Chapter 2: Investigate Life Form
"Secondary Load Sharing Unit is... three to four cells are gone." The ship's comm carried Applejack's voice up to the bridge from C deck, where she and her partner was looking over the damage the Nomastromo had taken while landing.
On the bridge, Rainbow Dash sat at her station resting her head against her hoof, wearily listening to Applejack's report. The other ponies there were gathered closely around her, standing in glow of the emergency lighting since the primary lights had yet to come back up.
"Is that it?" Rainbow Dash complained into the comm.
"Now hold on... uh..." Applejack's voice came through, blurred slightly with static. "I haven't even told ya about the PRIMARY Load Sharing Unit yet."
"And?" the captain heaved.
After a short delay, the reserved response came through: "Yeah... it's pretty much bucked."
"Great," Rainbow Dash moaned. She picked up her head and rubbed her eyes in frustration.
Applejack continued, "We can't fix it out here, anyway. We need to reroute a couple of these ducts. Wouldn't you say, Derpy?"
"Drydock time," Rarity assessed, sounding bothered.
Down on the engineering level, Derpy and Applejack overheard her comment. Unlike the bridge ponies, the engineers only turned their comm on when they actually wanted to speak to the others. Leaving it off otherwise afforded them the opportunity to, mostly, deride their shipmates without being overheard.
Derpy muttered to herself, annoyed, saying, "Drydock... telling ME to drydock... as if I didn't know..." She turned to Applejack. "Are we going to have to drydock?"
The chief engineer clicked her tongue. She hated to give the bridge crew the satisfaction, but Rarity's conclusion was right. Flicking on the comm, Applejack said into it, "Look, we couldn't fix it out here anyway. We gotta reroute all these ducts and, in order to do that, we're gonna hafta drydock." She switched off the comm and shook her head at Derpy.
A sigh came through the speakers and they heard Rainbow Dash's voice. "Anything else?" she asked.
Applejack toggled the comm unit on again. "Some fragments caked up and we've got to clean it all out and repressurize." She snapped the comm off.
"Cake?" Pinkie Pie's delighted voice clearly rang through the comm. "Can I have som-?"
Her voice stopped abruptly and there were several pops and crackles which came through, along with the brief sounds of a scuffle. Suddenly, Rainbow Dash was back on the line. "How long before we're functional?" she asked.
"Oh, the nerve..." Applejack said bitterly.
"Seventeen hours, tell them," Derpy commented.
Switching on the comm for a quick moment, Applejack said, "At least twenty-five hours."
"Oh, yeah..." Derpy realized, "Forgot to include the lunch."
A few more odd, struggling sounds were heard through the comm, but the only thing they caught clearly was from Pinkie Pie. "Feel free to get started, but I'll be right down!" she promised.
"What in Sam Hill is she coming down here for?" Applejack groused with a scowl on her face.
"She better stay away from our cake, I'll tell you that," Derpy replied.
The lights had finally returned to normal on the bridge after a quick fix to a blown power fuse. Rarity, Fluttershy, and Twilight sat about the area, waiting while a response signal was broadcasted in the direction they were picking up the original transmission from.
Rainbow Dash entered, asking them, "Any response yet?"
"No, absolutely nothing," Twilight reported. "Nothing except the same transmission every twelve seconds. All the other channels are dead."
The captain walked about the bridge slowly, looking at the monitors and thinking to herself. Stopping suddenly near the center, she turned to the navigator. "Fluttershy, let's hear that transmission again."
Fluttershy corrected her slouched posture and fiddled with the controls at her station. With the press of a few keys, she began pumping the mysterious transmission in through the bridge speakers.
It was very faint and broken at first, but it cleared up rapidly as the pegasus homed in on the signal. The power noise started spilling onto the bridge with clarity, thumping and beating with overlapping and clamorous, if repetitive, melodies. It was an unrestrained assault on the ears. Funnily enough, if a pony closed their eyes and listened hard, they could almost mistake it for some kind of hardcore remix of a theme tune to a foal's cartoon show.
