The crabs surged forward. “Wait!” the Doctor said. “Wait just a moment. Don’t you want to know why I’m not surprised?”
The swarm stopped, more out of confusion than anything else. The thing in Ditzy blinked, nonplussed. The Doctor glanced at the guards. “Aren’t you a bit curious?” he asked.
Marty stared. “Doctor, that’s hardly the question—”
“Yes, actually,” Lancey said, her face stony. “How long did you know she’d been replaced?”
“Oh, ever since we picked her up,” the Doctor said casually. “I mean, look at her eyes, perfectly aligned. That never happens. Then, she didn’t say a word on the way here, even after that muddle I was talking about her and Romana. Ditzy definitely would’ve taken the mickey out of me for that one. Most damning of all though? Ditzy is the postmistress. She takes the post out of the train station daily. And that’s not the postal room. I’ve been on her routes with her, I’d know.”
“And yet, you gave me your only real weapon against us,” the Ditzy-thing said with a cruel smile. “You talk a big game, Doctor, but you are a fool.”
Marty looked perplexed. Lancey’s expression made it clear that she agreed with the Brachyura. The Doctor grinned. “I didn’t set it to unlock the door,” he said cryptically.
The thing in Ditzy’s body frowned, her snout crinkling in confusion. “Then… what did you…”
She glanced at her hooves. The screwdriver was flashing, faster and faster. “Oh—”
The blast of high-pitched noise blotted out whatever she was going to say. Marty and Lancey clapped their hooves over their ears, falling to the ground in pain. The Doctor just stood there, his expression blank and his eyes empty. “I’m sorry, Ditzy.” he murmured. “I’m so sorry.”
He walked toward the door of the break room, absently kicking aside the burnt-out remains of his screwdriver in the process. He would build another one, eventually. Unresponsive silver crabs were kicked aside as well as he stopped and looked over Ditzy’s body. Still had a pulse, and at a glance the worst pain that she would suffer was a mild case of tinnitus. Annoying, but better than the alternative by a wide margin.
He rose and turned to the door. He jiggled the knob. It was locked after all. Sometimes, he reflected, turning around, it really was nice being an earth pony. He stared for a long moment at his wife’s unconscious body on the ground. Her body, but not her mind. His vision was tinged with red, and his jaw had subconsciously set. He lifted a back hoof, and channeled all that anger into kinetic energy.
The door flew off its hinges and slammed to the floor. The Doctor breathed in and let out a long sigh. “I needed that,” he said to nopony in particular.
The Doctor glanced around the converted break room with a critical eye. Little scurrying crabs halted, frightened, as soon as he arrived. He smiled. “Hello, you lot. Who’s up for a nice jailbreak?”
There was no motion in the bar. Everypony’s attention was focused on the bouncing table behind the bar. Fancy stared at it moodily. “It’ll hold,” he said, a hollow promise that fell on deaf ears.
In the corner, Rainbow sighed. Scootaloo glanced over at her. “Need another pillow?”
“Nah, nah, it’s fine, Squirt. I probably won’t have to deal with this much longer anyway…”
“Don’t say that!” Pinkie cut in. “We’re all gonna be fine!”
Dash stared, raising a brow. Scootaloo coughed awkwardly. “Pinkie,” Dash said. “We’re trapped. No way out. It’s only a matter of time before those Achy-breaky-whatevers break through.”
“We could go upstairs,” Civil suggested.
Dash glared. “And then what? Where do we go after that? What, exactly is the point of running? I say we stay and fight!”
There was absolute silence, save for the continuing whine of the modulator. “Fight,” Rose said flatly. “Fight the entire town, which at this point probably includes a magic-spewing dragon.”
Dash flushed. “Well, when you say it like that it sounds kinda dumb,” she muttered.
“She’s not wrong, though,” Berry said. “We can’t just keep running upstairs and downstairs. Maybe it’s time we went on the offensive.”
“Alright,” Romana said, lifting up the frequency modulator. “They’ve developed immunity against the one weakness we know they’ve got. What exactly do you suggest that we do?”
Hyacinth stared into space, thoughtful. “Keep up appearances,” she murmured, half to herself. “We wait, and we do what we can to survive.”
There was a long silence. Romana put a hoof to her chin, frowning thoughtfully at the barricaded trapdoor “Maybe we can put another table on top of that one,” she said.
A murmur of general assent spread through the bar.
The last of the crabs-that-were-still-crabs were shoveled into the break room, and Marty closed the door firmly. “That should hold them for a bit,” he said.
Lancey stared at Ditzy. “What about her?”
“I’ll take care of it,” the Doctor said, picking up a ball of packing twine from under the counter. “You two need to get this lot back to the bar. I’ll take care of this one myself. After that… well, I’ve got an idea or two. Oh, yes. And, uh, Thunderlane, Cloudchaser, and… Hail Comet? Yes, you ought to come as well. Your bodies are at the schoolhouse. Actually, I think most of the weather patrol is stuck around town, so you all might want to tag along.”
The Doctor made to leave, but Lancey blocked his path. “You knew,” she said quietly. “And you didn’t tell us. Why not?”
There was a long silence. “I didn’t want to give up the game too early.” He does not, will not, say the real reason. That even if Ditzy’s mind is not present, he needs to keep her body alive, and he can’t trust that to ponies with spiked armor and crossbows. “I knew what I was doing, didn’t I?”
She holds his gaze a moment longer. “Yes. This time, you did.”
‘This time,’ she does not repeat. She does not have to. She turns before the Doctor’s face can harden into a scowl. “Come on, Marty,” she said shortly. “Let’s get going.”
The pegasus stallion glanced helplessly back at the Doctor. What can you do, right? Then, they are gone.
The Doctor sighed. She hadn’t been wrong. Caring too much had killed him before. “Come on,” he said to the Brachyura-ponies. “Let’s go fix this mess.”
And so, a parade of silver crabs skittered out of the building, led by a tan stallion, while a grey mare was carried behind like a Sleeping Beauty in a coffin of glass.
The extra tables had helped to slow the cellar-dwellers down, but they were still obstinately trying to break through. The party had, therefore, adjourned to the stairwell. With doors barricaded at either end, it was the safest place to be. For now. Romana had long since turned off the modulator. It wasn’t repelling anything anymore anyway.
“This is getting ridiculous,” Scootaloo said flatly.
Rainbow snorted lightly. “See? See? Somepony else agrees with me.”
“Shut up, Rainbow,” Berry said flatly.
“You don’t suppose something’s happened to the recovery party, do you?” Fancy asked anxiously. “They really should be back by now.”
Fleur shrugged as elegantly as she could in the claustrophobic space. “Perhaps ze robots hid zeir prisoners somewhere more difficult to enter zan expected.”
“It’s a train station, not a labyrinth,” Fancy muttered. “How many hidey-holes can there possibly be?”
There was a knock from downstairs, and the stallion brightened. “Do you suppose that that’s them?” he asked.
There was a knock from upstairs. Dash raised an eyebrow. “Maybe that’s them.”
There was a long moment. There was a knock from downstairs, more desperate now. There was a knock from upstairs, almost a pounding.
Fleur breathed out. “I will get ze lower door.”
Romana nodded. “I’ll take the top.”
The two unicorns shifted and squeezed through the crowd toward the doors, where the knocking was getting steadily more desperate. “Hold on!” Romana said, throwing open the door.
At the top of the staircase, a trio of pegasi stood, expressions and eyes blank. Fleur glanced up, and quickly threw open the other door. A group of blank-faced unicorns and earth ponies stared back at her. “Merde,” she muttered, as the controlled ponies closed in from either side.