"This. Is. Lame."

Falco shivered in the snow as he surveyed the compound through his binoculars. It was the only building around for miles. Had it not been for the hills and dormant vegetation, he'd have no cover at all.

"Lame or not, we're getting paid three million credits each to steal this thing, and you drew the short straw." Fox's voice rang in his ear over his headset as his beak chattered. Avians were not meant for cold weather.

"Thank you for the reminder," he said through a chattering beak. His active camo blended perfectly with the snow white landscape as he made his way toward the perimeter fence. For something so valuable, the security around the laboratory was pretty lax. He'd been briefed on the object he was to retrieve, and from what he cared to listen to, it was quite valuable. And volatile.

“Stop complaining and get in there,” Fox replied. “That thing is scheduled to move today, and this is our only shot at taking it.”

Upon his drawing of the short straw (which he was certain Fox had somehow rigged), he had been instructed to handle the item with extreme care. Codenamed Drive, it was apparently some new type of propulsion system, though how it worked and what it used as fuel were known only to those who had discovered it. That's what the nerds who hired his mercenary team said, anyway.

As he began cutting through the links of the fence, the crunching of snow attracted his attention. Thinking quickly, he dove back into a bush as a guard patrolled near the fence. Once he'd passed, Falco removed himself from the near-frozen shrub. "Tell Slippy he owes me a drink for not telling me about the guards!"

"Intelligence isn't an exact science, Falco!" the toad's voice chimed in over the radio.

It isn't in your case, is it? Falco thought.

"Did you really expect something this valuable to be unguarded?" Fox asked.

"Forget it." Falco snapped. "Are there any other surprises I should know about?"

"Nothing that wasn't in the schematics I briefed you on already," Slippy replied. While he was an ace mechanic and inventor, Slippy was sometimes lacking as an intelligence gatherer. He would much rather spend his time in the maintenance bay modifying the Star Fox team's Arwing space fighters than looking up blueprints to some hole-in-the-wall science lab on Xenu-forsaken Zeras 12's polar ice cap.

Now freezing and wet, he resumed cutting through the fence. In a matter of minutes, he made his way through the hole he'd cut and into an access duct.

"Before I get any deeper into this place, you want to tell me what this duct is for?" Falco whispered, careful to avoid blowing his cover. A few seconds of silence allowed him to further himself from the cold air outside as he began to peer through the grates to check his progress inside the building.

"Looks like it's used to vent exhaust gases from the research labs," Slippy replied. "Chlorine gas, mostly."

"What?!"

"Calm down!" Falco could hear Slippy's fingers typing away at his station as he pulled up more info on the building he was infiltrating. Information he wondered why he wasn't given before he chose to explore the poison gas pipe. “The duct is only active from 0600 to 1500 hours!”

Falco checked the time: 1400.

Great...

“Okay, you’re coming up on the lab now,” Slippy added softly, as though his voice would give Falco away. “It should be through a grate and air filter on your right-hand side.”

Removing the air scrubber, he spotted a hare in a lab coat scribbling on a notepad beyond the grate. Behind him, on a pedestal of some kind, sat the metallic, nine-billion-credit box. No more than thirty centimeters in length, width and height. Easy enough to carry, but impossible to conceal. Nothing about it seemed extraordinary. It certainly didn’t look like it was worth a few million galactic credits.

Falco grabbed his blaster from its holster, selecting its ‘stun’ mode to neutralize the scientist. Though Slippy may not be much of an intelligence gatherer, he was an incredible inventor. As he readied himself to remove the grate, he heard a heavy door swing open.

“Dexter, you hungry? I was about to grab some dinner.”

Falco held fast inside the duct as another hare entered the lab.

“Yeah, I’ve been cooped up with this thing all day. Let me just set the alarm.” Dexter and his friend left the lab, but not before activating a laser security grid around the item in question. After the scientists had left, Falco removed the grate carefully before griping to Slippy once more.

“Lasers? You didn’t say anything about lasers!”

“What do you want from me?” he protested. “These schematics are four years out of date!”

