Fallout Equestria: The Light Within

by FireOfTheNorth

Chapter 39: P-8KE

Chapter Thirty-Nine: P-8KE

Rain fell in sheets, enlarging the ice-encrusted pools forming everywhere. Lighting flashed in the distance and thunder boomed. Bullets whizzed through the darkness, flitting over the barbed wire and past the stripped trees, but (usually) not entering the trenches that covered the slope. Leaning nearby against the trench wall was a wooden sign riddled with bullet holes, the words High Pines Ski Resort painted on it. The resort’s lodge was high up the slope, an army of zebras in the way.

Really, I was lying on a cot in the Clinic, but as far as my body was concerned, I was in the middle of a battle at the High Pines Ski Resort during the War. Ache urgently wanted to find this other pondroid she’d learned of, so we didn’t tarry long after we finished clearing the RoBronco factory. I’d informed the ponies of Neon that the factory was now empty and warned the Great Illuminated about the Northern Lights Coalition, and then we’d taken off for Vanhoover. As our mobile home rolled through the mostly empty wastes between Stalliongrad and Vanhoover, I experienced another one of the memory orbs Shining Armor had kept.

This one had a pine tree on it, probably symbolic of the location. Unlike the previous two, this was not Shining Armor’s memory. My host, much to my discomfort, was a mare, but that wasn’t the only strange thing about her. All signs suggested that it was the middle of the night, but my host’s vision was crystal-clear, despite the rain; I even thought I could see the individual drops fall. It wasn’t until she looked down that I realized she was a Crystal Pony. Her flesh, though it seemed to work every bit the same as a normal pony’s, looked as if it were made of crystal, light reflecting within it. Her vision wasn’t the only thing that was enhanced. Her hearing and reaction times were also far beyond a normal pony’s. She didn’t even flinch when another Crystal Pony jumped into the trench and landed next to her; she’d heard her coming before she’d even left the previous trench.

“What’s the situation, Opal?” the other pony asked, not waiting for a response before reloading the rifle at her side.

“The stripes’ve set up two nests of repeaters covering this area, and they’ve got a direct line to the artillery on the other side of the hill. Every time we try to rush them, shells start raining down,” Opal, my host, answered, “What are you doing here, Chrys?”

“We’ve already broken through in the east, so Command sent us over here to lend you a hoof,” Chrys (whose name patch on her uniform identified her as Chrysolite) replied, “Y’know, when we’ve been able to get pegasi up, they reported that our artillery has carved a path through the zebra trenches once we get past the next line.”

“So I’ve heard,” Opal answered between popping up to shoot at the zebras in the next trench, “No wonder the stripes are so intent on keeping us from breaking through here.”

A shrill whistle cut through the air with three short blasts.

“Over the top,” Chrys said in anticipation.

“I hope they have a better plan than just ‘charge’ this time,” my host commented.

More Crystal Ponies began to fill up the trench and prepare to sortie over the top and across to the zebra lines. Two non-crystal ponies appeared, both unicorns. One projected a shield around the other, and the protected unicorn climbed over the edge of the trench. As she did so, the whistle blew again, and the Crystal Ponies climbed out with her and began to charge toward the zebra trench while avoiding the barbed wire stretched everywhere.

The zebra machine guns fired at the Crystal Ponies, and I resisted the urge to try to dodge. My host was doing well enough of a job without me, far better than I’d have been able to in her place. Magical lightning shot from the unicorn’s horn and annihilated one of the machine guns, throwing crisped zebras into the air with the impact. My host rushed toward the suddenly undefended portion of the trench.

A zebra popped his head up and she quickly fired her rifle, biting down on the firing bit in her mouth to do so. The zebra fell, and my host jumped at the one that took his place, bucking him in the head until it lolled to the side lifelessly. Gunshots rang out up and down the trench as the Crystal Ponies and zebras exchanged fire, and the other machine gun was destroyed by a spell. The gunfire died down as zebras and Crystal Ponies fought each other in close quarters, striking with hooves and knives instead of firearms. It was soon impossible to hear any gunfire, since artillery shells began to pelt the ground between the trenches, adding more craters and forcing the Crystal Ponies still on the other side to wait. The unicorn retreated back into the trench until the barrage ended.

