//------------------------------// // a.l. #001 - Descensions // Story: Beneath The Dust // by NeverEatTheLemonsAlone //------------------------------// ALR 662 - Audio Log #001 - Descensions Warning: warplight decay and antimatter drive core detonation imminent. Evacuate immediately. All personnel report to lifepods for evacuation. Repeat: warning: warplight decay and antimatter drive core… The tinny voice of the Starjumper warpship’s onboard AI suddenly emanated from all terminals, every speaker system in the ship repurposed to the announcement. The cabins and corridors, cold sterile metal, ignited in a surge of red warning lights, flashing white arrows slicing through the crimson murk towards the lifepod bay. A moment later, screams rebounded across the silent halls, and the rumbling of the engine began to grow louder, less confined. Running hoofsteps blitzed down the halls as the crew ran for the pods. Me included. As I approached a pod, I noticed in a detached way that it was Pod #13, and wondered for a moment: wasn't that important somehow? No time to think. Just go. Get in the pod. Don't wait. If you do, only death is waiting for you. Desperately seeking an escape from the ship, I unsealed the hatch, letting the pneumatics seal behind me as I strapped myself into the memgel seat. The cold metal frame locked itself around me, and the electronic locks dinged into place. A touchpad lit up underneath my right hoof: a single red button emblazoned with the word LAUNCH, waiting for me to touch it. Beep. There was a deafening whoosh as the lifepod jettisoned itself from the hull of the Starjumper. I looked through the clear window in the top of the pod as the pods dispersed, scattering off into space. I sighed, averting my eyes as a great light blazed in through what was left of the porthole as the aperture slid itself shut. The first lesson everybody learned in spaceflight school: never look directly at an exploding warplight drive. I dropped my head. Everything had happened so fast. Manipulating the keypad, I activated the thrusters, trusting them to take me to the nearest habitable satellite. This close to Celestia, the planets were pretty much empty. I frowned. Something was wrong. It took me a moment to piece it together: silence. No engine rumble. My jaw clenched. Something wasn't working right. The wall in front of me darkened into a screen, and words in cyan scrolled across it. At the same time, they were spoken by the Starjumper’s AI, present on the lifepods as well. Lifepod 13 Hull Integrity: 72% Life Support System Status: 98% Thruster Functionality: Nonfunctional Power Supply: Indefinite (Sustainable Recharge) 0g Field: Functional Nutrition Synthesis: Functional, minor damage Landing Stasis Field: 52%. Moderate damage to emitters. My jaw clenched. Oh God, no thrusters. I'd have to float out here until I hit something's gravitational field, and if it was something dangerous, I'd be unable to do anything. A few more taps on the touchpad, and a holographic model of the Celestia system blipped into being in front of me from the ceiling projectors. A tiny red dot demarcated where I was: approximately one hundred fifty miles outside of the orbit of the nearest celestial body, closing fast. I didn't even need to check the label to tell what planet it was: first planet out from Celestia. Equus Veta, birthplace of ponies. There wasn't a lot that I could do but wait, so I waited. At my speed, it would take about about three hours to enter Equus’ gravity well, so there wasn't much I could do. Well, the 0g field was working, so I could at least take inventory. Another series of taps on the touchpad and the titanium chair brace lifted, letting me go. The conforming memgel also released me after a moment, allowing me to float freely. I flapped gently off of the seat, fluttering through the artificial oxygen-nitrogen gas cocktail to the storage compartment on the opposite wall, below the screen. Yanking it open, I peered inside at the secured tools; a knife, a plasma cutter, a flashlight, a bioscanner, a bag of hydrocaps, some nutribricks, a high-efficiency CO2 fire extinguisher. All in all, a pretty paltry sum; survival on the desert planet I was bound towards was going to be rough with only those. I grimaced. There should be one more thing… There it was. A small parcel shifted beneath the fire extinguisher, and I pulled it out, revealing an SCL suit. Keeps homeostatic temperatures up to 150C, withstands pressures up to 5100 PSI, impact resistant enough to neutralize a fall from 10 meters up, resistant to electrical currents and direct fire exposure. I unwrapped it, sliding it on in place of my engineer’s slacks and placing the mask above my head. There was an odd feeling as it sealed around me and a sudden, quickly-fading stab sensation as a needle punched into my neck, then the onboard filtration system began to convert my exhaled breaths back to oxygen, extending my breathing time dramatically. I sighed in relief. At least one thing went my way. Sometimes the staffers forgot to put the suits in the pods.The heads-up display flickered for a