Falco rubbed his temples before dropping into the laboratory to examine the security. As he stepped up to the pedestal, he retrieved a can of fine powder, spraying its contents to reveal the lasers guarding his objective. Plucking a feather from his head with a wince, he released a bit of his plumage into one of the laser beams. He prayed this was simply an alarm-grade lens, and not the flesh-melting variety. When his feather remained intact, he breathed a sigh of relief, though it was short-lived. His test-feather had disrupted the laser beam, causing all manner of alarms to wail.

Falco snatched the drive off its pedestal as the grate he had come through filled with an unknown gas, and a large blast door began to close over the lab entrance. With a quick sprint and a slide, he barely missed being cut in half by the closing blast doors as he escaped the lab with the drive clutched in one arm. His blaster in his other hand, he sprinted down the hallway as security guards gave chase.

“Slippy, how do I get out of here?” he asked urgently, nearly sliding around a corner as lasers began impacting the wall behind him.

“There should be an exit coming up on your left!” The door in question was still a few meters ahead as he continued his sprint. He glanced over his shoulder to see the security guards leveling their laser rifles at him.

This is why I prefer the sky! Aiming his blaster over his shoulder, he fired wantonly, hoping to keep them from shooting him in the back. After a few bursts, he lowered his shoulder and prepared to ram the door to freedom. He bounced off of it, the drive skidding away from him as he fell flat on his back.

“It’s... locked...” he gasped, scrambling for the drive.

As the hum of the guard's laser rifles filled the hallway, a scientist threw himself in front of the guards. “Don’t shoot, you idiots! If you hit that thing, we’re all dead!” Thinking quickly, Falco scurried to the drive and held his blaster to it. As he hoped, the security lowered their weapons.

“Slippy, the door’s locked!” he growled into the radio, buying precious seconds as the guards creeped closer.

“You’ve got a blaster!” he replied. “Freaking shoot it!”

Falco blinked, before blasting the keypad locking mechanism and kicking the door open, sprinting into the open snow and leaping over the three meter perimeter fence as the alarms continued to wail behind him. “Tell Fox to get down here and cover my extraction!”

“Way ahead of you!” Fox said, his sleekly shaped Arwing hovering above a clearing where Falco’s began to slowly fade into view from its camouflaged state. Falco’s fingers tapped repeatedly on a screen mounted on his wrist. The cockpit of his spaceship popped open with a hiss. A few more taps and a small cargo bay opened beneath the cockpit. Falco stored the drive in the cargo hold and jumped into his spacecraft. Before the security forces could give chase, the two mercenaries were rocketing through the atmosphere and back toward their mothership; the Great Fox.

“Boy, it’s a good thing those guards were so under-equipped!” said Slippy as they left the planet’s upper atmosphere.

“Why’s that?” Fox asked, his Arwing pulling alongside Falco’s.

“Your laser cores haven’t been charged in days!”

“What?” they replied in unison.

“That seems like something you should have told us, frog-boy!” Falco snapped.

“Well, in my defense, you wouldn’t have gone on the mission if you’d known that, would you?”

Forget a drink. That toad owes me breakfast, lunch, and dinner!

“Uncharged laser cores?” A familiar voice came over the radios. “How unfortunate for you.” The inherent sneer behind those words could belong to only one pilot: Wolf O’ Donnell.

“Agh!” Falco moaned. “Not now! I knew this thing wouldn't be so lightly guarded!”

“I’m afraid so. If you simply hand over the drive, my team and I will be on our way,” he suggested. “Perhaps we’ll even allow you to live.”

“Not a chance, Wolf.” Fox replied, the tags of the enemy fighters beginning to appear on his long range radar.

“Very well,” Wolf sighed.

“Falco, switch to com channel two,” Fox ordered.

“Okay, we’re both out of ammo and I’m almost out of fuel,” Falco said bluntly. “What now?”

A moment of worrying silence fell over him as Fox radioed his mothership. “Slippy, are there any ion storms near us?”

The soft clicking of keys beneath fingers echoed back in their headsets as Slippy searched. “You’re in luck,” replied Slippy. “This planet’s star is giving off coronal mass ejections as we speak. The next wave will be on top of you in thirty seconds.”

“Falco, do you have enough fuel to start your warp drive?”

You’ve gotta be kidding me.

“Well... yeah, but I’d be completely out afterwards!” he shot back.

