//------------------------------// // -93- // Story: Coarse Diamonds // by Darkonshadows //------------------------------// “So we all know the plan, I’ll go after Rarity and draw a lot of attention to myself while Greta hacks the system and goes with Rover to eventually meet up with Saffron and Applejack.” Ember didn’t get a response because she was already walking around the corner. “Give me five minutes to cause some carnage before following. The path will be clear to sneak in.” Turning the corner Ember calmly started to pick up speed and she started dodging the shots aimed at her from the five guns pointed in her direction, she quickly returned fire with her rifle and dropped three of them under a burst of fire. Once she was close enough, Ember threw her right fist into the male of the remaining two humans; he was standing to the left of the door.  As Ember slugged him, she spun into a crouch whipping out her tail tripping up the panicked female who had been trying to track her movements. The human female fell onto her back and brought her arms up only to get them both broken, as Ember continued her spin into standing position to bring down her rifle on to the human like a club. Not only that but the female’s helmet cracked horribly by the follow up swing. There was a look of fading fear in the eyes of that person as they blacked out from the pain, from what little Ember could see through her visor. The male behind Ember tried to get up and was swiftly slapped back down by her tail taking his helmet off and knocking him out at the same time, this was when she was performing her follow up swing on the woman before her. “So you’re Flamethrower.” A voice called out over some speakers, sound average male and he came off as rather amiable. “Whatever they’re paying you, we can double it.” “No thanks.” Ember walked up to the door and some shutters closed it off, she went for the rocket launcher. She was only carrying three shots for it, but it would have to be enough. “Are you sure we can’t convince you? You should know you’ll never be able to get through the shutters on the door as they’re blast proof.” The male sounded like he was trying to offer her the deal of a lifetime.  “I’m sure we can still come to some agreement, name your price. You’ll never get out of the tunnels alive otherwise.” “I’ll take my chances.” Instead of continuing to go for the rocket launcher on her back, Ember thought better of it and aimed her rifle at the wall to the right of the door and the shutters covering it. She hefted the gun and hit something to make the second barrel blaze to life with white hot flames, she started cutting a hole through the wall itself and when she was done she kicked the wall inwards and stepped inside. “You probably don’t have enough people to take me if you’re dumb enough to just reinforce the door and not the walls around it.” “We have over a thousand people and quite a few surprises for the likes of you.” The voice continued trying not to sound a little shocked that Ember bypassed the door with relatively little fuss. “Trust me; you’ll want to be on our side when we let loose our special units. Besides you’re just some small time bounty hunter, do you really think you can stop us?” “Ever heard of a geneticist named Neldwie Chramsten?” It was the geneticist she had spoke of when she was mentioning one of her weirdest bounty jobs. “He thought that he had enough of his creations between me and him too. Whatever you’re doing here, I’m honor bound to stop you humans from getting away with it.” There was a choking noise on the other end of speakers addressing her. He likely knew the name Chramsten and just because Ember mostly worked in the pony systems, didn’t mean that she was someone to take lightly. Not when she was dropping names like that one, especially considering that most of Chramsten’s creation could feasibly destroy three squads of their special units. “Hit me with your best shot then, because you’re not going to stop me.” Ember sent a burst of fire from her rifle down the corridor cooking a bunch of humans in their suits as they turned a corner she was approaching. They barely got more than two shots at Ember, both had missed due to flailing and being boiling alive in their uniforms. She had yet to get hit and was actively avoiding getting hit, she didn’t want to damage her EVA suit too much and she wanted to draw as much attention to herself as possible while Rover was sneaking in behind her carnage. - “All special units, report in, we have a case red! Converge on the target; she’s heading for section A-4.” The man was a little bit panicked at watching the flamethrower wielding alien bounty hunter rip through normal people without getting her suit damaged. He was making a call and it was a good one because he saw how dangerous that bounty hunter was, considering she’s already taken out fifteen… twenty seven people without a sweat and is ripping through their armored people like tissue paper.“I repeat case red, section A-4. Special units are to ignore the ponies and head for the bounty hunter. Our people can take care of them.” - A powerful looking machine stopped firing on the two ponies trapped in the hallway in the upper floors; they were taking cover behind a crate that was quickly being worn down. It was a human piloted humanoid machine with arms ending in four clawed grappling hands that fired rapid bursts of electrical energy. It turned away and started to run.  