Zebras fell left and right as the Crystal Ponies took advantage of their impressive abilities. I only saw a few of them fall to zebra fire or strikes before the trench was cleared. My host galloped through the trench with her comrades, Chrys nearby at all times, until they came upon the path up the hill. Something had torn a long gash through the trenches nearly all the way up the hill, a perfect path to reach the lodge, which I gathered was the zebra headquarters.

A few pegasi streaked through the sky as the Crystal Ponies fought onward, and an explosion in the distance signaled the end of the zebras’ artillery trained on this area. More and more Crystal Ponies charged in behind my host and those around her, making steady progress up the hill. Zebra after zebra fell to them, taken off-guard and disoriented by the rain and darkness, until they arrived at the lodge. The zebras that had survived the attack were now in full retreat, and the Crystal Ponies began to celebrate their victory.

A peal of thunder sounded, but I couldn’t recall there being any lightning to signal it. My host and the other Crystal Ponies also seemed to notice that something was off, and looked around wonderingly. The thunder sounded again, closer this time and less like thunder. Suddenly, a great shape burst through the clouds, rain turning to steam as it struck its flesh.

“Dragon!” Chrys yelled out.

“It’s—it’s neutral, right?” another Crystal Pony asked uncertainly.

He got his answer as the dragon swung around and unleashed a wall of fire on the battlefield. Crystal Ponies burned just as easily as any other ponies, it seemed, as they were reduced to charcoal by the blast. My host watched in horror as the colorful shapes of her fellow ponies darted across the hill before being consumed by flames. Some ponies tried to shoot the dragon down, but its scales were too thick and it shrugged the bullets off.

As it swung around toward the lodge, it released another blast of flame. My host ran, but she wasn’t going to make it clear in time. Chrys suddenly appeared and knocked her down into a trench, where she rolled into a muddy room carved out of the wall. She looked up as her friend tried to follow her, but it was too late. The blast of fire engulfed her, and she screamed as she was roasted alive.

My host—and by extension, I—was able to see every detail with her enhanced vision, hear the screams and her friend’s flesh bubbling with her enhanced hearing. It was terrible, but suddenly it was gone, dulled. My host’s eyesight became muddied, much worse than a normal pony’s, and all sounds seemed to come through a wall of cotton. As she covered her eyes with her forelegs, I saw that her coat was no longer crystalline and shining, but dull, as if all brightness had drained out of her.

She curled up, sobbing, as the dragon continued to circle the battlefield, searching for more ponies to barbeque. Even after the dragon’s roars could no longer be heard, my host remained in that position. She only looked up much later when something landed near her and she was splashed with mud and icy water. A pegasus wearing a peculiar uniform with a skull-and-wings on the flank was standing in front of her. Her face was covered with a flight mask, but her mane and tail were visible, stripes of color forming a rainbow.

“What happened here?” the pegasus asked, but my host didn’t respond.

“Commander, report!” a voice crackled through the rudimentary radio strapped to the pegasus’s side.

“I’ve found a survivor, the only one left of the Crystal Regiment, as far as I can tell,” the pegasus reported into the speaker at her neck.

“Ma’am you need to get out of there now!” the voice on the radio said desperately, “There’s a dragon headed your way! You’ve only got thirteen seconds to retreat!”

“Thirteen seconds?” the pegasus scoffed, “I’m Rainbow Dash. I’ll only need ten.”

Rainbow Dash. I knew that name. As she hoisted my host onto her back, it came to me. She was the Ministry Mare of the Ministry of Awesome. I couldn’t debate that too much as she took off into the air with incredible speed, carrying my host away. As we broke through the clouds, the memory came to an end.