"Kick up the bass," Rainbow Dash ordered. Swiftly Fluttershy obeyed, cranking the bass knob several clicks up. The loose articles on the bridge began to bounce with the beat and, with the sheer power behind the vibrations that were charging through, even a deaf pony would be able to hear the music. Rainbow Dash nodded her head along with the rhythm, but it only took a few seconds before she had a hoof in the air and was banging her head as far as her neck would allow.
With her hooves stuffed into her ears, Rarity tiredly moaned, "Alright! That's enough!" Fluttershy respected the request and shut of the transmission, bringing sweet silence back to the room.
During the whole scenario, Twilight hadn't batted an eye. Ever since they landed, she had been engrossed in looking over data at her station, trying to figure things out. She pressed a switch near her which turned on a large array of floodlights around the ship, illuminating their immediate area as much as the stormy conditions on the planetoid would allow. Several monitors at her station tuned to cameras which pointed out from the ship. "Take a look at this," she invited the others.
Rarity and Rainbow Dash ambled to her station and leaned over her shoulders, observing everything on her displays. They could see that they were caught in the middle of an aggressive storm, with howling winds dragging rock fragments across the surface and pelting the hull of the ship. Visibility was barely three or four meters. Most of the light the Nomastromo shot out was bounced back by the thick, gusty fog.
"We can't go anywhere in this," Rarity said.
"Well, Mother says the sun's coming up in twenty minutes," Twilight informed her.
Rainbow Dash shrugged, unsure if that would even make any difference, and kept looking over Twilight's various displays. "How far are we from the source of transmission?" she asked her magic officer.
Putting a hoof up to one of her readouts, Twilight answered, "It's northeast. Just under 2000 meters."
"Walking distance?" Rarity wondered.
Rainbow Dash looked at Rarity with some amusement, a bit surprised that she even remotely seemed to be considering hiking it to the source. Still... if they didn't get a response to their message then they were going to have to go and check it out anyway... She turned back to Twilight and asked, "Can you give me an atmospheric?"
"Yes," Twilight replied, immediately setting about punching keys at her station. One of her monitors cleared up and began printing out a tremendous amount of numbers and symbols, which scrolled by quickly. For a moment, Twilight stopped working and her eyes widened, almost awed at whatever it was she was getting out of the numbers. "Wow... it's almost primordial," she whispered to herself. Snapping back to attention, she read off at a glance, "Xenon, nitrogen, high concentration of carbon dioxide crystals, methane... I'm working on the trace elements."
Frowning, Rainbow Dash sarcastically griped, "Yeah, THAT tells me everything I need to know. Anything else? Anything... you know... important?"
"Uh..." Twilight let out while thinking, striking a few more keys. Different monitors flashed with different information. The unicorn seemed to stumble on something she thought was worth sharing, saying, "Yes. It's... rock."
"WOW, Twilight," Rainbow Dash quickly snipped while looking away.
"Rock... lava base. And deep cold. Well below the line," Twilight reported.
"Mhmm," Rainbow Dash said, still bleeding sarcasm. "That's great. Hey. Did you know we have self-contained environment suits on the ship?" she asked, inflecting her voice to make her meaning even more aggressively clear. The pegasus leaned in very close to Twilight's face. "You know... for exposure to inhospitable environments?"
Rarity spoke up. "For what it's worth, I'd like to volunteer... to stay behind. Those awful suits always ruin my hair." She stroked her mane once, concerned and frightened for the possible future damage it could wind up taking if it had to spend even a minute in one of those stuffy suits.
"Yeah, it figures," Rainbow Dash quipped.
"Uh... if it's alright with you... um... Captain Rainbow Dash," Fluttershy meekly asserted herself, "I'd like to stay here, too." Her chair was generating a tapping noise, the result of how badly her shivering was shaking her seat. "If that's okay with you... um... sir. Captain." Her voice dropped incredibly low, "I don't like spooky things."
Inversely, Twilight was enthusiastic. "I'll go!" she offered. "This is an absolutely incredible opportunity! Potential contact with intelligent, non-pony life!"
Everypony's head turned as there was a buzz from the bridge comm unit and Applejack's voice came through. "I couldn't help but hear ya'll talking 'bout a little expedition? Look, I know we're s'pposed to be repairing and all down here, but..." As she spoke her voice dipped into a panicked honesty. "I'm telling you right now I wouldn't mind a little away time. It's getting a might... claustrophobic-like in this tin can."
