“You cannot think. You cannot breathe. You dare not breathe. Your head is full of blood. There is something behind the door. There is something behind the door. There is something behind the door. The door begins to open inward, and something fluid and slow, no longer dreaming, begins to come out from inside, lurching around the edge of the door. You run you run you run you run from that place as fast as you possibly can, screaming until your throat fills with the blood in your head, your head now an empty globe while you drown in blood. And still it makes no difference, because you are back in that place with the slugs and the skulls and the pale dreamers and the machine that doesn’t work that doesn’t work that doesn’t work thatdoesn’twork hatdoesnwor atdoeswor tdoeswor doeswor doewor dowor door…”
Patient l9-9-l8-9-l4
Voss Bender Memorial Mental Institute
l3l4 Albumuth Boulevard
Ambergris Il3-241
VanderMeer, Jeff (2007-12-18). City of Saints and Madmen (Kindle Locations 3939-3947). Random House, Inc.. Kindle Edition.
Interviewer (I): "Do you know why you're here, Corporal Elliot?"
David Elliot (DE): "I was told it was a sleep study. There were a lot of PHL doctors coming by last week. Asking about… about dreams or something? Apparently, even Kraber was called in fairly recently. From what I can tell, you called in a lot of PHL about their dreams and then...”
I: "And then?”
DE: “Well, I don’t know. Didn’t have the opportunity to ask anyone. What’s this about a sleep study? If this is to help PHL sleep better, you might as well move on to my friend John.”
I: “Mr. Constantine?”
DE: “He has the usual potion-amputee nightmares. Things weird with his body. Some nightmares he doesn't even talk about.”
I: “Constantine… according to his records, he has never come in contact with potion. He hasn’t even lost a finger to it.”
DE: “Yup. Which is why it’s worrying me so much. I’ve heard people talk about damage to your soul from the potion, but… but can you be damaged from being near it? I’m getting worried about him.”
I: *coughs* "I've read your latest psych evaluation. Your dreams."
DE: "What about them?"
I: "I'd like to hear about them."
DE: (Fidgets) "Permission to speak candidly, sir?"
I: "By all means."
DE: (Pause) "I don't see how my dreams… well, why they're an issue. My shrink said they weren't."
I: "That's for me to determine, Corporal. I'd like to hear about them. Your file says that they're usually based around a conflict, yes?"
DE: "That's correct, sir. My shrink says that they're largely a combination of my own experiences, feeling of… of uselessness in the war, with a series of pop-culture images mixed in, creating unusual results."
I: "Such as?"
DE: (Takes breath) "Well, there was one dream where I was in power armour, fighting - zombies? Might have been?"
I: "Power armour?"
DE: "Paladin Mark I power armour - reactive runic defences, deployable buckler, helmet with standard HUD, IFF and target assist, magic-sink to prevent burnout -" (Pause) "I… sorry."
I: "What was that?"
DE: "I… remember things. Stats about the Paladin armour types, weapon types, troop positions… hell, I could probably field strip a Javelin rifle if we had one."
I: “Then… tell me. What’s a Javelin rifle?”
DE: “Eight-millimeter assault rifle. It’s not all too different from a Kalashnikov, and comes with a balanced recoil system.”
I: "You remember things from your dreams?"
DE: "Half remember. Like a - well, a dream. Except - except sometimes my muscle memory kicks in, like there was one instant on the front where -" (He pauses) "Sorry, it sounds nuts."
I: "Tell me."
DE: "A Royal Guard was in the trench. Earth Pony. Standard gear. He was attacking me - trying to stab me with his spear. I… I parried, used a bit of broken pipe to block his attacks. I didn't know I could even begin to move like that, I’ve never so much as learned to fence. And then I…" (He trails off)
I: "You…?"
DE: "Uh, beat him to death with the pipe."
I: (Chuckles) "No shame in that. I’ve done it before."
DE: "But there's more." (He pauses) "Sometimes I dream of other worlds. There's one - I… I'm flying."
I: "Flying?"
DE: "Yeah, I know, sounds crazy. But I'm - I'm fighting. It's raining. I'm wearing armour, holding a sword - and there's -" (He pauses) "Her."
I: "The Tyrant?"
DE: "Yes and no." (Pause) "Her name - S… S…"
(There is a pause.)
I: “Solamina?"
DE: "Astra Solamina Maxima. The Sun, resplendent and supreme. Monster." (He growls) "Glaive. Armour. Smirking. She thinks she's going to win. She knows she's going to win. She won't. I will stop her."
I: "Corporal?"
DE: (He pauses, looks embarrassed) "Sorry, sir. Got carried away."
I: "Do you remember anything of how to stop her?"
DE: "Yes." (He pauses) "It… you don't -"
I: "Can you tell me?"
DE: "But - but it was a dream."
I: "Even so. Tell me. Don’t you think that Red Couch or Finlayson’s diagnosis could be a bit of an oversimplification?"
DE: "But - but you can't think a dream holds the answer to beating Celestia." (He pauses) "Do you?"
I: "I think dreams hold more secrets than we've ever given them credit for. That's one reason we’ve had these tests."
DE: (He pauses) "Well, not these dreams."
(There is a long pause)
I: "Explain."
DE: "In my dreams, I'm not me - not just me. I’m - I'm like a magical warrior. It's part of who I am." (He pauses) "I don't know how it works. I'm sorry."
I: “That’ll be another question for another day, Although… tell me about the world you’re seeing.”
DE: “What world?”
I: “The one you’re seeing.”
DE: “I… sorry. Don’t know what came over me. But… look, if I try to think about it, I just… I know nobody’s left.”
I: “Nobody’s left where?”
DE: “Anywhere! I just… I know that everything outside of Britain is gone. I know that it’s the only place left and it has a population in the millions. So much of everything is gone that it makes this look like a golden age. There are people over then who honestly miss what we have now.”
I: (He pauses) “Do you think it's possible to have something similar to this - this magical figure you become?”
DE: “Like I said, I don't know how it works. I don't even know how to begin looking for it. And anyway, it was a dream. That world isn't real, and if it is I don’t want to know.”
I: “Why not?”
DE: “Because if it is, the others might be too.”
I: “What does that mean?”
DE: “I - no. No, I can't.”
I: “I could order you.”
DE: “Do you ever feel like there are things people aren't meant to know? I feel like that, sometimes. And it's terrifying.”
I: “Where are you going with this?”
DE: “I don’t always see pleasant, happy things like the end of the world, Colonel. Sometimes…”
(A pause)
I: “Corporal?”
I: “I see a door. The door is as small as your fingernail. The distance between you and the door is infinite. The distance between you and the door is so small that you could reach out and touch it. The door is translucent-the images that flow across the screen sweep across the door as well…”
I: “By the sound of it, you read more VanderMeer than Mr. Heald.”
DE: “Maybe…. I did. Or maybe I didn’t. But there’s something behind it. It’s not friendly. It thinks it is, it thinks we’re the same. But… we’re not.”
I: (Unnerved) “I was told there was a… limiting factor of some kind.”
DE: “That’s a word.” (He pauses) “If Celestia’s out there, then there’s more things out there. Maybe the Tyrant and her Equestria was just the first, and more bad things will follow. Maybe there are nameless things that she knows not, for they are older than her - shadowy things that knaw at the bones of the worlds. There are things that we are not meant to know.” (He pauses) “Not yet, anyway.”
I: “How can you know for certain?”
DE: “Sir?”
I: “You and - well, the other person who’s spoken of these things. You’ve said they’re not meant to be known. But how do you know we couldn’t survive? How do you know we couldn’t take what we need and then defeat them if they turned on us? Or why could we not seek something else out, something different, if there’s so much out there to find?”
DE: (He pauses) “The beginning of wisdom is ‘I do not know’. I do not know. But I know that I do not know. I do not know what my dreams are - whether they’re real or not. But I know that we should be content with reality. Our reality.”
I: “You’re incredibly unhelpful.”
DE: (Abashed) “Sorry, sir.” (He pauses) “One more thing, sir.”
I: “What?”
DE: “For in all things, as there is a beginning, so there shall be an end. It will not be here, it will not be now. We may never see it. But it will end, and the last choice that matters shall be made.”
(There is a pause.)
DE: “Something you needed to hear.”
I: “Says who?”
DE: “The tall figure in the light. And the dark knight hidden in shadow.”
(There is another pause.)
DE: “...Sometimes I see things I don’t want to talk about. Ow. Ow ow ow. My head hurts. I just…. Ah, piss. I feel like I knocked my head on a metal bar. What were you saying?”
I: “A better question is what you were saying…”
DE: “You were asking where I was going with this.”
I: “That was two minutes ago.”
DE: “Has it been? Where does the time go...”
I: “I’ll have to ask Doc Whooves about that.”
“Hold on,” Vinyl says. “How does that… how does any of that help?”
“I can’t believe I’m saying it, but yeah!” Verity asks. “You spend all this time building up to the Hotline, and then you just start referencing Rick and Morty while talking about a lame-ass party?!”
“Which cousin Sixstring apparently saved - wubba lubba dub dub -” Aegis adds.
“Well, I wasn’t there for most of this,” Viktor says. “I was keeping a low profile.”
“Actually,” Scootaloo asks, “I was kind of wondering about that. What… was happening for most of that time? With the Hotline, and… and HLF, and…”
“Now that you mention, it, scoots,” Vinyl asks, “Viktor? Verity? Elena? What’d you guys think of the Hotline?”
“Why do so many people in here have names that begin with ‘V’, anyway,” Heliotrope mutters.
“Good question. I have no idea,” Aegis says. “Seriously, though, I never asked.”
“Because you were too busy laughing,” Verity hisses.
“Verity,” Yael says, sounding bored, “Just… just answer the question.”
“I thought it was bullshit, to be honest,” Verity says. “I just wanted Dad broken out. I don’t… all this magic you PHL work with. The fucking awful shit the PER and Empire do. It’s more trouble than it’s worth.”
“But when you heard someone like Lovikov had control…” Heliotrope presses onwards, curious. “No, really. I never heard this.”
“Fuck you,” Verity says.
“You don’t have anything to lose by telling us,” Kraber says. “This is old news, Verity.”
“Honestly, you don’t have much to lose at all,” Heliotrope says and regrets it immediately.
“Fucking gluesticks,” Verity says. “But. I… yeah. I guess you’re right. Lovikov… so many people of the HLF are hard to point in the right direction.”
“Like Birch,” Yael says.
“Exactly, like Birch,” Verity says, surprised to find herself agreeing. “Or Kraber.”
“I’m not apologizing,” Kraber says.
“Lovikov would be another one,” Verity says. “Great at planning ambushes, hell of an organizer and strategist when he wasn’t off his gourd. I didn’t bother with him, though. Portland pissed me off because y-”
You back away at the waves of malice that seem to be radiating off of Kraber.
“-because he destroyed an opportunity to get back the… the only family I have left,” Verity says. “Well. Had.”
“And I was in Kentucky at the time,” Elena explains. “HLF go cultish all the time.”
Yael sighs. “We’re getting off-topic. Much as this has one. I… went after HLF obsessed with the Hotline plenty of times, but… the first time clue we had that something horrible was going on behind the scenes happened in Burlington. I’d gotten news that the HLF and PER were fighting just on the shores of Lake Champlain, so I’d come to break it up.”
“By which you mean shoot anything you didn’t like,” Verity says.
“Obviously,” Heliotrope nods.
“I know how that started,” you interrupt. “Mommy and I, we were there.”
“...I’m so sorry,” Kraber says.
“You weren’t even there,” Mommy says, confused.
“Well, you have the worst luck possible, I’m beginning to think,” Kraber says.
Mommy looks profoundly disturbed to be agreeing with him. “...Oh shit, you’re right. Anyway, the day Yael started getting worried about the Hotline began like this…”
July 29, 2016
12:30 PM
Burlington, Vermont
Dancing Day
“Pass the wrench!” mommy called from under a massive truck. She’s working on the internals.
A train was rattling by, just across the river.
You’re reading a comic book on an iPad belonging to this human you know, a black woman, a trucker named Keesha everyone calls ‘Chipmunk’ or ‘Chanterelle’. This is out in the yard of her company of employment, which is, more often than not, employed to work with the PHL. Hauling heavy supplies, people (well, why not? Not all the freight cars on that train look like they’re freight cars anymore) or whatever else.
There’s an umbrella over your head.
The black woman - Chanterelle - looked on, vaguely intrigued, as she walked over, a massive wrench held in one hand. She had a rifle and a pistol of some kind on a card table, both half-disassembled.
“Does everyone have to have a gun?” you asked Chanterelle.
“Why not?” Chanterelle asked, taking two long L-shaped pieces of metal the size of crowbars and affixing them to her rifle. “I don’t even like this, but…” she shrugged. “There’s bad people out there.”
