//------------------------------//
// Chapter 21 
// Story: Fallout Equestria: Old World Dreams 
// by KDarkwater 
//------------------------------//


21



 



 



 


In hindsight, she should have seen this coming.

It was one thing for her to speak of the difficulties she’d encountered in trying to learn to shoot a rifle.  But in the grand scheme of things, the most instruction she’d gotten in the stable was more or less just an old Equestrian Armed Forces field manual on the subject, whereas she’d had free reign for most of her time in security to shoot her monthly allotment of 9mm and 10mm ammo until the stocks had been depleted enough to preclude such privileges roughly two years ago. She’d learned most of her pistol shooting by doing, rather than reading and trying to apply said reading to actual shooting.

She was amazed how much of a difference real, professional instruction made in her shooting ability.  On the first day, she was learning the basic take-down and re-assembly of her new backwards rifle, and spent most of the day dry-firing the thing on the range to learn both the trigger pull and how much of an effect said act was having on the weapon.  By the end of the day, the rifle barely moved when she did it.  Afterwards, the rest of the week was split between rifle training in the morning and helping teach pistol training in the afternoon as a form of minor rehab for her post-coma recovery.

Day two was spent making sure her trigger pull did not move the rifle when live ammunition was involved.  Again, the decades of experience the Runners had in actual combat made their exercises and drills much more instructive than a dry, boring manual.  This was where the most unintended discharges happened, and with a trigger system that could do both semi-automatic and full-auto fire without the use of a switch or crossbolt button, more than one Runner (and herself) wound up bumping off short bursts of two to six rounds when they meant to fire only once.  It happened often enough that somebody suggested that the triggers be re-fitted with a tab or switch that could be pushed in or out to keep the trigger from coming all the way back until the shooter wanted it to.  It honestly wasn’t a bad idea, even if it did kinda defeat the whole purpose of the trigger’s unique method of operation.  The Runners’ “benefactors” promised to look into it and come back with a prototype within the month.

Something else to ponder concerning their origins and true capabilities.

Day three was the first true day of what the Runners called “combat drills”.  Since the Runners didn’t work in large numbers often, they focused more on individual shooting skills and techniques, but group tactics were not ignored. Given day two’s rather high number of accidental full-auto bursts, they started slow and easy with short-range reactive targets (mostly steel knock-down targets that could be reset by simply pulling a rope to pull them back upright).  With time and consistent success, they gradually moved up to targets farther away, and by the end of the morning everybody was hitting targets from twenty yards away to over two hundred in a single practice run with only a couple of misses at most.

It also pointed out the weak link in any weapon system—the magazine.  It wasn’t that it was a bad design—executed properly, it was as sturdy as any other design, and there was a definite benefit to being able to see one’s remaining ammunition at a glance when the mental round count was lost or forgotten in the stresses of combat or drills.  But it was fairly easy to overload the mags with an extra round, thereby making it almost impossible to actually get it to feed.  She’d done it a couple of times and were she not a unicorn gifted with excellent skill and strength in magic she’d have cursed and swore a lot louder (and longer) trying to pry that extra round back out.  One Runner, on day three, also began having a lot of malfunctions with his rifle—the thing would stovepipe trying to eject an empty casing, and eventually got to where it jammed almost every time it fired.  Upon taking the rifle apart, they found that the gas regulator on the barrel assembly was frozen in position and couldn’t be moved or adjusted in any way.  When a replacement barrel was substituted, the malfunctions vanished.

Day four, thus, started with a review of basic operation and handling of the rifle, to make sure everybody knew that a hard tap or a slap on the magazine was not going to work like it did on the worn-out black rifles they were used to, and to not lube or oil any part of the gas regulator or piston or risk having the liquids become congealed and gunk up the entire system.  Once that was done with, the day went pretty much like the previous one, except this time they were timed on it, and the last ninety minutes were spent working on group tactics.  It was too easy to forget muzzle awareness with such a short rifle, and the squad tactics session made everyone keenly aware of it fairly quickly (along with the tricky trigger system).  For her part, Sling was not required to partake in the group tactics session, but she did anyway because she had little else to do and she was anxious to get her body used to moving around again.  She’d been getting her strength back slowly and surely throughout the week, but figured a little extra physical exercise couldn’t hurt.   Her sore legs said otherwise.

Day five, today, was the last day for riflery training, and she’d been given the honor of being the first to take the Runners’ “qual” string on the range.  She silently marveled at how quickly and easily she had taken to the rifle once she’d gotten the trigger and handling down with little more than sixteen hours of training.  Twenty yards, or two hundred, or even three hundred, she was hitting the target, and often enough that she felt confident she could do it in an actual fight.  Not in all the years and failed qualifications in the one-one-five had she ever been able to figure out what she’d been doing wrong, and yet now in five days of practice she’d already matched every security pony’s best scores, and these Runners were far better at it.  She didn’t care that she would probably end up near the bottom of the scoring tally with such an obvious difference between her and the lowest-ranked Runner, only that she was shooting a rifle well enough to pass their standards.  Even the lack of a bolt-hold open feature on the rifle didn’t hurt her any—if anything, not having to worry about slapping the mag in hard enough to cause it to spew rounds into an open chamber helped her focus on just getting the mag into the gun. It was probably no slower for her than trying to reload a conventional rifle from bolt-lock.

And Ada wasn’t about to let her leave without grilling her over it.

“Your stable must not know a damn thing about how to teach people to shoot,” the large griffon remarked dryly, her eyes focused on the range as a unicorn stallion took up his rifle and waited for the signal to start.

“Not really,” she agreed freely, stuffing her empty magazines into her saddlebags on the ground by Ada’s body.  “Most of the time, qualification day was basically a reading of a training field manual before the range session.  Same for pistol.  I learned the pistol by using my monthly allotment of training ammo every month for six years, and some private practice with my .44 here and there.  I was the only one who actually did that.”

“So why not do that with the rifle then?”

With the magazines stowed away, she quickly worked the charging handle on the rifle to ensure there were no rounds in the chamber, and then pulled the barrel off and punched the disassembly block out to separate the receiver from the stock.  “Chief wouldn’t allow it.  No rifle rounds were to be expended except on yearly qualification, unless he authorized it. He usually only allowed one training day every season on the rifle rounds…except for those who couldn’t qualify, which was me.  Said I needed to qualify before he could justify letting me use up unreplaceable ammo to practice, so I was kind of in a nasty catch-22.  Couldn’t beat the qualification test without practice, but he wouldn’t let me practice because I couldn’t qualify.  And since he controlled all the paperwork, he could control my ability to bring it to the Overmare.  Not a week went by that didn’t have me wanting to murder him.”

Ada’s contemptuous snort was impossible to mistake for anything else.  “He’d fit right in with the Union.  Uptight assholes always do, Colada excepting.”

“Can’t help but notice she’s the only Union officer you guys have any respect for.”

“She hates the slavers as much as we do,” Ada explained quietly, bringing a talon up to tap at a necklace hanging around her neck and causing the attached sapphire jewel to flash several times when the range officer blew into his whistle to signal the start of his compatriot’s run—

—the unicorn stallion’s rifle came up, snapping onto a steel target fifteen yards ahead of him and let off two quick shots in about a second, but the harsh report of the gunfire was muffled by the sound barrier spell embedded in the necklace.  True to their word, the Runners’ “benefactors” had an immense use for the hearing protection spell she taught them and had managed to enchant enough necklaces, leg bracelets, and earrings to give everyone who wanted it hearing protection on demand, and even managed to improve on the spell so that it would only suppress harmful noise levels and allow them to converse normally.  It was a very nice improvement to her spell, and it was a bit of a relief to not have to cast it anymore, but she learned up on their spell alterations all the same.  Her own enchanted sapphire horn ring was connected to her innate magic and could activate on its own with a mere thought…an advantage she made sure to spread to everyone else in her travelling entourage, save for Julie who had to settle for a necklace.

She’d get her half of the “trade” when she got to the pistol range in the afternoon, whatever it was.  Rico wasn’t really too keen to share any details.

As the stallion began moving down the range, engaging targets on the move, Ada resumed her somewhat reserved high regard for the Major.  “Any other officer would have been strung up by their entrails for the shit she does to them, but she does it in a way that makes it impossible for the slavers to have her punished for it.  She’s the only officer in her region that actually makes the guilds hold to the Union’s rules, and they hate her for it.”

With the plastic olive drab stock now all by its lonesome, she pressed in on the rubber-surface buttplate and pulled out the retaining pin that doubled as the sling swivel point, allowing the buttplate to come off and the hammer pack to slide out alongside the small cleaning kit she’d stored in the small cavity at the bottom of the stock.  “And she’s still alive after all this time, how?”

“They can’t touch her for enforcing the Union’s rules, even if plenty of other officers let them get away with their shit,” Ada grinned back.  “And the one time somebody made an attempt on her life, they made the mistake of trying to hit her at her house, with her kids and hubbie and wife inside at the time. She gutted the dudes alive with a combat knife herself, right in the street, and then had the slave caravan they were riding with wiped out to the last soul.  Killed like, sixty slavers that day.  Yeah, we like her.  If anybody in the Union’s gonna back us if their shit system ever comes down on itself, it’ll be her.”

“If?” Sling questioned, her curiosity growing.  “I thought you guys hated the Union.  Went to war with them and everything.”

“…I maybe could have explained that better when we met,” Ada sighed.  “It’s not that we’re against better trade and access to goods.  We just don’t like entire towns being gobbled up into their system at gunpoint, or with a bunch of raping slavers attached to the whole mess. If the Union would turn every last slaver into ash and give towns the option about whether or not they wanted to be part of it, we wouldn’t be nearly so mad at them.  For all the shit they mess up, they do just enough good to be a hell of a lot better than going back to the bad old days, when every town was out for themselves and you couldn’t go an hour on the roads without getting neck-deep in raiders.”