Pinkie Pie's voice burst through the comm unexpectedly. "Oh! Oh! Pick me! PICK ME!" she frantically begged. "I'll go! ... Where are we going?"
"Yeeeaaahhhh..." Applejack could be heard moaning. "Or take HER. That'll do."
"Applejack," Derpy's voice came up in the background, "is the converter supposed to burn like this or-"
"SWEET MOTHER OF CELES-" A sharp, warped static hissed for a moment as the comm was suddenly shut off on the engineering end.
Rainbow Dash stepped away from Twilight's station and began pacing the bridge again, thoughtfully humming to herself. She looked at the three other faces with her and back at the comm speaker several times. At last, she stopped her trotting about and stood firmly, having come to a decision.
"Alright," she announced loudly so the comm would catch and carry her voice, "I've taken everypony's opinion under advisement and here is what I think we should do." The pegasus proudly knocked on her own chest with one of her hooves. "If science fiction stories have taught me anything, it's that the captain always goes on the potentially dangerous and life-threatening away missions. So obviously, I'm going." She raised a hoof and started to level it in Twilight's direction, but then rolled completely past her and pointed at Fluttershy. "Fluttershy, you're coming along because I can bully you into doing anything I don't want to do."
Sadly, the navigator's head drooped and she stared at the floor. "Okay..." she surrendered without a fight.
"And Twilight..." Rainbow Dash announced.
The unicorn excitedly perked up at the mention of her name.
"... you're staying here. We'll need somepony to monitor us remotely. Plus you can keep those hoofheads down below on task," the captain ordered.
"What," Twilight flatly stated.
Whipping around, Rainbow Dash pointed at her second-in-command. "Rarity, you're coming."
"What?" Rarity shrieked. "Why?"
"I dunno," Rainbow Dash indifferently admitted with a shrug. "I like to see you suffer, I guess."
The sound of the zipper going up seemed unusually satisfying as Twilight sealed her green jumpsuit. The unicorn took a second to feel out her new garment and make sure she had fitted it on properly. Stepping forward in order to head to the monitoring station in the room, she was seized by a sudden stiffness and did a rapid jog in place to relieve it, nervously looking around to see if anypony had caught sight of her. Relieved and loosened, she went over to some consoles connected to the wall.
Twilight was in the away team monitoring bay, a small room designed for a single operator to interface with displays that were linked to all remote team members. A swiveling chair was stationed near a sturdy, impact-resistant glass bubble which looked out over one side of the ship. From there the operator could keep an eye on any members who were working on or near the outside of the ship. The board of monitors and consoles next to the chair were what allowed the operator to see what all the linked members see, and to communicate with them.
Waiting patiently in the Nomastromo's airlock was Rainbow Dash, Rarity, and Fluttershy, all suited up in their self-contained, pressurized environment suits. They were heavy, bulky suits that needed to carry all the equipment necessary to maintain their own internal atmosphere, allowing ponies to move about and explore in some of the harshest of places. The most striking feature of the padded, cumbersome suits was the helmet. Large and bulbous, the transparent face shield was incredibly wide so the wearer could view a significant amount of their periphery field of vision, but it amusingly made it appear like their head was sitting in the middle of a fishbowl. A lamp on top provided illumination, and the back of the helmet connected directly to an air recycling system which, when active, would occasionally let out puffs of irredeemable gas. Rainbow Dash's and Fluttershy's suits had patches on their backs made of a strong, tight, flexible material that allowed their wings to be comfortably stretched and utilized. Lastly, each suit had a small bubble just above their rear which the wearing pony's tail was unceremoniously crammed into. A butt-bubble, if you will.
Rarity scratched vainly at her tail in agony, feeling the sweltering suit slowly destroying all the laborious work she had put in to making it the pinnacle of brushable perfection. It was like being locked away while knowing that mercenary forces were out slaughtering your entire family, only worse because this was HER TAIL. She whined breathlessly, her suit radio transmitting the sound to her two companions and to Twilight's board.
"Can it," Rainbow Dash heatedly commanded.
