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Ministry Interoffice Mail :: Crusader Encryption Enabled
To: Rainbow Dash
From: Pinkie Pie
Subject: Bereavement
06/28/1075
Hey Dash,
I know this is sudden, but I wanted to let you know that I'll be gone for the rest of the week while I get myself into a better head space. I sent a bulletin to my department heads letting them know I'll be out of Canterlot to recharge the ol' party batteries, but... I'm not sure how to bring this up with the other girls. Please keep this between us, Rainbow. I'm having the nightmares again. I can't sleep. I can't work. I don't know what's wrong with me. I don't want the war effort to slow down because I can't go a day without crying. The only reason Sugarcube Corner got bombed is because I used to work there. I know it's not my fault but I can't stop thinking about the funeral and how everything could have been avoided if the Tree of Harmony hadn't picked me in the first place.
I hate this. I hate what we're doing, Rainbow. I don't like killing even if I'm not the one doing it. It shouldn't BE this way.
I'm sorry. A week off should help me get this out of my system. Maybe Dr. Meadowsweet will be able to give me something to take the edge off. I don't know. I'll send the girls something along the lines of a vacation notice. They'll see through it, but I don't think they'll care. It's not like I can quit, anyway.
Take care,
Pinkie
Three soft raps on her office door drew her weary eyes from the terminal. Only one pony in the entirety of Equestria knocked that quietly. Rainbow Dash rubbed the end of her muzzle into her wingtips and sighed. The war was taking a toll on everyone, but none more visibly than the Element of Laughter. She made a note to visit her in person this afternoon before she sank any deeper into her depression.
Another trio of knocks. Rainbow cleared her mind of the day’s worries and tapped a key on her terminal. The door buzzed, and she waited for Fluttershy to finish her customary hesitation before entering.
Rainbow looked to the trophy case that dominated the far wall and the layer of dust that had accumulated on the glass. Medals and plaques sat alongside framed photos taken years ago, glowing softly under the built-in lighting. She frowned, wishing she had time to get up and clean it off. She didn’t like ponies thinking she’d forgotten where she came from. Her eyes lingered on a photo of her with her friends, the six of them caught in a candid moment enjoying donuts and conversation at an outdoor diner in Ponyville. Life had never been easy after the Tree of Harmony chose them to bear the Elements, but it had been so much simpler than things were now.
The polished oak door swept open on whisper-silent hinges, admitting the pegasus she expected and two ponies she hadn’t.
“Good morning, Rainbow Dash.” Fluttershy smiled as she pushed a pink-and-gray strand of mane out of her eyes. They all had a little gray these days. “I’m sorry for not telling you in advance, but I’m giving the new Ambassador of Friendship a tour of the ministries and I thought you would appreciate a visit from an old friend.”
Rainbow’s smile tightened, masking her discomfort. Zecora followed Fluttershy into the office along with a lanky, younger mare who gawked at the trophies on the far wall. She vaguely remembered one of the girls telling her that Zecora was a mother now, but the detail had quickly faded.
The young zebra gasped when she saw Rainbow reclined behind her terminal. She was what, maybe thirteen or fourteen years old? Right at that age when a pony thought they had the world figured out. Rainbow knew that feeling all too well. It had taken her longer than most to grow out of it.
Fluttershy stared at her with a pointed expression. Say something, it said.
Rainbow cleared her throat. “Congratulations on the new position, Zecora. Would you like something to drink? Can I get you some coffee?”
Zecora looked around the office with her characteristic smile. “I do enjoy my coffee black, but a brewing pot you seem to lack.”
She closed her eyes and sighed. Twilight made her take the coffee pot out of her office last year after she caught her working through the night on nothing but caffeine and hay cakes, and the idea of sharing the day-old brew in her smuggled desk thermos was mortifying. She decided to change the subject.
“Still rhyming?” she asked.
Fluttershy’s eyes widened. “I think what she meant to say-”
Zecora laughed. The same deep, rich laugh Rainbow missed from all those years ago in the Everfree. “Do not worry, Fluttershy. It’s an old joke between her and I.” Her smile grew as she noticed the ornate golden necklace glinting under Rainbow’s flight jacket. The bolt-shaped ruby had heft to it, but not enough for Rainbow to notice anymore. “It’s reassuring to see one of you still wearing your Element.”
Rainbow glanced at Fluttershy, who turned to inspect the bookcase of adventure novels next to the door. She couldn’t remember the last time she saw the girls wear theirs.
Neither of them commented on the absence of rhyme. Times changed, and Zecora had the awareness to know when her traditional cadence was becoming a distraction.