<-=======ooO Ooo=======->

The ceiling of the Clinic greeted me as I returned to reality and considered what I’d just experienced. It was different than the other memory orbs Shining Armor had saved, and a dramatic downswing from the optimism of his preceding recordings. Why had he wanted to keep a memory of a massacre that wasn’t even his memory? I’d just experienced the destruction of the Crystal Regiment, the unit that Shining Armor himself had led, but I had seen or heard nothing about him. I knew he hadn’t died at the battle, so had he even been present? Hopefully, I would find out more in the future from his other recordings, but first I had to adjust to reality. It had been a long memory, and I still thought I could feel Opal’s body, both before and after her dramatic transformation on seeing her friends get wiped out.

***

Upon arriving in Vanhoover, we didn’t go straight to the RoBronco offices where P-8KE had last been. Like the last time we’d returned to the city, we stopped off first at Burnside. The settlement was abuzz with activity when we arrived, and not just within the former prison. Along the road and bridge that led to Burnside, the militia was busily reinforcing their defenses. I wondered if it was general upkeep or if there was a reason for the sudden improvements. I didn’t have to wonder for long.

“Just the ponies I wanted to see,” Spruce said as he approached us shortly after we entered the marketplace, “Your trip to Stalliongrad to deal with the Northern Lights Coalition was productive?”

“Fairly,” I answered, “The Black Skulls are in shambles, and we know where the NLC controls in Stalliongrad.”

I was surprised by the Regulator’s interest. I’d helped him go from Apprentice to full Regulator and talked to him a few times since then, but I wouldn’t really consider the two of us close. He was my closest contact within the Regulators, but that was it. If he was interested enough in my trip and progress against the NLC, then he must’ve seen some profit in it for himself or for Burnside.

“But nothing new on Vanhoover, I take it,” Spruce said, and sighed when I shook my head, “I was afraid of that.”

“What’s going on?” I asked, my curiosity piqued.

“A large group of raiders is preparing to attack Burnside, or, at least, that’s the only reason we can think of that they’re gathering so close to us,” Spruce answered, “Fighting off raiders is nothing new to us, except … we’re worried this might be the Northern Lights Coalition. To band together like this, it’s not something raiders normally do. I haven’t forgotten our fight with the raiders outside Bunker Hill, either. If they have advanced weapons, we may have a problem.”

“I know there are a lot of raider gangs here that the NLC has recruited, so it’s not improbable that they’d be preparing to attack-” I started to say, but stopped when I heard a flare go up behind me.

As I turned to see the signal with my own eyes, alarms went up and ponies in the market sprang aside to let the militia through. The sound of gunfire, both mundane and magical, came from the approach to Burnside. Roaring Thunder shot up into the air and over the wall of the settlement, and ponies gasped in surprise at seeing a pegasus. Rare Sparks took off toward the fighting too, militia members jumping aside to make room for the former Steel Ranger. Ache and I headed toward the fight as well, though we weren’t able to bypass the militia to catch up with our friends.

By the time we reached the fighting, the first barricade had already fallen. Several of the raiders had salvaged or makeshift suits of power armor, and others behind them had rocket launchers. The Burnside militia members were forced to retreat or else get blown away. Rare was facing off against one of the power-armored raiders, trying to cripple him with her minigun and grenade launcher, but she too was forced to retreat when we arrived. Some of the raiders were shooting up at the sky, trying to hit Roaring Thunder as he dove at them, magical energy weapons flashing.

Eight or nine large gangs must’ve been assembled here, outfitted with quality weapons by the NLC to make their assault easier. I climbed one of the guard posts and fired at the crowd of raiders as they advanced. Raiders tended to be crazy, and these were no exception. Instead of being content with advancing behind the cover of their power-armored brethren, they charged ahead at the barricade manically, makeshift melee weapons held in mouths or with magic. With SATS, it was easy to cut them down with my magical energy rifle.

I threw a metal apple at the nearest power-armored pony, but the blast didn’t do anything but knock her off balance for a moment. She turned toward the guard tower I was in and fired several missiles from her armor at it. I and the other ponies within it scrambled to get down, retreating through the floor hatch or the windows in some cases. As the missiles struck home, the top of the tower was blown off and the upper half of the structure quickly came down. I saw Rare take care of the armored pony as I picked myself up, but the other attacks from the raiders destroyed what was left of the barrier, and we were forced to retreat again.