It was hard to argue against a position like that. “Kite’s said the same thing, more than once.  But she’s not nearly as optimistic, considering the Union allowed the slave system that abused her her entire adult life.  I don’t think she’d lose any sleep if the Union vanished overnight.”

“I wouldn’t blame her, given her experiences,” Ada cautioned.  “There’s other ways to run farms besides slave labor without making people pay in body parts for the food.  But when the Union was just starting up thirty years back they couldn’t afford to spare any people to work their farms and went to the slavers to provide the workforce.”

With the cleaning kit spread out before her on the ground, Sling set to work cleaning out all the gunpowder and copper fouling out of the barrel and receiver.  “And yet they’re willing to spare people to guard it.”

“They were gonna do that whether it was slaves or honest folk working the fields,” Ada countered.  “A farm putting out fresh, edible food is too valuable to not have a guard force.  With the slaves, they wouldn’t lose more than they needed to keep raiders and gangs away from it, and by the time they got large enough to be able to do away with the slave labor, the slavers had found ways to imbed themselves into the Union’s workings to make it impossible to be rid of them.  Ironically, the war we started with them just made that little ugly part of the Union-slaver relationship even worse.  Most of the old heads of the major trade guilds got killed or stepped down during the war, and their successors weren’t too keen to lose the support of the slavers who were keeping the farms and trade routes open. Even though the trooper corps recovered enough to take over patrols again years ago, the trade guilds remember the slavers’ “help” keeping the Union running, to say nothing of our attempts to crash the slave trade by helping the Underground ferry folk from the Union’s towns to the other side of the valley.  There’s no real incentive in the Board to remove them now.”

There’s that “Board” again….  “This ‘Board’, I’ve heard that name before.  From Kite.  I assume it’s the actual leadership of the Union?  Styled after a corporate board of directors of the old world?”

The unicorn stallion on the range finally finished his run—he’d had a little trouble with the four-hundred yard target, but not enough to get him laughed at.  In truth, he did pretty well considering he was sticking with the rifle’s integrated 1.5x optic and its doughnut reticle.  Most everyone else had gone with the railed-top receiver and put either a 4x marksman carbine’s optic or a zero-power reflex sight on top. “Yup.  Nine guys in total, all running the top-earning trade guilds. The Union itself has like…two hundred caravan companies or trade guilds?  Really, their whole political system’s a clusterfuck of a mess. There’s only about a dozen outside the nine Board guilds that really matter.  The rest are just a bunch of ponies and griffons and zebras trying to get by in the wastes, like everybody else.  Funny thing about the Union, half the trooper companies are supported primarily by a trade guild.  Colada’s, for instance, is sponsored by the Last Call Trading Co., and they’re one of those twelve other guilds that have any real power in the Union.”

Oh sweet Luna, a system like that’s gotta be chaos on its best day.  “…now I’m wondering how the Union hasn’t imploded yet, with a system like that.”

“Sometimes I wonder that myself,” Ada admitted with a sigh. “Ain’t for lack of tryin’.  And the shitstorm you stirred up in Trotpeka, and then with the Pythons three weeks back, Chief is a mite miffed we may have to go hardcore on ‘em…speaking of which, he wants a word with you about that. I’ll take you there when I finish my qual run.”

The casual mention of the time lapse had her nearly gaping when she ran it through her head when she took a moment to sort it out. She’d been in a coma for twelve days, and she’d come to last week, on a….Thursday?  And that horrible mess in Trotpeka before all of that…it was hard to believe it had been nearly a month since that day.  It didn’t feel like it…

Having finished with the barrel and receiver, she went to the bolt carrier group and took it apart to clean the bolt face with a brass bristle brush.  “I’m not sure I’m going to like what your “chief” has to say.”

“Just don’t blow his face off with that rifle and you’ll be fine—”

“Ada!” the Runner’s range officer called out suddenly. “Step up!”

The griffon’s body promptly stood up on all fours and stretched out her limbs in a manner more befitting of a house cat than a hardened mercenary.  “Awww, hell yeah.   Watch and learn, neophyte of riflery.”













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Even watching Ada ace her range test with only one miss at the five hundred meter target did not bring her any joy when it came time to deal with the Runners’ “Chief” in his working space twenty minutes later. What Light Tail referred to as their camp was in reality the remnants of an old military outpost, which according to the one sign left intact near the entrance was the home garrison of two companies from the 5th Sunrise Battalion and the 22nd Mechanized Logistics Support Company.  While the military vehicles were obviously long gone, the portion of the base dedicated to the infantry companies was more than enough for the roughly two hundred and fifteen Runners who called it home.  In some ways, it was really too big, but they kept the main gate guarded and the base itself was far enough out from Withercha that anyone wanting to take a shot at it had to do so across wide open ground offering almost no cover or concealment.  As post-war living spaces went, it was probably one of the better ones she’d seen thus far, which had her briefly considering Ada’s recruitment offer.

The Chief maintained his “office” in the primary command and administration building on the first floor, where the Runners also did most of their mission and patrol planning—the other two floors above saw little, if any use.  Even now, as Ada led her past the front lobby and through the door next to the receptionists’ desk, she could hear a few Runners in one of the rooms down the hall to her right talking through a mostly shut door.  It was too muffled to make out clearly, but she had a sinking feeling in her gut that she’d find out shortly.

She’d barely come to a stop at the Chief’s desk, in a small room on the far left side of the building, when he dropped the first bit of bad news she’d had in over a week.  “You stirred up a lot of shit with the Pythons over one wasteland orphan,” he half-growled through his beak, eying her in much the same manner as another chief of security in a past life did whenever she’d done something to displease him. “And got us mixed in with it in the process.  You’re lucky you have three trustworthy witnesses to credit you with Saurus’s death.”

So much for us staying here, she decided right then and there.  Even though she’d never really seriously considered it, signing up with the Runners had at least been briefly touched on with Kite.  The benefits were obvious—safety, a clean source of water, decent bedding, and the unknown “benefactors” who could likely be the only souls in the prairie with any manner of working industrial manufacturing, given the state of the guns they were making for the Runners.  But if that meant working for someone who already had a hard dislike towards her, she wasn’t sure how long she would be able to tolerate it.  “Then let’s make this a quick conversation.  What do you want?”

“I want to be done with it, to hell with the why,” he growled again.  “Got a few of my guys working up an assault plan right now, and you’re going with them.”

She almost blurted out a two-word response that would have been almost certain to get her kicked out of the Runners’ base, but managed to hold them back long enough for Ada to jump in in her defense.  “Since did you start giving orders to outsiders, Chief?”

“Since we started letting them have brand new firearms from the people we’re now single-sourcing our equipment from,” the Chief fired back.  “Particularly when said outsiders also manage to get us involved with their problems without working out a contract, and this one’s a pretty damn big one by the sound of it.”

“I didn’t ask your Runners to get involved with that fight in Hayfield,” Sling countered, in vain, but she had felt the need to at least point out that Ada, Leon, and those Runners she met there had offered their help of their own accord.

“You didn’t turn them away when they offered it either,” he replied, as expected.  He was starting to sound more like she expected a mercenary to sound like, leading her to wonder if the eight Runners she had met were the exception in their outfit, or if their Chief was.

“I set up the plan to have Double’s crew watching for Sling’s party if they happened to find her,” Ada cut in, her tone growing a tad more confrontational.  “I got us involved in that shitstorm in Hayfield, however unintentional it was.”

“You only helped them out ‘cause of that little filly you and everybody else around here is so smitten with,” he said evenly.  “I keep telling you people not to get involved on the fly like that.  A lesson that you, Sling Shot, could stand to learn very soon.  Sticking your neck out for others out of the goodness of your bleeding heart gets good people killed quickly in the wasteland.  You won’t last a year if you keep helping runaways and orphans with their own baggage issues.  Hell, that teen’s got a bounty on her head that drove her all the way to Rough Port before she got held up by Puck.  I barely understand the mess you got yourself into on that one, and us along with it.”

Sling felt a bubbling, familiar anger rising up within her veins.  This Chief reminded her too much of Farsight already.  Maybe it was because he felt the need to take the title of “Chief” for his leadership position, or maybe it was because he was starting to sound like a heartless asshole, but she already disliked him about as much as he disliked her. “It wasn’t just Rally they were looking for, they were keeping an eye out for me and my little girl too.  It was just blind luck that all three of us happened to be in the same spot when they came to get her.”

“If you believe that bullshit story she told you, then you’re even dumber than I thought,” he spat at her—

—Ada’s left talon lashed and pressed into her barrel, unintentionally jarring her from a hasty and unconscious decision to attach this increasingly infuriating griffon in the heart of his own camp—

--he caught the slight forward jolt of her body nonetheless.  “Looking to take a shot at me just for ruffling your coat, stable pony?”

“I’m thinking about it very strongly,” she hissed back, letting some of her anger out through her voice.  “I—”

“Chief, if you called her here just to piss her off, I may just let go of her,” Ada warned her boss darkly.  “There’d best be a reason for this little get-together.”

This Chief, if he took ill to being threatened by his own mercs, did not show it in any manner of visible body language, and simply continued talking to Sling as though his subordinate was not even there.  “I’m serious, who else besides this wasteland urchin can verify her story?  Puck? He’s dead, wasted in the crossfire when you went and took on the group trying to catch her.  The Pythons?  You killed all but one of them, and she probably killed the last one herself to keep you from questioning her little tale.  Kids like Rally don’t make it to her age on their own by being nice little ponies like you stable folk.  She may have more blood on her hooves than some of my Runners, and that’s not even counting the thieving orphans get up to when nobody’s looking.  For all you know she pulled your leg to get you to get into a dust-up with the Pythons.”