In short order, the airlock fully depressurized and the outer hatch opened, granting access to the surface of the planetoid. The blaring noise of the massive winds screaming patch the hatch immediately became noticeable, and small rocks and other debris were flung into the airlock by the gusts. The three crew members stepped out onto a lift, which lowered them down to the cold, rocky surface.
Twilight looked out of her bubble at them, waving and giggling in amusement. Even at this range it was hard to see them through the fog, but the ship's floodlights and their suits' headlamps were sufficient to make them distinct.
"I can't see a thing," Fluttershy complained.
"I think I, ah, I forgot my hair brush inside," Rarity babbled. "Why don't you two go on ahead and I'll-"
Rainbow Dash rammed her from behind, pushing her forward. "Come on! Get moving!" the impatient pegasus snapped. Then, yelling into her suit radio to try and overcome the unbearable roar of the wind, Rainbow Dash asked, "Twilight! Are you receiving?"
"Good contact on my board," Twilight answered. She looked across her displays. She could see what each of them was seeing, via video transmitted from their suit cameras, though she got a fairly low quality image because the company had skimped on the Wi-Fi service. Regardless, the connection signal to each suit was strong.
"Alright," Rainbow Dash determined, "Keep the line open. Let's go." She forced herself into Rarity, continuing to push the reluctant unicorn forward.
Down below, Applejack and Derpy were hard at work rerouting the ship's ducts so they could make a safe take-off when the time came. The horrible storm combined with the shaky descent had caused an uncountable number of stony fragments to become lodged in the systems during landing. Not to mention that the blown pressure shield had resulted in internal damage that left a huge vulnerability open. Several pipes in the area were blasting warm steam as the engineers were testing which conduits were damaged or blocked.
Pinkie Pie, meanwhile, roamed the area freely, shoving her face and hooves into all manner of cracks and crevices in the ship's structure, searching for the mythical confection she had heard the engineers mention earlier. She spotted an open vent that had yet to be cleaned, dirt and grime oozing along the walls. Deciding to be absolutely thorough in her search, she plunged her head in to check.
"Hey Pinkie!" Applejack called. She had a raised voice to keep above the sound of the open steam vents, but her half-smile demonstrated no real hostility. "Hey Pinkie, we want to ask you a question! Right, Derpy?"
"Right?" Derpy asked, turning her head to check her right side. That got her face a few centimeters away from a steam port just as it went off, spraying her dead on.
"If they find what they're looking for out there," Applejack asked, "does that mean we get full shares?"
Pinkie Pie planted her hooves against the wall and pushed as hard as she could to extract her head from the dirty vent. Eventually her noggin popped loose and she slide backwards into the opposite wall. Her face was coated with the black gunk that had been all over the insides of the vent, and some of it had even encrusted onto her hair. "Aw, don't worry Applejack!" she reassured her friend, "When we find that cake, you'll get whatever's coming to you!"
Dropping some of her cheer, Applejack said "Look, I ain't going to do any more work until we get this straightened out." She was half-serious. They had been trying hard to get equal pay to the rest of the crew for awhile now, but she really didn't have any incentive or desire to stay on this barren rock of a planetoid.
"Applejack," Pinkie Pie responded, "I'll guarantee you that if we don't find the cake I'll still share my ice cream with you."
"What?" Applejack yelled, partly to overcome the steam, partly in confusion, and partly because she should have known better than to try and discuss this with Pinkie Pie.
The excited pink pony bounced up and down. "Oh, I brought along strawberry, and chocolate, and minty caramel! Yum!" She licked her lips but she didn't seem to notice that she caught quite a bit of her face grime with the maneuver. "And also butternut squash surprise. Oh! And DOUBLE vanilla. And-"
Applejack just shook her head, stupefied.
Derpy emerged out of the steamy fog with a swollen, beet-red face and puffy, teary eyes. "What'd you say, Pinkie?" she asked, unsure if she had heard her favorite flavor of butternut muffin mentioned in the list.
Pinkie Pie started to walk away, seemingly having changed her mind about her search. It wasn't proving fruitful, and now that she had gotten her ice cream supply on her mind... the cake just didn't seem worth it. "If you have any trouble," she shouted back to them, "I'll be having ice cream on the bridge!" She trotted off towards the ladder to the upper decks.