Time and again, that story played out. We’d hold them off at each barrier for a while and thin their numbers, but still they continued to advance on Burnside. As we got nearer and nearer to the former prison, some of the militia members headed up to the top of the wall to snipe the oncoming raiders. It still didn’t help that much. Power armor wasn’t the only advantage the raiders had; instead of the ratty makeshift armor they usually wore, most of the raiders were now wearing modified combat armor, much like mercenaries did.

I drew my combat shotgun as we were forced back against the gate to the settlement. Ponies atop the wall, not all of them militia, hurled down Maretov cocktails on the raiders, but the last two power-armored fighters strode through the fire. Using SATS, I tossed a metal apple at one of them. It detonated next to her and knocked her to the side, where I’d already thrown another metal apple. The second explosion threw her and caved in her armor. She was finished off by a rocket shot too low by one of her comrades. The other power-armored raider was finished off by Rare’s minigun at the same time when he made the mistake of trying to remove his damaged helmet, becoming frozen in place by the armor’s weight.

The remaining raiders charged through the dying patches of fire, screaming at the top of their lungs. The ones with rocket launchers hesitated, not sure what to do, until one of them fired up at the ponies on the wall above. Roaring Thunder swooped down from the sky, turning three of them to ash with magical energy blasts. The fourth he sliced the throat of with his wings as he flew by, and the fifth her picked up with his forelegs. Back against the prison now, we were on the narrow strip of land that reached out to it, and the pegasus threw the raider through the radiation shield and into the crater before arcing up to avoid being exposed to the radiation himself.

A raider charged me with a shotgun of her own, but her bullet merely glanced off my miraculous doctor’s coat, while mine bored through her face. Without the power armor and rockets of the other side, the fight swung in our favor. When the raiders got close, I used my shotgun on them; otherwise, I stuck to my magical energy rifle and tried to get lucky by turning them to glowing ash. They tried several times to cross the last line of barricades erected last minute outside the gate but failed every time, and the last few raiders fled when it became obvious that their attack was hopeless.

As a few militia members pursued the fleeing raiders, the rest cheered in victory and fired their guns into the air. Roaring Thunder quickly landed to avoid being shot accidentally. His armor was already pitted and scorched by shots during the battle, but thankfully, like Rare’s Steel Ranger armor (which also had taken some damage), it could repair itself.

There was no doubt in my mind that the NLC had been behind this attack . . . but why? Did they recognize Burnside as a threat? A foil to their plans? A settlement that wouldn’t bend to them? Or, had it been simpler, merely wanting to take revenge after my friends and I had thrown several large wrenches into their plans? Until I knew more about the NLC and its enigmatic leader, Lord Lamplight, I couldn’t say. Puzzling over that would have to wait, however, since we still had a pondroid to track down.

***

“This is it,” Shining Armor’s voice said apprehensively from my PipBuck’s speakers, “This is the last time in official logs that I’m allowed to mention the Crystal Empire. They insist on destroying all the recordings I’ve made during my time in the Equestrian Army, but I’ll see if I can pull some strings and get the important ones sent back home. I don’t know what I’ll do with them, but it feels important that I keep them, so I can look back and see how we got to this point, I guess. I know how we got to this point, one step at a time …”

“First the War, which never seemed to touch the Empire, apart from Frostpoint expanding and the installation of an army camp there. Then the Massacre at Littlehorn and the outrage not just in Equestria. The creation of the Crystal Regiment, then … my son’s death. Finally, the Crystal Regiment’s destruction at the High Pines Massacre. I know if I’d been there, I’d be just as dead as everypony else, but it still feels wrong that I wasn’t there, to lead the Crystal Ponies even in that terrible defeat.”