“I realize that,” Fox said calmly. “I’m gonna follow you into the storm and engage mine back to the Great Fox. The ions from the star will keep Wolf from tracing your jump and getting the drive.” Falco could see the idea behind Fox’s plan. Though it seemed crazy, he knew his friendly rival was a great strategist and the best pilot out there. Besides himself, of course.

“Okay, but if Wolf can’t trace my ions, that means you can’t either.”

“I know. We’ll follow your emergency location beacon.”

Falco sighed, massaging his temples. “You know it’s called an ion storm for a reason, right?”

“Yeah, you’ll just have to trust me on this,” Fox assured him.

“Ten seconds until ion impact.” Slippy reminded them.

“Ready?” Fox asked.

Falco charged his warp drive, the frost and cold from the planet below now long since melted away. “Yeah.”

In a flash of light and super-charged particles, the two fighters disappeared amongst the pinpoints of light.

Falco watched as the gauges in his cockpit slowly flickered before reading ‘zero’. As he engaged his ship's reverse thrusters, he checked his surroundings. Nothing he could recognize, but a single planet within reachable distance had already begun pulling on his spacecraft. A warning flashed across the screens of his instrument panel.

Re-entry imminent. A soft computerized female voice announced. After a few quick keystrokes, his computer analyzed the available data regarding the planet he was about to crash land on.

“Ninety-nine percent oxygen probability, ninety-nine percent chance of liquid water...” he mumbled to himself, looking past his reflection onto what appeared to be the surface of a planet filled with green plant life. “Could be worse...” Falco readied himself for what he hoped would be a soft landing. Within minutes, the rumbling of re-entry buffeted his fighter as the exterior began to glow bright white.

“Hold together for me, baby,” he exhaled through gritted teeth, fighting with the manual controls to keep the wings level. As he lost speed and altitude, he noticed a dense forest rising up to meet him. Within moments, he was skimming the treetops, the sturdy wooden shafts strengthening the lower he went.

His cockpit screens began calling out their warnings as the hull integrity of his ship beginning to rapidly deteriorate. “Geez, what are these trees made of, lead?” Before long, both his laser pods had been stripped away, and the deafening screech made by the trees he was decimating confirmed one of his worst fears; he would have to bail out on an alien planet.

Falco grabbed his survival gear in one hand and gripped the ejection seat handle in the other. For a moment, his thoughts turned to the precious yet volatile cargo in the hold. Deciding it would be better to survive and recover the drive than to die with his ship, he yanked the striped handle upwards, sending the canopy of the Arwing flying off over his head. Unfortunately, only half of the rockets in the seat fired when they were supposed to, pushing him only halfway out of the spacecraft. As he tumbled out of his ship, his parachute to snag on a jagged edge of the fuselage.

Thinking quickly, he produced a superheated thermal blade from its holster with his free hand and began sawing frantically at the constricted fabric tying him to certain death. Once free, he realized all too late that he was falling with only half a parachute. Cursing his species for evolving beyond the ability to fly, he flapped his arms wildly to try and slow himself down.

He hit the ground legs first, a bolt of searing pain shooting through his right leg as he landed awkwardly on his arm before losing consciousness completely.

---

Apple Bloom and her fellow crusaders sat idly in their treehouse, tediously planning their next attempt to earn their cutie marks. The walls of their home away from home had been decorated with hoof-drawn pictures of ponies they idolized, things they liked to do, or things they wished they were able to do. Sweetie Belle and Scootaloo rested their chins on their forelegs as Apple Bloom paced before them. "Ah dunno, Ah don't think you can just 'become' a psychologist," she said skeptically. "Ah'm pretty sure that's somethin' ya have ta go to college for."

"Well I haven't heard any suggestions out of you!" Sweetie Belle replied.

"We've tried almost every other job in town!" Scootaloo chimed in.

"Ah'm just sayin' we probably shouldn't do anything that might get us in trouble with the—"

A rumble shook the treehouse as Scootaloo hurriedly trotted down the ramp in time to catch the after-effects of a sonic rainboom. "I bet Rainbow is practicing for the Wonderbolts!" she said happily, scanning the skies for the signature rainbow.

She was joined by the other crusaders on the ramp as they too, scanned the skies.