It left the armored humans to deal with the two small problems randomly wandering their base to deal with a bigger fish. Said fish was Ember, who was considered dangerous enough that she could blow their whole operation apart if she wasn’t stopped. The mechanical suits were made to fit in the wide hallways and corridors; they were heavily armored and could deal with problems close up or far away in equal measure. The grappling claws alone could rip apart a pony if they managed to grab hold of one and were twelve to fifteen feet in height. “Why do you think they had him just scamper off like that?” Applejack leaned out from behind the crate and fired her rifle once; her material weapon was made to fire single shots at a long range. In close quarters it wasn’t any less effective, but it wasn’t meant for rapid firing or dealing with multiple targets at a time. Plus she was limited by ammo and was slowly running out of material shots or pellets for her rifle. The sound of someone falling to the floor with a grunt was heard. A wince came from Applejack as she wasn’t cut out for violence or injuring other people and was shooting to disable only. She hadn’t missed a single shot yet, she had a sturdy aim and she had some willingness to injure. Considering that these people were ruining her livelihood, Applejack felt a little justified in dealing injuries to them even if she didn’t like it. “It’s probably my friends causing bigger problems for them.” Saffron was behind Applejack and looking down the hallway the other way and sending blasts of energy from her armored hooves, there was a strangled scream that caused Applejack to wince once again. Ar-Mare-Do-Well was aiming to maim, she didn’t care about the health of these people at all and she shouldn’t considering they were trying to kill them. These humans hadn’t asked for them to surrender and had started shooting at them immediately once they were spotted, which didn’t take long. The intent to kill them was pretty clear. Whatever they had stumbled upon, nobody wanted any witnesses or information of it getting out. The mechanical suit that showed up was more of the known style for humans than the robot wolves and sharks had been. Humans had a tendency to design things after themselves, their science fiction was notably full of alien races that walked on two legs and acted exactly like them with very minor differences. Humans could hardly make a science fiction stories without something like themselves being included in it. Well the universe certainly showed humans that intelligent life was far more varied than their cookie cutter aliens from their fictional stories. Didn’t stop them from doing the same thing when they designed machinery when they reached a good enough technological level for it. Strange robot sharks and wolves were not the first things to come to mind when you thought human designed technology, so maybe some kind of outsourcing was involved. It had Saffron pondering at least. The armored suit that they had been holding off for the past few minutes was definitely of a human design, the wolves and sharks less so. Saffron’s shields were taking quite a lot of hits and she needed to recharge them soon, she was down to seven percent usage and her battery utility was having problems charging them back up. She was spending quite a lot of time taking hits for Applejack and making sure she was protected, the farmer had only been grazed three times but the injuries would add up if things kept going like this. “Well that’s some good news, now if we only knew where we were going or what to do when we get there!” This fight was understandably upsetting to Applejack, she wasn’t nearly as willing as Mare-Do-Well to cause permanent injuries. Though she understood the kind of situation they were in. It had been rather tense considering they were between a rock and a hard place a minute ago when that human driven machine joined the fight. “Anywhere is better than being stuck in this hallway where our cover is slowly being destroyed.” Flicking a shock wing around cover Saffron launched several blasts of electrical energy and watched as the humans hit by them fell to the ground in spasms and jerky twitches. “Come on, grab a hold of me. We’re getting out of here.” Saffron waited for Applejack to move and when she did jump onto her back, Saffron activated skate mode at full blast. She went rocketing out of cover and skidding down the hallway under a hail of fire from behind, as she bowled over the humans in front of her and passed them faster than they could follow. At least they weren’t trapped in place any more, she needed to find some kind of outlet to plug her suit into or prioritize her battery energy to focus on the shields instead of weapons. “Once we lose these guys, we need to find a better place to go for a bit. I need to recover my shields or else they’ll start damaging my armor. In such a situation I won’t be able to protect you very well.” “Hey, I’m a grown mare and I can take care of myself!” Applejack ducked her head low as a material round pinged off of Mare-Do-Well’s armored thighs as they shot around a corner and ricocheted into a wall. “I wouldn’t mind finding a place for you to recover those shields at though. I may be well over my head here, but that doesn’t mean I’m ready to call it quits on living Mare.” Skate mode was keeping them ahead of most humans and it was proving to be one of the best functions in Saffron’s suit for getting away from danger. It was still rather hard to control and making sharp turns was quite hard unless Saffron slowed down. Slowing down with as many humans as there were in this facility could mean trouble, there were very few places to hide that weren’t storage closets. A door opened nearby and nothing came out of it. “Hey guys, get inside quickly!” Greta’s voice called out to Saffron. Saffron swerved into the room at Greta’s behest and the door slammed shut behind her. Several humans rushed