moment, then jumped to life, displaying my vital signs; heart rate, blood-oxygen levels, blood pressure, body temperature. All normal, if a bit elevated by stress. Time passed, and the life support started slowly ticking down: 98, 97, 96%. The lifepods were supposed to have 100 hours of heat, light and air. So as it ticked to 95%, I braced myself; the red blip on the model was now on the edge of Equus’ gravity well. There was a sudden jolt, and more text scrolled across the screen, accompanied once again by the generic mare’s voice of the AI: Planetary gravity field entered. Prepare for reentry. I did so, falling back into the seat, dropping the frame back over me and securing it in place. My teeth clenched as the pod began to rumble. A field of kinetic energy pulsed outward in stasis from the emitters in the craft's sides, absorbing most of the friction and dispersing much of the heat that went along with it. Nevertheless, it began to grow warm, and I started sweating. A red warning light shot up on the screen, and not a moment later, there was a tremendous blast of sound and the pod jolted. Once more, the AI spoke: Warning: landing field compromised. Rerouting power to the 0g generator and initiating emergency landing procedures. I swore. I just could not get a break, could I? First the thrusters, now the landing field...why? I decided to just hope for the best, and hope that the projected 0g field buffered the impact enough for me to survive. Outside of the top window, the world around the pod was red with the hellish glow of reentry, and sweat ran down my coat in rivulets behind the mask as the temperature increased further. If I wasn’t wearing the lifesuit, I think I’d be dead already. The AI kep talking throughout: 200km to landfall. 173km to landfall. 127km to landfall. 104km to landfall. On and on, the distance ticking down as the heat increased. Half a dozen warning lights popped up, the lifepod exceeding its approved heat ratings as the ablative materials coating the outside burned away. 49km to landfall. I was moving incredibly quickly; with any luck, the 0g field would let me live through the absurd impact force. 1400 meters to landfall. Well. Here we go. The sound was tremendous. I must've been moving at nearly 40,000 kph. I was tossed like a ragdoll, bouncing back and forth with absurd force. Without the metal frame on the seat holding me in place, I would be absolutely stone dead. I coughed as the pod came to rest, realizing how insanely lucky I was to be alive after all the things that went wrong. A blue dot on my helmet’s HUD blinked a few times before the onboard speakers broadcast the voice of the omnipresent AI: Location detected as: Veta Equus. System: Celestia. Population: 186 equine bioforms. Adapting to location. With that, the blue dot expanded into a small holographic image displayed on the screen of a tall pony. I recognized the image well enough, though I’d never seen her myself, and she was supposed to be white, not cyan blue. Still, I supposed it would be rather soothing to hear Princess (still Princess even after all these years; can you believe it?) Celestia’s voice instead of the AI’s. It was kinda jarring too, though. I wasn’t really sure what to think. The image blinked a few times before speaking in a reasonable facsimile of Celestia’s voice and tone: Be careful, my little pony, and remain inside the lifepod. This planet is listed at Extremely Hostile in database. Planetary statistics have shown a survival rating of 2.76% outside the pod, versus 32.89% if you remain inside. A Veritas Inter-Systemic Trading Coalition recovery crew has been dispatched to your location. Their estimated arrival time is: 12 days. I tapped a button for the porthole aperture, but nothing happened in response. Great. It probably got busted up in the crash just like pretty much everything else. Still, far be it from me to rush. I was perfectly happy staying in the lifepod. Now that I’d entered a planet with an atmosphere and some ambient magic to draw on, the pod’s life support was basically limitless, not to mention I could synthesize nearly any palatable food substance with the aid of the nutritional synth machine and a slew of nutribricks. Water wouldn’t even begin to factor in as an issue; plus or minus fifty hydrocaps was more than enough to last me twelve days. To be frank, I hadn’t been altogether thrilled about the possibility of opening that hatch to begin with. I was an engineer, not a survivalist. As long as VISTCO came through on the allotted time, I would be absolutely fine, and wouldn’t need to slog out into the arid heat that surrounded my little self-contained environment. Content for the moment to wait, I relaxed back into the memgel seat and, after checking the readouts on the screen one last time—not a whole lot had changed, other than the status of the Landing Field Stasis Emitters changing to 11%: Nonfunctional. With that, I let my eyes slide shut as the aches and pains from the crash faded away into the background and I fled into unconsciousness. --- What time was it? Wait, no. Better question. Why were the lifepod