She was well and truly pissed now, but in that little speech she also noted a certain…distaste for orphans like Rally that seemed to line up with Kite’s own bias against them (a bias she was making an effort to ignore for Rally’s sake).  Apparently wasteland orphans were doing enough thieving and troublemaking just to survive to piss off the wasteland at large at how they did it…and that cemented her little theory on the raiders.  More than likely, the vast majority of them were orphans forced to survive on their own, or were the offspring of raiders who’d grown up in very similar situations generations prior.  The world had yet to really rebuild itself in the last two centuries since the megaspells, after all.  Ironically, it seemed that this “wastelander society” was responsible for the very raiders they detested.

If those same raiders weren’t prone to murdering, stealing, and raping their way through entire settlements, she would almost pity them….

“Either shut up, or explain why I’m standing in your office,” she warned him with a sharp tone.  “I don’t have the time or patience for your bullshit.”

For a moment it almost looked like he was going to take her up on her unspoken threats, but he seemingly erred on the side of caution (and getting her out of his sight).  “I called you here to lay out the future ahead of you.  My guys are getting an assault plan on the Pythons worked out, because now that we’re involved in your little tussle they’re going to be looking for blood from us and I want to make sure they’re in no condition to threaten anything more dangerous than a crawling foal.  You’re going to be a part of that plan because it’s your mess and my guys are not going to put themselves at risk dealing with it while you and yours sit here all safe and sound.”

Much as she loathed to admit it, that last bit…it made just a little bit of sense.  She didn’t like it, but she at least understood the reasoning.

“Given the treatment you’re giving me right now, ‘me and mine’ will not be staying here for very much longer,” she said back, resisting (mostly successfully) the urge to nudge Ada’s outstretched arm aside and charge into this “Chief” where he stood—

—and at last, she managed to get a response from him other than his harsh, stern (but calm-sounding) distaste.  “Hear my options out before you toss them aside, stable pony,” he said with a slight insistent tone.  “Because it’s rare that we come across anybody with a working knowledge of arms repair or medicine, and you and your girlfriend have skills we could use.  That damn orphan too, much as it pains me to say it.  Your little horde could do well here.”

Do not kill do not kill do not kill, she forced herself to repeat in a silent mantra of control, lest she give in to the murderous urges compelling her to make the worst mistake she could make.  “A mercenary camp is no place for my daughter, or Blue Jay or Rally for that matter,” she snarled back.  “I will help your mercs with their plan against the Pythons, but after that me and my little horde are leaving.  I don’t give a damn how safe this place is, if working under you is going to be like this I’d rather ta—”

The office door smacked open behind her—given who had dared to intrude a moment later, Sling wondered if it had been an accident or intentional.  “Oh, there you are, was looking for you!” Rico’s voice chimed gleefully, inserting herself into the room and quickly focusing all of her attention on her.  “I may have some work for you, very important—”

“Wait your turn, Rico,” the Chief cut her off. “She’s got work she needs to do for me first.”

Sling thought she saw a foul and dark gloominess come over Rico’s face, but it vanished by the time the grim-looking mare turned her gaze onto the gray-feathered griffon behind the desk.  “What kind of work?”

“He wants her to tag along with us when we go after the Pythons,” Ada answered immediately, likely realizing the Chief—whatever his name was—might not be inclined to offer the information on his own.

Rico’s frown of disapproval was almost motherly in nature. “Chief, there are more important things that Sling Shot can do than to go running around killing people.  She’s not a soldier or mercenary, any one of your Runners could take her place for that mission.”

“She started this little war with the Pythons and she’s going to help finish it, end of story—”

“My number two caravan came back this morning,” Rico countered calmly.  “Misty Veil found part of the key we need.”

There was a palatable, if short, silence before the Chief spoke again.  “By ‘found’, do you mean she has it in her physical possession, or did she just find its location?”

“…the latter,” Rico admitted.  “The key itself is locked in the secure wing of a Ministry of Arcane Science facility in the northwest quarter of Withercha.  The terminal that controls access to the wing is non-functional, but Misty found a secondary interface that can be utilized by a PipBuck…which I know Sling Shot has.”

She hoped the jump her heart did didn’t show in her face. “Do you?”

“She walks with a higher step in her left foreleg because she’s worn it for so long her body is not used to being without it,” Rico revealed casually.  “And the first time we met last week, there was a noticeable crease in the leg where that PipBuck has been attached for most of her life.  I know a stable pony when I see one, no matter how much they try to hide it.”

Ada’s beak snorted something that sounded like an amused laugh.  “Told you she’d figure it out in ten seconds, Chief.”

  “I’ve also figured out that it may be necessary to alter our business arrangements, if you’re going to start withholding information from us,” Rico countered smoothly, drawing a slight glare of ire from the Chief.  “We supply you with ammunition, spare parts for your old guns, and now new-manufacture guns, and at cost, and in exchange we ask you to keep us informed of events beyond the immediate Withercha region.  A pony from the last unclaimed Stable in Union territory with an intact working PipBuck is news worth learning and I had to surmise it from meeting with her face-to-face despite her being in the camp for five days when she came to pick up the bounty reward on Saurus.  The fact that the first thing you want her to do for you is to go into the city and fight the second largest merc group in the western prairie has me wondering if I need to talk my superiors into holding back on some of that support until you get your priorities straightened out.”

Ohhhhhhh shit, her mind cursed silently.  Her mere presence being enough to sour the Runners’ relationship with their most critical—and perhaps only—supplier of arms and munitions was not something she had foreseen this morning when she woke up….

“My priority at the moment is making sure Sling Shot’s problems don’t remain ours for very long,” the Chief bellowed coldly.  “Or they could very well become your problems as well.”

Rico’s face began to harden, as if silently mulling over whether to pull her group’s support right then and there instead of trying to argue her point further.  “…maybe we need to lay out the larger picture shaping up around us right now, just so you can see past these damn snakes.  At one point in time, the Oak Tree manufacturing plant the Scrappers run was the only place in the whole prairie where one could get decent gun parts. They went under three months ago when a machine on a production line finally gave out, and the old Ironshod plant is still locked up tight so there’s no one else who can fill the gap they just left.  The Bullet Farmers in the southwest quarter of the city could make factory-condition ammunition, to proper specs, and even had access to a source of lead and copper. Two months ago tribals set up camp near the lead mine, built a prayer shrine at the mine entrance, and have all but cut everyone else off from it.  The Radical Angels control the two production plants in Withercha that could still manufacture healing potion, and which are out of operation for reasons unknown, and that was only a month ago.  Even the optics shop at the northern edge of the city is having issues keeping their operations going.  In short, almost every valuable source of trade commodities that Withercha could still offer the Union is either gone or heading that way.  And these Pythons you bitch about so much are sensing an opportunity to shove you aside as the dominating mercenary force in the western prairie, if what Misty reported to me is accurate.”

Sling felt her gut turn cold as the list of Withercha’s problems grew more and more ominous.  What had once been painted as a place of freedom from the Union’s slaver-loving clutches was starting to sound more like a region on the verge collapsing in on itself and begging the Union to steamroll right on in.  “…this is not the land of Union-free troubles you painted for me, Ada.”

“No, it’s not,” Ada’s voice agreed solemnly.  “And we need to fix it, fast.”

“What you need to do, Ada,” the Chief countered sharply, “is follow your sundamned orders and get to Withercha with the others, take those Pythons out or do enough damage that they won’t get in our way again, and that stable pony is coming with you.”

“Did you hear even one word I said just now?” Rico growled angrily.  “I just told you that Withercha’s trade and economy has almost ground to a halt and the Pythons are taking advantage of it!”

“You’ve yet to enlighten me on the how, Ricochet.”

“I’m beginning to wonder if it would matter—”

“Let’s get going,” Ada snapped suddenly, with an unusually succinct crispness that was not what Sling was to used to hearing from her.  Like her patience had just run out with the whole mess…

Well, if we’re being honest here, I ran out of patience about three minutes ago…

Sling Shot turned away from the Chief’s desk and followed Ada out of his sight, subtly nudging Rico to tag along with a small burst of magic at one of her forelegs.  There was a little resistance to her touch, but the dark grayscale mare didn’t delay in joining them.

It took all of five seconds, once they’d cleared his office and escaped his hearing, for Rico to try and make good on her threat.  “If your Chief is going to let the whole western prairie tumble right into the Union’s slaving clutches, he’ll do it without us—”

“Not here,” Ada warned before she could finish, quickening her pace and all but leaving them behind in her dust.  “I’ll get the others, find you at your caravan later.  We’re gonna do this the smart way.”

Rico wisely held her tongue until the two of them had exited the half-crumbling administration building and got roughly a minute’s walk away from it.  “I can promise you I am much easier to work for than that asshole,” she hissed through clenched teeth.  “Worst chief the Runners have had in two decades.”

So it’s not just me…  “So this guy, whatever his name is…he’s an anomaly?”

“The Runners are mercs, but they’re not nearly as driven by caps, vice, and whores as the rest of their guns-for-hire world,” Rico spat. “They’re real particular about making sure their contracts are for good reasons, like wiping out slavers and raiders, or keeping an honest caravan from getting knocked over by a rival.  They try to keep people safe and not screw anybody over, and sometimes they’ll just go out and waste whole gangs of thieves and raiders without anybody paying them to.  This new Chief of theirs, though…he’s something else.  Wants every Runner to work under contract or not at all, no more freelancing about and doing good just ‘cause they want to.”

“That sounds more like a guy who was brought in from outside than one of their own.”