by and some started checking the rooms that were not security protected. - Rover was sitting underneath a desk and cradling his rifle and keeping a lookout as Viral’s large tail seemed to peel into four smaller tails and a small inner one stretched out to jab into the nearby computer. From there Greta started pulling and copying as much data as she could get from the system. The system was now disastrously open to Greta and she had control of it. The facility surprisingly didn’t have automatic turrets or anything that wasn’t manually operated. The only thing that was automated was the entire of army of robots and several towers being built to operate them. “Let’s see… hey I found a kill code! I can destroy all the wolves, sharks and some other things they have with one fell swoop. I expect them locate my intrusion, so this computer will be compromised when I do that. Get ready to move out Rover.” Greta continued to talk to Rover through the robotic fox she made. “First I’m going to tell Ember where she needs to go to meet up with Rarity. I need Rarity to investigate that big room and I’m sending her helmet’s display a map to get her there. My reasoning is that they have some systems not connected to the overall computer network in this facility, so I don’t think I’m getting all the more secretive stuff I could be getting. As for Applejack and Saffron, they are on the move and… now there’s a good place for them to be. Hey guys, get inside quickly! Rarity sending map information, get to this location. Ember is going to meet you there. Now dropping that kill code and…” The entire base and surrounding area shook with hundreds of explosions; the Centaur-pede almost fell from its perch on the ceiling near the facility as the ground shook and quaked for several minutes. In that time Greta quickly had Viral detach her tail from the computer and close it up; she had her robot quickly lead Rover away from the computer as the power throughout the facility flickered violently. It was kind of an afterthought, but Greta had realized that she underestimated the domino effect of exploding every single wolf, shark and a number of other things all at the same time above a system of crafted hollow tunnels. Checking the end results afterwards she had collapsed a lot of the ice tunnels. There were still a few paths out, but if anyone had been in those tunnels they were bound to be buried under ice, snow and dirt with no chance for escape. That was far more destruction than Greta had intended. - “Woo, that was a big one!” It had Gilda smiling, which had been an awesome series of explosions. It was probably one of the most impressive things Greta had ever done. Minus the mechanical fish thing, that would always be in Gilda’s top five.  She watched as the map warped and change in front of her. The rumbling lasted for a good three minutes and she was pretty sure Greta checked to see what she had done. “So did you get us trapped underground or do we still have enough power to dig out of this?” “We still have enough power to dig out if we have to, but it’ll take a while. There are still some tunnels we can use to get back to the surface.” After some consideration Greta added with a slightly sheepish tone. “They might not exactly be structurally sound after what I just did.” “Gee… you think?” Sarcasm aside, Gilda still thought the kind of destruction that Greta just pulled off was incredible. She’ll give nerds and dweebs credit, where credit is due. Jocks couldn’t possibly create that level of destruction without an incredible amount of stupidity. “I’ll look over the data while you’re busy helping out dog boy. You know, to see what you got from them before you decided to collapse almost everything on top of us and kill us all.” - “What the hell… how the hell did… just fucking hell!” There was a command center in the facility and there were three leaders, one was a man that tried to talk Ember into selling out her own hoard. It was a bad idea to ask a dragon to give up their hoard, not that Ember wasn’t already coming for them anyway and this kind of thing just made it worse. There were currently a lot of flabbergasted expressions to go around. “I’m going to go get my walker out; these people are bigger threats than I previously thought!” “Far more so considering they cut off almost all of the escape routes after they’ve already infiltrated the base in several places.” This one was a woman and she decided to get her weapons out as well, from what she saw someone found the kill code and had been in their systems shortly following Flamethrower’s entrance into their building. A lot of their entrances were closed off and their vehicle bays were all but useless now aside from utilizing the walkers, if they cut power to the elevators then getting the mechanical armors between floors would become impossible. She headed towards the doors; she also wanted to see if she could deal with these intruders personally. “They are well organized professionals, they cut our ability to deal with them down by a lot and we still don’t know how many of them there are.” “Well so much for the plan, we need to work on the fallout if they find all the… shit they have information on most of our operations.” That last man was checking their computer systems and found that it had been compromised already, but how had someone gotten access so easily? A good portion of their operations were compromised and it would be a public relations nightmare, considering that they have pulled this kind of crap before. Once this stuff came to light, the human race was going to have a lot of problems explaining things and they would have a lot of enemies on all sides. The fan was being hit with all the