lights dim? That wasn’t supposed to happen. They’d never changed lighting in any practice evacuations I’d ever taken part in, and nopony had ever mentioned anything of the sort. Was it power conservation? No, it was a self-regenerating manabattery, no need as long as it was on a planet. I tapped the release button of the seat frame and frowned a moment later. It hadn’t released itself. Things kept going wrong, and that was definitely cause for concern. My survival until VISTCO could pick me was as a house of cards. If any piece of it caught the wind and shifted, the whole thing would come tumbling down. Only the emergency lights were on, I belatedly realized, my eyes following the strip of narrow lights that trailed along the periphery of the floor. The bright overhead light was sparking in a pathetic attempt to reassert itself, and with every flicker, my frown grew deeper. Oh Celestia, what had happened to this pod? Was it breaking down? Again, something resurfaced in my memory. Pod #13. The number was niggling at the corner of my mind, for some reason I couldn’t quite remember. Was the pod defective? Was there any power? Was I going to die here, sealed off from… Oh Celestia, oxygen! I gasped out “Computer, status,” lamely surprised at my ragged, quiet voice. Well, I guess that answers the question of whether or not I screamed during the landing. My throat was so raw I was surprised it wasn’t straight-up bleeding. Maybe it was and I was just too out-of-sorts to taste the blood. I pried up the bars holding me down, and eventually I managed to stand. My legs were shaky and I could barely stand, but with any luck, I would get some strength back into them before too long. As before, the wall in front of me darkened into a screen and words scrolled across it. Lifepod 13 Hull Integrity: 32% Life Support System Status: Indefinite (Sustainable Recharge) Thruster Functionality: Nonfunctional Power Supply: 37% 0g Field: Functional Nutrition Synthesis: Semifunctional (Moderate Damage) Landing Stasis Field: 11%, Nonfunctional And at the bottom, in bright red instead of the same cyan as the rest of it, WARNING: 2 Power Cells CRITICAL WARNING: 1 Power Cell SEVERE WARNING: 1 Power Cell MODERATE Ah. So that explained things. Suddenly my options had just gotten a lot smaller. All four of the lifepod’s power cells had been damaged, and the pod didn’t have advanced enough equipment for me to even begin repairing them. The SEVERE one would progress to CRITICAL within a matter of days, if not hours, and it wouldn’t be long until the CRITICAL cells decided that enough was enough, and it was time to fail spectacularly hard. “Computer, what’s the estimated time to power cell failure?” The apparition of Celestia took a moment to respond, and as she did, her voice was marred by some sort of strange static interference. It wasn’t the power supply; the lifepod’s AI had been transferred into the electronics in the SCL suit. I decided that on the list of problems, that one was less severe than enormous magical explosions and assured death, so. Estimated time until CRITICAL status power cell rupture: 45 minutes. I couldn’t help it; I choked. I was expecting something dire, but less than an hour? I needed to get out of here as fast as my legs could carry me. “Computer, reroute power from main light,” I rasped, watching the light flicker above me, “to delay of power cell failure.” Confirmed, intoned Celestia’s voice. Estimated time until CRITICAL status power cell rupture: 1 hour, 32 minutes. I grimaced. A bit better, but not by a whole lot. I had to grab whatever I could and get out of this pod now. A bitter feeling of frustration briefly rode over me. Broken thrusters, busted landing field, explosive power cells. This lifepod just could not cut me a break, huh? I snorted as I trotted over to the storage locker, ripping a few of the tools off and shoving them into my saddlebags. Hydrocaps, nutribricks, that went without saying. Knife. Plasma cutter. Flashlight. Not enough room to fit anything else in the SCL suit’s limited saddlebag space. I wished for a moment I had my engineer’s saddlebags, but I’d left them on the Starjumper, so I was pretty sure I wasn’t getting them back any time soon. Call it a hunch. What are you doing? I was so surprised I fell over. A couple reasons why: number one, the AI wasn’t exactly the chatty type. It would respond to inquiries, it would warn of emergencies, it would acknowledge commands, but I’d never heard of a Starjumper’s AI actually asking a question. Was this some sort of anomaly? Hey! Don’t call me an anomaly! Alright, yes, please and thank you that cemented the fact that I was going absolutely stark-raving nuts. The Starjumper’s AI wasn’t really an AI, not in the same sense as the supercomputers back home on Planet D. It was a semisentient computer program, intelligent enough to perceive, recognize, and report on threats that ponies wouldn’t be able to catch. Never had I ever heard one speak outside of answers or reports on threats. And never—never—had I heard one refer to itself as me. I jolted suddenly, remembering something: