Chapter 11
It turned out, finding a submarine had been the least of their worries. Downtown Ponyville was surrounded by two rivers, the Splendid River which separated downtown from the suburb of Freetown on the west side, and the Whitewater Rush, which served as the divider for Whitetail on the east.
Criminals weren’t very smart, fortunately. Oh, they’d had a brilliant plan alright, a drugs smuggling ring had tried to sneak several kilos of crash into Ponyville via submarine. They had failed to do their homework, and had picked the Splendid River as their avenue of approach, not discovering until it was far too late that the Splendid was the shallower of the two, and passing downtown, the river level dropped to only being two metres deep.
The smuggler’s submarine had run aground and they’d abandoned it and their cargo. Drugs smuggling fell under the purview of the Serious and Organised Crime Group. Kelso and Viola had gone to take possession of it, knowing immediately how fortunate they’d been.
‘It almost seems too convenient,’ Viola commented as the car drove; navigating itself to the scene, turning onto the motorway and glancing over to her left, to Kelso sitting in the passenger seat; her eyes buried in the holographic display of her PIP. ‘Not three days ago, we determined we needed a submarine, and one just pops into existence?’
‘I agree,’ Kelso said with a nod as she closed the hologram over her eyes and looked over. ‘Trap?’
‘Trap,’ Viola said with a nod. ‘Fontaine must have someone tailing us.’
Kelso nodded again. ‘Well, on the plus side, since we know it’s a trap, we can’t get caught in it.’
Viola had nothing to say to that.
Kelso looked out the window as they drove along the busy motorway. She glanced up as she spotted two police hovercraft floating above them. The flying saucer shaped aircraft buzzed over to support them on three turbofan engines mounted on the underside. Kelso had been inside one once, they were particularly advanced craft. Essentially, they were two cast sheets of stainless steel welded together on the outside. On the inside, they were packed to the gills with the most advanced tracking technology, complete with a negative feedback control system,and a virtual reality holographic display to give them a real time view of the outside of the craft, allowing a pegasus pilot to fly it as if they were flying in open air under their own power.
Flying is neat. I should have been a pegasus, she thought to herself.
The car came to a stop at the edge of the river. Kelso glanced out the window, looking at the abandoned submarine. It was a small one, no surprise there, only about ten metres long, and three wide. It was sure to be a cramped little thing inside, but it would have to do. Kelso stepped out of the car, and flashed up the display of her PIP over her eyes. She looked up at one of the hovercraft floating above them.
‘What do you think Kilo-2-3? Think you’ll be able to get it with your tractor beam?’ Kelso asked.
She heard a snort over the communication channel. ’Honey, I could pick you up in my tractor beam and carry you around. This thing is going to be no trouble at all,’ the voice of the hovercraft’s pilot; an older mare, responded.
Kelso blushed and nodded her head, she looked over as a flatbed lorry pulled up, its backup alarm chiming as it moved perpendicular to the river.
Kilo-2-3 slowly tilted forward, coming to a halt over the submarine, as a bright blue flash of light enveloped the smaller craft. The vehicle began to move upwards as the hovercraft pulled it from the water. The craft’s pilot gently manipulated the submarine in the tractor beam, lining it up with the flatbed lorry, and placed it down with a gentle thump.
‘Thanks for the assist, Kilo-2-3, we should be good from here,’ Kelso said with a smile.
‘Anytime, Detective Sergeant, always happy to help out!’ the pilot said as the hovercraft banked and flew off back towards headquarters.
Viola walked around to the driver’s side of the lorry. ‘Take this thing to the impound lot. We’ll be by to have a look over it later.’
‘Of course Detective,’ the driver said with a nod as they pulled away.
Kelso frowned and looked to Viola as the lorry drove off. ‘So, is the submarine itself the trap? Or what we’ll find when we drive it into Station SPECTRE?’ she asked.
‘Knowing FutureTec? Probably both,’ Viola commented.
…
Sparky sat at the kitchen counter; slumped over, idly playing with an old sixpence coin from before the Republic switched over to decimalised currency. FutureTec was starting to weigh on her. She and her friends had been through so much lately she was starting to get demoralised. She’d rationalised her continued employment with the company in order to have someone on the inside to keep an eye on things.
So far, it wasn’t working. FutureTec security had foalnapped a young filly under her nose while said filly was visiting her installation. She was supposed to be in charge at Station BRIGHTHOUSE, but it was clear that someone else was calling the shots.
She wasn’t contributing to their cause one bit, her work load as administrator was quite heavy. It was almost as if the secretive cabal of FutureTec’s dirty tricks squad had done this purposefully. Dumping workload onto her to keep her from being effective.
That was a sobering thought.
She frowned and got up from her seat, and put on her jacket. ‘Grandma!’ she called out.
Her grandmother trotted in, the older than dirt pale yellow unicorn mare brushed her fading two toned mane out of her ruby red eyes and cocked her head side long at her. ‘What’s up Spark?’ she asked.