crap they’ve pulled against various other alien races and they weren’t going to be able to do much against all those races allying against them. They couldn’t bury the operations unless they could ensure the intruders died before they could escape with the information. This man set to work trying to find where that copied information went; it was a supposedly secure computer near where Flamethrower had started her assault. Which led him to a numb conclusion, the human race was going to lose a lot of ground real soon. - “I swear we have been so disorganized since we’ve been separated that I haven’t the foggiest what is going on anymore, at least Ms. Gollenfer managed to send me something to do. I’ll be glad to meet up with Ember, because my injuries certainly aren’t getting any better.” They were causing huge messes everywhere and there were only seven of them, if you excluded the Puffle’s presence. The Puffle ignored her talking to herself. Rarity wondered how much crazier things could get, there were a lot of violent thuds and the entire world shook for a few minutes. She had managed to avoid security so far and then she suddenly got a map on her HUD and a location to head to before that series of explosions went off. “My goodness, what in the world? I swear my friends can do amazing things, but I really hope they didn’t go overboard with whatever that was.” The Puffle had squeaked and covered her eyes while cowering; they were in the middle of the corridor when the lights started flickering as much as the power throughout the entire shaking building. Rarity sighed, until Fluffy Puff decided to stop cowering she was stuck in place. Giving the Puffle a name made it much easier to see her as female.  Once all the noise died down, Fluffy uncurled and looked around and started moving on her own once more. It was slow at first and it… she… was highly curious about her surroundings for a moment. She blew a raspberry and was back to being a smiling idiot that Rarity knew her to be, nothing really seemed to faze her for long. It was becoming obvious that this was what all Puffles were like. Rarity wondered how she was going to get to the location on her HUD. She could take the elevator, but after all of that ruckus she figured the stairs were safer. Would Fluffy even climb all those stairs if she directed her to do so? Well there was only one way to find out now that she had a map of the entire structure. She lit her horn and made the dot float in front of Fluffy, the Puffle squealed with joy and started to chase the dot towards the stairwell with Rarity watching out for any patrols as she rode her fluffy pink steed. “I swear, of all the ridiculous things I get myself into.” Muttered Rarity who was quickly moving through a cross shaped intersection. “I’ve found intruders!” A voice shouted and several material rounds whistling through the air around the pony, she ducked down into the thick pink mass below her while grunting at shifting her broken leg about. It would probably be worse if she couldn’t feel how much pain she was in. Rarity couldn’t take any distractions right now as she kept Fluffy on course. She aimed for the door; thankfully it didn’t look like it was a door with a security lock. She flung it open as a bunch of humans charged down the hall behind them, Rarity leaned back and fired her material pistol several times and direct Fluffy to head up the stairs by following the little pink dot of light after putting her gun away. She couldn’t shoot and keep her dot in front of the Puffle at the same time. So she prioritized ignoring the humans shooting at her and moved the light up the stairs for the Puffle to follow while looking at the map on her HUD. She needed to go at least ten floors up, take two lefts and a right to reach that large room Greta was directing her to. Shots rang out behind them following them up the stairs and Rarity turned her head slightly to the right and pulled her material pistol once more to start shooting back at the humans below. Once they backed off slightly she had to once again put her pistol away and create a pink dot for the Puffle to follow, she was getting a bit low on magic. If she had to, Rarity would ditch the Puffle and use her pinpoint puller to get around, riding on the back of another being much like a pony was not ideal and she was getting a bit saddle sore, her head hurt and she could really use some pain killers and some time in a medical bed. She was thankful that the stairs had solid railings, she wasn’t as happy that the staircase was a square shaped spiral. It made sense that somebody would probably want exits in four directions instead of the two a rising zigzag would have. They had managed to get far enough away to avoid being shot at, but the humans could still be heard giving chase as Rarity stopped the Puffle before a door. She opened the door looked out and got the Puffle moving while quickly shutting the door behind her. Apparently the large open room she was heading for was within the labs section of the facility. The stark white corridors were quiet and there wasn’t a sound around aside from Fluffy’s excited gasps at seeing new walls and lights. Something wasn’t quite right here, she looked into a room that had a glass panel and didn’t see anyone and the nearby security station had no one manning it. The sudden lack of people felt entirely off, she would have expected at least someone to be shooting at her or raising an alarm as she entered this area of the facility. She’d expect places like this to be swarming with scientists. - It was after leaving behind a long corridor of half dead, crippled and or otherwise soundly put down humans that Ember met her first special unit