Applejack rehearsed what she knew, as she often did. Repetition was an anchor for the heart when all other bonds frayed. Dull, ceaseless repetition of the known and the safe secured one as well or better than the sharpest blades and spurs, and it could obliterate the very rational fears of life just as quickly and dreadfully as any bomb.
The village was under the ordered rule of the Cogs and their glassy-eyed Auditor corps. She’d seen this town’s Auditor from the bluff and sneered at the air at the sight of him. Most ponies had a kneejerk reaction to the Auditors. How could you not? To call them abominations was a kindness. Revulsion was not an emotion Applejack approved of or enjoyed, but in sight of one of the Cog’s little disciples she found it very appropriate.
. They were an unholy and--if one believed what the whispers said--unconsensual marriage of flesh and machine. The clockwork legs jutted out at odd angles, and each one was a new experiment of the artificers of the Tower, each a unique but incomplete answer to their Questions. Their bodies were a canvas of experimentation, and with each Auditor the Tower of Cogs grew closer to the perfection it sought. This Auditor’s eyes were still intact, which Applejack supposed was a sort of blessing. Great, hideous tubes and vials of fluid rose up violently from its sexless, gaunt body, and an jointed iron hand which emerged from a compartment in it’s chest held a clipboard.
They galloped out from under that masked orderly shadow like buzzards to the kill, she knew, and they set about the rotting countryside to bring all things into their Order, as if the world were a ledger of numbers. Numbers born to consume resources, aye, that and that alone, and nothing beyond the calculus of size and distance and supply.
Weren’t a matter of them bein’ wrong, so she told herself gruffly, jus’ they went about it wrong.
She needed supply. Stealing was out of the question. Not that she was bad at it, because she was a surprisingly excellent thief. Cogtowns, even small ones, were secure. The townspeople of new acquisitions weren’t much of a threat, but even new villages to the fold got the standard array of defensive trickery. Mines that jumped out of the ground and clung to your body before exploding in a killing rain of shrapnel. Razerwire that caught runners and killed them before they had even noticed. Some said that the first villages had strange fire-casters now that could burn a pony to a crisp from far off without a single unicorn to keep them lit.
There was money in her pack, and Cog towns traded with the outside, even if the prices were never remotely fair. All she needed was a few moments to buy, just five perhaps, and then she could be on her way.
So it was that she came striding down the road, hat obscuring her face a bit, pace slow, as if she’d been traveling for awhile and wasn’t herself. Her duster was tight about her, and her weapons were secured out of sight.
Applejack approached the town and stopped when the two nervous looking stallions at the end of the path called for her to stop. They asked her where she’d come from, and she told them she was passing through from Briarpatch, looking for family in Owlet Falls. The guards talked a moment and then nodded and patted her down for weapons.
She was tense as they did so, but neither of them were terribly competent. Or perhaps something of their old sense of decency was left, for they did not touch her flanks. The first big hurdle was out of the way.
“You have thirty minutes,” said one, and she saw that he’d been “blessed” with a timepiece in his leg that he showed her. “I’ll know when. If you aren’t gone by then, I’ll escort you out. Cause no trouble. Speak to no one but the merchant. She’s in the town square.”
“Thankya kindly,” Applejack murmured, and the pony merely hummed back--or at least, the whirring machinery somewhere within him hummed. They did not look at her.
Applejack walked through the streets towards the center of the village. It was perhaps a hundred souls, she guessed, all thatch roof and timber. Looked not unlike a Ponyville street, before the Line went up and Ponyville was flattened.
There were ponies in the streets, all of them rushing by busily as if they were on strict schedules. She supposed they were. The Auditor was nowhere to be seen, which was just as well. She walked alone in the center of the street and the others filed around behind her, hugging close to the wall, avoiding eye contact.
In the square, a single trader was set up with a few carts forming a half square of wood. He was a frail looking colt, no more than eighteen, and his wide eyes sized her up.
She didn’t mind.
Without a word exchanged, she stood in front of his arranged carts and slipped out of her saddlebags. She rolled out a few trinkets: old coins, some iron ore from the last merchant through Ponyville, bullets for one of the great long barreled guns like the griffons bear, a spare set of spurs in decent condition, and some food. He looks over what she has brought and then pushes the spurs and food away. No need for them. The ore and the coins are raw material for more creation, and the long barrel can be repurposed for the defense of the tower.
The trading colt offered money, old Equestrian bits first and then Society crowns, but she turned both down. He blinked in confusion, and then settled on food and water, which she did take. It was a terrible rate of exchange, but honestly she’d expected that.
With a nod and a grunt, Applejack turned and left the way she had come.
Or she tried to, at least.
It happened fast. Listen:
First, a hum filled the air. Turning, Applejack saw the Auditor standing behind her at the edge of the square. She tensed, but it did not move and so she relaxed into her next step.
But she misjudged. She misjudged several things at once. Her duster caught on her saddlebags as she hoisted them onto her back and flashed a bit of her left flank to the air. It was enough.
The Auditor began to hiss and advance with frightening speed. Applejack looked back at her leg and cursed loudly before bolting.
Villagers poured out of houses, called without knowledge by the Auditor’s rising calls with slack jaws and blank eyes to hunt her down.
Applejack, running through the street, dodged a groaning mare whose eyes had been replaced with fine-tuned lenses and then kicked her as she passed for good measure. Another replaced her, and she doled out yet another kick. Bu she couldn’t stop. She couldn’t fight them. There wasn’t enough time.
The Auditor was only a few steps behind her. Its hissing had become a scream and it drove all of the thoughts out of her head. Experience with the beasts helped with nothing. They would take and tear, take and tear, take and--
Another kick as he passed, but her luck had run out. A pony she hadn’t seen wrapped it’s front half around her leg and she went sprawling in the dust. More joined, until she was lost under the squirming, groaning mass of mindless thralls as they bore her upwards to meet the hissing, steaming Auditor and its horrible face as the syringe of sedative rose from a compartment in its cheek.