“Nopony expected the dragons to break their neutrality, or for the Crystal Regiment to be wiped out, but here we are. Things in the Crystal Empire are bad. I haven’t seen it this bad since Cadence and I first arrived here. There isn’t anypony who hasn’t lost somepony close to them, and it’s taken its toll. The Crystal Ponies have lost their shine and their light, sinking into a depression that will kill the Empire just as surely as a zebra attack would. The Crystal Heart has lost nearly all its power, and Cadence holds back the storms of the north alone now. There’s talk about Twily’s and Applejack’s Ministries joining to build something to keep back the cold and the windigos if the power of the Empire fails. With the state that Equestria is in, the zebras could easily let those winter spirits overwhelm us as they feed on the division in our society.”

“The Crystal Ponies have made the drastic decision to depart entirely from the war. They want to be forgotten, to be allowed to live without any outside interaction, and Luna’s government is working to make it happen. Everything is in place to make the ponies of Equestria forget that the Crystal Empire even exists. Tonight, every newspaper printer in Equestria will have an agent of the Ministry of Image onsite to enchant the newspapers as they’re prepared for delivery. As ponies peruse the news tomorrow morning, they will forget all about the Crystal Empire, the Crystal Ponies, everything. The Ministry of Magic has a counterspell for the Crystal Ponies, my family, the Ministry Mares, and the Princesses; as of tomorrow, we’ll be the only ones to remember. Well, not totally. It isn’t like everypony reads the papers, but over the next few months, every book and advertisement that passes through the Ministry of Image will receive the enchantment as well. Already all books and records have had all mention of the Empire removed. All of Equestria is going to forget everything about the Crystal Empire, including the Crystal Regiment’s acts in this war, but that’s what they want.”

“There is a condition that Luna’s government insisted on: I cannot disappear. I must remain in the Equestrian Army; they’re not done with me yet. I, a colonel with no regiment to command, am being promoted to general and given command of a division. A division of Equestrians who will have no idea where I’ve been the past thirty-eight years. I must continue to fight, not just because the Equestrian Army commands it, though. The zebras will not forget the Empire’s existence, and until this War ends, my home will not be safe.”

Compared to the RoBronco factory in Stalliongrad, their offices in Vanhoover were unimpressive. They occupied only three floors of a much larger office building in downtown Vanhoover. The latest recording from Shining Armor clicked off as we climbed the stairs to the offices. It was a somewhat perilous climb, since the office building was no longer standing directly upright. At some point in time, the entire structure had decided to lean against the building next to it, which was less inclined to leaning and held this building at an odd angle. Going one direction, the stairs were incredibly steep, and going the other direction they were nearly level. I hoped that we wouldn’t have to deal with broken windows and the danger of falling through them once we were on the actual floors.

The doors to the RoBronco offices were locked, suspiciously. Either P-8KE had come through here by a different way, or he’d managed to relock the door before leaving. I was able to pick the lock, and soon we were in the offices. If it wasn’t for EFS, I’d have never known anything was wrong. Red marks popped up representing hostiles moving around, though I couldn’t hear any on this floor. Picking the lock had triggered a silent alarm, though it seemed whoever had designed it was content to let the intruders have their run of the lowest floor.

We fanned out through the level, looking for any signs P-8KE may have left behind. There wasn’t much here to find other than abandoned cubicles, suprisingly without terminals. It seemed strange that so many offices had terminals, yet they were missing in the offices of a robotics company, but I supposed somepony had to deal with all the paper files. There were more than enough of those, filing cabinets stacked everywhere.

With nothing else to see here, we headed up to the next floor, using the staircase internal to the offices. I slid the door open, and a magical energy beam shot through the crack. I cast SATS before pushing it open the rest of the way and targeted a security robot trundling down the hallway with my magical energy rifle. The red light shining from its domed head blinked out as I burned a hole through it with my magical energy blasts.

Another security bot appeared down the hall, and Roaring Thunder jumped into the air to shoot over my head at it. One of the legs of the robot collapsed under it, and it sent energy blasts firing in all directions until Roaring Thunder pegged it with another shot. Synthetic voices came from elsewhere on the floor as the robots tried to find us. With the four of us together and in close quarters, they didn’t prove much of a threat. For some reason, they never seemed to fire directly at Ache; I wondered if they knew she was a pondroid, and if they wouldn’t have been hostile if she’d come here alone, like P-8KE.