‘I’m going out for a bit, I probably won’t be back for dinner,’ Sparky said.
Vinyl ‘Grandma V’ Scratch, merely nodded her head. ‘Alright kiddo, is everything okay?’ she asked.
‘Not really, just need to clear my head for a bit.’
Grandma V nodded again. ‘Alright, take it easy out there, okay?’ she asked.
Sparky nodded before trotting out the front door and over to her Cord Perfecto SUV. She climbed into the driver’s seat, and engaged the autopilot, before leaning back in the seat and closing her eyes. She must have nodded off for a bit, because she found herself awaking twenty minutes later, having arrived at her destination.
She stepped out of the car and wandered into the Freetown cemetery. She combed the rows of tombstones aimlessly for a few minutes, debating with herself if it was even a good idea to be here right now. She finally came across the one she’d been looking for.
Shortfuse Skydancer
76-100
Lost, but never forgotten.
Sparky dropped to her knees. ‘Hey Shortfuse,’ she said quietly. Her feelings of loss for her dead friend coming into the forefront of her mind. It had only been a few months since her best friend had succumbed to her fatal injuries when the Cosmonaut Anatoliy Leninov crash landed during their return from the gas giant Tartarus.
She still had trouble accepting her friend’s fate. Tears ran from her eyes as she remembered what had happened. The last words she’d had with her friend came rushing back to her.
‘Hey Sparky? Do you think heaven is real?’ Shortfuse had asked.
Sparky closed her eyes, and found herself back in the smashed cockpit of the Leninov, looking on in abject horror as she relived the one experience in her life that left her the most helpless. Shortfuse sat in the pilot seat with a steel beam through her chest.
‘I hope so,’ she had said, in the quietest of whispers.
‘Well—if it is, when it’s your time, meet me at the bar,’ Shortfuse had said with a smile as she closed her eyes and her head went limp.
The memories were too painful for Sparky, she got to her hooves and bolted from the grave. She could never keep herself together when she visited. She hoped that Shortfuse would understand.
Sparky stopped to catch her breath under a tree. She rested a hoof against it, and panted softly. She wiped her eyes with her free foreleg. Why did she do this to herself? If Shortfuse was still alive, she’d tell her not to morn her, but to remember the good times.
She had trouble remembering the good times. That had been almost a life time ago.
Sparky suddenly jumped as she heard a twig snap. She glanced around, paranoia setting in. She wasn’t alone.
She looked up into the tree, and looking down at her was a navy blue earth pony mare, sporting a long, jet black mane, looking back at her with icy blue eyes. She wore a set of khaki coloured saddlebags on her flanks, and a set of green lensed goggles on her forehead. Sparky tried to place the mare for a few moments, before realising who she was looking at. ‘Siddley?’ she asked.
The mare looked back at her. ‘Lost, confused, feelings of worthlessness and regret hang over you like a black cloud. Sparkplug Starlight,’ she said in a deep, thoughtful voice.
Sparky grimaced at the use of her full name as Siddley hopped down. She’d met Siddley only once before, during their first trip to the Ghastly Gorge Industrial Complex; going by the nom de guerre ‘The Unknowable Mare,’ a telepath whose skills had been honed by imposed blindness. She'd become a co-belligerent in the fight against FutureTec. Secretly hating them for stealing her away from her family to train her as a Stalker.
Stalkers were pony telepaths trained to root out changelings. Before Siddley, the last known pony known to be a Stalker had lived fifty years ago. Telepaths were rare among unicorns, almost unheard of from Earth Ponies.
‘I am surprised to see you here,’ she said. ‘I didn’t think that you’d be allowed to wander.’
‘I would like to see them try and stop me,’ Siddley said with an unamused look. ‘Besides, I do important work. This city is plagued; face dancers walk the streets freely. Did you know there are one thousand, one hundred and seventy-three that roam?’
Sparky blinked at her. ‘How do you know that?’ she asked.
‘I am a telepath. It is my business to know,’ she said scornfully. ‘The face dancer you keep among you hinders my progress in rooting them out. I have not given it the long sleep only at the insistence of Ana Kelso.’
Sparky growled. ‘And you'll keep it that way. If you hurt Felicity, you will regret it.’
Siddley looked surprised. ‘You’ve given the abomination a name? What folly. You treat it as if it's people.’
‘She’s more of a person than you are. You're soulless,’ she said.
Siddley smiled eerily. ‘Why thank you Sparkplug Starlight, having a soul in my line of work is a hindrance,’ she said as she opened her bag and an apple floated out of it.
Sparky gasped. Siddley was an earth pony, but she had just telekinetically lifted the apple. She took a bite and offered a bite to her.
Sparky took a step back, looking at her in fear. This was not normal.
‘What are you?’ Sparky asked.
‘One without soul, as you say,’ she said and telekinetically tossed the apple core over her shoulder. Sparky turned tail and fled. If Siddley had meant to intimidate her, she had succeeded.