"Cool!" Sweetie Belle gasped, "A shooting star!" She pointed her hoof to the heavens, a fiery comet with a smoking tail scarring the otherwise clear blue sky.

"Wow..." they said in unison.

"It looks awfully close..." Apple Bloom said as they watched shards of the meteor break off from the main body in the atmosphere. Within seconds, it was below the tree line, followed quickly by a dull thud.

A brief silence followed before Scootaloo spoke up. "It sounded like it landed close!" she said happily before turning to her friends. "You guys thinking what I'm thinking?"

Sweetie Belle and Apple Bloom exchanged nervous glances.

"C'mon you guys!" Scootaloo insisted. "Don't be scaredy-cats!"

"Okay, let’s go check it out..." Sweetie Belle groaned.

"That's what I'm talkin' about!" Scootaloo cheered.

"CUTIE MARK CRUSADERS METEOR MINERS, YAY!" they shouted together, bounding out of the clubhouse and following the gentle smoke plume rising from the treetops.

After a few minutes of trekking through the Everfree forest, they came upon a massive trench dug by the falling object. The ditch was easily three Applejacks wide and at least two Big Macintoshes deep. The crusader's eyes widened as they came upon the clearing.

"Whoa," they gasped, looking into the crater. Apple Bloom slid down down into the trench, dirt and rocks sliding with her.

"Are you sure it's safe to go in there?" Sweetie Belle whined. "It could be radioactive or something!"

"Radio-what?" Scootaloo repeated as she followed Apple Bloom into the trench.

With a reluctant sigh, Sweetie Belle followed suit, entering the divide with her friends. "If I grow an extra head because of this, I'm coming after the two of you," she threatened as they followed the path dug by the falling object.

"Don't you mean, 'we're?" Scootaloo replied, earning a chuckle from Apple Bloom.

The trench seemed to stretch for miles into the forest before the fillies came upon what had created it. A smoking hunk of twisted white and blue metal sat smoldering, buried halfway by uprooted trees and dirt.

Apple Bloom approached the object cautiously, though not cautiously enough for Sweetie Belle's liking.

"That doesn't look like a meteorite," she warned, though her pleas fell on deaf ears as Scootaloo joined Apple Bloom in investigating.

"You guys... I think this is a spaceship!" Scootaloo declared, climbing atop a mound of dirt in front of it to view the vacant cockpit.

"A spaceship? As in, a-aliens?" Sweetie Belle asked, backing away from the strange object.

"Yeah!" Apple Bloom said, joining Scootaloo on the dirt pile. "Don't worry Sweetie Belle, the spaceship is empty."

Sweetie Belle carefully climbed the dirt hill and peered into the cockpit, sweeping over the dead instruments and empty hole where she guessed whatever had been flying this thing sat. "See? No aliens," Scootaloo assured her.

The color drained from the unicorn's face as she turned to her friends. "So if the alien isn't in its ship, then where is it?"

The three adventurous fillies pressed their backs against each other, scanning the woodline for anything not of their world.

"Y-You don't think it's an evil alien, do ya?" Apple Bloom stammered.

"I hope not," Scootaloo replied, just as a high pitched beeping nearly deafened the crusaders. Flattening their ears against the sharp screech, they tried to discern its source.

"Oh Celestia, what's that noise?!" Scootaloo shouted, though she was barely heard over the racket.

"Ah, Ah think it's comin' from—"

As quickly as the terrible noise had come, it was gone, replaced by a softer, fading beep that seemed to slowly die. The sound appeared to be coming from behind a thicket of bushes. Nervously, Scootaloo stepped off the dirt hill and headed toward the shrubs.

"Scoots, what are you doing?!" Sweetie Belle whispered urgently.

"I think the alien might be back here," she shot back, her sense of adventure not spoiled by the ear-splitting screech it had just made.

"So you're gonna go find it?" Sweetie Belle asked incredulously.

The curious filly ignored her friend’s warnings and proceeded to push the bushes back with a hoof. She had expected to see some kind of monster with tentacles for legs and a million eyes, or a blood-thirsty beast from beyond the stars. Instead, she found a scruffy looking wounded creature, which had similar coloration to a blue-jay.

"You guys, I think I found the alien!"

Next Chapter: I Estimated time remaining: 42 Minutes