Frustrated, Applejack blew some air out of the side of her mouth and idly cranked down a steam valve, shutting off some of the venting pipes in the area.
"What's the matter?" Derpy turned and asked her. "Don't you like some of those flavors?"
The chief engineer gave her partner a hard stare and then reached for another valve. Giving it a spin, a fresh steam vent ignited, blasting Derpy in the face again.
Across the surface of the planetoid, the trio of pressure-suited ponies were continuing their trek, tracking down the source of the unknown signal. The landscape was rough-hewn, with numerous crevices and small trenches carving their way through the hard ground. Not to mention a few tall spires of rocks and several craters that dotted the area. The away team was able to keep partially out of the storm by sticking to some of the low trenches, but it didn't spare them from the thick fog.
"I can't see a thing, my hooves are sore, and I can literally feel this sweaty, recycled air spoiling my delicate curls!" Rarity whined desperately. "Do you have any idea how long this will take to smooth out?"
"Quit griping," Rainbow Dash told her. The captain was beginning to regret her team selection.
Rarity took on a defiant tone. "I like griping," she said.
"Just knock it off and come on!" Rainbow Dash yelled, getting behind her again and shoving her along to speed things up.
Up ahead it looked like the storm might be letting up, or at least it could be moving on away from their position. Maybe they would be able to get a good look at the surrounding landscape, or possibly the source of the transmission they were tracking...
Pinkie Pie stood on the Nomastromo's bridge with a fresh face and clean hair. However, she was looking disappointingly out the window at the storm. The only other presence with her was Opalescence, the ship's cat, who sat lazily on the floor batting a mouse toy back and forth.
The depressed pony heaved a sigh and took a sip of a drink she had poured for herself. She hadn't found any cake, and now when she had checked the kitchen for her ice cream she couldn't find that either. Surely she had misplaced it, but the doubly disappointed pony had trouble working past her sad lethargy to begin searching again.
After many minutes of wallowing in her self-pity, she wandered over to a work station and turned on the comm unit to the remote team monitoring bay. "Hey, Twilight..." she greeted with an unusual lack of bounce in her voice. "How's it going?"
Over the comm, she could hear the surprise in Twilight's voice. "Oh. Alright," the unicorn answered.
"Have you seen my ice cream anywhere?" Pinkie Pie asked.
"What? No, I haven't."
"Ohhh..." Pinkie Pie mumbled.
"Look," Twilight said while letting go of a large breath, "I'm very busy here, Pinkie. Why don't you try decoding that transmission to take your mind off things?"
Pinkie Pie cracked a small smile. "You mean like playing it backwards to listen for hidden messages?"
"Sure, whatever," Twilight acknowledged, and shut off her comm.
The pink pony's mood started to pick up a little bit, and she likewise turned off her comm before wondering over to Twilight's usual bridge station. Putting on the headset there, she sat down and pressed several buttons. Before long she was banging her head along to the overly rich soundscape which crashed down like an avalanche through her earpiece.
Rainbow Dash flapped her wings fast and firmly in order to float up to the edge of the small canyon she and her group were working their way through, looking for a chance to survey their surroundings. Lift and control were a bit more difficult while wearing the unwieldy pressure suit, but she was pony enough to manage.
The storm had cleared up to the point that there was some reasonable distance visibility. The sun of the planetoid could finally be seen, but it was so far away and weak it resembled no more than a small spotlight in the sky. Not all of the fog had blown off, leaving an eerie coating of mist on the surface.
Fluttershy struggled to lift herself up with her wings and Rarity had to claw her way dangerously up the least steep part of the canyon wall, wheezing forcefully when she finally made it to the top. They looked at Rainbow Dash, but their captain had stopped her survey and was staring off into the distance. Following her gaze themselves, they simultaneously gasped at what they saw.
Only a few hundred meters out sat an incredibly strange sight. It contrasted instantly against the rocky landscape, though somehow its wicked arches seemed to have an equally gnarled structure. The lack of symmetry in design gave it an uncomfortable appearance, and the massive, seemingly vein-covered wings or legs of it curved up towards the sky menacingly. It was a derelict ship, definitely not pony in origin, crashed and partially buried in the surface of this random planetoid.
