Pony Girls

by Brian Brookwell

- do not use without the author/artist's permission.
- more stories and art at The Mermaid's Tail



hen the Ca'athu'uh arrived in their great golden ships, they promised great advancement for the relatively minor cost of a base on Earth. The Ca'athu'uh gave humanity great knowledge and technology in the biosciences, physics (all except their trans-light drive, of course), chemistry and mathematics. The base, as all today know, proved to be Australia. This worried the rest of the governments very little and the Australians had little to say in the matter. They went to bed one evening, as usual, and awoke the next day dispersed throughout the rest of the world. Australia, itself, was covered by a strange greyish bubble. Nothing could penetrate it in either direction. Spy planes, satellites and listening posts in New Zealand proved equally useless.

Then without preamble, they announced they would be pleased to allow select individuals who met their criterion into the base to learn from them all their secrets. Of course, everyone with any ambitions at all wanted in. In some inscrutable fashion, a few thousand out of the nearly four hundred thousand that applied were selected by the Ca'athu'uh. Those selected learned at least one of the secrets of the Ca'athu'uh. The trans-light drive was not their own. Their forte was biology. All of those selected were biologically manipulated in some way. Some as computers for their masters and some as servants.

Tina and Crystal had been aspiring actresses in differing companies. They ended up yokemates pulling one of the pleasure vehicles of the high ranking Ca'athu'uh in charge of communication with humanity. The Ca'athu'uh had, it seems, performed this little planetary takeover routine on half a dozen targets since they'd discovered the damaged spacecraft crashed on the smaller of their two moons.

Regardless, Crystal has had enough. People are not draft animals. She hated his pasty face with it's strange permanent smile. When he stepped into the chariot, she and Tina took their ready stances: one leg up. But his last "Giddap" was one "Giddap" too many. Instead of leading with the raised foot as she'd been trained, Crystal stopped cold, twisting the yoke and nearly tripping Tina. What would happen to her now was anyone's guess, but there'd be no more chariots for this little brown pony.