my superiors had told people to not use lifepod #13, because the AI was acting strangely. Did...the the semisentient AI from the ship somehow incubate itself into a true sentience on this dinky little lifepod before being quarantined from everything else? I scraped myself back to my hooves. Got it in one, replied the surprisingly equine-sounding voice in my helmet, no longer resembling Celestia’s voice. Or any I’d ever heard, for that matter. They don’t like their AI giving them smack talk, so they locked me up. Surprised you even got in the lifepod. So wait...exactly how did I talk to this AI? Did I just...think at it? That seemed a little weird, even for me. It was probably linked to the advanced monitoring equipment holed up somewhere in the pod. I shrugged and just talked into my helmet. “Not a whole lot of choice when the warplight drive is about to detonate ‘cause of a rupture in the antimatter drive core.” Oh, so that’s what happened up there, mused the computer. I couldn’t really tell; cut off from the ship’s mother system. So the whole thing blew up? “Mhmm.” My voice was becoming a little less ragged with use, and I resumed what I was doing, which, at this point, was simply walking to the exit. Normally I’d caution you against going out there—I feel like I did, actually—but with the power cells going tick-tock as we speak, you don’t have a whole lot of choice. “I got that, thanks,” I muttered bad-temperedly. I returned to the seat and tapped the display again, poking at it with a hooftip until I found the button that said Release Hatch. Pushing it did nothing, because that would’ve been far too easy, right? Well, not quite accurate to say that it did nothing at all. There was a clunking, grinding sound, and a brief beep, but the point was that the hatch remained closed. I touched it again; the same sound, the same beep. “Hey, computer. Anything going on outside?” Hmm? Oh, yeah, there’s currently a massive duststorm raging around it. If it keeps going at its current pace the hatch will be buried within about ten minutes tops. I probably should’ve mentioned that. I choke out a surprised sound. Well, that was one mystery solved; of course the hatch wouldn’t open with that on the other side. I needed a manual override. I looked around for some time, only to find that there was no manual override in sight. Only about five minutes left until certain death. I looked down, only to suddenly realize something. “A manual override,” I breathed. Huh? That was as much as I heard before I slammed myself bodily into the hatch and it blasted open, tossing me out into the...sand? No, it was smooth and hard, a surface that, while largely neutralized by the suit, was still unpleasant to fall down on. I brushed some sand away, revealing something dark and glossy. Was it...glass? Right, of course. The impact force and heat would’ve liquefied the sand. It was already covered by a thin veneer of sand, but I could still feel the heat radiating off of it through my suit. After the dim, yet clean white interior of the lifepod, shot through with cyan blue in perfect order and, but for the voice of the AI, utterly silent, it was complete chaos. Through the winds beating me around—gale force winds, informed the AI, about 93kph—I managed to crawl my way a meter or so away from the lifepod, then struggled to a low standing position, not quite offering enough resistance to be toppled over. I looked up, and my breath caught in my throat. “...Oh.” So...hang in there, I guess? You have approximately 1 hour and 14 minutes left before catastrophic power cell failure. “Lovely,” I muttered, shuffling forward at an agonizingly slow pace. Scouring sands whipped against me with enough force that I could feel them, even through the suit. I had no doubt in my mind: if I hadn’t been wearing it, I would be blind, my skin would be raw, and I would be in incredible pain, and I wouldn’t be able to breathe. Sighing in frustration and general annoyance, I began the arduous trek up the shifting sides of the crater my landing had wrought. While the sand had been blasted away and it wasn’t deep, the harsh winds conspired with the thin sand over smooth glass to make walking a grueling ordeal. It was a long, shallow incline, perhaps a twenty degree angle, that stretched out for a good sixty or seventy feet in each direction. On that note… “Hey, computer,” I gasped out, “how big is this storm anyway?” I’m going to say it’s somewhere around the 300 to 350 kilometer mark, though the only imaging satellite anywhere near Equus is at such an angle to the planet as to make exact calculation impossible. My mouth dropped open. That big? I had no idea what part of it I was actually in, so I could be stuck in this thing anywhere from an hour to three, and I had no way of knowing exactly how long. A grueling trek of nearly fifteen minutes later, and I had escaped the confines of the crater. Without the small shelter that it had imposed, I was fully exposed to the brunt of the sandstorm. I could barely see my hooves in front of me, and I stumbled drunkenly off in whatever was NOT the direction of the