Judging by all the posters, both framed on the walls and lying in stacks on desks, this floor was devoted to advertising. There were a few terminals scattered about the floor, but hacking into them revealed they were mostly used for intraoffice communication, so we headed up to the last floor. There were more robots here, intent on keeping us from stealing company secrets. They fared just as well as the ones on the floor below.

We were feeling pretty confident when we entered the maneframe room. There were no more red marks on EFS, and the terminal I’d hacked into to open the security doors had been relatively easy. We were, however, unprepared for a turret to suddenly drop down from the ceiling as we entered the room. It swung back and forth across our group as it fired, and we scattered, desperately trying to shoot back at it. Somepony managed to hit it and deactivate it permanently, but by then we’d all been hit.

I’d been shot in my foreleg, just above my PipBuck, and also in the side, where the bullet had cut right through my saddlebags, body armor, and doctor’s coat as if they hadn’t even been there. I was surprised to see that the bullets had cut right through Rare’s and Roaring Thunder’s armor just as easily. The blood ceased flowing out of the holes in Rare’s armor as it injected her with healing potions, but Roaring Thunder and I both had to drink them manually for the same effect.

Ache’s injury was the most troubling. Above her left eye a hole bored all the way through her head and out the back. Her eyes closed as she wobbled unsteadily, and her off-color blood leaked out of the hole. I rushed over as she sat down on the floor heavily.

“Ache!” I yelled, digging through my saddlebags for something to help her, though I didn’t know what would and wouldn’t work to heal her synthetic body.

“Anti-machine bullet … got through my skull,” she said with slightly slurred words as her eyes snapped halfway open, “Need to … reallocate functionality before rebuild.”

“What can I do?” I asked, feeling helpless.

“Didn’t hit any electronic components,” Ache said, staring ahead blankly, “Need to rest, regenerate. Bandage the wounds to stop fluid loss. Need to sleep.”

Her eyes snapped shut and I pulled magical bandages from my saddlebags. I wasn’t sure if enchanted ones would be any better than regular bandages, but I wanted to give Ache every chance of surviving. She didn’t seem concerned, but her behavior was alarming. I placed my head against her side and could still hear breathing and her heartbeat, so at least she was still alive.

There didn’t seem to be much else I could do for Ache, so I headed toward the terminal on the nearest maneframe. A few minutes later, I was within the RoBronco system, searching for info on P-8KE. I’d seen his ID in the RoBronco system back in Stalliongrad, so I recognized it when I saw it in the logs here. There was the entry date for the offices we were in, and underneath it was another ID dated today, likely Ache’s identifier. I glanced at my friend where she lay on the flooe; she still seemed alive, so I pressed on.

This office didn’t have as robust a set of information as the one in Stalliongrad, but I was able to determine the most important thing: where P-8KE was now. I would have liked to find some information on the Artificial Pony Project, such as how to heal Ache, but this was good too. I didn’t want to think about it, but if she didn’t make it, I felt she’d still want us to find this other pondroid. I downloaded the coordinates to my PipBuck and prepared to leave.

***

“Midnight Aurora is packing up and moving again, this time to a more remote place than just Manehattan. Not that I’ve been able to see her much lately. They’ve jumped me all over the place since … I was promoted to general. The zebras have opened up new fronts everywhere it seems, and we’re hard pressed to keep them back. We need more pegasi to keep the skies clear of those blasted dragons! But, that’s not the reason I’m making this recording.”

“Her involvement with Resolute in the Ministry of Morale was never a secret, especially not to me, but I never saw her transfer to the MoM coming. I guess it has something to do with Resolute’s transfer to the Badlands to command the zebra internment camp there, which just makes me even more uneasy. Most ponies are content not knowing what goes on in those camps, but I have an idea of what happens there. It isn’t anything anypony ought to be proud of, yet Pinkie Pie and her Ministry seem to think they’re doing a great service to Equestria with them. To think, nopony would have ever contemplated those kinds of things before the War … I hope that Aurora doesn’t lose herself there.”