For a moment, all three ponies stood watching it breathlessly, before finally a stunned Rainbow Dash spoke into her suit radio. "Twilight," she called in awe, "can you see this?"
All the way back at the Nomastromo, in her bubble, Twilight was staring at her monitors, equally mesmerized. Her signal to the others had degraded a bit, the images now being less fuzzy and distinct than they already were to start with, and the voices coming in were occasionally interrupted by pops of static. But she was still getting enough to be hypnotized.
"Yes, I can," she murmured in complete wonderment. "I've never seen anything like it..."
"Yeah, well," Rainbow Dash answered unsurely, "it's the stupidest looking thing I've ever seen."
"What IS it?" Fluttershy questioned, before quickly deciding that she didn't want to know. Turning to Rainbow Dash, she begged, "Oh, let's get out of here."
Twilight's shouts came through their radios, a mix of excitement, encouragement, and garbled static. "You've gone this far," she told them. "You must go on! You have to go on!"
"Oh, must we?" Rarity balked, expressing some rising fear.
Inside her helmet, Rainbow Dash breathed heavily, mild condensation building on the visor. At last she decided, "Alright. I think we should head over there."
Rarity said bleakly, "Oh... I suppose it's too much to hope it's some kind of off-world spa or resort?"
The three began making their way forward, descending the hill in front of them. "Twilight," Rainbow Dash reported, "if you can hear this, we're moving in closer."
At her bubble, Twilight didn't quite receive the message. The static had broken up most of it. To her observation, it seemed as if each step closer to the source they took, the more her signal degraded. She was steadily losing audio and visual contact with the team. Perhaps it was the transmission from the alien derelict? It's signal could have been so powerful it was drowning out others close to it, in the way only industrial techno could.
"Will you say that again?" she asked. But no response came through. She sighed regretfully and turned her focus to her control board, doing whatever she could to boost her signal.
Sliding down hills, crawling through trenches, and climbing over mounds, the away team inched closer to the derelict. They passed under one of the bizarre wing-legs of the ship, working their way around to the central base which was partially embedded in the rock. When they finally reached it, they found three ports on the side, low to the ground. They were wide and gaping, having a slight teardrop shape. Small hoods were over the top of them and there were stretched, vulvic folds which ran down the sides, causing the holes in every way to resemble... some kind of completely G-rated exhaust port.
On Twilight's board, her efforts to boost her signal were only fighting the inevitable, and all her screens and channels eventually turned to static. "Rainbow Dash?" she spoke into the comm hopelessly. "Rainbow?"
The buzz of the static echoed bare traces of the captain's voice, but there was no way to tell if she was receiving or acknowledging anything.
The sounds of the surface: light winds, miniature volcanic vents, and the occasional tumbling rock, faded into nothingness when the exploring ponies stepped inside of the derelict ship. Amping up their headlamps, the three walked slowly, step by step, through the interior of the ship. Some moved more trepidatiously than others, being frightened at the solitary sounds of their own clops and the occasional puff of their suits' air system. Those noises stood out like thunder against the dead sonic backdrop of the interior.
The architecture inside the ship was no less alien than the outside. What were recognizable as pipes could occasionally be seen zigging their way along the walls, but for the most part everything resembled twisted bone with some kind of solid and scaly material in between, connecting everything. There were metal parts, perhaps supports or unusually designed circuitry, which seemed jammed in at random places. Everything had a rotted green color, including the more metallic parts, and the walls were somewhat slick from a strange moisture that hung the thin air, despite the excessively dry atmosphere outside.
"Come on down here," Rarity called to the others. She had been forced ahead by Rainbow Dash, and now she stood at the entrance to a larger room. Some kind of tremendous, raised platform stood in the center, towering over her. "There's something different down here! I don't know what it is... but if we can get up that wall..."
Rainbow Dash and Fluttershy came over to her, looking up at the tall, grand chamber. It was incredibly more broad and sweeping than any of the tunnels they had been in so far. Most of the winding corridors just seemed to end, so this central chamber was probably the best way forward.
Rarity stepped aside to allow her crewmates access up. However, they just looked at each other for a moment before turning back to Rarity.