lifepod-turned-bomb. I gamely struggled on through the blizzard of sand, barely able to keep my traction as the capricious masses of sand and dust slid on a whim, shifting beneath me and all too often sending me rolling on the ground, where getting up before the sands could cover me over was a matter of life and death. The wind’s noise was a howling roar, a deep, throated sound that one would normally associate with a bear or something. It seemed hungry. I’m not sure how far I went, but suddenly the AI spoke: Power cell detonation imminent; I recommend finding shelter. T-minus ten…nine...eight… I suddenly wished for a unicorn horn instead of the wings that hung uselessly at my side. Trying to fly in this sort of brown wind would be tantamount to suicide. All I could do was put as much distance between myself and the blast as I could. I broke into as close to a gallop as I could come. Seven...six...five...four… I slipped on the shifting sands and fell, rolling down a long dune. As I reached the bottom, my helmet bashed into the ground with a hollow thud. Three...two...one… I don’t know what it was, but there wasn’t anything else to do. I pressed myself to the wall of the dune, closing my eyes. Zero. There was a brief moment of intense silence as I waited, holding my breath, peering over the ridge of the dune. The world was suddenly cast in a glare of blue light that hung silent in the air for the barest fraction of a second, visible even all this way away, even through the whirling, storming sands. It was beautiful, in a way; mana that had been compressed against itself releasing in a bloom of cerulean light that shot skyward with ferocity enough to rival a solar flare. A second later, the sound hit me. Boom Though I was far enough that I couldn’t hear it particularly well, I could feel it well enough. The shockwave blew past me, sending me end over end. I cried out in surprise and swore as I tumbled down the dune. I’d thought I was well past the blast radius, but I’d forgotten to factor in the intact cell detonating along with the three damaged. I hadn’t quite left the area. Once again, the sheer durability of my suit saved me; my ears were ringing, but I was alive. And tumbling. And as I reached the end of my tunnel, it stopped abruptly. In fact, everything stopped abruptly. That same dull, hollow thunk from before, followed by a crash, and then...darkness. Silence. The feeling of falling. A patch of dull brown receded from me as I plummeted down into blackness, the sandstorm above already an afterthought. Little chunks of wood—ancient, solid wood—hovered around me as I dropped. Everything around me was sheer, utter blackness. So black, perhaps, as to be called blank instead. It wasn’t so much the presence of darkness as the absence of everything. Computer yelped in fright. It continued to surprise me, sounding so like an equine. Gone was the wind, gone was the sand, gone was the neverending howling. I absorbed all of this information in what felt like minutes, but was in reality only seconds, then flipped in the air, snapping out my wings and activating the lights on my suit’s helmet. I dove in a graceful swoop, and as I lay my hooves on solid ground again, they made a muted clank. I was on some sort of metal, and, looking around, I could tell: we were in a tunnel. A massive, tremendous tunnel, stretching beneath the surface of Equus. I looked ahead, at the looming darkness, and considered: there could be anything in there. Ponies, sewer beasts, any manner of creatures. I shuddered despite myself; if dragon’s hadn’t been extinct long ago, I wouldn’t have even dreamed of going forward. And yet, as I looked up again at the blasting wind and scouring sand, the desert above me, I shook my head. This had to be better than up there. I popped a hydrocap into my mouth, letting it cascade into a bulging mouthful as I broke the pressure seal, and crammed a chunk of tasteless, cardboard-y nutribrick after it. Then I put a hoof forward, beginning my walk into the dark of the tunnels. This is a bad ideeeaaaa...said the AI nervously, no longer sounding—or looking, actually—anything like Celestia. She was bouncing on her virtually actualized hooves, looking quite concerned. It was rather cute, actually. I chuckled, and she glared darkly at me. I’m serious, you know. I don’t have any mapping functions in tunnels like this. I’m as blind as you are, and I’ve never been blind before. I stopped chuckling. I hadn’t considered that before. She was new at this whole sentience thing, and she’d never been alone with a strange pony in a strange place without any assistance from satellites or system grids. I sighed. “Sorry,” I said quietly. “Just let me know if there are any signs of life, alright?” She nodded her virtual self and blinked out, resuming her state as a blue dot in the bottom-left corner of my screen and leaving my field of vision clear. The tunnel I was in was, in a word, colossal. Even with the lights on my helmet, I still couldn’t quite see the top clearly; it was just a vague gray smudge. As I panned my vision down, I looked ahead instead of up, nerves