Mommy made a vague noise of agreement from under the hood.
“How I have a magical unicorn fixing my truck,” Chanterelle sighed, “I’ll never know.”
Honestly, you don’t get it either. Mommy could - and this is not an exaggeration - have any job she wants. According to the people who serve as your host family, mommy - as a unicorn, with neigh-irreplaceable power - is on the same level of importance to the PHL as somehuman that can create elerium.
Whatever that is. You tried to tell your host family that none of the psionics you know can make that, but her and mommy brushed that off as you being overimaginative.
And yet, Mommy is perfectly happy out here in the countryside, repairing the machinery the PHL distributes. The windmills, solar panels, water purifiers, saltwater stills, alcohol stills, medical equipment, and whatever else. Quick hexes to fix someone’s engines.
She’s hoping to teach it to you too.
You protested. Of course you did. Why wouldn’t you? Your cutie mark is in dancing. You got it on the Eiffel Tower. You want, more than anything, to dance.
But mommy - who told you to think of yourself as the closest thing to Canterlot nobility as was possible in Hoofington - covered in engine grease, wearing a little baseball cap backwards with her horn poking out the hole in the back, will just shrug and say it’s a living.
An (apparently) almost-noble unicorn fixing machines. Some of the Canterlot unicorns would have fits of apoplexy.
So here you are.
“Wait, so Dirk Anger buries meat in New Jersey?” you called over to Chanterelle.
“Uh-huh,” Chanterelle nodded, peering up from her aviators,, pulling on the half-rebuilt rifle experimentally.
“Oh, Kamala! Come here, beta! Some nice man left us meat!” you called out in a passable imitation of a Pakistani accent. Chanterelle stared at you for a moment, and then fell on the pavement laughing.
Your mother stops working on the engine. “I don’t get it.”
“It’s a… it’s from this comic…” you explain.
“Uh, from back in the 2000s, and…” Chanterelle added.
Suddenly, it became abruptly clear that you would never get mom to understand the reference and it wasn’t wor-
December 2022
“PPPFFFFFT! BaaaaahahahahahahHAHAHAHHAAAAAHHAAHAHA!” Kraber guffaws in his hospital bed. “Oh, oh fok ja, that’s fokkin’ hysterical! Fokkin’ lekker… Ah… ah man, I needed that.”
Verity thinks for a moment and cracks up. “I used to love Kamala Khan so much!”
“Like Titanic, But the boat's still floating… No it's not!” Kraber not-quite sings. “The motherfokking boat is exploding!”
“NEXTWAVE!” Aegis adds.
“NEXTWAVE!” Vinyl choruses.
“...I still don’t get it,” Mommy says.
“It’d take too long to explain,” Verity says.
“I am so confused,” Nurse Redheart says.
“I feel your pain,” Mommy agrees.
“Anyway,” Chanterelle had said, “Glad you’re enjoying that comic collection I have, little day.”
Mommy stepped back from the truck, and her horn glowed a little. The truck rumbled - no, it purred. You hadn’t understood why machinery was said to ‘purr’. ‘Grumble,’ or ‘groan,’ or ‘rattle,’ but…
“The cooling enchantments were a bit off,” Mommy explained. “You kept a cooling pump in there even with the enchantments, didn’t you?”
Chanterelle looked a bit dejected. “Yeah… I just… after what happened, it’s hard to trust magic sometimes.” She paused. “No offense.”
“None taken,” mommy said.
“Least you didn’t touch the solar panels on the roof,” Mommy said. “They were weirdly drained though.”
You and Chanterelle look at each other sheepishly.
“Dancing Aphelion Day, tell me you and Keesha didn’t…” Mommy groans, facehoofing.
“I helped her siphon some of the power into those spare PHL power cells, and sell it for food,” you say, very embarrassed. “And more comics.”
Mommy just stares slackjawed for a second.
“Well, I’m not even sure if I’m mad anymore,” she says. “Was this how you got those butternut squash raviolis?”
“Yes?” you said. You remember you were really unsure.
“Did you use your own magic to gather the power and sell it?” Mommy asks.
“I didn’t even do that much,” Chanterelle added. “All her.”
“I’m not even mad,” mommy said. “Well done.” She hugs you. “Not sure anything could ruin toda-”
’In retrospect,’ Mommy says, ‘it almost would’ve been rude for the universe not to listen to that.
It was just then that you saw a flicker, a shifting of light behind Chanterelle’s tinted aviators, and she ran - no, dove - no, flew, for a second Chanterelle seemed to have intimidated gravity into giving her some leeway - for the table.
She grabbed the barely assembled weapon and started pounding the upper half, a set of rails, and something that looked like a box with a hole in it to that rifle. To this day, when you think back on it, it you can’t mentally separate the image of Keesha - of Chanterelle - trying to destroy her gun from the image of her trying to put it back together.
“Something very well could ruin today,” Chanterelle said. “Keep quiet. “
You follow what could be the gaze of Chanterelle’s aviators. With those sunglasses she could be looking anywhere.
Except that’s not true.
As you look over to the road, you realize there is only one place that your friend could be looking.
“But it’s-” you started. Your voice died. Mommy and Chanterelle looked at you, as if to reprimand, and then realize that you have been through enough.
Might just be about to go through more than enough.
For trundling down the road, just outside the trucking depot, was another truck.
It looked like it’d just driven off the set of a movie. It’s not quite military. It looked like a pickup truck, but bigger, meaner. Jagged bits of scrap metal are affixed to the front. It looked like a prefab has been attached to the back. There’s at least two machinegun turrets on it. The words “BIG HURT” were sprayed on one side.
In front of it was a truck that looked… that looked military, but like… like the edges had been sanded down (civilian model?) then built back up. You know that the spikes on it and the other cars are for times when things get desperate enough that newfoals start running at the trucks, so they just might impale themselves.
Or maybe the HLF that built it just saw it in a movie. Behind all of this was a mining truck that barely seemed to fit on the road. Surrounded by bikes and a few small cars with slapdash repairs so bad you weren’t sure if mom was cringing from the poor quality or the occupants.
Years ago, back in france when the Barrier was only barely inside Switzerland’s borders, this sort of thing might have inspired confiden-
“Is Kraber here?!” you whispered.
There’s no way to know but you’re shaking all the same. That bastard, gun to your head, looking so darn empty…
“Hide,” Chanterelle said. “Now.”
You and mom stood frozen in place but still shaking.
“For the love of-” Chanterelle said, muttering something, and then she slung the rifle over her shoulder. She shoved the pistol into her waistband, then suddenly she was picking up you and mommy, running for the building faster than you thought she had in her.
You went blind for a second as you careened through the door.
Chanterelle staggered, Mommy dropping from her arms. She didn’t stop moving, not for a second, and pelted down the hallways.
Then you were running. You don’t know when or how, but one minute Chanterelle was holding you. The next, you were racing along the old, threadbare carpet.
“Keesha,” you heard someone say, “What’s going-”
“HLF,” Chanterelle said. “There’s no time.”
A middle-aged man who looked like he’d worked at this company for most of his life reached under his desk and pulled out a sawed-down shotgun.
“Why aren’t we hiding in the truck?!” you asked.
“They’d expect that,” Chanterelle said. “And there’s a little hidey-hole upstairs.”
You don’t know how long you ran. Not even now.
But then suddenly you were in a little apartment just above the stop. In a closet, hidden just behind some boxes. You could not move.
Astral Nectar
I saw the HLF dragging a pony behind a pickup truck.
I don’t know who it was. They had him harnessed in what looked like a parody of a carthorse yoke, and he was bouncing, skidding behind it. The road had gouged out chunks of their flesh.
I covered my daughter’s eyes.
The truck was packed with HLF, clustered around a rusty machinegun. They were cheering and hollering.
I heard yelling from downstairs. Pressed an ear to the floor.
“Are you housing any PER?!”
“We’re just a trucking company, you mo-”
BLAM
Oh God! Were they okay?! Dancing Day, my daughter, was trying to squeeze herself into an ever-tinier ball against the closet’s walls.
“Reubens, you goddamn-”
“My computer!”
Suddenly, an explosion.
“They’re here! The Hotline was right! I can’t believe it, it was actually-”
When we came back down, it looked like a whirlwind came through. Papers were scattered. Bookshelves had fallen. There was a missing computer or two, and bulletholes in the ceiling.
“What happened here?” I asked.
“They just ran in, and started smashing everything,” Chanterelle said, dejected.
“What…” my daughter said, whimpering slightly. “Why’d they stop?”
“Something across town distracted them, I guess,” someone else explained.
“They were supposed to be good guys,” one man said glumly, as we trotted down through the building.
“You mean the HLF or HTF?” my daughter asked.
“HLF,” the man said, still glum.
Okay, I can be immature sometimes. I can be… unforgiving or whatever. So when I heard that, I started laughing.
“The hell?!” the man asked.
“I never had that certainty,” I said. “Hell, I joined the HTF’s Paris chapter. Then Michael Carter came in. Then the Three Weeks of Blood. When I came to the meeting, the Bureau was attacked, and…” I sighed. “Some of the people there pulled guns on me. I had to jump out a window.”
“So… that’s why you walked with that limp,” my daughter said. “You never told me.”
“You got to like the humans there,” I said. “I didn’t want you to stop trusting them, and when we were on the boat, well… It didn’t seem important.”
“It’s sad, though,” the man said. “I… was part of the Three Weeks of Blood too.”
I stared at him for a second. “Um.”
“I…. kind of fell out of going to the meetings,” he said.
“I think a lot of people are going to soon,” my daughter said.
December 2022
“So,” you say, “I.. never quite asked anyone this.”
“About what?” Kraber asks.
“The HLF… being there,” you say. “I just… why were they even there? I barely know what happened that day.”
“Far as I know,” Yael says, “It was something like this: The PER - some bastards backed by Captain Cactus-”
It is impossible for you not to notice the somewhat dejected look on Heliotrope’s face.
“-and led by Shieldwall were supposed to infiltrate the ruins of a Bureau, find some supplies, and use the basement portal to escape,” Yael explains. “It didn’t work out for them.”
“Why not?” you ask.
“Because,” Heliotrope explains, “The HLF were waiting for them. We didn’t know how or why, but they’d planted themselves all over the city. They’d set up gun emplacements not too far from the Bureau, too.”
“And when PER get cornered…” Kraber says, and shakes his head. “Don’t let PER get cornered. Just kill them all first, it’s a quite an ubuntu.”
Everyone just stares at him.
“Not kinder to them, to the… the people they’ll obviously turn into barely sentient abominations,” Kraber explains. “Honestly. What do you people expect from me? But PER do fokkin’ boos things when you get them cornered.”
July 29, 4:30 PM
Burlington, Vermont, near an old Conversion Bureau...
Yael
I fucking hate Conversion Bureaus, Yael thought as she sat on the bed of a wrecked HLF pickup truck - made by International Harvester of all people, did they even make pickups anymore? - that somebody had outfitted with a large Neo-Panzerfaust. Once again, Yael’s big .308 Galil sat next to her, bipod extended outward, as she used it to open a bottle of Vermont root beer.
“That looks unsafe,” said one Canadian servicewoman with a large, ambiguously wolfish black dog that looked to have a very diverse breeding history, some of which may have involved Newfoundlands or bears.
Probably newfoundlands. The latter seemed unlikely.
“Well, I’m not using the mag,” Yael said. “Besides, what do you think the little gap was made for?”
“The bipod?” the woman asked.
“Yes, but no,” Yael sighed.
It’d been awhile since Yael had been in the presence of one, but you never forgot that sort of thing. Fucking Reitman. Fucking Catseye.
Yael hated the ugly place with a passion. Oh, it’d been painted over in a rainbow of colors once a time, given little flourishes of Equestrian architecture, but once upon a time it had been subjected to the wrath of almost half a decade’s worth of angry residents.
The student uprising during the Three Weeks of Blood, for example. Yael had seen Nny’s photos. The drawings. Nny clutching a molotov cocktail, a stolen revolver in his belt, as he and other students marched on the Bureau...
A photo of a horrified look on someone who’d just been spattered with potion, as someone with that little revolver (the same one Cousin Nny had stolen?) held a gun to their head.
The building sat on the edge of Burlington, Vermont, not too far from a set of railroad tracks. Queen Celestia’s little concentration camp. It bore the scars of hundreds of rounds, angry graffiti, and burns from molotov cocktails thrown in the Burlington Student Uprising back in 2019. A brass memorial of an almost aggressively featureless newfoal, verdigris choking the life out of its features, stood guard or vigil outside. “To Our Eternal Shame,” it read. It had been pocked with bulletholes. One shot had gone straight through its flank where a cutie mark would have never grown.