“Sadly, that’s not the case,” Rico said, her words laced with a disappointed sigh.  “His name’s Vergil, if you care enough to call him by name.  He took over after the last chief was killed on one of those freelance excursions against a road gang occupying a highway rest station, down south. They’d been extorting a settlement of about two hundred souls for food from a royal ration stockpile nearby.  It was one of the last ones in the region that still had anything left inside, so four Runners and the chief decided to strike out and take the gang down.  Chief caught a couple rounds in the throat when he was clearing a maintenance supply shack.  Vergil has made it his personal mission to turn the Runners into a merc outfit no better than the Pythons.  So far, his attitude hasn’t taken hold with the rest of them, and I’ve been seeing signs of late that the Runners would rather do away with him altogether and just keep going like they have been, only without anybody really in charge of the group overall.”

…oh, shit, I think I see what you just did back there.  “So you made sure they’re going to want to,” Sling finished out loud, but only after taking a quick peek around to make sure her accusation wouldn’t be picked up by anyone else.  “Because once they hear that you threatened to pull your support and munitions supply, they’re going to think very, very hard about whether they really want to do away with him.”

Rico didn’t shy away from it in the slightest.  “It was a threat my bosses told me to lay down if I deemed it necessary.  I wasn’t given any specific scenarios or parameters about what they would accept as “necessary”, so I had to make a gut call.  Things in Withercha are pretty dicey right now, and we need the Runners out there doing what they do best.  This bullshit with the Pythons is going to soak up a lot of their time and resources and it’s going to get the whole region pissed off at them in the end, because those snakes are worming their way into the city’s economy in ways the Runners would never consider.  Becoming the only reliable food source in the region, when all the other major factions can no longer produce any trade goods of any significant interest to the Union, would do far more than just put the Pythons at the top of the power hierarchy here.  It could entice the Union to break their treaty with the Runners and start laying claim to the western prairie, or just straight out annex Withercha itself in a “stabilizing” relief effort.  Within a year you’d have slavers everywhere setting up shop in every major settlement south of the old mountain pass to the Core, and the Pythons would be in a prime position to benefit from it every step of the way.  Simply killing them en masse is not going to get things back to the way they were.”

“I’m inclined to kill the whole lot of them just for sending thirty-plus of their number to run down a fourteen-year old orphan and rape her to death,” Sling fumed, feeling her blood boil even as the slightly hazy memory came back to her in two brief flashes.  Four mercs, pinning Rally to a couch and…

“One thing at a time,” Rico pressed gently, just as the silouhette of her wagon train began to appear in the far distance.  “Kite has the last of her shopping list in hoof now, you should probably check in with her in your quarters.  We can discuss this later.”

“Did she finally settle on something?”

“Not fully,” the gray mare replied.  “For the moment she’s decided to try a standard Maretta nine, with a little extra work, but she also picked up a couple of extras along with some Rig-Mayer nines.  Total of six guns, maybe she got the spares for your kids if you feel the need to arm them when you’re back on the road.  We didn’t have time to do a lot of upgrades on the Marettas.  Heavy duty slide, like yours, with green arcane gem rods embedded in the sights and the enchanted ceramic plate in the frame to offset heat and recoil stress.  I’m afraid they’ll have to settle for group sizes of between two to two and a half inches at twenty-five meters.  And we didn’t have time to cut in the front serrations, but the magazine wells are beveled to help with reloads.  For their shooting level, it should serve them well.  A custom rig like yours wouldn’t do them any more good than what they’ve got now.  You’re probably the second soul I’ve met that could make the most of the accuracy potential of my baby project.  The Rig nines were barely touched, just beveled the mag wells, added the arcane gem sights and left it at that.  They’re actually a tad more accurate than the Marettas, but the grip screws like to work loose after a couple hundred rounds.  You’ll need to keep an eye on them.”

Distant, faint pops began to roll across the horizon, and Sling thought she could see brief flashes of yellow at the wagon train, but she wasn’t sure.  “I figured you had a good deal of work put into that pistol, given everything that you knew about it.  How long did it take to make?”

“That little beauty?  About a month, including the six days that the enchanters in my outfit spent working their magic on every imaginable part.  It was originally built for a griffon in the Runners, but he died before we could finish it.  It’s….it’s honestly kind of a relief to not have to look at it in the back of my wagon anymore.”

The weight of the custom 9mm on her left side seemed to double in that moment.  “…oooh.”

“Yeah,” Rico sighed sadly.  “That was the first custom job we failed to deliver on in time. From what I’ve heard, it could have made a difference for him if he’d had it.  Take good care of it, okay?”

It was just as well that her brain couldn’t come up with anything to say to that, because she was starting to have a harder time getting her mouth to work when it came to conversation.  That…really killed the enthusiasm I had for it…

Fortunately, the ten-minute walk to the barracks building solved that issue, once she made her way up to the fifth floor, and to the room she currently shared with Kite.  As Rico had predicted, her new gun was laid out on a table in the corner of the room, slide locked open, though for the moment more attention was being paid to a saddlebag just beside it—

—and completely forgot about almost everything else in the world when she saw that Kite’s left hind leg no longer had that reconstitution brace attached to it—

“When did that that thing come off?” Sling asked out loud as a sort of greeting, but also to get Kite’s attention as she worked her travelling saddle off and set it aside on the floor.

Not that she needed to put in the effort.  The mare seemed all too eager to spend any available energy on her, even flexing her leg about to prove it that was back to full function.  “About five minutes after you left for your shooting test.  It’s just like it was before those ghouls got to me, damn thing actually worked.”

Sling was inexorably drawn to Kite’s position, pulling herself close to the leg as the mare lifted it out and stretched it.  She’d never been able to get Kite to tell her what had happened to her leg, and with the brace slapped on it she’d never gotten a look at the injury it was attempting to heal.  It was thus rather difficult to tell if there were any real differences from before, mainly because she’d not really been all that interested in scoping Kite out like this.  “Does it…does it feel any different from before?”

Out of the corner of her vision, she could see Kite pulling what looked like another Maretta out of the saddlebag, locking the slide back and setting it down on the table.  “I remember what was done to it.  It may be physically intact, but in the back of my mind I still can’t bring myself to believe it.  I feel like it’s going to re-open and it scares me.  I’ll do just about anything to take my mind off of it right now.”

Easily done, Sling silently agreed, finally allowing herself a cursory glance at Kite’s pistols.  Thicker slide with raised humps on the slide, right where the locking block would be…sights had those green gem rods in them, very bright. Turning the gun over on its side revealed the beveled mag well, and another second’s effort to pull the slide off exposed the blue ceramic insert inside the frame’s dustcover.  “Well, if it makes you feel any better, I can complement your choice of pistol.  It’ll be easier to clean, at least, even the firing pin channel.  Just spray some solvent in there and hit it with a concentrated air blast spell, and blow all the shit out of there without having to take the firing pin block out.”

As usual, Kite was quickly lost and left behind. “…wait, what?  What are you talking about?”

Sling turned the slide over until its exposed underside was oriented towards Kite.  “That area there, behind the breach face.  The firing pin channel can get all kinds of junk blown back into it.  Bits of brass, unburned gun powder, gas fouling, things most people wouldn’t think of when it comes to guns.  There’s a piece inside the slide that keeps the firing pin from hitting the chambered round if the gun is dropped, and gets lifted out of the way when you pull the trigger.  On most pistols that part is captured inside the slide and you have to take it apart to clean the firing pin channel out, but with this gun, I don’t need to do that. Makes it much, much easier to clean thoroughly.  I’m kind of hoping Light Tail might want one of these too.  That M&A 9 she has is a classic, but that particular gun was put together using the best parts I could find from two separate pistols that I found my first day out of the stable.  It’s working better than I expected, but it’s not the ideal way to get a gun running and it’s two centuries old.”

Kite finally took her eyes off the contents of her saddlebag and settled them on her.  “You can do that?  Just…take a couple of old beat up guns and make a working one out of them?”

“If there’s enough good parts between the two of them, then it shouldn’t be a problem.  I’d rather not, though, so many different parts with different wear characteristics thrown together is usually a recipe for disaster in the long term.  But at the time, we only had my 10mm, Grayhawk, and that five-shot revolver Light Tail keeps and I wanted her to have something she could reload a lot faster than a revolver in a hurry, so I took the beat up nines and made something workable.  Like I said, it’s doing better than I expected, but that’s not gonna last.”

Kite’s throat made a light, purring sigh of approval as a third Marettas was set out on the table, locking the slide open as she put it down.  “Then it’s a good thing I got a couple of spares, which Rico modified just like she did mine.  Thought the girls could use one, but Light Tail prefers the pistol she’s been using so I just got her a new one from Rico.  You may want to look it over later.”

The thought of four 9mm pistols among them that could share magazines in a firefight was offset by the worry of having to buy and carry enough ammunition to keep all the magazines topped off.  Assuming every pistol came with five magazines, that would mean roughly seventy-five rounds per pony, totaling three hundred rounds all told.  That would mean having to carry at least that much in reserve to reload expended magazines as needed, and that wasn’t taking into account practice sessions that would invariably need between fifty to a hundred rounds for each of them, or the five or so magazines El-Tee had for her 13-shot 9mm…

“…how many magazines did you get?” she asked next, briefly inspecting each of the three pistols to ensure that the dovetailed sights were centered in their slots.  She’d have to check trigger pulls in a few minutes with a pressure gauge, make sure they were all fairly close.

“Eight per pistol,” Kite answered, inadvertently blowing her ammo estimates out of the water.  “You said once that you preferred having five loaded magazines as a…combat load, you called it?  I figure extras would be prudent in case one gets lost or damaged.”

D’oh, yeah, that makes more sense now.  Shoulda thought of that.  “It would be,” she sighed.  “But now I’m worried about how we’re going to carry enough ammo to keep the guns fed. Everybody pretty much has at least one weapon now, when before it was just me, you, and Light Tail—”

“You had most of them,” Kite cut in with a snicker.  “Like, four at once?  Elly had two pistols, and I had that rifle I didn’t much care for and couldn’t hit well with.  Now we can all keep a couple on us.”