of the facility. Sure it looked big, bulky and angular, but she was pretty sure she could take it down. It started charging her as soon as she spotted it and it hit her with its left set of charged claws when it threw them forward, its mechanical fist connected with Ember’s chest. The EVA suit Ember was wearing was slightly pockmarked with spots from solidified breach gel, but on the whole she had been in good health. The hit she just took to the chest launched her backwards down the hall and she bounced and tumbled over several rather still human bodies before coming to a stop on all fours where she slides for a foot or two. “Okay, I admit, that shock actually stung a bit.” That and the thing could hit hard, as Ember had just experienced from an electrified punch to the chest sending her flying. Say what you will about human design when it came to their weapons, they could build things to hit hard. She stood up and cracked her neck to the left and right, handling one of these things wouldn’t be too hard. If she were to fight two or more, then she might actually start having a problem with them. She aimed her rifle at it with her right claw and making a come at me gesture with her left claw. “If you really think that machine will be enough take me down, then you’re either really brave or really stupid. I’m thinking it’s the latter.” Standing up, Ember started walking forward and began picking up speed until she was running at it, the mechanized suit fired several blasts her way and she just avoided them with a duck and a leap to the wall which she started crawling along. It trailed its shots up after her on the wall and she jumped off the wall to the other one and it quickly turned to try and continue shooting at her. Only the pilot didn’t see anything on the opposite wall. Ember dropped from above and cleaved the left arm off the machine with an overhead swing of her blazing bayonet melting the left shoulder into a pile of melted metal. The machine staggered backwards in surprise as its pilot hadn’t seen her coming; it tried to swing its right arm into her with its claws wide open attempting to grab her. Due to the unfortunate problem in the machines design, the machine was horribly imbalanced and its four fingered claw went high and over Ember’s head. The dragon only had to duck slightly to avoid the clasping electrified metal fingers that were spread out around the circular hand. Ember didn’t waste any time after it had missed grabbing her, she smashed the darkened glass screen with her rifle and unbalance it even further. The machine tilted backwards with its thick blocky left leg lifting into the air. Crouching down, Ember leapt at the machine shoulder first with her rifle angled to take the brunt of the impact and bounced off it. It fell to the floor with a thunderous crash, cracking the flooring and creating fissures all over the place. Leaping on top of it, Ember fired a round into the armored glass and it shattered covering the pilot with the broken shards, she reached down swiped the claws of her left hand at the belts holding him in his seat and lifted him out of the machine. “It was the latter.” Confirmed the human as a spot on his pants were becoming darker as Ember put her rifle away and pulled off his helmet to stare him in the eyes angrily, the human found the back of his head smashed against the rim of the machine’s broken view screen. His head bled a bit thanks to the jagged bits of glass he was knocked out upon and Ember subsequently dropped him back into his seat. These walkers might actually be able to actually harm her seriously if she let them and Rarity was all by herself down below. If any of these walker things went near her centerpiece and hurt her… well Ember wouldn’t be a happy dragon. She found the doors to the elevator shaft and wrenched them open with her claws and just jumped down the shaft. The fall was uneventful and she fired her pinpoint puller at the wall to stop at the right level. Once she got her feet into position at the frame of the doors, she started pulling with all her strength and the doors eventually screeched and were wrenched open. Elevator shafts wouldn’t stop her nor would armored walkers, she was going to meet with Rarity and stick with her until everything was done with. She idly looked around after stepping out into the hallway that branched off in five directions and took in the kind of space she was in. This was some kind of laboratory, what were they testing here? That made the large room Greta wanted them to investigate all the more ominous. White hallways with several decontamination rooms were before her, around the corner of the elevator was a corridor leading to five more directions. “Well no time like the present.” Ember looked around warily while pulling out the energy pistol, where were all the people? She barreled through a section of the facility while under a constant stream of attacks by armored men and women and even that walker, yet here she was and nobody was shooting at her. You’d expect a place like this to be somewhat guarded, it was too quiet to be normal. Something was horribly wrong here. - The man at the computer in the command center had been keeping track of Ember and then he saw that she was in the laboratory sector, near the humongous cold storage room. Yet there were no soldiers there to greet her to at least distract her, what was going on? Checking the various camera’s he came to something that filled him with dread. Looking up when it happened, it was when a majority of their ice tunnels collapsed and they lost all of their blizzard manufacturing capabilities. They had a very bad containment breach and it went completely unnoticed until now.