Lately - as in, within the last hour or so - the landscape had improved. In that the old charnelhouse had suffered several explosions, one wing looked to be collapsing thanks to weapons fire, another one was a skeleton thanks to grenade fire, and the main wing and suffered damage from regular fire.
“So... What do we know about the start of the battle?” Yael asked.
“Didn’t you get here early enough to…” a National Guard said, moderately confused.
“No,” Yael said. “There was a lot that I missed. I… I didn’t see the opening shots of it all.”
It was true. There’d been news of violence in Burlington today - Yael and Heliotrope had been hoping to go on leave, meet Nny, Fiddlesticks, Aegis, his foals, and that strange (strang?) scotsman.
By the time she and Heliotrope got here, an entire neighborhood of Burlington in view of the Bureau had turned into a warzone. HLF had been looting any building they could find and flaying people in the streets, PER had been steadily ponifying anyone in view and fighting their way to the Bureau.
HLF had set up machinegun emplacements nearby in an almost impossibly short amount of time and opened fire into the overgrown garden in front of the Bureau, a hailstorm of bullets shredding any PER nearby.
Until the PER had brought in a herd of anomalous newfoals. The struggle for whatever the goddamn quislings had been looking for had turned into a bloodbath within seconds.
Yael was actually okay with that. Less okay with the staggering civilian casualties, but more okay with the idea of PER being dead. She headed over to the prisoners, tied to trees until the prisoner transports arrived, and peered down at them.
The HLF were a rough-looking group of men and women. One woman with an awkward-looking prosthetic leg made from scrap metal. A man with a burnt face. A woman whose arm looked to have been ponified then cut off in the last hour. Another who looked like he’d been a trim, nautilus-toned old man (maybe ex-military?) before the war, but now just looked beaten to hell by the war.
But then, what didn’t?
Heliotrope trotted over alongside Yael as they looked down at the prisoners. Well. Heliotrope looked up.
One of the prisoners spat in their general direction. Heliotrope wasn’t sure if it was her or Yael.
“You’re going to tell us why you’re here,” Heliotrope said, eyes narrowed.
“To kill the gluesticks,” the man with the burnt face said. “Not that you’d understand. Brown. Quisling. Bitch. Came swooping in…”
“Nah, Yael doesn’t have wings,” Heliotrope interrupted. “That’s my job.”
July 29, 2:30 PM
Heliotrope
She was off scouting. She was always off scouting.
There was an intersection ahead. Another road bled into this one, and a tractor trailer had inexplicably rolled over just nearby.
The HLF had set up a minigun through a hole they’d cut in the trailer (possibly with a stolen laser cutter) and had opened fire at the nearest ponies they’d seen.
This had been PHL tending to wounded, so Heliotrope had divebombed the gunner and splattered his head against the floor.
“FUCKIN’ GLUESTICK!” someone shrieked, firing their M16 in a wide, uncontrolled… well, it was spitting out too many bullets from its ungainly, high-capacity magazine for it to really be called a burst.
Heliotrope spread her wings and catapulted herself to the left, the HLF man tracking her with his rifle, bullets spitting out like some kind of weird sideways hail.
‘-run out of bullets at some point!’ Heliotrope thought frantically as she turned invisible, and flew up, to the right, the HLF man’s bullets continuing along her previous trajectory.
“Can’t hide from me, demon!” the HLF man cackled.
Okay, first, I kind of am. Secondly… demon? The hell?! Heliotrope thought as she flung herself upward like a grenade, comfortably far from wherever the HLF man was fring. All around, she could see HLF spraying their weapons in the direction of the PHL or PER all over this stretch of abandoned highway.
PER were using what few guns they had - thrown vials, as it happened, were rather poor competitors to modern weaponry, so they’d settled for paintball guns, homemade grenade launchers, and ballistas.
Purple explosions thudded along the road, and humans screamed. Heliotrope… tried not to think about it as she flew upwards. Yael would be taking care of them, wouldn’t sh-
July 29, 4:35 PM
“Mind if I sit?” Yael asked, immediately as she sat down on the hood of a nearby pickup truck. It had a rusty yet serviceable copy of a DsHK - rechambered, or more likely built from scrap from the ground up for .50 BMG. Looked almost Chechen.
Yael had worked with Russian and Chechen soldiers before, and it looked kind of like their work. The pickup had been hammered with scrap and painted over several times.
Yael had found that this usually worked out for her.
The prisoners were silent. Even the man with the burnt face.
Heliotrope fluttered up behind the homemade DsHK.
“I’m not here to hurt you,” Yael said.
“Bullshit you’re not,” the woman with the prosthetic leg spat.
“If I was, you’d already be off in - no, fuck it. Nevermind that,” Yael said. “As things stand, you’re still here, and I’ve been getting them closed down. And you’ll probably be put in the prison up in Berlin. I’m not responsible for what happens there.”
“You’re part of the PHL, you brought one of the damn gluesticks here, and you’re Yael Ze’ev,” the ex-military man snorted. “I’m calling bullshit. I was at Nipville, you bitch.”
“So was I,” Heliotrope said. “Your point?”
Yael ignored that. Ignored the argument that was sure to result from it.
“I’m here because right now, the PHL doesn’t like what it’s seeing,” Yael said. “Currently, we’re more on a support role. Build towns up, instruct civilians, create evac routes, kill PER-”
“And our friends!” someone called out defiantly.
“Those HLF kept ponies chained to walls to make weaponry for them,” Heliotrope said. “Took over a refugee camp. You think we’d let that slide?!”
“Well, I can see why you wouldn’t,” one of the prisoners said. “Goddamn geldo.”
“I don’t even have a y chromosome! That doesn’t even make sense!” Heliotrope said.
“No, what I don’t understand,” the prisoner continued, “Is why a human would try to help. Haven’t they taken enough from us? How do you wake up every morning, look away from the horse you must be fucking, and tell yourself that you’re doing the right thing?”
“It’s easy,” Yael said. “You just think about all the good you’ve done. All the successful evacuation. All the food deliveries. All the times civilians looked up to you when you helped set up defenses for their towns and said they were safe. But I’m sure that’s easy for you, isn’t it?”
There was no response.
“That’s what I thought,” Yael said, her face unchanged. “That’s what I thought. Officially, I’m not here to burn Nipville again. I’m just here to scare you all straight thanks to the actions of one Leonid Lovikov. Who turned a hostage situation into a bloodbath and started firing on a city.”
There was silence.
“And arrest the fucker, of course,” Yael added. “Are any of you willing to help?”
More silence.
“Oh, for the love of…” Yael facepalmed. “Please tell me somebody’s at least ashamed of that.”
Still more silence.
“People died? The PER used the chaos as an excuse to ponify and get the Bureau back up and running? Kraber apparently has a higher PER killcount than all of you combined that night?” Heliotrope suggested.
Well, you get the idea.
“What, afraid of actually doing dirty work?” the ex-HLF man asked.
“In which case,” Heliotrope asked, “Why aren’t you afraid of us burning Defiance to the ground? I could do that if I want. I’ve never understood american militias. Read a lot about them when we were taking the flight from Africa to Montreal. And apparently, how it works is militia apparently want nothing more than to get themselves killed.”
“NO WE DON’T!” the man with the burnt face yelled.
“Then why do all the early HLF occupations end with you provoking people?” Heliotrope asked. “You want blood. So the two of us are here.”
July 29, 2:41 PM
HLF, Heliotrope decided, had all the subtlety of a jackhammer.
This wasn’t a real military she was seeing fight its way to the Bureau. This was an armed mob.
They stormed through what few houses were near the old Bureau, men and women and armor rushing out with electronics, appliances, and stolen food.
Some of them were whooping in joy as they carted everything out. Were those…. Were those dead civilians? Had they… had they killed them?
Not that it was out of the ordinary for what Yael and Heliotrope had seen in the Middle East. The PHL had military backing, aid, and a supply of workers. The HLF had little of that, and what they’d done to survive in North Africa as the Barrier pushed them to the Atlantic was best left unmentioned.
Especially as Shieldwall and other PER ran roughshod over them.
Poor Yassen… he did not deserve to be exploded and put back together as a newfoal.
This? Watching HLF ransack the house of some poor human, its windows broken, a hole in the roof from some improvised “artillery?”
From what Heliotrope saw, this was just par for the course.
All around, there were HLF throwing themselves at PER. That hadn’t been the last one she’d seen blow themselves up, taking multiple PER with them.
A woman with one arm, a twisted orange-furred lump of something on the ground next to her, fired her rifle one-handed. An HLF man held a massive pony with one arm, using them like a meatshield.
This isn’t war, it’s a goddamn madhouse! Heliotrope thought.
July 29, 4:43 PM
“You bitch, Ze’ev!” one of the prisoners spat. “You left Matheson to die!”
Yael raised an eyebrow, confused. “And that would be…”
“Eyepatch, pegleg, had a Kalashnikov?”
“We got him to an ambulance,” Yael explained. “Do you really think I’m-”
‘-cruel that I’d let you get ponified? Just laugh it off?’ is what Yael wanted to finish. Instead, Heliotrope just interrupted her.
“Don’t finish that question, you know how they’ll answer,” Heliotrope said. “Anyway, Matheson’s fine.”
“Um. Shit, really?”
July 29, 2:41 PM
Heliotrope rammed her foreleg into the skull of the man that’d been firing at her. His face exploded back against the pavement, and she felt a momentary burst of… joy? Adrenaline?
She didn’t want to think about it.
The battery indicators for her invisibility suit flashed red in the lower left corner of her goggles, and Heliotrope cannoned towards an HLF car left lying on its side. She turned off the suit and flickered back into visibility, clinging to what’d been the right side of the car before a PER unicorn sent it careening through the air.
She was hiding just next to one of the wheels.
In front of her, she could see a foxhole punched into the earth, a crater in the middle of the road.
Looks just like the emplacements we used during the Crystal War, Heliotrope thought disinterestedly.
Two PER, a human and an earth pony, were crouched down in there. The earth pony had what looked like a scavenged assault saddle, with the gun replaced by two crossbows.
The human was feeding boxes (magazines?) into the crossbow.
As Heliotrope watched, the pony squeezed its saddle’s mouth trigger. Two bolts THWACKed out from the pony’s twin bows, and…
Heliotrope suddenly felt sick.
The two bolts punched through an HLF man’s football armor, probably worn because it was… maybe better than nothing?... and stuck there. The man fell to the ground, wheezing in agony. As she watched, the man contorted himself, his back bending at an impossible angle. Strands of purple seemed to be growing through his thick beard.
Ponification bolter! Heliotrope thought, her mind racing.
But the man was making no sound.
Picking himself up on unsteady and warping legs, the HLF man let out a howl of adulation, kissed the cross he wore round his neck, and charged the foxhole. Bolts peppered him, his breathing grew so ragged it actually hurt Heliotrope’s eyes to hear it, but he was still going.
“WE HAVE THE VOICE OF AN ANGEL!” the man warbled through vocal cords that were being reassembled as he spoke. “DO YOU HONESTLY THINK YOUR PATHETIC BITCH-GODDESS HOLDS A CANDLE TO THE ANGEL WHICH SPEAKS TO US! YOUR GOD CARES NOT FOR YOU, BUT WE! HAVE NOT! BEEN! ABANDONED!”
It was hard to describe it, but when she saw the man pull two grenades, the man was… intelligent. Happy. And bloodthirsty to the core.
‘Voice of an angel?! Heliotrope thought.
KABOOM
The HLF man exploded, whatever he had in those two grenades obliterating the bow...stallion? Bowspony? Bowmare?
All that was left of the man was a shoe.
‘The hell was that?!’ Heliotrope thought. But that was another question for another day. She pushed herself up from the roof of the car and fired off her SMGs, pouring a hail of bullets on the stunned-looking PER staring at the sooty remains of their compatriots.
“IT’S HELIOTROPE!” a PER man screamed. “Switch to slug ammo! SWITCH TO-”
Concentrating her goggles’ reticule on the man, Heliotrope squeezed the mouth trigger and fired. Two bullets - hollowpoints - rained down the sky and split his head in half.
She angled her guns downwards and fired down on the PER below. Nine-millimeter rounds from her SMGs poured down on the pavement, chopping through them.
The Bureau was close by. The PER were falling back. Actually, they’d been falling back a long time now.
July 29, 4:53 PM
“If you don’t mind my asking… What the hell?” Yael asked.
Heliotrope shrugged. “I dunno.”
“Not.. I know what you said. But what the hell,” Yael said.
The prisoners down below didn’t look happy to hear from Yael. Or see Heliotrope. Actually, they were just pissed in general.
They were silent.
“Voice of an angel,” Yael said. “Sure. I knew a man who claimed to be hearing the voices of angels.”