“That comes with the problem of having enough ammo on us to reload those weapons if we end up using them.  The 9mm alone is starting to scare me with how many guns we have in that caliber, and then there’s the .357s that can also fire .38s, my new rifle, and then my .44 Mag—”

“Which reminds me, look on the bed a moment, you blind ass mare—”

Sling barely felt more than a tinge of irritation at the slight flung at her vision as she half-heartedly complied with the request. “You might want to steal a few extra hours in it while you can, we probably wo—”

Her words died in her mouth when her eyes swept over the foot of the bed.  Lying atop the fluffy, inviting comforter sheet was Grayhawk, bearing a new set of red-shaded hardwood grips whose luster and grain pattern seem to shift with the angle of the light hitting it.  The old grips, while quite good, were meant for target shooting and much too large for a gun that had thus far spent most of its time in a holster.  These new grips were much slimmer and actually matched quite well with the dulled, matte satin stainless steel of the gun.  It had been something Rico had suggested on a whim a few days ago, and she heartily agreed to it.  But that wasn’t what was stealing every other breath from her lungs.

It was the eight fifty-round boxes of .44 Magnum ammunition piled atop each other next to the gun.

Eight.  Boxes.

Fifty rounds per box.

Her body slid across the floor until her chest was pressing into the footboard, and it took her a couple of seconds to register that she couldn’t get any closer than that.  Her magic looped over the ammo and scooted the boxes up to the very edge of the bed, and then separated one of the two blue-marked boxes from the group and pulled out the plastic tray—

I am not dreaming, she failed to whisper breathlessly at the sight of the polished brass and the fully copper-coated bullets that, when inspected with a very minute scrying spell, hit her mind’s eye with a small shimmer of mana—

“I’ve almost finished up my examination of your Phoenix .44—”

The bed and its cargo of gun and ammo vanished, a recent memory returning to her in full—

“Almost? You’ve had my gun for five days now—”

  “I only get a couple of hours per evening to take my measurements,” Rico defended herself.  “Most of my day is spent working out the kinks with the Runners’ new rifles while they train up on them.  Training they have graciously allowed you to partake in, I might add.”

  “….oh.”

  “Yeah, ‘oh’.  But I won’t hold it against you.  In fact, I do have a question for you, what ammo have you been shooting through it? I found very trace amounts of residual mana in the barrel last night.  Nothing harmful, it’s just…odd.”

  Her lone box of .44 Mag ammo from home was lifted out of her saddlebags and into a world that coveted every last round of the caliber that could be found and murdered for.  “Wait, in the barrel?  How would you even know to look for something like that?”

  Rico quickly plucked a round out of the box and began turning it about in a telekinesis spell, the glow of her horn pulsing slightly more brightly as she focused on the bullet nestled into the casing.  “I could almost feel it in my spell fields whenever I was handling it, so I decided to try a specialized scrying spell I developed specifically to look for this very thing—ooooh, oooh my I think I know what this is…”

  “Well, don’t keep it to yourself.”

  Rico’s face began to grow into a sick, delighted grin as she put the round back in the box and floated it back over to her.  “I believe you may have one of the only known remaining boxes of pre-war .44 Magnum mana burst rounds.  They’re essentially regular bullets infused with small, but very potent charges of mana to enhance their power.  The downside is that the true effect of the round was a little varied compared to a true enchanted bullet.  Usually it was a twofold increase in velocity or explosive expansion, but occasionally they were known to tear off limbs or heads, or blow them up like tiny explosive charges.  They were strictly custom-order only ammunition, and were known to fetch as much as one hundred bits per box in the war’s heyday before they were banned from civilian possession—”

Sling’s eyes blinked, and the memory vanished, bringing her back to the room, with Grayhawk, and over four hundred rounds of .44 Magnum ammunition, one hundred of which appeared to be mana-burst rounds…

Four.  Hundred.

She stared at the bullet floating before her, almost unwilling to believe such a large quantity of one of the wasteland’s most coveted and sought-after treasures was just lying there in the open like that, but a few taps against the collection of boxes with a slightly trembling forehoof confirmed that they were in fact real bullets and not a figment of her degrading senses.  Slowly, and with the care that one might take with a newborn foal, she slipped the cartridge back into its nesting spot in the ammo tray, closed the box back up…

…and heard what sounded like a mouse-like, joyous squeal from her throat as her forelegs reached out and hugged the pile of ammo against her chest.  Four hundred rounds of .44 Mag.

Four hundred rounds of .44 Mag!  Four hundred FUCKING ROUNDS OF—

A foreign touch upon her withers nearly jolted her from her euphoria, but the voice that followed was calm, even slightly frightful. “S-Sling?  Ummm….arrrrrrre….are you doing okay?”

She squealed again, still unwilling to physically let go of the ammo lest it vanish and prove to be a figment of her degrading senses like she was afraid it was.  “I’m…I’m good.  I’m fine. This is fine….this is fine…”

Her magic reached out, bid Grayhawk to float away and settle down upon her discarded travelling saddle, and she only subconsciously realized a moment later that her precious new hoard of ammunition was streaming in right behind the massive revolver—

—her forelegs, now empty, sought a new object to grab hold of and hug and settled for Kite, latching onto the grape-coated mare’s body and pulling her close—

“Whoa whoa whoa whoa what are yo-oooOOOOOhhh—”

Kite’s protests were cut short by what Sling would later remember as a deep, delirious kiss, much like one she’d received when Kite had finally been freed of the slaver’s cruelty.  But she didn’t realize it until what seemed like an eternity of bliss had passed and she found herself lying on her side on the bed, still holding Kite close to her and who looked like she’d just found the equivalent of the heavens herself.  To be clear, neither of them were coated in sweat or short of air, but they had clearly just enjoyed a few moments of each other’s company.

How sad was it that she couldn’t remember it because she’d just been gifted four hundred rounds of a rare caliber?

Kite’s tongue, sticking out slightly out of the right corner of her mouth, lapped at her snout before retreating back into her jaw. “….it just couldn’t be flowers with you, could it…”

A light, nervous laugh slipped out of her throat. “Eh hehehe, I uh…I don’t remember what we just did.”

She felt a light, harmless slap at her left ear, probably a teasing burst from Kite’s horn as the other mare squealed with faked rage. “Oh my gods you sick creature are you kidding me?!  I give you eight boxes of your precious .44 bullets and you can’t even be bothered to remember the five minutes we just spent making out on this soft and comfortable bed?!”

Five minutes?! She managed not to shriek back into Kite’s face.  That would have been bad.  “I…remember this period of bliss…does that count?”

“No!” Kite shrieked gleefully, slapping at her ear again as she rolled over to take up a position above her.  “You just said you don’t even remember what we did!  You were on cloud nine because of the stupid bullets, uggghhhh!  You are impossible!”

A rush of shame flooded into her cheeks, mostly because it seemed likely that Kite’s assumption was more correct than she wanted to admit.  She almost decided to just let things go at that and get back to the depressing reality of the world she now lived in…

…almost.

And then she began to recall a few choice words of insight that Julaya had freely shared not too long ago—at least, it wasn’t that long ago to her.  Namely, insight into why the zebra did what she did.  To live, to enjoy the things she could, when she could.

Maybe it was time she started doing the same.

Her body leaned up, grabbed onto Kite, and pulled her back down with her in a soft whump! into the comforters.  “I might need an encore, then.”

Kite’s eyes did not lose that perplexing look of glee and frustration that made her look like a dime novel mad scientist.  “Don’t lead me on when you don’t even know which way you swing.  If you do at all.”

“I said I couldn’t promise it would go the way you want it to,” she corrected gently with a pawing touch at the other mare’s face. “I still can’t.  I don’t want to go that far right now.  But I had this short talk with Julie, the day before I put myself into that coma, and I found that I had a great deal to learn about actually living a life instead of just surviving it.”

With great restraint and self-control (or maybe she was honestly upset with her), Kite resisted every urge that must have been telling her to go with the flow and pushed herself back up on her hooves. “Maybe later, when the kids are asleep and have no chance to interrupt us at a crude and extremely inappropriate moment.  We got lucky these last few minutes, and in my experience it usually doesn’t happen twice in the same day.”

A light pang of longing and disappointment hit her as Kite hopped off the bed and returned to her saddlebags, which were very strange and new sensations to her.  She wasn’t a very social pony…or she thought she wasn’t, anyway.  It wasn’t like anybody in the Stable had wanted much of anything to do with her…

…and maybe that was the problem.  Never having much of any kind of companionship beyond a daughter she’d had too soon and one real friend.  She’d had everything she could want in the Stable…except another soul to share her life and time with.  Here in the wastes, she faced violent death on a weekly basis, in a world dangerous enough that she seriously entertained the idea of letting children walk about with loaded guns close to hoof and horn…and she found herself feeling more complete when this scarred, abused mare in front of her was near her.

How much of her life had she missed out on…

In a fit of emotionally-driven madness, she jumped off the bed, absently flinging the door lock on with a simple thought into her horn, and made sure that Kite could hear it—

—Kite’s left ear flicked towards the sound of the clicking lock, and she turned her head back towards her—

“That’s what door locks are for,” she said with a low voice, stealing herself into Kite’s personal space with a soft nuzzle, relishing the brief joy that filled her when their snouts met.