jangling. The silence was broken only by my own echoing hoofsteps, rebounding off the walls and echoing away into black. It made it difficult to hear anything else; even if there had been somepony behind me, my own echo would drown out any sounds at all. Computer was silent. I assumed that was good news; if it started screaming at me, something bad was probably about to happen. I had no idea what the tunnel was actually made of. It was some sort of dark, matte, dense metal. Gunmetal gray, if I had to name a shade. Lines of what looked like alumiglass ran along both sides, stretching out an unforeseeable distance. Probably old mana-fueled linelamps that burnt themselves out after ponies stopped feeding them magic. With some investigations from my wings, I’d discovered that the wood where I’d fallen in was likely an anomaly, a patch of some sort. The roof was just as metallic as the rest of it. The air was rather cool, from what I could feel through the suit, and dead still. The silence was still pressing down on me, simply by virtue of its sheer enormity. I’d never been anywhere so quiet but for my own hooves. That, plus the darkness before and behind me gave me a distinct feeling of isolation. I felt like I was the pony on the world. I very nearly was, actually. More than that, I felt like the only pony in all existence. I was just beginning to grow a bit more relaxed when… Hey! Equine bioform approaching rapidly from behind you! Heads up! That was the last thing I heard before I found myself whipping around. The echo of my hoofsteps had done exactly as I’d thought, and had blocked me from any kind of audial cues. There, running at me headlong from out of the darkness, was a pony. I could barely tell what they looked like; they just moved so fast. One moment I was backtrotting, and the next I was pinned to the ground, visor rammed against the metal as a voice snarled into my suit’s ear: “Going somewhere, dirt licker?” As usual, the suit protected me from most of the trauma. It also broadcast quite clearly into my mind computer freaking out a bit. I couldn’t quite hear what it was saying over the voice coming from the pony, though. “If you know what’s good for you, you’ll take that suit off and give it to me.” “Hang on,” I grunted out, to be rewarded with another smack of my head into the metal, the impact clanging around the tunnel for quite a long time. My voice grew more cross. Despite the lack of any real impact pain, the whiplash still hurt my neck. “Okay, that’s enough. Get off me.” “Or what?” sneered the mare, “you’ll call your friends at VISTCo? By the time they get here there’ll only be sand left.” I couldn’t see her, but I could hear the smile in her voice. “Look, you can’t do enough damage to really hurt me as long as I have this on,” I replied, my voice a perfect example of strained patience, “so why don’t you calm down and tell me a few things first?” Boss… warned Computer. I ignored it as the mare started laughing. “What’s so funny?” I snapped. “You...you think I can’t hurt you?” she choked out through her laughter. “Sure, those VISTCo suits’ll keep you safe from the sand,” her laughter died and, with a brief telekinetic glow, she pulled the object off of her back, revealing a massive rifle, barrel glowing with eerie cyan light and pointed straight at my face, “but they damn sure won’t keep you safe from me. Now, the suit.” I was loath to give up Computer, who was my only company down here on Equus. I hesitated for a moment. She looked like she knew how to use that cannon, and I don’t think I could evade those bolts. Computer piped up. Hey, boss. I just had a thought. I didn’t want to speak, and I needed to look like I was doing something, so I made a show of trying to pop the seal on the helmet and failing. It had the added benefit of quite a pronounced nod. It took it as a yes, and continued. So, she wants the suit, and if you don’t give it to her you’re basically dead already. So, here’s the deal: give her the suit. When she puts it on, then I can do my thing, and she won’t be any position to shoot you after that. My teeth clenched slightly. It wasn’t foolproof, but it was the best plan available. I sighed and, with a hiss-pop, actually disabled the seal, letting the helmet tumble to the ground. The light bounced away from me, down the tunnel. All I could see of the mare now was a faint illumination from the glow of the telekinetic magic still pointing an enormous gun at me. After a grueling battle with the suit’s elastic properties, I stood before her, naked and shivering. The air down here really was cool. Less cool, actually, and more cold. She nodded sharply once, then scooped up the suit and shoved it into a pair of saddlebags, motioning at me with her gun towards the darkness where I’d been going. “Alright, dirt licker. Start walking.” What else could I do? I did as she asked, nerves taut. She hadn’t put on the suit. Computer hadn’t thought about that. Why would she want the suit, if not to wear it? I mused. My now-visible feathers ruffled in anxiety, and every second that I spent walking deeper into the guts of this