“Was he happy? Did it help?” one prsioner asked.
A woman with a hook for an arm - likely to help stabilize her grip to weaponry with foregrips - scowled, and smacked him on the back of his head with her real hand.
“No, it was some kind of Imperial weapon Shieldwal made. And he died,” Yael said. “He exploded - took out most of the tent, and I watched his body parts crawl back together.”
Everything - even the giant dog owned by a National Guard - seemed to go quiet.
“We handled it,” Yael said simply.
“You set him on fire, filled him with all the bullets in the mag - and you had a Beta-C - and blew him up with a grenade launcher,” Heliotrope said.
Yael’s expression didn’t change.
“Then fired a Shipon at the bloody stain in the sand just to be sure,” Heliotrope said.
The woman with the hook snickered.
“You try dealing with watching a man explode, and then watch all his viscera reform into a pony,” Yael said.
There was silence.
“That’s what I thought,” Yael said, nodding.
July 29, 2:54 PM
Heliotrope had fought people that’d later be considered HLF in the Middle East, back during the campaign to alternatively evacuate or defend the place. This most holy of lands.
Some of them had been remnants of ISIS. Some had been angry men and women who happened to have access to soviet materiel and didn’t trust westerners and Israelis trying to help. And others… overlapping with the last two more often than not...
Well, this was why Heliotrope had been skeptical of Yael’s deeply-held belief at first: Fanatics that’d been given an apocalypse. Not their apocalypse, but one all the same.
The fighters that fit into that last category had always terrified Heliotrope. HLF that hung people from cranes, stoned people, crucified them, all kinds of punishments that must have seemed appropriate for the times. And they fought like…
Not like soldiers. Like beasts. A soldier would aim and fire, the fanatics Heliotrope remembered would shoot to fill with lead. With utter disregard for their mortality. Sometimes blowing themselves up with grenades. Sometimes shooting their arms off and firing their rifles one-handed.
The HLF here were like that. In fact, Heliotrope could see examples of it for herself.
But she had bigger things to worry about - for example, the PER ahead of her.
There was an intersection ahead of the Bureau both ends of the road long since walled off by police and National Guard.
A ragged, uneasy alliance of HLF and police had taken points at either end, and were spraying full-auto into the PER just ahead.
And just ahead…
“Golem!” Heliotrope hissed.
“Heliotrope? What’s going on?” Yael’s voice crackled over Heliotrope’s earpiece.
Just below Heliotrope was a vaguely humanoid shape made of all angles and sharp pieces. Like a human of unstable proportions. Last Heliotrope had heard from a… ‘friend’ that’d been captured from the Royal Guards, the Solar Empire didn’t use things like that because of their resemblance to the human form. A human skull, its jaw wired shut, sat just between the shoulders.
And it was slaughtering the HLF in droves. The wicked, hooked blades cutting through them.
“We are not dealing with the usual PER,” Heliotrope said.
“I gathered that when I saw them fielding this many,” Yael said wryly. “Find the animator.”
The Golem was too thin and wiry for bullets to have much long-lasting effect. They skidded across the wood and metal rods that formed its skeletal structure, punching through spots where vital organs would be…
...If it wasn’t just a puppet, about as much as any of the newfoals. It glowed lightly, the telltale aura of a unicorn’s telekinesis.
“Already on it,” Heliotrope said.
And then the Golem ran a teenager through. They looked like they were HLF, wearing homemade leather armor that looked like it was made just to deflect blades.
Heliotrope saw the life bleed out of him. Saw him cough up blood, and-
There was an unearthly shriek from the teenager still impaled on the blade. Almost gingerly, the golem slid them off, and Heliotrope watched their body contort. Watched them… watched them ponify.
It was like their whole body turned inside out.
Aw, the hell with it, Heliotrope thought, and swooped downwards.
“Heliotrope, what are you…” Yael asked, confused.
“I just can’t watch, Helotrope said, and flung two grenades down at the golem.
She watched them both explode, watched them vaporize part of the Golem’s legs. It fell to the ground, only one arm scrabbling on the pavement.
She saw the PER staring agape, up at the spot where Heliotrope had fired the grenades, and turned a homemade machinegun up at the spot. Heliotrope yelped in fear, and-
OW!
One bullet dug a runnel through the side of her suit, just under her wing, and Heliotrope screamed in agony. She fell to the ground, landing on her face just behind a car.
“Medic,” Heliotrope mumbled, as she fell to the ground. Did that thing bruise a rib?!
She pulled herself up to all four legs, only to find three HLF staring down at her.
“It’s Heliotrope,” said one woman with a trucker hat.
There was a strange moment, Heliotrope staring up at these three armed militiamen, (and woman) each pointing guns at her, the strange little brightly-colored alien.
“I’m trying to kill the PER, same as you!” Heliotrope yelled, almost protesting.
The woman smirked. “When you killed some of my friends in Tunisia?”
“They raided the-”
And suddenly, a round through two of their heads, reducing one to vapor, and simply obliterating half of another man’s skull.
The woman gibbered for a second, then suddenly the round punched through her arms, shredding through her ribcage and leaving nothing of the arms about two inches above the elbows.
She… crumpled? Shattered? to the ground.
“Can’t believe that Abe made that shot,” Yael said. “The hell, Heliotrope?!”
“I had to disable the golem!” Heliotrope yelled.
“It’s only downed-” Yael said, and paused. “And pulling itself together. Goddammit. Are you okay?”
“I can still fly,” Heliotrope said. “But the suit’s damaged.”
“You’re the furthest out, and I don’t have air support,” Yael said. “Get in there, and kill whoever’s leading the PER here.”
“I thought you were here to kill us,” someone said. Heliotrope jumped back, and hovered in the air for a second.
“How did you get there?!” Heliotrope stage-whispered. Then shrugged, and put the trigger in her mouth.
“Wait! Wait, no, no no… stop!” the person said. Heliotrope looked over at her - female, dark skin, barely more than a teenager, AR-15. “I’m not going to kill you.”
Heliotrope narrowed her eyes. “Really.”
“Look, the last people that did were shot through their heads,” the woman said. “I don’t want to deal with that.”
Heliotrope shrugged. “Fair enough.”
“Besides,” she said, and something about the way she said this piqued Heliotrope’s interest. “We knew they’d be here-”
July 29, 5 PM
“She said what?” Yael said.
The man with the burnt face slapped the side of his skull. “Dammit, Tamara.”
“See, I’m curious as to what that means,” Yael said. “We knew they’d be here.”
“Maybe we have intel, or something,” one man said.
“I don’t buy it,” Heliotrope said. “You’re Menschabwehrfraktion. That means you work for Lovikov. And Lovikov…. Is not an intel person. He’s someone that others, like Atlas Galt, point in the wrong direction.”
“Don’t you mean the right…”
“No, not at all,” Heliotrope said.
“PER attack. Right,” Yael said, looking down at the corpse of a PER earth pony with an assault saddle modded for two homemade revolver grenade launchers. She placed her thumb and finger over where the gas mask touched the bridge of her nose, out of habit more than anything.
“Why…”
“This wasn’t just a PER attack,” Yael said, pushing one piece of rubble off the man’s body. “See, I asked Heliotrope to run recon awhile ago. And I was at the synagogue while some of your brothers-in-arms kept mentioning the Hotline, whatever that is…”
“Shieldwall said as much,” Heliotrope said, nodding.
July 29, 3:07 PM
Heliotrope flattened her wings to her side and cannoned through a shattered window. Her suit still wasn’t back up to par, but she was Heliotrope, dammit. Plenty of people could remain unseen without an invisibility suit.
Only question was how long she could with the long run cut through her flightsuit.
The indoors had been decorated in the best approximation of Equestrian decor that the early builders of the Bureau could afford.
God, I hate this place, Heliotrope thought, slinking along the walls, almost catlike. She kept her hoofsteps to a soft, steady beat.
It looked for all the world like nobody had gone in here since the Three Weeks of Blood. Gurneys were left scattering the hall, as if a whirlwind had rushed through the building. She could see medical equipment strewn all over the place, strange, specialized things that nobody had even considered looting.
Walkers for the newly Converted, for example. Just ahead, in what was going to be a lounge of some kind, there was a… well, it was hard to describe. It was like two metal rails bent into the shape of waves, cresting upwards.
‘I remember that,’ Heliotrope thought. ‘Mom had me use one to help me fly when I was a foal. Didn’t want to throw me off the cloud. ’
But it was sized for more-or-less fully-grown ponies.
‘They took functioning adults and turned them into children that’d pick the wings off of bugs for fun,’ Heliotrope thought. She knew, on a purely academic level, that the newly converted had needed certain things to help integrate them into their new bodies. The early ones had slight mental problems (apparently, it’d been considered a fair trade to cure alzheimers or something like that) but they’d needed time to integrate. Time to be in a magically neutral environment.
Apparently - according to some of the boys in R&D - ponifying outside of a magically neutral environment could have problems. This was why there’d been specialized Bureaus in the first place.
“Yael,” Heliotrope said. “I’m in the Bureau.”
“Please, for the love of all that’s holy, tell me you added cognitohazard protection to the head,” Yael said.
There was a spray of bullets just overhead, and Yael made a distinctly un-Yael-like yelp.
“Yael? What did you do?”
“I pissed them off,” Yael said.
This was where, if someone hadn’t been familiar with Yael, they’d repeat the question. But, no, it was probably that Yael was just nearby.
Heliotrope didn’t worry. This wasn’t her job. Which sounded callous in retrospect, but Yael could handle herself. Yael… usually had things under control.
She wrinkled her nose as she walked past a room with broken scraps of a door. It looked like someone, hopefully PHL, had stripped the door for its orichalcum. Heliotrope peered inside. It looked like…
Gross!
It looked like there was a sheet of dead skin spread out over part of the floor. Waste biological material, Heliotrope thought, remembering a set of Bureau memos that she’d stolen during the earliest days of the war. All the mass has to go somewhere, so…
Still gross.
All around Heliotrope, as she crept along the hallway, there were remnants of the bad times when humans had grown horrified by the Bureaus and risen up, rioted and ripped them apart.
She’d thought the PHL had been stripped everything of value. Of course, this begged the question… why were PER here?
Portland, Heliotrope thought. Of course. There’d been supplies in the basement of Portland’s unfinished bureau. Of course they were looking for something. They had to be getting potion from somewhere.
There was an atrium just ahead. Heliotrope could hear footsteps and hoofsteps just below, and she crept up to the railing.
This place is a goddamn tomb, Heliotrope thought.
It was a ragtag group of ponies and humans trudging downwards.
Just below, she could see Patrick Fairbairn. A PER man in too-huge aviator sunglasses, who looked fat - or as if he’d once been fat - with a face that looked like a horrible accident. Not like it had resulted from one, no, the first thing that Heliotrope thought of when she saw this man was that some kind of horrible contrivance of fate had led to the existence of his face. His face was more scar tissue, stab wounds, and poorly-healed bones at this point than anything else. Scars looked like they’d exploded outwards from his jaw, cheek, left eye, and a prosthetic nose sat awkwardly on his face, always seemingly on the verge of slipping down to his lips.
He’d been handsome (apparently) before the Alaska incident, when Joseph McCreary and Shieldwall had finally, as Nny put it “kicked what looked like a husky only to find out it was a wolf.”
Fluttering just nearby was a pegasus pony in a gas mask, wearing what looked like a flame-retardant suit. Only their wings were uncovered, and Heliotrope couldn’t tell what color the fur was. It was… kind of ashy grey, but strangely blotchy.
An earth pony mare with a hideous gash in her throat stood nearby. She was carrying a violin case on her back.
December 2022
“Heliotrope?” Vinyl asks. “Were they… were they really that ugly?”
“Probably not all of them,” Heliotrope says, a little sheepish. “I was angry. really angry.”
Kraber, sitting upright in his hospital bed, shrugs. There’s something a little odd about the movement, but he doesn’t seem to notice. “Fair enough.”
July 29, 3:11 PM
Leading all of them, Heliotrope could see a pale earth pony with a short mane. His legs clinked oddly against the floor. He appeared to be drinking something in a cheap glass bottle. And his cutie mark was… was a shield blotched with purple. Was it just her, or had the purple spread? What did… what had happened to his cutie mark? Could the Potion affect it?
Shieldwall!
It took every bit of self-control Heliotrope had not to simply toss in a grenade and watch them explode.
“Yael,” Heliotrope hissed, “I found Shieldwall. Please advise.”
They were cornering a ragtag assortment of humans.
Fairbairn, the three unfamiliar ponies, and Shieldwall - that added up to four. Five, as Heliotrope watched an almost deformed-looking purple unicorn stallion join them. He looked like that huge pony from the synagogue… what was his name? Aegis? Yeah. Like Aegis, as created by an inexperienced sculptor going through a messy breakup.