She felt Kite’s snout bump her back a little, a soft mewing noise escaping from her lips.  “…you really have been thrown for a loop this past month, to be acting like this. First Trotpeka, then that business with Rally and those Python mercs…if I didn’t know you used to live in an underground Stable that shunned you out of its social network I’d be less worried. This is starting to look like an existential crisis to me.  Your only real social interaction for the last ten-plus years was your daughter and a single pegasus friend you rarely speak of to me.  What you want right now could easily lead into something much more…intimate, if we aren’t careful.  You know what it’s like to lose yourself in your passions, it’s how you got Light Tail after all.  You have no idea how relationships with other souls really work, and I don’t want to hurt you.”

“You won’t, as long as you keep that in mind.”

“…we’ll see what happens later, when we don’t have work to do,” Kite relented, slightly, before turning back to her saddlebags and pistols on the table.  “Did that talk with the Runners’ chief go about as poorly as we expected?”

“Pretty much,” Sling mumbled.  Between Kite putting her off and the reminder she’d just gotten about her very unpleasant visit with that damn griffon, any lustful longings she’d been harboring was rapidly draining away from her.  “He outright ordered me to go along with some of his Runners to pick a fight with the Pythons, on their home territory no less.”

“The fact that you were able to come back here afterward tells me you didn’t kill him for it, so there’s that, at least,” Kite hummed. “Didn’t even listen to what Rico had to say about Withercha’s problems either, did he?”

“If he heard her, he didn’t show it,” Sling bemoaned. “He doesn’t seem all that concerned about it either way, which leaves us with another problem on top of what we’re already saddled with.  We can’t go back east, but things are no better here either and it’s not going to get better without some serious help.”

Kite stopped rummaging through her bags, a disheartened grimace settling into her face.  “…so, slavers are looking for you, if you believe what Rally told you—”

“I do,” she snapped, perhaps a little too harshly, but she couldn’t help it.  It was the second time she’d heard that line and it was starting to get under her coat. “When she explained how she’d come across the Pythons at Puck’s bar in Rough Port, she also said that they’d been told by a contact they had in the slavers that I’d wiped out a slaver kill squad and that the Union was looking for me because of it.  That fight was well away from the populated section of Trotpeka, and the only ones who know about it besides us would be the Union and the slavers.”

“…okay, then, the slavers are looking for you, and apparently are paying the Pythons to help them since they can’t cross the valley without risking the Runners going to war with them.  Why?”

She had her suspicions on that, actually.  And she was afraid that when she went to see how valid those suspicions might be, she would have a great many reasons to regret it. “Light Tail’s picked up a latent talent for sleuthing that scares the shit out of me sometimes.  Let’s go see if she can still do it.”

“How did I know you were going to say that,” Kite sighed in defeat, the glow of magic returning to her horn as she began to pull at the contents of her saddlebags again.  “Fine, but first let’s see how this little present of mine fits you.”

“You keep giving me gifts and we may not leave this room again today.”

“Tempt me not, lest I give in to these exceptionally powerful urges to pin to you that bed and let myself go haywire with you,” Kite mused with a small laugh.  “Rico had your armor ready when I went to pick up those four hundred rounds of your precious bullets.  Comes with a bodysuit and some lingerie to wear underneath it.”

The last fleeting, pleasant thoughts she had left about the next few minutes abruptly vanished from her mind, and a creeping terror began to leech into her chest.  “…la…la…did you just say…lingerie?”

“Mostly to keep the bodysuit from chaffing you between the haunches.  Let’s just give this stuff a quick fit test, see if Rico’s measurements were off—”

She’d barely spun around and made it two steps away from Kite before she felt Kite’s magic wrap around her hind legs and pull them back towards her.  She hit the floor with a hard thump that briefly knocked the air out of her lungs, leaving her with nothing to scream her protests with as she was dragged into Kite’s carefully-laid trap—

“Oh wow, not even a minute ago you were all hot and bothered with me and now you can’t run away fast enough when I bring out the undergarments,” Kite cackled evilly.  “You are the most perplexing mare I’ve ever had my heart set on, now get over here—”










--------------------------------------



 








A week after Mom pulled out of her coma, she finally had a chance to sort it all out.  Or most of it, anyway.  There were some things that still didn’t seem clear, but it was looking like it was going to rain soon and she didn’t want to be out in it, so she didn’t have much else to do but put it all together and try to unscramble her brain for a second time. The first time, like, two weeks ago? Or three?  Luna’s moon, she couldn’t keep track.  She remembered that she lost almost all ability to reason and think, watching Mom get buried under that diner and then trying in vain to move any big pieces of rubble.  She didn’t get more than a couple of minutes into it when she found herself pulled away by Ada’s big claws and dropped at Kite’s side, and…

…well, that was it, basically.  The only things she could remember about that day after that was a lot of tears and crying, and the oddly comforting warmth of a mare that wasn’t Mom when she finally fell asleep that night.  Or maybe it was the combo of wool and fleece blankets.  Maybe even both.  She did know she hadn’t slept that deeply since Trotpeka, and the wagon didn’t even have anything like a mattress to sleep on.

Might be worth asking about later.

For now, she just focused on her little brain project. The Runners’ had taken up an old military base as a “home” decades ago, and she was surprised by how much of it had managed to stay intact, and how much of the place could be compared to a small city.  It wasn’t anywhere as big as Fort Wiley, but at one point it had a royal post office, a track field, some restaurants, and even a neighborhood with houses like in a city. Of course it also had several big buildings that Ada called barracks, and that soldiers who lived on the base basically had a dorm room for a living space.  It wasn’t much, really, but compared to some of the places she’d seen folk living in out in the wastes, it was a lot better than most.  It used to have a med clinic, but it collapsed a couple of decades ago and the Runners were still trying to organize an actual building or something.  Anybody that got hurt, once they were treated, were moved into the barracks to recover.  For the first few days of her stay, she’d been sleeping on a cot in a tent outside with Rally, BJ, and Julie, like most of the Runners did.  Max and Mona never did seem to mind sleeping on the floor no matter where they were.

And then four days ago, those mysterious “benefactors” of the Runners had brought in a few caravans stuffed full of beds, pillows, blankets and comforters and whatnot, and spent a whole day moving it all into one of the barracks buildings, and after that the Runners were having a field day moving themselves into an actual sheltered living space with a soft bed. She and Rally wound up sharing a room, but it had two beds and it was nice to not be alone in a building full of strangers even if she didn’t think any of them of would hurt her.  She let one of the pups stay with BJ in his new (temporary) room, and Max and Mona seemed to switch places there every night, like they were taking turns keeping watch on everybody or something.  Julie was staying somewhere in the same building, but didn’t say where.  She did mention she had not slept in anything as soft and comfortable as these new beds in her whole life, and that it was making her seriously question whether she wanted to leave or not.

And one of the benefits of having a walled room was having a wall that she could hang stuff on, like a big chalkboard she could write on to her heart’s content as she worked to sort out all of the information she’d learned in the last…three weeks?  What a month she’d had…

The first and most important thing on her mind, was home. The Stable.  The one-one-five, the one Stable left in Union territory that hadn’t been emptied out, ruined, or claimed by anyone.  She knew Mom believed it was gone, but she didn’t—couldn’t—believe that herself, and even if Mom was right, a dead stable was still a pretty valuable find if enough of it was intact. She hoped that everybody in there was okay…and that they could find a decent place for everybody to move to, if it came to it.

The number “115” got the honor of being written into the middle of the chalkboard.  She wrote the word “HOME” underneath it, just to remind herself what it was to her.  It was the center of her universe, and she missed it.

So….what next….

…well, if she was going to be thinking of safer places for her stable to move to, it wouldn’t hurt to list them out.  The Union was the first thing on her mind, but only because it was no secret the Union wanted it.  According to Kite and BJ and Ada and just about everybody, they even had a couple of working stables in their territory, feeding them technology and medicines and all that neat stuff.  But they’d also heard rumors floating about through the trade caravans that the Union was looking at Stable 115 a lot harder lately.  That, Ada had said, was a sign that perhaps one of the Union’s stables wasn’t going to last much longer, and they couldn’t afford to lose the technology advantage.  There was still a lot of work to be done to make Union territory truly safe, but at least the potential was there.

She drew a line up to the top, and wrote the word “MERCHANT UNION” and circled it.  It felt like the Union…needed to be at the top. They were the most powerful and influential group in the whole prairie, after all, and she even wrote “CLOSEST THING TO GOVERNMENT IN PRAIRIE”.  She drew another line leading out between the seven and eight o’clock positions of the Union’s bubble, and wrote in “GOT 2 STABLES, ONE DYING?”.  Couldn’t ignore that, despite the fact that nobody could say for sure that it was true.

…of course, the Union let slavers run around.  They supposedly had rules they had to work under, but after what happened at Trotpeka she was under no illusions as to how well that was working.  A second line from the Union bubble, at the four o’clock position, was squeaked out of her chalk piece, and the words “LETS SLAVERS THRIVE.  JERKS” was written out.

…and now that she’d thought about it, the slavers were almost as much their own thing as everybody else…

So to the right of her chalkboard, she wrote out “SLAVERS” and circled it, though she had to keep from spitting at it in the process. She was starting to understand why Kite wanted to do nasty things to a slaver, like peeing on them after beating them up.  They did nothing but hurt people, sold them and traded them around like cattle and chairs, like other people meant nothing to them.  And under the Union, they prospered enough to be split into five guilds, and were almost like a little faction themselves.  To hear Ada tell it, the slave guilds helped keep trade routes open in the Union’s territory during the war a few years ago, and the Union’s leadership, something everybody called the Board, remembered it well enough that they weren’t in any hurry to lessen the Union’s dependence on them.

She could almost believe she could watch them get killed and not feel anything about it…

Another line, at the ten o’clock position of the “SLAVERS” circle, was scratched out, leading up to the Union’s bubble, and in-between the line she wrote out “UNION DEPENDANT ON SLAVERS”, and “SLAVERS HELPED UNION IN WAR”.  A relationship like that wasn’t something to dismiss, and it seemed vital to what she was doing.