The location where P-8KE had last been, only two days ago, was a secret bunker to the south of Vanhoover. All four of us were outside the entrance now. Ache had recovered miraculously, as she’d tried (and mostly failed) to tell me would happen before she went into hibernation. In addition to being incredibly resistant to damage, most wounds that would kill a regular pony were nonfatal to her. She’d gotten lucky with her head injury, though. Her brain was mostly synthetic tissue, a mimicry of actual brain tissue, but there were portions of it that were not. Some electronics ran through her brain that, if damaged, could be as fatal for her as a headshot for anypony else, because she couldn’t regenerate them. Her metal skull was supposed to protect them from damage, but anti-machine bullets, bullets that could pierce even Steel Ranger armor, could pierce that skeleton of hers just as easily. Her skeleton also wouldn’t regenerate without a manual repair.

After leaving the RoBronco offices, Rare had carried Ache’s unconscious body to the Clinic, which we’d had to park some distance away due to the difficulty of navigating it through downtown Vanhoover. Ache continued to sleep while we drove around the city and into the industrial district south of it—Steel Ranger territory. We didn’t see any of the power-armored ponies as we passed through into the wastes outside the city entirely. Ache awoke slightly before we reached the entrance to the secret RoBronco bunker, a concrete bubble poking out of the hillside, the trees meant to conceal it now no more than twisted, blackened trunks.

The heavy door meant to keep out a megaspell blast wouldn’t be stopping us from getting inside. As I’d come to expect, a panel next to the door provided the means to open it. Somepony had smashed in the terminal screen and broken the port for me to plug my PipBuck in, and I panicked for an instant before I spotted the keyhole next to it, for use in case of emergency. This lock was many orders of magnitude more difficult than the one to the RoBronco offices, but I managed to pick it nonetheless, after losing a considerable amount of bobby pins. There wasn’t much to the bunker’s entrance besides a small room and the door to an elevator that the four of us piled into.

“Look out!” I yelled as the elevator doors began to open at the bottom of the shaft and three red marks appeared on my EFS.

The elevator was plenty large, but the four of us just barely managed to pull back against the walls before the gunfire started. Bullets flew through the elevator door and through the back panel as if it were nothing; more anti-machine bullets. The gunfire ceased, and a whirring came from outside the elevator, so I dared to take a peek at our assailants. There were three turrets, two on the walls and one on the ceiling, mounted on tracks that ran the length of a long cement hallway with no cover. The whirring came from motors on the turrets as they pulled themselves along the tracks closer to us. I pulled back into the elevator as they stopped and began firing at me.

“What’s the plan?” Roaring Thunder asked expectantly.

“Take out the tracks first,” I said, “If those turrets get too close, the elevator will turn from a shelter to a kill box.”

Roaring Thunder jumped out of cover to fire a few blasts from his armor’s weapons before flying up and off to the side. As the turrets paused and opened fire on him, the rest of us aimed for the tracks. I aimed for the ceiling, pulling the trigger of my magical energy rifle until the energy cell was empty and the track was dripping to the floor. Rare was with me on the left side of the elevator and fired her minigun at the right wall, separating a section of the track from the rest so that the turret couldn’t roll past it. Ache fired her submachine gun at the track on the left from the other side of the elevator, ducking back as Roaring Thunder landed next to her.

We took cover and the turrets rolled forward again. I was a little disappointed when they all stopped before reaching the gaps in their tracks. I’d half hoped that they’d just roll off and crash to the floor, but it looked like they were smarter than that. Roaring Thunder took the lead again with our second attack, jumping into the air and hovering before dropping to the floor. As the turrets aimed upwards, he fired his magical energy weapons at the one on the ceiling. Its barrel was blown away and the machine burst into flames.