He was pulling a cart that looked like it had once been an Equus firetruck, a massive upright cylinder that Heliotrope simply knew to be full of potion.
A bandolier sat over his body, with teleport spikes sitting in each slot.
There were about twenty humans in a corner. A But five ponies, most of which didn’t look to be armed, staring down twenty like a Special Forces squad with M16s to someone’s head?
That didn’t feel right.
Shieldwall took a long, disgusting slurp from the bottle. It looked like it had been coke at some point.
“So,” Shieldwall said, looking refreshed, “Who told them?”
“What?” one woman asked. She was trembling like a child.
“The transmissions we’ve been hearing,” Shieldwall said. “Telling people to smash the spikes. PHL being onto us, that I understand. But the HLF were here first. So, to whoever it is…”
July 29, 5:04 PM
“All the high casualties,” Heliotrope said. “Of PER, that is. And the lack of Grotesqueries. This was an HLF ambush. The machinegun nest up there. The HLF had been lying in wait for awhile. It’s too precise to be something that they threw together at the last minute.”
“And there aren’t many HLF here?” a purplish unicorn mare named Chablis asked, confused.
“You kidding?” Yael asked. “My cousin came by here for some investigative reporting around may, and joined the student riots cause he was bored. HLF were the first guys they turned on.”
“I’m tempted to ask why,” one of the members of Yael’s taskforce asked.
“Apparently there’d been a pegasus student cousin Nny wanted to interview,” Yael explained. “She’d been dropping molotovs on the Bureau along with all of them, and the HLF still wanted to cut off her wings. So cousin Nny kicked them in the face.”
She looked down, trying to remember.
“Ask him about it sometime,” Heliotrope said. “The point is, there’s about six colleges around here. And almost everyone there hates the HLF. The point is… the HLF are definitely onto PER around here. Only question is how. And why.”
“It could just be a coincidence,” Chablis suggested.
“It’s never that easy,” Yael said. “There’s something we’re not getting here. I just know it.”
July 29, 3:20 PM
Shieldwall narrowed his eyes at the human PER members.
“I can’t even believe how bucking disgusting you are,” he said, raking his eyes over each and every human. “At least PHL can be made understand their… position relative to ponies. But you. Sell out for the average human. I don’t get that. Aren’t we here to uplift them? Make them better?”
“Please advise!” Heliotrope hissed.
Shieldwall took another sip. Something about the sound made the fur just under Heliotrope’s mane crawl.
“The HLF were waiting for us. I want to know who sold us out. We walked right into a damn Changeling nest full of HLF, and one of you humans has to have told them.”
“Gather intel,” Yael whispered. Heliotrope could just imagine Yael, her best friend, shrinking up against a concrete barrier. “Whatever they’re plotting, we need information on it.”
“I don’t like that sort of thing,” Shieldwall said, pulling the bottle from his mouth with one hoof. “I don’t like it at all.” He turned to the massive cartpony. “Mattock, did you get the supplies?”
“Yes sir,” he said. Heliotrope looked them over, and saw…
No cutie mark?
That was the biggest newfoal she’d ever seen.
“A load full of potion here-” Mattock tapped his cart- “And all the teleport spikes we could need. Our Queen was smart when she built these places. Huge amounts of raw materials down here, even Equus-treated tungsten.”
“What would we need tunsten for?” the newfoal with the throat wound and violin case rasped.
“A lot of-” Shieldwall started.
“Yeah,” said one PER man with a neck that looked to be mostly scar tissue. It looked like he’d been hanged. “Why do we? I’m losing friends down there. We-”
There was a second for Heliotrope to catch a glimpse of an utterly flat, reptilian glint in - no, behind Shieldwall’s eyes - before she watched him pull a vial from one saddlebag and snap his neck forward, the vial shattering against the man that had interrupted him.
Blood dripped from the man’s shoulder where the vial had fragmented. It bubbled and boiled, as lime-green fur grew from inside the wound.
“Listen to your betters,” Shieldwall said, a strangely newfoal-like smile on his face as he took a sip from that glass bottle. “You seem to be mistaking Dicey’s question for possible agreement. We can’t afford to question the Queen. The last time we let a defector live, the PHL’s tech took a running jump forward.”
The steadily ponifying man stared at the lime-green, mossy fur growing out of his shoulder with the glazed eyes of a drug addict.
“But, as I’m a forgiving pony, since I believe you can all be useful-” he swept one hoof across all the humans in the corner. “I’m rewarding you, ah…” He looked like he was confused, trying to recall something. “Ah well. Whatever your name was doesn’t matter. Jimmy?”
“Jeffrey,” the ponifying man whispered, voice raspy. Dare Heliotrope think it, hoarse.
“Sure, whatever. It doesn’t matter,” Shieldwall said dismissively, as he walked up to the ponifying man and reared up. Almost instinctively, the man - Jeffrey - bowed, and Shieldwall placed his hooves on the man’s back. “Because you’re asking questions like that, I’m rewarding you.”
“Thank yurrrrrrr,” Jeffrey slurred.
“You’re all useful assets,” Shieldwall said, and there was something approximating warmth in his voice. “All of you. But I need you to be better than questioning the Queen.”
“What’ve you learned?” Yael asked.
“I don’t even know anymore,” Heliotrope sighed, shaking her head as she watched Shieldwall massage the man’s back.
What was he doing? He was… he was interfering with the ponification process somehow, but Heliotrope had thought only unicorns could be potionshapers. Wait. Earth ponies were able to channel a planet’s magic through them, could it be that Shieldwall was doing that… and pushing it into this human?!
In a Bureau, no less. Bureaus were magically sterile, to prevent outside influences from infecting the process. Like any other hospital room. Letting outside influences in could result in living weapons like Imperial Creed, or… or Reaper. Any process immediately had a chance to fail, and adding outside factors to ponification only made it more likely.
The bastard was using people like building blocks. Not that it was anything new for the Impie sons of pigs.
“That’s… very nice of you,” Heliotrope watched one woman say.
“Mossy Knoll,” said the lime-green pony that had once been a man. It had a black mane with pink highlights, and looked oddly… feminine? Its proportions were strange, and its fur looked strangely lumpy.
There was… there was moss growing in place of the newfoal’s fur in places. A tree branch with a few leaves sprouting from it poked up from its mane.
“He’s… I think he’s making an anomalous newfoal,” Heliotrope whispered.
Yael was silent.
“Say again?”
“Now,” Shieldwall said. “What Jeffrey didn’t understand-”
“Mossy Knoll,” the lime-green pony said.
“Yes, yes, we know,” said the pegasus in the asbestos suit. Rather un-newfoal-like behavior.
“It’s… it’s like some kind of walking tree,” Heliotrope whispered. “Shieldwall... He’s a potionshaper. And worse, he has job satisfaction.”
There was a muffled curse from the other end, and the sound of Yael’s big Galil rattling out a long burst.
“Yael?”
“The HLF have us under fire,” Yael said, “But you’re right. Blow those filthy motherfuckers to-”
“-In a month’s time, it’ll all be over. The PHL will be in ruins. I will stand at the Queen’s side over a land brought to our hooves. I’ll make the filthy betrayers and the humans they’ve enthralled with Hearstrings’ message beg to be ponified. I’ll watch them bleed. And when they’re all ponified, we’ll work over every last one for hours, for months on end, but they’ll accept it with humility. So noble of them.”
“Mossy Knoll,” Mossy Knoll said, nodding.
“And all of you can be fixed,” said the pegasus in the asbestos suit.
“Exactly, Firewhirler,” Shieldwall said. “But, afterwards, we’ll put them to work. Because that’s what heroes do. They show mercy.”
“But, won’t that…” one PER woman said. “I have family in Montreal.”
“They’ll understand,” Shieldwall said, dismissively. “When they see how we’ve crippled the PHL’s stranglehold on Montreal, punished them for the arrogance they had in not perfecting themselves…”
“They don’t know… Maelene doesn’t know that I haven’t been ponified,” the woman said. “I just… I don’t want her to get hurt.”
“Doing the right thing hurts people, Tanith,” Shieldwall said, offering her his bottle. “But then, that’s why it has to be done. We’ll destroy the abominable machines of the PHL, and a lot of people will die. It won’t be easy. But then, worthy tasks never are.”
The woman - Tanith took a sip from Shieldwall’s bottle and froze.
“You sure you don’t want to at least let her think she’s right?” Shieldwall laughed as Tanith went rigid. There was a strange look on her face. It could have been joy. It could have been horror. It could have been anticipation.
“Shieldwall, no!” one man started.
“Excuse me?” Shieldwall yelled, turning his head towards the man that had spoken up. “Are you saying this isn’t an improvement? Do you want me to-”
July 29, 5:10 PM
“He actually drinks potion?” one of the HLF prisoners asked, profoundly disgusted.
“Like great-uncle Set with Nesher Malt, apparently,” Yael said.
“A pony… addicted to the Potion,” one prisoner said. “That’s just… that’s hideous.”
“It’s fucked up, isn’t it?” Yael asked. “I knew a lot of awful people. I’ve worked with people I would’ve been shooting about seven years ago.”
“So much for that moral superiority, huh?” the old veteran sneered.
“Oh, like you haven’t hired awful people,” Yael said dismissively.
“Okay, we… have,” the woman with the prosthetic leg said, “But… from what your little pet there told us-”
“Don’t do it, Yael! They’re not worth it!” Heliotrope pleaded, holding Yael back as her fingers drummed the top of her Jericho 941.
“It’s just…. He just has such a cavalier attitude towards ponifying,” the woman said. “I had friends that tried to hunt him down, y’know. It was like… you know the old trope where someone’s horrible boss shoots his subordinates for failing him? Or just because he enjoys it?”
“I am familiar with it,” Yael said. “I’m just surprised you’re not, too.”
“Even Lovikov, even… even Galt wouldn’t do that!” the old veteran protested.
“I know,” Yael said. “Mike Carter, him I’m not too sure about.”
“Don’t insult our commander like that!” another prisoner yelled.
“He’s. Not. A. Commander,” Yael said, her voice like a whipcrack.
Everyone fell silent. The National Guard. The police. The PHL that’d been deployed to deal with the escalating situation.
“Stom ta jora,” Yael said, and Heliotrope shrank back.
Yael being angry - as in, find HLF in North Africa torturing and raping pony refugees, that kind of angry - was normal. Watching Yael being furious yet perfectly tranquil was terrifying, even if you knew her.
Sure, it wasn’t that different from how Yael usually was. Calm, collected, most of her words strangely precise. But there was something chilling about hearing Yael talk and knowing that somewhere, something had just switched off.
“Michael Carter is a miserable fucking son of a whore who just so happened to be angry enough to convince you, convince people all over the world, to murder every pony for having the chutzpah to look like the bastards that took our friends and family and turned them into chirping little fucking golems. He’s not fucking military. He’s not fit to hold any fucking rank. He’s just another ben zona that hates everything, and doesn’t care about any of you as long as he gets to watch ponies bleed and fucking laugh at it. You. You are not soldiers. You’re not even fucking militia-”
“Most of our fighters are from militias-” someone interrupted, but Yael kept going.
“And I’ve known militias armed with fucking world war one surplus that did their part. Their god-damned duty. You have no duty to anything besides murder, and-” she held up a hand as one prisoner was about to interrupt her. “No. Fuck you. I don’t even want to call you an army. You’re the goddamn manson family’s hired guns,” Yael said. “Now. Fuck off.”
They were silent after that.
“Oh for the love of…” the woman with the prosthetic leg sighed. “Can I finish?”
Yael stared at her. “I honestly don’t give a shit.”
“I just… I meant to say it’s like Shieldwall treats ponification the same way as that,” she said. “But nobody… nobody seemed to really question it. They actually seemed to act like he was… like he was rewarding them.”
“I can vouch for this,” Heliotrope said.
“Did you get him?” asked the woman with the prosthetic leg.
“I handled it as professionally as anyone could be expected to,” Heliotrope said, nodding slowly. She looked almost zen.
July 29, 3:25 PM
“CONSUME YOUR OWN PENIS, YOU UGLY FREAK!” Heliotrope yelled and tossed a grenade down at them.
The look on Shieldwall’s face was priceless.
“Oh, what the-”
“Heliotrope, what’re you-”
“Fuck subtle,” Heliotrope snarled, staring down at the PER. The bastards. The sons of whores that’d sold out an entire world out of self-hate.
“MOSSY KNOLL!” the plantike newfoal yelled, throwing itself at the grenade.
Helitorope watched in horror as Mossy Knoll blocked the grenade with its plantlike bulk. It seemed to grow to impossible proportions over the grenade.
