"How much farther is the exit?" Jamjars complained, plodding along at a speed that blocked Starlight's path on the narrow walkway. "My hooves hurt!"
Grenada glared back in irritation, setting a swift pace through the power tunnels that spanned between Sosa and Karma Industries. "Keep up! I've got a lot riding on me if I don't get this done quickly, and you were the one who could have stayed behind. And we passed the most recent exit about ten minutes ago."
"What!?" Jamjars squawked. "Why didn't we get out there!?"
"Because it's hot outside, and these tunnels go to Copsewood just fine," Grenada replied, levitating along a big bundle of weapons beside her head. "And it's best not to be a walking armory aboveground when tensions are high. We need to come out as close as possible to where the Copsewood Spirit are meeting before heading to..." She shook her head. "Why am I telling you this, again? You're just a civilian kid."
Bad choice of words, Starlight thought as Jamjars pointed a hind leg back at her. "Oh?" She tossed her mane, still containing the stolen poster. "And what's she, then?"
"A friend," Grenada said. It wasn't enough.
"A friend, huh?" Jamjars smirked, taking the edge off her tiredness by prodding at Grenada... or never having been tired to begin with and just wanting to whine. "Well, I'm a friend of a friend, so there! Or did you mean 'friend' as in 'accidental family member you don't want anyone to know about?'"
"She has a missile launcher," Starlight remarked from the back of the procession. "If you're going to be annoying, she could blow you up."
Grenada blanched. Unfortunately, she didn't seem to have any idea how to deal with Jamjars... and the filly had waited to become a pest until they were too far along to want to turn back.
"These aren't missile launchers," she said, hefting the bundle of short, cannonlike devices in her aura. "They're portable shields. They're supposed to keep our ponies safe."
"Oh yeah?" Jamjars kicked at a cluster of hoof-sized metal balls that hovered low enough for her to reach. "And what are these?"
"Don't touch those." Grenada swiftly floated them further up with the other piles of weapons. "They're sedative grenades. A recent Sosan invention we haven't started mass-producing or shared any designs on yet. They let out a cloud of gas that will knock you unconscious for hours."
Starlight tilted her head, something about Grenada's weapon cache not lining up with what she already knew about the Sosans. "Those sound like defensive weapons," she pointed out. "I thought your contract wanted you to make dangerous weapons, that were designed to kill ponies."
Grenada shrugged. "Not everything we make has to be for the contract."
"You mean you steal." Jamjars stuck her tongue out. "It's the Sosans who make everything. You're from the Spirit, and just take what you want."
Apparently sensing that she was being drawn towards saying something she shouldn't, or perhaps feeling guilty at being called a robber, Grenada shut up, marching straight ahead with the weapons floating well out of Jamjars' reach. Starlight frowned. "Should you really be insulting the mare who's helping you right now?"
"Oh, I'm not insulting." Jamjars tossed her mane. "I do what I want too. When I grow up, I'm going to be just like her."
Grenada hung her head, grimacing helplessly at the ground with reddened cheeks.
"What is your problem?" Starlight asked, walking impatiently close to Jamjars, much more easily sustaining Grenada's pace than the yellow filly. "You're going on your adventure, and I'm coming with you. You're getting exactly what you wanted. Why are you still being such a jerk?"
"Eh. I dunno." Jamjars shrugged. "Maybe I'm just bored. Aren't you bored? This place is nothing but the same thing over and over again. It's pretty blegh. I dare you to say it's pretty."
"You just said it was pretty," Starlight countered, just because she could. "Pretty blegh, at least." She stifled a snicker.
Nevertheless, Starlight glanced around the tunnel, and had to agree that it was repetitive. As far ahead as she could see, and the same for behind, it was nothing but endlessly-stacked concrete rings, the catwalk suspended in the middle and a small river of drainwater that had seeped in flowing by underneath. The left side was heavily laden with protected conduits, carrying massive amounts of energy and eliminating the need for dedicated lighting. Of course, as far ahead as she could see wasn't very far, given the tunnel's strange habit of imperceptibly zig-zagging just hard enough to limit her ability to see around the corners. It was a straight line from Grand Acorn to Sosa, wasn't it? Had the ponies who built the tunnels really been that bad at digging in a straight line? She asked Grenada.
"I wasn't born yet when they made this place. I don't remember." Grenada shrugged. "My mother might have even still been a filly. It would have been thirty... no, twenty-five... or..." She shook her head. "It was a while ago. History is history. I care more about the ponies who are here and alive, right now." Blinking, she realized she had strayed from the question. "Um... sorry. My best guess is they made the tunnel bend but only wanted to cast one kind of segment, so they made them curved. It could also be to avoid obstacles in the ground. We're not far from the surface, and Earth District soil is deep."
"Huh." Starlight shrugged. That made sense.
"So what's with the big basement?" Jamjars asked, apparently forgetting to be rude. "Did somepony just forget about it, or what? There should have been more down there!"
"More down there?" Grenada raised an eyebrow. "There's a whole hidden Spirit base! What were you expecting? Giant engines and machines and the like?"
"Kind of," Starlight admitted, backing Jamjars up. "It was a really big, empty basement."
Grenada bit her lip. "Well... that's a slightly longer story. You both know about Project Aslan, right? Starlight, I know you do."
"Project what?" Jamjars' brow furrowed. "Sounds unsafe."
Grenada sighed noisily. "Okay. It sounds like you don't." Her pace grew stiffer. "The short version is this. Decades ago, before the skyport and the yaks and the Stone District becoming better off than us, Sosa tried to go into constructing airships. As part of the project, they wanted to make their own port, with a hangar and a control tower, so that they wouldn't get in the way of water traffic. Some political nonsense. I bet it had to do with Shinespark's dad. Eventually, the ship part of the project got scrapped, so they had no reason to keep working on the port. So it sat there for a year or two, half complete, until Dangerous Karma came along and bought it, then renovated it into his base. The basement is the old hangar. He just built a hill over it to cover it up, then made his tiny, neat-and-orderly town on top of that."
Suddenly, dozens of pieces clicked into place in Starlight's mind. Of course, Sosa would have installed a power tunnel to the site of their hopeful Earth District skyport. And that explained how Karma Industries had such a grand foundation and impressive structure, yet bore the look of being perpetually unfinished, with only the cheapest materials used sparingly for interior decoration. She imagined if she pried off one of those ugly drywall panels, instead of seeing wood and stuffed insulation, she would be greeted with high-tech steel infrastructure. The current skyport was in the Sky District because... Well, she could speculate a whole host of reasons on that one.
Abruptly, she collided with Jamjars's backside, not realizing the filly had stopped. Jamjars turned, snickering.
"We're there," Grenada announced before anything could start. "Or close enough, at least."
"Huh?" Starlight glanced around. They had emerged in the corner of a mid-size underground room filled with mana equipment... evidently a routing station from Sosa. To her right, another pipe diverted, labeled as 'Copsewood.'
It didn't have a walkway next to its bank of manaconduits. Instead, it had a pair of rails and a high-speed tram.
Jamjars smirked wickedly.