vast tunnel took me further away from the surface. The fact that I now couldn’t see even three meters in front of me didn’t help any. I honestly wasn’t sure how long I’d been walking when I realized there was a glow in front of me. A faint cyan luminescence, an island of blue light in the nothingness of blackness around us. The hoofsteps behind me sped up, and the mare drew level with me. Her eyes were wide with anticipation. As we crossed the threshold of the light, I saw that the linelights on the sides of the tunnel were lit up. Something was fueling them, which, from what I’d read, took a pretty impressive amount of magic to accomplish. The tunnel suddenly opened up into a wide, round room, from which sprang a series of three more tunnels. A vast hub, carved beneath the surface of Equus itself. The walls of this room were spiderwebbed with more linelights, and the pale blue glow they cast on everything stunned me. I’d seen some examples of magic in the past—the manabatteries that the lifepods ran on, a few oddities on Planet D, the old compression process for warplight—but unicorns, real living unicorns, weren’t all too common where I came from. The few I had met had done some basic spells occasionally, things like telekinesis. Their horns were shriveled and almost nonfunctional. The atmosphere of Equus Nova didn’t quite have the same relationship with magic as this Equus, so it wasn’t friendly to younger unicorns, the ones that hadn’t had time to develop a completely closed magical circuit. I’d never seen anything like this. I’d only ever seen alumiglass linelamps in history books. In the corner was the presumable source of the magic that fueled the lights. Half a dozen power cells, of a much older and mismatched variety than the ones that ran the systems of the lifepod, were stuck together, jammed into a series of jacks in the wall. They were coated in dust; I could tell they hadn’t been disturbed in quite some time. The readouts on them were a deep amber; one of them had no readout at all. I could tell they didn’t have a whole lot of juice left in them. Despite my circumstances, I was fascinated; what would this pony do after the lights went out? In addition to the batteries, there were trappings of life in this hub: a small bed in the corner, a chest of drawers, a little hydroponic platform with a few leaves poking out of the likely-artificial soil. The mare trotted past me, ignoring me utterly and levitating the suit and helmet out of her bags. Then, after heaving a sigh, she turned back to me. “Alright, dirt licker. Start talking. What are you doing here?” Now that I could see her clearly, she was almost the same gray as her suit, with a brilliant green mane and eyes of the same emerald shade. My ear twitched; I was really getting sick of her calling me a dirt licker. “Well, I fell down a dune in the sandstorm on the surface and—” She waved a hoof, face writ in irritation. “No, no. Not here, in the tunnels. Here, on Equus. You VISTCo ponies don’t belong on this planet. “Oh.” Swallowing down my confusion and frustration, I did my best to respond reasonably. “My jumpship’s warplight drive failed catastrophically about three hundred kilometers outside of Equus’ gravity well, and my lifepod’s thrusters were down. There wasn’t a whole lot I could do to avoid coming here.” I bit back an extra snide remark, and waited for her reply. She stared at me for a moment, then sighed, rubbing a hoof on her temple. “Celestia,” she muttered to herself, “he didn’t even mean to get here?” Another sigh, this one heavier. “Look, here’s the deal: we don’t like ponies from VISTCo very much around here, and they don’t like us. They have this...thing about unicorns.” My ears perked up, and I frowned. I didn’t like the sound of that; there was a lot I didn’t know about the company I’d taken this job for. She went into no further detail about it, though. I would have to ask her more in the future, as long as she didn’t try to kill me. “So I’m going to keep this suit of yours, make sure you don’t call any reinforcements. You got two options: one, you can stay here, live in the tunnels like pretty much everypony else still here.” I interrupted, curiosity still acting up. “What are these tunnels, by the way? I’ve never heard of a tunnel network underneath Equus.” She chuckled, but there was no mirth in it, no warmth. “Most ponies haven’t. Why do you think we’re still alive?” A sigh. “Honestly? We have no idea where they came from. There were just...here. We don’t know how long they’ve been here, but it’s a long time; they were here when we hadn’t invented warplight travel. They were just hiding really, really far underground. Once this place went desert, all the erosion brought them closer to the surface. Guess it was only a matter of time.” “ANYWAY,” she continued, glaring at me for my interruption, “you can live in the tunnels. There aren’t a lot of plants or anything, but there are enough jerry-rigged hydroponics rigs for us to scrape by.” She shrugged. “It’s not bad, once you get used to it.” “The other option is try to get out of here, and I wouldn’t hold