“Mossy knoll!” it kept repeating madly.
Can’t it say anything else?! Heliotrope thought, and, almost on impulse, lobbed her remaining grenades at the PER below.
She held her hooves over her ears and crouched to the floor.
“SWEET RELEASE!” Mossy Knoll yelled as the grenades burnt him to cinders.
“Wait, so is his name Sweet Release now?” Mattock asked. Because-
“SHIELD, DAMMIT, SHIELD!” Shieldwall yelled.
But it was too late. Heliotrope, spraying Russian 9x39mm rounds into the PER on the floor below her. They’d been made to use the most kinetic energy possible at short distances. They weren’t long-range rifle rounds. They didn’t punch through the people below and leave gaping holes in the floor. They just did that to the PER.
Or rather, they had been doing that to PER. Mattock’s shield flared to life in front of the remains, a dull translucent red-brown.
As the forcefield flicked to life, one grenade was split in half. Another one bounced off of Mattock’s shield.
“Scatter!” Shieldwall yelled. “Get to the basement!”
Heliotrope yelped, fluttering her wings madly and flying away from the plume of fire and magically sharpened shrapnel that had been the atrum. Someone’s arm spiralled up through the air.
Who’s arm is… well, whatever.
“Heliotrope, what the hell are you-!” Yael yelled, and before Heliotrope could turn on the comms, she saw Yael.
Just in front of her.
Heliotrope smiled.
“We’re gonna find Shieldwall and make that bastard into brushes and leather!” Heliotrope yelled, fluttering down through the atrium beside her friend.
There was a disturbed look on Yael’s face, but she brushed it off and kicked a heavy, long-since-emptied cabinet to the ground. PHL and National Guard alike were swarming into the Bureau, all around Heliotrope.
They looked ragged, and distinctly unhappy.
“Can’t believe you got here so quick!” Heliotrope breathed.
“Well, the HLF started shooting at us,” Yael said flippantly. “This was better cover.”
“I still can’t believe they-” one man started.
“I’m going to stop you right there,” Yael interrupted.
Heliotrope peered over the cabinet, and stared over at the PER. They were opening up a hail of bullets and ponifiction pellets in the direction of the PHL, National Guard, and assorted others, painting the wall in holes and purple gunk that smelled of grapes.
Shieldwall was at the front, firing from what looked like a stolen assault saddle.
Yael fired off a burst from an unfamiliar open-bolt rifle, only to watch as the bullets skidded of a translucent dull-red surface.
“Shield-disruptors!” she yelled. “Grab the disruptors!”
She slid back into cover and turned back to Heliotrope.
“I was thinking you’d get it all done yourself,” Yael panted, wheezing slightly. “We weren’t hoping to get in here for awhile. So, what’d you find out?”
A powder-blue Earth Pony mare with a build that looked to be mostly muscle fired off the auto-grenade launcher on her back. Blue-pink flashes flared against the shimmering surface of the shield, and slowly but surely, it began to crack.
“It’s tougher than it looks!” the mare cried, “But I’ve got them on the ropes, I d-
There was a bang, and she fell to the ground, a massive hole drilled through her skull.
‘They can shoot through their wall shields, and actually started using guns?’ Heliotrope thought, her gaze tracking up to a human woman standing behind the shield. She held an assault rifle. ‘This just isn’t fair…’
With the exception of one human male with bandoliers of potion slung over his chest and a box full of long, thin tubes on his back, all the other PER were fleeing down a side hallway.
He was unslinging a pipe from his back.
“Everyone throw your damn shield grenades at that thing!” Yael called. “They’re getting away!”
“What does that even mean?!” Heliotrope yelled back. “We’re forcing them down to the basement!”
Yael shook her head, confused, pulled a shield-disruptor grenade, and tossed it in their direction. “They have a plan. They always have a plan.”
“From what I can tell, their plan was just to pick up supplies,” Heliotrope said. “Apparently, some Bureaus have hidden stashes.”
Yael flung herself back down, just as an improvised rocket made from a can of beans, several fins welded to the back, careened over their heads. It had an oddly purplish-colored trail of fuel, and smelled-
“GET DOWN!” Heliotrope yelled, and skidded in front of Yael. “EVERYONE, GET DOWN! IT’S A PONIFICATION ROCKET!”
The other personnel in the room blanched.
“Ah, fuck,” swore a young man with a thick Czech accent, before rolling into another room. PHL and National Guard alike rushed for cover.
Even the ponies, oddly enough. As Heliotrope watched them all scatter, she reflected on how odd it was that even PHL ponies would run away from potion strikes. Sure, the cans would often explode, shrapnel whirling everywhere, but PHL ponies seemed to pick up a lot of the fear that their human compatriots had at the thought of the Potion.
Yael grabbed Heliotrope in one arm and flung them both behind the desk, next to several other humans cowering in fear.
BOOM
The rocket smashed into a wall behind the two of them, splashing Heliotrope and Yael with drips of potion.
For just a second, Yael went… well, if she’d been white, her skin would have gone practically translucent.
She breathed a sigh of relief. The potion simply hovered above her skin by millimeters, as if a invisible layer of something oily sat atop her dark skin.
“When I find Presley and Dovetail, I’m going to rip off all of my clothes and have sex with both of them as thanks for making this thing,” she said.
“Whoa!” someone called from across the room. “Some of us do not need to know that!”
“Go on…” Heliotrope said, a smile creeping up both sides of her face.
“Or I could buy them a cake or something,” Yael shrugged. “Everyone okay? Everyone still think Celestia oughtta go fuck her mum?”
There was a chorus of affirmatives.
“Right,” Yael said. “Heliotrope, can’t you… I don’t know, go invisible and flank them?”
“Can’t,” Heliotrope said, shaking her head. “Got shot. Some of the projectors are damaged.”
Heliotrope poked her head up from the cabinet, and fired off another quick burst from her rifles, more to get rid of the remaining ammo than anything.
“You’re low,” Yael observed, withdrawing two ammo drums from Heliotrope’s saddlebags and feeding them into her rifles.
“I… got carried away,” Heliotrope said.
“It’s another rocket!” someone called.
Yael snarled for a second, and stared down the sights of her Galil.
The PER down the hall were inching steadily towards a doorway, the human with the rocket launcher busy shoving another rocket onto the front.
“Some Russian did this,” Yael said, and squinted at the rocketeer. Her rifle didn’t tremble a bit, even with all the explosions threatening to crumble the Bureau. “Aitmatov, I think.”
The PER man fired.
Yael did too. The Galil didn’t have the fire rate of the other PHL and National Guard’s lighter carbines, it didn’t have an impressive full-auto roar.
But it did have a capacity for impressive full-auto pounding. The rounds crashed out the barrel at full-auto, landing…
Right on the tip of the rocket as it passed through the shield.
Yael smirked slightly as the rocket abruptly detonated midway through the shield, shrapnel turning the cracks in Mattock’s shield into great, gaping wounds.
The man with the rocket launcher had been shredded. Shards of panzerfaust and rocket alike had split his body into pieces. Scraps of flesh, clothes, and metal lay on the floor. Roughly half of Mattock’s body had been sliced apart
And best of all, the shield was… gone. A few fragments hung in midair, fizzling slightly.
Some PHL and National Guard, through truly astonishing feats of poor aim, managed to hit the fragments of shield… but only just.
It was more of a reflex than anything. The PER man with the rocket launcher was a bloody mess on the floor, and the PER had already filtered down the stairs.
“WE’RE COMING FOR YOU, YA BASTARDS!” Heliotrope bellowed, the noise barely seeming to come from her tiny frame. She spread her wings and cannoned forwards, what little glass remained in the room shattering in her wake.
“Hold fire!” Yael commanded. “They’re going to hole themselves up in the basement. I don’t have the explosives to level this place, so we’re going in after them.”
“Already on it,” Heliotrope said as the two of them sprinted for the basement door.
It was just then that disaster struck.
Shieldwall stepped out, a glistening section of shield in front of him. But that wasn’t the worrisome part.
No, that was the assault saddle he was wearing. Loaded with a set of four guns that might have once been paintball or airsoft.
There was a manic grin on his face. “You’ll thank me when this is over. “
A flurry of purple projectiles thoop-thoop-thooped out the barrels. Where the guns hit, purplish spheres almost a foot in diameter grew. There was only one thing they could be: The Potion.
“TAKE COVER!” Yael yelled.
PHL and National Guard alike ducked into rooms, behind shelves and cabinets, anything to get out of the way of the purple spheres.
Heliotrope couldn’t.
Neither did the men and women that had been prepared to follow Yael, their feet stuck to the ground with potion.
“Anyone even moves funny,” Shieldwall called out, almost jovially, “And I can ponify everyone in this room!”
“You’re bluffing!” Heliotrope yelled.
“Okay,” Shieldwall said. “I’m bluffing.”
He moved his neck downwards toward a second mouth trigger, and closed his jaws around the thing.
Within the space of a second, a sphere popped, splattering a PHL man with potion. The walls bled purple with the noxious concoction, and Heliotrope gagged as some got in her mouth.
She retched on the floor.
“Here’s what I’m thinking,” Shieldwall said. “You can surrender, and maybe I won’t ponify you. Disappointing, but needs must as Discord drives.”
“Fuck you,” Yael spat.
“What’s that?” Shieldwall asked. “You want another one of your men ponified? I can do this all day.”
“I know how you operate,” Heliotrope said. “You won’t use them as bargaining chips. You’ll ponify them when you get tired. When you’re hungry. Horny. Or for snoring too loud. Or just when you get bored. Fuck… you, Shieldwall. You want Yael, go through me.”
Shieldwall didn’t move.
“What’s wrong?!” Heliotrope taunted him. “I thought you hated ‘betrayers’ like me.” She mockingly raised the one hoof not pinned by one of the purple bubbles. “I’m the worst Equestria has to offer, even if you’re worse than me by a long shot.”
Shieldwall still didn’t move.
“You’re trying to trick me,” Shieldwall said, his voice even. Calm. Happy. Too much so. “It won’t work. I don’t care. ”
He walked closer to Yael, struggling against the purple bubble holding her prisoner to the wall. He was smiling. Too much.
July 29, 5:15 PM
“Oh, I’m calling bullshit,” one HLF woman said. “He had you dead to rights.”
“How the hell could you possibly know that?!” Chablis asked.
“We were going into the Bureau to kill you,” one of the prisoners said.
A PHL man who’d come to New England with Yael blanched. His face looked like it was caught halfway between angry and confused, then it veered off in a different direction and firmly planted itself in a nearby brick wall. Yael recognized him - his name was Evangelisto.
“The fuck,” he said.
Everyone else - PHL or HLF, pony and human - turned and stared at him.
“What do you even…” the woman with the large dog asked.
“Yeah,” Heliotrope added. “Look. This happens all the time. The religious fanatics that took PHL and UN forces in North Africa, a bunch of pissed-off refugees with guns and one hell of a murderboner for any pony.”
Who the hell even says murderboner, anyway? Yael thought. “Yeah,” she added. “What, do you think I have a reputation for turning them a blind eye?”
“It’s just… none of this makes much sense,” Evangelisto said. “Look.” he gestured to the HLF. “You’ve already gotten one breaking speech, but just… why?”
“They hate us,” Heliotrope said. “Isn’t it obvious?”
The man with the burnt face nodded. “Any horsefucker dying is a good start in my book. PER or PHL”
Yael sighed. She’d killed people for that in North Africa. She’d told herself it was necessary later. She’d told herself it didn’t matter. That somehow, those prisoners dying would have been the straw that broke the camel’s back for the refugees she’d been escorting. It probably wouldn’t have been. The HLF had condemned her for it, maybe even rightly, but the thought of being equated to a goddamn potioner…
The woman with the burnt face smirked. “Go on. Shoot us. Show the American people just what kind of person you really are…”
“Yael,” Heliotrope said. “She’s-”
Okay. The thought of whipping out her Jericho was there. But not tempting.
Yael kept the pistol in her pocket. “Not worth it. I know. Anyone that thinks that way is likely to work with PER to fuck us over.”
“We’d never do that!” the military veteran from the HLF shouted.
“Yeah, but I’m doing just what you said,” Yael said. “‘The other two guys are just as bad.’ Think for a second about what you’re saying.”
“Yael,” Heliotrope said. “What happened to not being worth it?”
July 29, 3:40
And suddenly, bullets. Everywhere.
Some of the PHL fell to poorly-aimed volleys of automatic fire, and Heliotrope watched Yael, despite herself, breathe a sigh of relief.
“KILL THE HORSEFUCKERS!” the HLF were chorusing from outside.
Shieldwall laughed. Like he was untouchable. Like this all had no bearing at all on him.