I tried to throw a metal apple at the turret on the right, hoping to land it between the turret and the wall, but even with SATS it proved too difficult a task. Rare took care of the turret with concentrated fire from her minigun, though, keeping back far enough that the turret on the left couldn’t target her. Ache waited for the gunfire to cease before galloping out of the elevator, low to the floor. The turret tried to keep up with her, but she managed to get behind it. As it tried to swivel around, she struck its exposed mechanisms with her hooves repeatedly until it whined to a halt. Before we trotted out of the elevator, she disconnected its ammo feed, just in case.

At the end of the hallway was another heavy door that led into a spacious room. The walls were still plain concrete, and I couldn’t help but notice its similarity to the Equestrian Army bunker I’d been to. Crates of supplies were stacked around the room and doors lined the walls. Examination proved that the doors led mostly to living quarters, though a few led to workshops, and one each led to a communal bathroom and a kitchen. Along one row were several terminals and a large device with a map similar to the one at the Stalliongrad Stable-Tec factory. Ache sat down at it and began to tap away on the keyboard. Soon a map of Vanhoover was pulled into place and the rods pinpointed our location south of the city.

“I don’t believe it,” Ache said as she sat back in the chair, “They must have implanted a tracking chip in me, to see where I am from here no matter where I went. This was the last search in the system, which means that P-8KE is looking for me!”

“If they were tracking you, are they tracking him as well?” Roaring Thunder asked.

Rare leaned back over the keyboard and began typing again. The map remained the same, the familiar overhead view of Vanhoover, but the rods began to move. They stopped over a point in western Vanhoover.

“That’s where he is,” Ache said and laughed, “Of course, by the time we get there, he’ll probably have moved again.”

“May I?” Rare Sparks asked, and Ache moved the chair aside.

It wasn’t easy for the Steel Ranger to type with her armor still on, but somehow she managed with her nose. After looking some things up and saying nothing, she crouched down and began to open up the guts of the machine.

“I wish you’d enlighten us as to just what you think you’re doing,” Roaring Thunder said as Rare mumbled to herself.

“I think I can build something that’ll let us track P-8KE on the move,” she said as she extricated herself from the machine and popped her head back up, “That way, if he moves again we can just go there. I need to get out of my armor and get my tools, though.”

As Rare headed back out to the Clinic, I sat down at another terminal along the wall. Hacking in, I accessed the bunker’s database and searched for anything interesting. Surprisingly, there wasn’t much there. Most of the files were from during the War, before the megaspells had fallen, and consisted of maintenance reports and inventory checks. There was one file from after the War, an audio recording, and I played it as Rare returned with her tools.

“Head Scientist’s report, since I guess I’m head scientist now,” a mare’s voice came from speakers on the wall, “The Artificial Pony Project has been both a phenomenal success and failure. Units P-8CH and P-8KE are everything the project was designed for, but the earlier units have gone amok. With P-8KE’s disappearance and P-8CH’s complicity in the uprising, I’m beginning to suspect that the flaw is not isolated to the older models. We must start again on our research to create pondroids that are completely obedient, but we are too few now to pull off this task and not safe here.”

“Only sixteen of the forty-five scientists managed to escape the labs and make it here when the pondroids rebelled. I’m sure the older models don’t know about this place, but P-8KE does for sure; I suspect that P-8CH may as well, and she’s still with the older models. Though it’s still unclear whether her participation in the uprising was voluntary, we can’t take the risk. We will leave Vanhoover and head to Stalliongrad, to meet up with the researchers in the bunker there. According to our last communications with them, their experiments to meld centipedes and scorpions to create a security force was becoming dangerous to them, so they need to relocate just as much as us. The Griffin Commonwealth sounds pretty good right now…”

Level Up
New Perk: Burn, Baby, Burn – All fire-based weapons, including flamethrowers and Maretov cocktails, do double damage.
New Quest: If I Only Had a Heart – Follow P-8KE’s tracking chip to locate the pondroid.
Explosives +4 (100) [Max Level Reached]
Lockpick +8 (76)
Medicine +6 (76)
Melee Weapons +2 (100) [Max Level Reached]