"You first," Rainbow Dash said.
"You two have WINGS!" Rarity violently asserted.
The two pegasi again exchanged stares before looking back at Rarity.
"You first," Rainbow Dash repeated.
Nervously whining, Rarity turned around and looked up the side of the platform. She swallowed once and put an unsteady hoof onto a thin edge in the wall's lattice-like structure and started to drag herself up. Straining, she brought all the foreleg strength which she really didn't even have to bear and hauled her pressure suit's bulk up towards the top. She ascended at a painfully slow pace, meter by meter. By the time she had gotten her front hooves over the edge of the top, she was sweating profusely within her helmet and her mane was a wreck. She barely had time to catch her breath when she glimpsed something ahead of her, and she gasped.
Behind her, Rainbow Dash and Fluttershy gently floated up, passed over her, and touched down on the platform. "Woah..." Rainbow Dash uttered.
Secured in the center of the platform was some kind of large, technological, chair-like structure, only far more massive than any pony-sized chair. Additionally, the base was built in quite a pod-like way, completely enveloping the lower half of whatever was sitting in it. It was made of the same green, rotted metalwork found elsewhere in the ship. Attached to the front, a large metallic arm hooked out and supported some sort of elongated control device... perhaps a navigation aid, and this was the pilot's chair?
Most disturbing of all was what sat in the chair. Though "sat" might be a little generous, as whatever it was seemed more like it was surgically (or otherwise) grafted to its seat. Large stretches of former skin and bone reached from the thing's back into the chair itself. The entirety of its remains were bony and skeletal... a creature of mammoth proportions. It had lengthy arms and an odd, bulb-shaped skull with an unusual tube running out of where its nose should have been... assuming that wasn't the thing's nose to begin with.
Whatever this... space jockey... was, it had long since fossilized after its death. The alien derelict must have crashed on this rock a very long time ago.
Rarity kicked her legs wildly while trying to pull herself up the rest of the way. "A little assistance, if you don't mind," she asked the others. But they were too caught up in what they were seeing and walked over to the chair-creature, inspecting it. Eventually Rarity was able to swing her hind legs up, and she tumbled over onto the platform floor, panting.
"An alien life form..." Rainbow Dash whispered to herself. She floated up to the deceased creature's face, looking it over carefully. With a light touch, she tapped it once, causing the small section she touched to crumble to dust. "Looks dead to me," the pegasus noted.
Fluttershy had been lagging slightly behind Rainbow Dash, but she got a tiny bit closer at the news. She poked her head around her captain and took a peek for herself while her teeth chattered anxiously.
Rainbow Dash hovered about, trying to figure what she was looking at, or why it was physically attached to its own chair. The places where bone met metal were nearly seamless. "Geez... it's like it has a chair FOR a butt," she commented, baffled. Looking near the face again, she noticed that the creature had a sizable hole in its rib cage.
"Oh... the bones are bent outwards," Fluttershy observed, getting a little bit closer. "It's like he exploded from the inside."
"Yeah, Fluttershy," Rainbow Dash said in a sarcastic tone while turning to look at the frightened pegasus. "He swallowed a bomb or a bug and it just BURST out of his chest."
"R-r-really? D-d-d-do y-you t-t-think-" Fluttershy stammered uncontrollably in fright while she drifted backwards.
Sighing, Rainbow Dash grouchily told her, "No. Of course not. That's dumb. Clearly this thing was... you know... stabbed or shot from behind. Pfft. Swallowed a bug... puh-lease."
"O-oh..." Fluttershy let out, but she didn't feel any more relieved. Nervously glancing about, she said, "I w-wonder what happened t-to the rest of the c-crew?" But again she immediately decided that she'd rather not know and she begged Rainbow Dash, "Let's get out of here, please!"
Suddenly, Rarity called to them. "Rainbow Dash! Fluttershy! Come on over here!" She was leaning over some kind of grating in the platform floor.
The pegasi floated down to her, with Rainbow Dash stopping and turning back to catch one last eyeful of the quiet, dusty remains of the space jockey. "What do you got?" she asked Rarity after she had taken her final look.
Rarity directed their attention to what she was looking at and said, "What do you make of this?"