“Why do you try to protect humanity so much if that’s what they sink to, huh?” he asked. “You’re not much better. What do you really fight for? War? Desolation? The right to hurt each other for no reason at all?”
There was a strange look on Yael’s face.
“What are you…” Heliotrope wondered.
And Yael flicked out a lighter and set herself on fuckin’ fire. The bubble stuck to her leg popped in the intense heat, and for a second Yael was ablaze. A tall, eerie, flaming silhouette.
Everyone stared for a second. The HLF stopped firing. Heliotrope’s jaw dropped. The potion bubbled and boiled on her shield, and for a second Shieldwall just stood, openmouthed.
“Wha-”
That was all the incentive Yael needed, and she rushed forward and kicked him in the face.
He stumbled, staggering across the Bureau floor, before Yael reached down, one flaming hand around the mouth trigger that had exploded the spheres of potion, and pulled.
It snapped off in Yael’s hand. Shieldwall cursed, rearing up, and rammed one foreleg into Yael’s stomach. She staggered backwards, just as the long-dormant sprinklers of the building began spraying water.
It ran in rivulets down her shield, extinguishing the flames.
All around, Heliotrope could see the spheres melting slightly, covering the floor in purple. There were purple stains on everyone’s clothes. Thankfully, everyone seemed fine.
Probably. The PHL and National Guard had all been wearing some kind of countermeasure. Like hazmat suits, wetsuits under their armor and fatigues. The one guy that hadn’t - the poor bastard - looked like he’d unzipped parts of his suit to deal with the summer heat.
The water looked to have diluted the potion enough it wouldn’t do much of anything but burn people - already it was being washed into the drains scattered through the hall.
Heliotrope breathed a sigh of relief as she pulled herself free of the sticky purple sphere, then winced slightly as she watched Yael and Shieldwall grappling near an open doorway. All around her, the PHL and National Guard were taking cover, sliding into disused rooms.
“NEWFOALS!” someone yelled. “THEY PONIFIED OUR FRIENDS, THE BAS-”
It was chaos. The battle had been compressed into this small area, and blood filled the air. Heliotrope could barely hear over the sound of all the bullets.
Newfoals were rushing in and out of the doors looking for the nearest foe, as PHL and HLF alike scrambled out of view. Bullets riddled the walls.
For close to a second Heliotrope’s senses were simply disconnected. Up, down, left, right, loud, quiet, they had no meaning. It was just a constant blur of sensation. Then suddenly reality snapped back into focus and Heliotrope was in a doorway, breathing heavily.
She poked her head and squeezed off a quick burst. At what, she wasn’t sure.
She thought she saw a newfoal collapse.
“Why are the HLF even shooting at us?!” somebody yelled from the doorway across from her. Looked to be National Guard. Sounded young. Heliotrope remembered him “We’re PHL! PHL, GODDAMMIT, WE’RE TRYING TO HEL-”
A bullet punched through the visor of his armored gas-mask. He made a horrible gurgling noise.
Well, that answers that, Heliotrope thought, and looked down the hall.
Yael and Shieldwall were still fighting, pushing their way down a nearby side hallway.
Heliotrope, not knowing what else to do, gritted her teeth and flew out the window.
I’m not leaving Yael with that monster! she thought, enjoying the sensation of being back outside if only for a few seconds.
She stared down at Burlington as she flew back towards the Bureau. There were fires everywhere, smoke wafted up from between the buildings, and she could hear sirens.
Then she folded one wing to the side and dropped, careening towards the first floor window of the Bureau, right about where she remembered seeing Yael and Shieldwall.
I hope I’m right about this, Heliotrope thought, and gritted her teeth as she smashed through the window.
Oh thank God for these goggles, she thought as, hooves outstretched, she burst down the hallway.
She could see Shieldwall, holding a vial of potion above Yael, grinning madly. They were next to a set of stairs leading downwards, deep into the bowels of the Bureau.
Won’t she be fine with the shield? Heliotrope thought. No. Doesn’t matter. This is my best friend. “And nobody!” Heliotrope found herself yelling.
She braced herself, watching Shieldwall’s grin slowly melt into a grimace of hatred.
“-HURTS MY FRIENDS!”
He tried to dodge.
It didn’t work. Heliotrope felt something give under her forelegs, heard him cry out in pain. She circled back, watching Shieldwall staggering on all fours. There was blood running down from just under his mane. His jaw looked somewhat lopsided.
Heliotrope saw Yael breathe a sigh of relief as she staggered to her feet.
And then winced as Yael grabbed her Galil from the floor and jammed the buttstock of the rifle downwards into his snout.
This time Heliotrope heard something crack. She watched as Shieldwall twisted around, and bucked out at Yael’s knees. She slid back an inch, wobbling, before Shieldwall headbutted her in the stomach.
Yael grunted, clasped both hands together, and brought them both down on his head like a sledgehammer.
Whatever he was planning couldn’t be allowed to happen. She circled back, and smashed one hind leg into his ribs.
He staggered. Yael lashed out with one leg, knocking him off-kilter.
She and Yael rushed down the stairs just as Shieldwall picked himself up, and rushed out of their field of view.
Yael swore in Hebrew and unslung a shotgun from her back. Heliotrope followed, close behind.
“I’ll take point,” Heliotrope said. “Yael-”
“We’re taking him down together, shield or not,” Yael said.
“How are you doing? You’re looking a bit… battered,” Heliotrope said, and Yael scowled slightly.
It was their safeword, so to sp-
Kraber starts laughing hysterically. As does Vinyl.
Aegis looks… well, as he always does, restrained. But there’s a slight curl to his lips, like he’s trying not to smile. Either that or it just slightly amuses him. For somepony with such a large face, it can be hard to tell with Aegis.
His foals, on the other hand, are as confused as you.
”Shut up, Kraber,” Verity groans.
“I don’t get it,” you say.
“See, it’s important to-” Kraber starts, and before anyone can fix him with an angry glare, he just sheepishly says, “We’ll explain when you’re older.”
Anyway.
Yael’s shield, as it happened, didn’t automatically recharge. It ran on a PHL thaumic battery Heliotrope had helped fix, and there was only so much it could take before it simply crapped out and died. The original plan Presley, Dovetail, Heliotrope, Hex, and the others at R&D had made when building shields owed a lot to some researchers playing too many videogames. It’d been to make a shield module to make sure PHL soldiers or allied civilians were able to shrug off the potion. A rechargable shield.
This didn’t quite turn out as hoped. There was only so much energy it could store, and while it could absorb ambient thaums and convert them to power, it was inefficient enough that Yael had taken Heliotrope’s advice and gotten rid of the recharging mechanism in favor of more capacity.
Heliotrope guessed that her best friend’s shield had reached the bottom of said capacity. Shot by HLF, took potion, set on fire…
“Guess I am,” Yael conceded. “Fine. Take point.”
Heliotrope nodded, and the two of them surveyed the basement. From what she could see, it looked just like the basement of any building. Equipment of uncertain use sat off to the side of the room.
And there was a hallway. Unless Shieldwall had forced his way past the rusty medical equipment nobody had looted, without knocking any of it askew, and somehow unlocked a secret passageway in the wall, he’d gone that way.
The two of them, followed by various other PHL allies, moved deeper into the innards of the Bureau.
‘Heh,’ Heliotrope thought. ‘More like the bowels. Or the-
Why was she comparing it to organs, anyway?
Heliotrope tried not to think about that as she flew down the hallway, lit only by guttering electric bulbs running on the bare minimum of power.
“Clear!” Heliotrope called as she approached a corner. ‘How goddamn fast is Shieldwall, anyway?’
At that thought, she started flapping her wings faster and turned sideways, her body just scraping against the wall as she turned.
“Heliotrope, slow down!” Yael yelled. “You could get hurt!”
“It’s either that or Shieldwall,” Heliotrope said, flapping her wings faster and faster, as she sped through the innards of the building.
‘Innards? Again?’ Heliotrope thought as she sped towards a door. She gritted her teeth, held her hooves forward…
And smashed into it, every nerve ending in her body screaming in protest as she crumpled to the ground.
Something else was screaming in protest. It took Heliotrope a moment to realize it was her.
“Are you okay?!” Yael asked.
“I’m fine,” Heliotrope said, fluttering upwards, wincing a little. “Ouch.”
“Stay still,” Yael commanded. “Heliotrope, we’re coming to get you.”
Heliotrope peered through the glass slit in the door. A purple glow issued forth from one wall, and…
No.
A portal!
She could see the PER pushing cart after cart of potion through the swirling purple vortex that encompassed an entire wall.
There were dollies being pushed through, each one loaded with potion and those strange crystalline spikes. Each PER member was pushing crate after crate of supplies through the portal.
Heliotrope didn’t think about what she was seeing. She only knew that PER and a portal never led to anything good. That letting the Solar Empire intrude with whatever new weapon they’d decided to equip a newfoal with could only lead to pain. She also knew that the whole city would probably have to be evacuated.
I’m not letting that happen!
Heliotrope ignored the pain in her wings and rammed against the door.
She hissed in pain, flapped her wings again, and was about to-
“Yael,” Heliotrope said, “I’m going to try to blow this door off its hinges with one of the grenades.”
There was a pause.
“You… do realize that in here, that might kill you, right?” Yael asked.
“Well…” Heliotrope started.
“What’s wrong?!” Shieldwall crowed from the other side of the door. “Scared? Don’t want to attack your kind all of a sudden-”
‘I’m gonna kill him,’ Heliotrope thought. ‘What a jackass…’
December 2022
“Well, did you?” you ask.
“Actually...” Yael starts.
“Nah,” Kraber says. “He wasn’t worth it.”
And it is at this moment that you, Mommy, and Verity, and Elena, all of you stare at Kraber in awe.
“What,” Vinyl says.
“I just… how does that even…” Verity is shocked. Her mouth is open. It’s not making words.
“We’ll get to that later,” Aegis says.
July 29, 4:00 PM
By the time Yael got to the door, they were gone.
Heliotrope stared at it all, mute. The portal taking up the wall. The shelves of potion, of supplies… all gone. A crystalline device, smashed to shards. Not quite a totem-prole, but it looked like it had been hooked up to a prole once upon a time.
Something cast a shadow just outside Heliotrope’s admittedly limited field of view. It was swinging slightly.
The door was almost aggressively normal. Painted a calming shade of blue, electric lights running on emergency power illuminating it, a red warning sign painted just by the handle.
And for no reason, Heliotrope thought of Piero from Italy.
When the portal opened, when everyone had their illusions of peace and cooperation, ponies had believed the Royal Guard would make their swords and armor into plowshares. Heliotrope…
Well, she hadn’t quite not believed it, but she hadn’t believed it either. She left for Earth as soon as she could and went to Italy. Which was fuckin’ wonderful. Far away from any humans scared of any alien invaders, beautiful mountains, the salty air from the sea. And pasta. So many great vegetarian dishes… or dishes that Heliotrope thought were vegetarian. She’d eaten meat on a dare from one of the griffons at a flight camp, so it didn’t bother her that much.
And then the city she’d taken up residence in had set up its Bureau, and her friend Piero had gotten curious. Like most ponies, Heliotrope hadn’t seen much wrong with Conversion if it was consensual.
Piero had been shy. Piero had never felt right in his own skin. Piero had been excited at the prospect. Piero had wondered if he was born in the right body, and kept steering conversations towards the Bureau.
Heliotrope had been about to tell him that maybe he had another problem he should talk about, and then one day he’d come back as a pegasus named Cloudburst.
Heliotrope hadn’t minded at first. They enjoyed racing, Piero - excuse her, Cloudburst - had seemed elated to be able to fly, and his sister had been happy too. Give humans the ability to fly, grow incredible plants, or use magic. Sure? Why not? Heliotrope had thought it was all in good fun…
Until someone had called him a cavallo, and… well, after that, things got fuzzy. Heliotrope didn’t quite remember. Maybe the other man had said hew as suspicious of Celestia, maybe he’d said Converting didn’t feel right, maybe he’d mentioned Jazmin Carter. Either way, it’d been minor - something Heliotrope had actually agreed with - and the man had triggered one of the tripwires that made up a newfoal’s mind, and Cloudburst had beaten him to a bloody pulp with a smile on his face. Then he’d turned on Heliotrope for agreeing. Said he was a better pony than her for it.
At that point, Heliotrope had realized beyond a doubt that the thing that came back from the Bureau was not Piero. It wasn’t even a pony. It was a person that had been turned inside out, with the little things that made it a functioning person excised.
It was right about then that things had gone wrong. The Three Weeks Of Blood happened. Heliotrope had flown away at high speed, towards Turkey. At which point, Kraber had shot her.
Where the hell is he, anyway? Heliotrope thought as Yael and the other PHL rushed toward her.