your breath on that one. Last time anypony around here saw a warplight drive was before the exodus. Trust me, we’ve tried. There might be one or two more hidden somewhere in these tunnels, but we’re pretty sure they go all around the world, so it’ll be a long time before you find anything. If ever.” I swallowed. Neither of those options sounded particularly enjoyable. Still, I didn’t want to live in tunnels for the rest of my life. I swallowed. “As tempting as the offer to live underground forever is, I think I’m going to try to get out of here.” She shrugged again. “Suit yourself.” She pulled out an oily cloth from her saddlebags and started polishing her rifle. I frowned. “Where did you get that kind of gun?” She looked at me curiously. “Found it in the tunnels. It’s not particularly advanced, but it serves. Why?” “Not a lot of guns where I’m from,” I explained. “The Guard has them, but they’re about the only ones that are allowed to. I’ve never actually seen one up close.” She snerked. “Seriously, you let them get away with that?” It was my turn to shrug. “It’s peace, isn’t it?” I asked rhetorically. She laughed again. This time, it wasn’t just lacking warmth; it was actively cold. “Peace? Is that what you want? I should’ve just shot you already.” My brain froze. “What?” She shook her head, long green mane waving. “What’s the point of peace without freedom?” As soon as it became apparent she wasn’t actually going to shoot me, I looked at her steadily. “What’s the point of freedom without peace?” She stuck out her hoof. “Good answer. I’m Tunnel Dasher, but I hate how long that is so call me Tash.” I met it with a greeting hoofbump. “Quick Fix.” One one hoof, it was somewhat odd to be hoofbumping someone who pretty much just kidnapped me at gunpoint, but on the other, I’d take that over being shot any day. She nodded and levitated a few supplies over into her saddlebags, including the suit. “Alright, let’s get going.” “What?” I replied, confused. “You didn’t think I was gonna let you fumble around these tunnels alone, did you?” she answered. “Pretty much everything down here is going to want you dead, ponies and otherwise. Plus, I need to make sure you don’t have some other way to contact VISTCo until you’re off planet.” I sighed. “So I assume that means you’re not going to give me my SCL suit back?” She smirked. “Do I look stupid?” I bit back the snide response and sighed. It wasn’t as though I could tell her that there was a sentient AI self-contained in the circuitry of the suit’s helmet. If I did, Computer would probably be either isolated for experimentation, or simply destroyed. If Tash was anything to go by, the ponies around here weren’t overly fond of the tech propagated by Veritas. I would just have to take it from her later. I shivered again. “Can I at least have one of those jumpsuits or something? It’s pretty cold down here.” She rolled her eyes. “You’ll get used to it. Now stop whining and let’s go.” With that said, she took off down another one of the colossal tunnels. My teeth clenched. Spreading my wings in the still air, I darted after her. “Where are we going?” She looked back at me over her shoulder as I overtook her. “I dunno. You’re the one who wants to go adventuring.” My snout wrinkled at her tone. “I just decided to go into this tunnel. Problem?” I flapped ahead of her. “You’re the one with problems,” I muttered. A few minutes of slow flying later, the linelights petered out and we entered darkness once again. “Tash,” I said from the ground in front of her. I’d never liked flying without being able to see. “In the pouch on that suit you took from me, there’s a flashlight. You want to get that out for me?” “Sure,” she replied, digging into her saddlebag. “I thought I felt something lumpy in there.” After sorting through the assorted objects in the bag and distributing each of us a few hydrocaps and a fragment of nutribrick, she tossed me the flashlight. I flicked the switch on, squinting as the world once again burst into existence in front of me. The tunnels were the same, though I wasn’t much expecting anything else. Something suddenly caught my focus. “Hey, Tash,” I said, voice echoing off of the walls into forever, “you said there were tunnels like this underneath the entire world.” It wasn’t a question; I knew she’d said it. I just wanted to know what she meant.” “Mhmm,” she replied. “Big experimental warplight core went boom, blew open a huge hole in one of the tunnels. Must’ve been two or three kilometers down. Since then, we’ve been trying to eke out a living down here. No picnic, let me tell you.” By the end, her voice has dropped into a dark mutter. “Last I checked, I’ve found interconnecting tunnels underneath pretty much every hundred square kilometers.” That was interesting; not “we” in that last bit. “You, specifically?” I asked. “Mhmm.” She seemed to say that a lot. “I’ve been trying to chart the tunnels. Not easy without any light. I’ve gone a long way.” Now that I thought about it, she did look rather muscular underneath the jumpsuit. We lapsed into silence again as we walked forward into the darkness.