, Michael threw it off and rolled to his feet, battle rifle switched back to burst fire, backpedalling as fast as he could into the open fields and freedom of movement, pumping burst after burst into the mini baboon every time he saw it twitch or make a move to get up until the bolt on his weapon locked open, signalling the magazine was empty, and the creature fell still.

Heart hammering away in his chest at a thousand beats a minute and pounding in his ears, Michael dropped the empty magazine and slipped a fresh one into place as he finally came to a stop, rifle still pointed at the now very dead mini baboon, a mess of red and tattered flesh lying inert on the forest floor, turning on his heel at the sound of a shocked gasp.

The six ponies that had come to investigate his pod were standing aghast, mouths hanging open as they looked upon the faceless black clad figure, spattered with mud and blood and fur, who held a weapon breathing smoke and roared with thunder, and an unnatural silence fell over everyone and everything.

Then, as one, the ponies fled.