And then there was the Runners.  They got a bubble, on the left side of the chalkboard, and underneath the bubble she wrote out “FOUGHT UNION AND SLAVERS IN WAR, NOT BEST OF FRIENDS” underneath them, and then “SNUCK SLAVES OUT OF UNION”.  That was worth mentioning, even if they did it mostly to try and hurt the Union by taking away their “free” workforce.  That underground movement they helped set up, the slavers went and utterly destroyed it after the war in the most brutal ways they could come up with…well, most of it.  It apparently ran like a railroad or something, started in Stifla and had “stops” along the way.  The main one ran through Syrup Mound and right on to Trotpeka, but there were smaller side routes for the smaller towns and settlements to the north and south of Mound too.  Only the Runners knew the entire network.  Kite had said something about her second master knowing it too, but there was no telling where he was in the seven years since the war ended.  They didn’t get the whole route, but they destroyed enough of it to make the survivors really not anxious to make themselves noticeable.

So!  All the big pieces of a game board were up there!  Home, the Union, the slavers, the Runners….

…now the hard stuff.  Little details.

Little details, like…what?

…oh crap, this was starting to be a little more hard work than she’d thought it’d be.

…ooo-kaaay, ummm….well, I know the slavers tried to kill us, after Mom went and bought Kite and BJ’s freedom…

…pretty big thing, really.  The way Kite was telling it, it was almost like committing suicide to get caught doing something like that.  So under the slaver bubble, she drew out another line almost straight out to the left and wrote, “TRIED TO KILL US AFTER GETTING KITE AND BLUE FREE THE ‘LEGAL’ WAY”—

Wait, no, Kite also said the slave guilds listed all those guys that came after as us “former employees”, as if a slaver could make an honest living buying and selling people like furniture…but everybody knows at least one guild knew what was going on.  And it was the guys running that caravan that Mom dealt with, too, so the whole ambush could wound up looking like some petty revenge thing at a glance…

So, she amended that little remark with the closest thing she could draw to an ateisk or whatever that spiky little star thingy icon was called and put down, “GUILDS DENY IT, UNION KINDA BUYS IT”. Kinda.  That Major Colada didn’t believe ‘em, but it wasn’t like she was the one in charge.

Still, the slavers came after them.  At first she’d thought that those guys had come after them to try and get revenge on Mom (since they couldn’t go after the Major), because it made no sense for a guild who’d just been paid twenty thousand caps for two slaves’ freedom to turn around and try to kill the pony who’d paid them.  But then she got to thinking about it all…about how Mom had said that the Union had closed the bridge at the slavers’ request to keep some escapees from being able to flee, and then she began to wonder…why just the bridge?  If the guilds were really trying to keep slaves from getting away from them, they’d make the Union shut the whole town up, not just one bridge.  Nobody would leave…or get in, for that matter.  And they’d gotten into town, only to be stopped at the bridge they’d been trying to get to for weeks?

It was a trap.  She’d seen it as one when Mom said the bridge was closed, but now she wished she’d thought of all this back then, and maybe then they could have called that guard’s bluff and pushed on ahead and Kite and BJ wouldn’t have fallen into that canal and…and everything that came after wouldn’t have happened.  She didn’t really have any proof of it, but she was almost certain those guards had been working with the slavers to re-direct them, to make Mom choose another way to cross, one that they’d already scouted out.  And that’s what had her looking at it so hard.  What did they want that was so important that they’d risk the Union’s wrath and try to disguise what they were after?  It wasn’t for more money, if used soda bottle caps could even be called that in a sane world.

…and they didn’t stop at Trotpeka, either…

To the upper right of the “115” bubble, she scribbled out the word “PYTHONS”, with a line drawn from that bubble to the slavers, and then added, “TRIED TO KILL US OR CATCH US TO SELL,” and “HAS A CONTACT WITH THE SLAVERS”…

…right, what’s the name that keeps coming up when it comes to that one slave guild? What was it Rally told Mom when those snake ponies came at us the first time—

“Oh, wow, you’re making charts and everything,” Rally’s voice broke into her thoughts right then, and her body reacted properly and jumped about three feet into the air, her little legs flailing and running in place before she landed with a yelp.  She even lost her hold on her chalk piece.

Rally’s mocking laughter didn’t help any either, so she let her ears stay flat when she spun around to snarl at her.  “Hey!  I was tryin’ to think just now!”

“Yeah? About what?” Rally continued to laugh as she trotted past her and went straight for her side of the room, leaping up into the soft bed and practically melting into its blankets with a contented sigh.  She never left the thing once she came back from whatever she did in the day.

“Uhhhh…well, right now I’m thinking about how much like Mom you are, ‘cause you’re impossible to get out of a real bed unless you’re bribed with food—”

“I’m nothing like her!”

Inside, she smiled a great big smile, though outwardly she still scowled and glared.  “Really? You’re a freak MEW nut, and Mom’s into regular guns, and you both love sleeping in late—”

  “….mostly not like her,” Rally amended with a grumbling voice.  “…and what’s with the chalkboard project?”

Come into my web, naïve prey! El-Tee cackled silently.  “Tryin’ to make sense of everything goin’ on with my life the last few weeks.  Slavers trying to kill us, mercs trying to kill us or catch us, and for what?  I don’t like not knowing.”

“Get used to it.”

“I’d rather get answers,” Light Tail said, finally letting a little bit of a smile work its way into her mouth.  “Like what you told Mom about what you overheard those snake ponies talking about, the first time they came at us.  Something about a contact they had with a slave guild…which one was it again?”

Rally almost blew her off until she took her head off the pillow just long enough to glance at the chalkboard from where she was at, and then she started cussing at herself.  “…oooh, dammit I walked right into it—”

So did we… “Welcome to the club, comes with membership cards and everything.  Now quit cussin’ and tell me!  Which guild was it?”

Rally’s body climbed under the blankets and curled up into a small ball, finally sticking her head out and laying it atop the pillow. “….they said they’d heard about you and your mom through a contact they had in Life Tap’s slave guild…”

Life Tap…Life Tap….she’d heard that name before….wh—

--an orange-coated earth pony stallion was wrestling Kite to the ground in the alley, pulling at her mane until he spied the strange mark on her neck—

  “—she’s marked!  Life Tap’s guild—”

She blinked the memory away, returning her focus to her chalkboard as she plucked another chalk piece off of it (she didn’t know where the first one had flown off to) and started writing again, putting the name “LIFE TAP” out just to the left of the slaver bubble…

Life Tap…his guild owned the caravan that tried to take Kite and Beige out of Colada’s garrison, before Mom bought them free of it…

She couldn’t explain how or why, but she felt like a critical piece of the puzzle had just been slapped down in front of her.  This Life Tap jerk, whoever he was—a pony, a griffon, a zebra, or something else—his name kept coming up a lot.  He must have a lot of power in the slave guilds…or he was just a really mean pony.  He was a slaver.

So…she had another puzzle piece.  Next question…why would Life Tap’s guild want to tell the Pythons about her and Mom?  Or had the Pythons only known about them because of that person of contact, and Life Tap and his guild actually had nothing to do with the snake ponies trying to catch or kill them?

…nah.  This Life Tap was willing to risk being executed by the Union to try and kill Mom, and threw away the lives of his own guys to do it and simultaneously managing to make it look like they did it of their own free will just to satisfy their own pride.  There was no way he didn’t know.  But he also wasn’t going to be stupid enough to send any more of his guys out like that again.  He only had that one chance because of how things had gone down in Colada’s town, and even that was a risky chance, especially if the Union ever found out one of their units helped them do it.  If he was serious about killing Mom, for whatever reason, he would have to do it through somebody else on this side of the prairie—

—a hard, metal clang rattled from the floor, causing her to glance over at the source and find Rally’s metal leg rocking to a stop from being dropped off the edge of the bed.  “…really?”

“It can take it,” Rally mumbled from her comfortable nest, even as her obscured form was fidgeting about beneath the comforters. Probably putting on that sling that covered up her right leg whenever she took the cyberlimb off of it.  “There were times in my life when I didn’t even have shelter to sleep under or a blanket to ward off the cold.  This is high living for me and I want every moment I can get in this warm, comfortable bed.”

…oh, yeah…the whole ‘no family’ thing.  “…I guess I’d be lazy too if I’d never had a soft bed before.”

“This is the good kind of lazy after a day’s work,” Rally hummed contentedly.  “Just lay back, soak in the warmth and the soft…everything.  And it’s supposed to be kinda chill tonight, so why not bundle up now?”

Her chalk piece scribbled out “PYTHONS HUNTING US FOR SLAVERS?” after drawing another line between the PYTHON and SLAVER bubbles. “Work?  What I hear is, you spend all day giggling and laughing while you play around with broken tech.”

“And when I’m done that tech is ticking along like it’s brand new,” the teen’s voice half-giggled, though by the sound of it she was already well on her way to falling asleep.  Or maybe she was just getting really relaxed in that bed and not wanting to do anything to disturb whatever mental state she was slipping into. “And I get so many strange ideas while I’m working too.  Someday I’m gonna build a gun that works off a spark battery cell and fires bullets by magnetic propulsion and make it small enough to be used by hoof or magic—”

This part of Rally’s rambling she just tuned out. Cool as it might have sounded, it was still way beyond her and not really helping with her little brain project right now—

—she gave up all hope of having quiet thoughts when the dorm room door opened, and a familiar, warming presence began intruding into her personal space in ways only a parent could.  “Oh gods, what are you up to now?” Mom’s voice groaned in despair.

“You say that like it’s a bad—” she started to say, feeling her body turning around to leap into a crushing leg or body hug (it depended on how high she could jump), and then stopped speaking entirely when she saw Mom standing a couple of feet away and….