Dalibor Svec - a PHL man barely out of his teens who’d been sent to New England along with Yael and Heliotrope, one of the snipers from Nipville - rushed over to Heliotrope.
“Jsi zaremny,” he said, taking a medical bag from under his coat. “Zde.” He held out a pill.
Heliotrope swallowed it.
“You know you’ll need actual medical attention when we get out of here, right?” asked Dalibor’s brother Abraham in thickly accented English.
The two barely looked alike.
Abraham was barely under height regs for any army, and had a gut that stubbornly refused to disappear no matter how much physical activity he underwent. But he made up for it in width. He was blond and brown-eyed, with a face like a half-finished block of granite. Dalibor was taller than his brother by a few heads, skinny, and carried a marksman rifle on his back. His dark brown (or black?) hair was set in what was almost a mohawk, very slightly trailing down the back of his neck.
His green eyes were full of concern for Heliotrope.
“Just… I need a moment,” Heliotrope said, watching Abraham walk over to the lock, and pull out a screwdriver and small crystalline object. He looked to be fiddling with the lock.
“Heliotrope?” Yael asked, bending over to her friend. “What happened?”
“They…” Heliotrope bowed her head. “Got away. Went through the portal in the wall, and…”
Without warning, Abraham kicked the door open.
“How…”
“They locked it,” Abraham said, walking in, pistol unholstered. "I fucked with the lock, a bit."
“And I think they had a spell here,” one unicorn said, his horn glowing as he looked over the door. “It’s gone now, of course…”
Heliotrope groaned. “Dammit. I could’ve gotten ‘em!”
“In a room full of the things Shieldwall makes?” Yael asked. “I heard about them from cousin Nny. Shieldwall likes… improving. Going under the hood, like I did with dad’s Sabra Sport car.”
“Your Otec,”Dalibor said, “Had an Sabra. In Isra-”
“Oh,” Abraham said, much too calm. “You mean like the things at the other end of the room?”
“Don’t be silly,” Heliotrope said, her mind dulled slightly from the pain medication. She unsteadily picked herself up off the ground and walked into the room alongside Dalibor. “How could a Sabra Sports-”
She stopped and looked to the other end of the room.
Suddenly, Heliotrope wished that the refreshing numbness of the painkillers had come back. In the other end of the room, she could see what might have been newfoals standing aimlessly in the back of the room. Chained to the floor.
Might.
One had a human head poking out from the top of its neck, surrounded by peach-colored fur. Like it was coming out from the hood of one of the costumes Nny had. It was… almost curiously perfect. Too perfect.
Somehow that made it worse. Another one had hands at the end of its forelegs. One of them had come out as a cruel, skinless parody of one of Luna’s Night Guards, its batlike wings at mismatched length. Heliotrope could see fingernails at the end of the… what was it that Lunar Phase had called them? Fingers. Huh.
There was still a ring on one of them. Another newfoal didn’t look equine in the slightest, on account of no two bones in its body pointing the right way. It was… inverted was the only word that Heliotrope could think of at present.
“I guess it is like that,” Yael said, her voice sounding like it was coming from far away.
“Why would…” Heliotrope started, her voice trailing off. Of course. Why would Shieldwall do anything? For the Empire.
For the…
It was just then that the crystalline device on the desk burst into life. Light radiated from every facet, in a riotous rainbow of color that would have been beautiful almost anywhere else.
“Heliotrope,” Yael said. “You know more about Empire tech than most people here. Any idea what that is?”
“Well, Shieldwall is impulsive, so I’m guessing-”
“I meant the crystal terminal,” Yael explained.
“Ah,” Heliotrope said, staring at it, transfixed. The light seemed to dance off the eyes of the nearby failed newfoals. “Okay, that one, I don’t know.”
She inspected the crystalline device. With luck, it hadn’t been made from the same things that the totem-proles were, but she didn’t exactly have enough trust in the Equestrian government to make a judgment at this point.
Parts of it were cracked. Heliotrope could only guess what the cracked sections did, or what the various runes meant. Was that… something about connectivity?
The light coalesced, and everyone in the room saw the figure of an inexplicably angular pony hovering above the crystal.
“Who the hell is that?” Abraham asked.
“My old commanding officer,” Heliotrope said. “Captain Cactus.”
Chablis stifled a giggle.
“He got hit with a Crystal Empire Composer Crystal,” Heliotrope explained. “But…”
The holoprojected figure grew more distinct. Heliotrope knew it. Knew that within a moment she’d see the horrific… scarring? What was the word…
Spikes burst seemingly at random from the earth pony’s body. At some spots on the legs. One poking up through his head in a parody of a unicorn’s horn. But it was far too thin and sat at an off-kilter angle. One eye had been replaced with a sightless crystalline orb. Just by his joints, there were tracks of scarred flesh under paler-than-usual fur. The crystalline spikes grew out from everywhere on his body, with the exception being his left leg.
On account of the fact that it was already entirely crystal. Heliotrope couldn’t see his cutie mark underneath.
“See,” Heliotrope heard herself say, “Composer Crystals convert biomass into fuel for Crystal Empire war engines for the golems, the retrofitted airships, the prism cannons.”
“Why don’t you have any of that now?” Dalibor asked.
“Officially, it’s because the Empire doesn’t like the casualties that might result, but…” Heliotrope shrugged. “Yeah, I know. Mostly because nopony actually knows how to use most of them. The golems are easy - just a basic animation spell I saw unicorns do in their spare time - but something about the crystals from the Crystal Empire just…”
Her voice trailed off as she realized that everyone was more focused on this crucial bit of information literally hovering in front of their faces.
The holographic pony hung, unmoving.
“Anyway,” Heliotrope said. “Long story short, Celestia personally healed him.”
“Bet she ‘healed’ his mind, too,” one blue pegasus stallion said.
“Maybe,” Heliotrope said, shaking her head, her blue-green and pink mane shaking as she did. “Maybe. Not sure it’s that simple.”
The holographic pony spoke. His voice sounded as bad as he looked. Punctured was the only word that came to mind.
“You promise that the war will be over if I do this,” he said. He was wheezing. “My condition. Cured.”
Heliotrope listened intently. Then her head snapped back towards the deformed newfoals. She stalked over to them, confused.
No fuckin’ way, Heliotrope thought, and her blood ran cold.
Their mouths were opening and closing in unison with Captain Cactus’s speech.
“Someone get to recording this,” Yael said. “Now.”
“Absolutely,” Heliotrope heard Shieldwall say, from the mouths of the newfoals.
“You make a lot of promises, squirt,” Captain Cactus said. “You promised your finest newfoals, and human-fighting in Alaska. But… the things you did…”
“I know, I know,” Shieldwall said, dismissively. Like Shieldwall was brushing off a disobedient child or pet. No regard for Heliotrope’s former commanding officer at all.
‘Then again, I don’t really give a shit about him anymore either…’ Heliotrope thought.
“If you do anything like that to us, ever again,” Captain Cactus said, “I will make sure you know every minute of the pain I’ve had since I took that Composer Crystal to the leg.”
“Ohoho, don’t worry at all,” Shieldwall said. “I promise I’m not doing that to us.”
“Then what’s this I hear about the casualties that’ve been inflicted on us recently?” Captain Cactus asked.
“A pony needs a hobby,” Shieldwall said, and Heliotrope could just hear the smirk in his voice.
“You disgust me,” Captain Cactus said.
And then Shieldwall laughed. “Come on, Cappy! Have a sense of humor! That’s unavoidable. No, what I’m doing here is just… probing.”
“While using your underlings as bait,” Captain Cactus said. “You’ve-”
There was the sound of a hoof tapping on the floor. “May I finish?”
Captain Cactus grumbled. “Does it even matter?”
Evidently not, as Shieldwall just plowed onwards. “I want the apes to be scared. I want them to suffer knowing we could be anywhere. I want them to lie awake, so afraid of their world that they think they’re out of time and that we’re invisible. Omnipotent. Unstoppable.”
There was a pause.
“And I want to prove them right.”
Captain Cactus sighed. “Good. The world would be better off without the Celestia-damned monkeys and their defiance. Still, on the subject of your attitude towards personnel, towards resources… I suppose I shouldn’t have expected anything different from you.”
“Why would anyone want to?” Shieldwall asked. “Captain, this thing we’re planning… Project Fillydelphia… will rip out half the discs in the spine of any human resistance.”
“I hate your methods,” Captain Cactus said, weak yet still gruff all at once.
“And yet you go with them,” Shieldwall said.
“Will they end the wars?” Captain Cactus asked. “Can I go home? Just finally have some peace of mind?”
“Abso-buckin’-lutely,” Shieldwall said.
“Then that’s why I go with it. I’m tired, you irreverent little colt. And this is what I have to do for Equestria’s glory,” Captain Cactus said. “I would’ve hoped you learned in Alaska that I have a different set of rules than… whatever you operate on.”
There was a pause.
“By the way,” Captain Cactus added, “How did the HLF find out about this? The PHL I can understand, but-”
His hologram glitched and abruptly froze.
There was silence.
And then Captain Cactus’ hologram went haywire. The crystals shot outwards, piercing through the blue pegasus mare, through Heliotrope, through Chablis, through any PHL in the vicinity. Heliotrope held a hoof to her barrel, breathing heavily.
Her former commanding officer’s mouth twisted upwards into a smile that would have fit perfectly on a newfoal… and then slowly rotated, dragging his face in a grotesque spiral. His eyes were somewhere on the lower left of his chin, fixing Heliotrope with a stare.
Yes.
Heliotrope. Specifically her.
The thing that had been the image of her commanding officer had a grotesquely stretched face. Bloodless. Barely recognizable but for the vague shape of a skull, and the crystals poking through skin that took the vague shape of a face…
“Jag kan inte sova…” a chorus of voices intoned.
“Oh,” Yael sighed. “This again.”
“I am… we are, we…” the voices warbled, and then a burst of syllables in a smattering of more foreign languages than anyone in the room could count.
It was exactly as surreal as the last time. Exactly as nonsensical. Heliotrope’s fur stood on end.
“...Who am I? Who are we? Who were we?” it asked, its voice coming from the newfoals.
Yael stood, rigid. Everyone else seemed to be edging back towards the doorway, towards anywhere that the deformed newfoals and twisted hologram weren’t.
“We are regrets, and we regret everything. We are…”
It was…
“My slave number is P-902. Crystal Empire… prism cannoneer. I am… we are… Gestalt. We were-”
Honestly, after the battle, after seeing Shieldwall, after watching the Captain Cactus hologram do that thing with its skull, after the chaos, after all the pains that were wracking her body, Heliotrope just felt drained.
‘Exhausted’ might have been a better word, but she felt drained. As if there was just an absence of energy inside her, nowhere enough for her to feel even remotely scared of the events.
She just fell to the side.
“Heliotrope!” Yael gasped, bending to her knees and placing her hands on her friend. “Are you-”
“Look, I’m sorry, Yael,” Heliotrope said. “I just… I’m kind of tired out. And after what we’ve been through, I don’t really care.”
“Why wouldn’t you?” Yael asked.
“Look,” Heliotrope said. “It’s just. I’m tired. How d’you do keep doing it, Yael? We have to deal with the HLF. With PER. The Empire. And internal politics. I just…”
“I just want you to know,” Gestalt’s voice echoed over the device, “that no matter what… I do aim to help. There is plenty to be learned about the PER, about what's happening in this region from what is here. There are terrible designs ahoof.”
“Then why doesn’t it tell us anything?” Heliotrope asked. “Look, Yael. Let’s just… whatever this is, I say we let the boys in R&D work on it.”
“I don’t tell you as much as I’d like, Heliotrope, because my authority is limited,” Gestalt explained. “There’s… only so much I can say. So much I can get past the empire.”
Heliotrope would have given anything to be bored and tired right about then.
But that was something neither Heliotrope nor Yael wanted to think about. The prisoners were set to be taken up to one of the two prisons in Berlin, New Hampshire. Relief services and the usual PHL or government spooks were combing the wreckage.
Well, not the usual ones. Yael could see Agent Mamjudar Whitman - the man who’d infamously been beaten for hurting Reitman when she was incarcerated - and Colonel Ambrose Hex nearby.
And a six-wheeled APC that looked like it had been designed by James Cameron. The PHL prisoner transport vehicle was here, now.
Yael could finally relax. Finally! It was about damn time, too.
Before the HLF could be loaded into the transport, Yael found her voice.
“Right,” Yael said, nodding unconvincingly. “By the way, do any of you know where Viktor Kraber might be?”
None of the HLF prisoners seemed to have any idea.
“Fucked if I know,” the woman with the prosthetic leg said. “But I bet that at this moment, he’s doing something truly horrifying and irredeemably evil.”