…and dressed?  It looked kind of like a Stable suit, but…it was a darker shade of blue, with these black ribbed sections running down the sides and leg sleeves, and seemed pretty thick around her barrel like there was some sort of special material or inner lining inside the suit itself.  It was jarring enough to even see Mom wearing anything that it briefly threw her off. “….thiiiiiinnnng Mom what is that and why are you wearing it?”

She could hear Rally’s bed creaking very slightly, like she was intrigued just enough to lift her head up from her pillow.  “Hunh?”

Mom’s head hung low as she huffed a depressed sigh. “It’s…it’s uhh…armor, of a sort…”

“Armor?  You mean you’re buying something besides bullets for once?”

“…nnnoooo?” Mom answered hesitantly.  “Um…Kite…Kite’s buying it.  For me.  For…for some reason.”

“That reason being, ‘I don’t want my only friend in the wastes to get her stupid ass killed in another one of her stupid stunts’,” Rally giggled—

“Quit cussin’,” El-Tee snapped back.  “Umm…that doesn’t look like it protects a whole lot…”

“It’s based on a Stable suit, but modified with ballistic fiber lining in-between the cloth layers, and body cooling enchantments to offset body heat buildup,” Kite’s voice added, her scarred grape body slinking into the room and taking up space right next to Mom.  Like, right next to her.  Weird. “The sides, chest, back, and legs can also be fitted with either ballistic fiber panels to improve protection from bullets, or mana reflective panels to partially absorb the energy discharge from a MEW.  And this is only part of the armor.  She has a bodysuit that goes on under the stable suit that’s designed mainly for MEW protection, and she can strap on some cured leather barding armor pieces over the stable suit if she wants.  It’s not the most advanced piece of protection out there, but it will give her the option to employ the armor in layers according to how much protection she thinks she may need, and what she expects to face in terms of incoming fire.”

“That bodysuit will be chaffing me in places I’m really uncomfortable with!” Mom whined.

“That’s what the…wait, should we even tell the kids right now?”

“No!” Mom shouted with a panicked start, shirking back from Kite’s side.  “No, j-just, uhhhh…uh Light Tail what are you doing on this chalkboard you little brainiac heh heh?!”

It’s something really embarrassing to her for Mom to switch the subject with a yell, El-Tee grinned inside, looking back at her growing organizational chart. “Ehhh, just puttin’ stuff up where I can see it.  Y’know, who’s who and what’s what, what’s happened, how they’re connected…people keep trying to kill you and it’s got nothing to do with Kite or BJ.”

Most people would have been a little disturbed to be talking about any kind of attempts on their life, so the fact that Mom seemed to calm down in the presence of the subject was…really weird.  “Ah, that.  I have a fair idea what they might be after,” Mom answered, her eyes gazing over the chalkboard.  “But let’s see where your little project takes you.  You might find something I hadn’t thought of yet.”

“What’s this, here?” Kite asked, her right foreleg pointing at the “SLAVER” side of the chalkboard.  “This part about Life Tap and the Pythons?”

Ha! More prey for my web!  “Oh!  Well, Rally was just tellin’ me about how the Pythons knew who we were, when they came after her in that bar.  They had a friend or contact in this Life Tap’s guild who told them about us, and this was like…four days after Trotpeka?  C’mon, nobody’s really buying that lie that none of the slavers knew what those guys were doing at that bridge.  They were sent there to get us, and the only reason they even tried was ‘cause it was the same guys that that angry major messed with when Mom got you and BJ free. They could make it look like the whole thing was just a bunch of angry jerks trying to get some petty revenge on the only other pony they could get to, and it could work ‘cause that’s what we were thinking when we got to the main bridge and found it shut down…eeehhh, did any of that make any sense just now ‘cause it sounds kinda weird now that I’m saying it out loud and not in my head—”

Kite’s face went dark and serious, and she levitated a piece of chalk off of the bottom of the board and started writing down her own things in-between the “SLAVER” and “UNION” bubble—

“I had a chance to talk to Colada about that, before I left town,” Kite said, as the words “SANDY SHADES” was drawn out beneath the “UNION” bubble, near the part about the Board.  “Two days after we left her garrison, a member of the Board, this guy—” she accented her words with a tap of the chalk piece against the “SANDY SHADES” name— “arrived in town, interrupted her day off, and he was asking a lot of questions about how exactly Sling was able to buy me and Blue Jay free after being taken into detention for travelling with runaway slaves.  She said he was a lot more interested in Sling, your stable, and where she was than on what she did to some of the caravan’s guards, and that he was very unhappy when she told him that we’d left before he’d gotten there.  He had a detention warrant for Sling’s arrest—”

“Wait, wait, hold it, the Union wants me arrested?” Mom cut in, and she kinda had a right to be worried if the Union was after her.  “I know they want access to the one-one-five, and that Colada couldn’t hide my existence from her bosses forever, but to arrest me?”

“I couldn’t get much more out of her than that,” Kite said back.  “We weren’t there, so he had her send the detention warrant on up to Trotpeka, just in case you ever came back through there.  She was only able to delay it a day, mainly because of weather conditions. The platoon she sent to deliver the warrant sent back word of what happened at the bridge crossing and she hurried her ass over as soon as she could.  Her troopers went poking around while they were waiting for her, and found Shades was spending a lot of time in areas where Life Tap’s guild had a heavy presence.  She made it a point to  mention this old bridge on the southern edge of the trade district, which is supposed to have troopers guarding it, and Shades was seen in the vicinity of that bridge with a couple of Life Tap’s minions.  I didn’t think anything of it then, but now that I’m looking at Elly’s project it starts to make sense—”

Oh crap, El-Tee managed not to say out loud, because if she’d lost control she might have wound up saying another word entirely. But the look on her face must have been really bad, because Kite stopped talking a couple of seconds later and almost freaked out when she looked down at her.  “….E-Elly?  What’s wrong?”

“She probably just figured out what’s going on with the slavers,” Mom answered for her, and the way she said it, it sounded like Mom already knew what that thing was.  “So what are you thinking, honey?”

…she…hasn’t called me that in a while…  “…it’s you.”

She heard Rally rolling about in her bed, and the creaking bed springs were quite loud, so it sounded like she was actually daring to remove herself from her bundled nest to get a better look at the chalkboard. “…we know it’s about her.  We’re asking ‘what for’.”

She tried to speak, and found her voice quiet silent for a moment, and she had to force herself to actually use it with conscious thought.  Deep down, she knew that once she explained what had just struck her brain, it would send everybody down a very dark and violent path that couldn’t be changed or set aside.  But if she was even half-right….

  ….the slavers can’t get what they’re after…not ever, it’s that bad…

“It’s no secret the Union wants our Stable,” Light Tail began, making herself sit down on her haunches.  “They’ve tried to get in before and it didn’t work out, and if a PipBuck was all they needed they got hundreds of ‘em from the two Stables they control.  But not just any PipBuck will do.  They need one specific to the Stable they want to get into.”

“What are you talking about?” Rally said from behind. “PipBucks can jack into a Stable’s blast door if they have to—”

“Normally, yeah,” she cut her off.  “But this ain’t normal.  The day Mom and I left home, we broke into this little building at the edge of the first town we came to, crap what was it—”

“A prospecting office,” Mom corrected gently.  “I remember, we found a terminal inside that revealed the “office” was just a cover for the local Stable-Tec branch overseeing the construction of the 115, in Equestria That Was.”

“Whoa, really?!” Rally shrieked happily, the bed creaking growing sharper as she finally rolled off of the bed to join in the “group” discussion proper.  “How much of the data was left?!”

“Most of it was degraded, but a few entries survived, which I downloaded onto my PipBuck before we left, so we can back up what Light Tail’s about to tell us.  The surviving entries detailed the bidding process for construction firms lining up to do the actual stable-building, and the first one that got the job was discovered to be suspected of funneling aid to the zebras in the war.  Stable-Tec had to put half their projects in the prairie on hold for a while until they could be absolutely certain about the companies they were hiring to build their stables.”

“And even then, they’d probably put in extra security,” Light Tail added.  “Like making sure the zebras couldn’t use anything they might have learned to break into the prairie’s Stables if the war ended the way it eventually did.  The best way I can think of would be to make it so that a Stable could only be opened from the outside by a PipBuck from that particular Stable.  Something in the programming code, maybe.  It’d explain why the Union never got into our Stable all the decades that they’ve been around.  None of the PipBucks they have access to would have worked on our door.”

When Rally didn’t say anything right off, she risked a quick look, her body tensing up just in case she had to quickly escape her reach and not get her mane tussled up or something—

—Rally’s body was stone-cold still, a sense of shock seeping into her slightly-open mouth as her left foreleg rubbed at the stump of the right one, which was cupped in a sling to keep the cybernetic graft joint from tearing up soft things like blankets and pillows.  “…oh….oh, god, I think I see it….”

“…yeah, ya do,” El-Tee answered her unspoken fears. “The slavers want Mom’s PipBuck. This Shades guy…he’s either paying the slavers to get it, or promising them something if they get it for him, and the slavers know how badly the Union wants the 115.  They’re not gonna just give it away.”

She heard a sharp, muffled gasp from Kite’s spot, and she kinda felt sorry for upsetting her like that.  “…oh, god no, if they get the one known key to the 115, the slavers could get anything they wanted in exchange for it.  I mean anything.  A voting seat on the Board, free range access to the west for their caravans and hunting parties, they could practically re-build the trooper corps from the inside out over time…they’d practically own the prairie five years from now…”

Even Mom seemed a little upset, even though she’d probably figured it out at about the same time that she did.  “…how confident are you about this, honey?”

Light Tail felt a cold chill creep up and down her spine, and she finally realized what she might have just done.

She might have just started a war.