“It’s good to see you too, Zecora,” she said. She slid her terminal aside and looked over her desk at the striped filly. “Is this your daughter?”
Zecora nodded, putting a hoof over the young mare’s shoulder. “Say hello, Teak.”
Teak’s sunset orange eyes dove to the floor. “Hi.”
“Hi back,” Rainbow chuckled good-naturedly. Teak was quieter than Fluttershy in a church. “What do you think about your mom’s new job?”
Teak rubbed one foreleg nervously across the other. “It’s pretty cool,” she admitted.
“A lot of ponies are counting on her,” Rainbow said, though the words weren’t meant for Teak. Her old friend stood a little taller behind her daughter, taking them to heart. “She might just have the coolest job in all the ministries. Even cooler than mine.”
The younger zebra shrugged. “Well, yeah. Mom’s going to actually accomplish something.”
Shock and embarrassment leapt into Zecora’s face. “Teak!”
“What? It’s true!”
Zecora gave Rainbow an apologetic grimace before turning her attention to her daughter. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. You need to apologize.”
Teak spun away from Zecora and jabbed a hoof toward Rainbow. “Mom, her ministry is called ‘Awesome.’ Nobody even knows what that’s supposed to mean!”
Rainbow smiled politely at the smooth surface of her desk while Fluttershy tried to keep the two mares from devolving into a full-on family crisis. It wasn’t the first time she’d been accused of doing nothing with her position. It wouldn’t be the last time either as long as she did her job right. The work she did wouldn’t get done under the scrutiny of the Equestrian public. The girls had taken to calling her ministry The Bit Furnace. Experimental technology took money and rarely produced usable results. But it had to be done, and it was best done where prying eyes wouldn’t balk at the price tag.
She looked at the picture of the six of them frozen in mid-conversation. Rarity with her Ministry of Image. Rainbow always assumed she would go on to become a fashion icon and Rainbow wouldn’t have bet against it. Her creativity was endless. Now she sat behind a desk of her own, the singular hoof behind propaganda machine that some feared was the spark behind so much anti-zebra violence in Equestria.
Pinkie Pie wasn’t doing much to help that problem. With the bombing at Sugarcube Corner killing one of her oldest friends, she’d begun to turn inward. The Ministry of Morale had taken a darker turn in the wake of her grief. Rainbow wondered if Fluttershy would bother taking Zecora down to see her. She worried how Pinkie might react, especially now that she’d begun using mentats more frequently.
She’d find out, depending on which elevator they called. Fluttershy’s ministry filled the two floors perched above Rainbow’s office, her own being allocated a total of five separate levels. She needed the space, after all. But no, chances were they wouldn’t go any lower than where they stood now. Pinkie wasn’t a pony to bring a filly like Teak to meet. Not anymore.
Twilight’s Ministry of Arcane Sciences was off limits to nearly everyone excluding the other ministry mares. The only alicorn to reject the title of “princess,” Twilight had imported entire libraries worth of books to be filed and cataloged in the lowest floors of the ministry complex. Even if Fluttershy wanted to include her in the tour, the odds were that Twilight would be too busy researching some new spell to give them the time of day. For how raw her ear had been chewed for working overnight, Rainbow was pretty sure Twilight had smuggled a bed into one of her libraries to accomplish the exact same thing.
That left Applejack.
Rainbow pretended to listen to Fluttershy recite an old moral to Teak about the importance of being considerate, but her mind was elsewhere. Up until the advent of the ministries, she had played with the idea of seeing whether Applejack thought more of her than just a friend. There had been a spark there, once. One that she regretted not pursuing while she had the time. Then AJ was given the Ministry of Technology and the clock ran out. Like the rest of them, the former orchard owner was buried under her work. Equestria’s soldiers needed every advantage they could get, and much of the progress being made on the front line was due to Applejack’s high expectations within her ministry.
“You know, Zecora,” Rainbow said, cutting into Fluttershy’s lesson, “one of these days, Equestria is going to need the Elements again. Don’t be surprised if Teak winds up with the Element of Honesty when the next bad guy shows up.”
Teak’s eyes widened at the recommendation. Rainbow didn’t have the heart to tell her it didn’t mean a heap of apples what she thought. The Elements chose who they chose. Even she didn’t know how it worked.
“Why can’t you use the Elements to end the war?” Teak asked. It was a question that Rainbow heard at least once a week, and she could always tell when it had been eating away at the pony asking it. “You defeated Nightmare Moon and Discord, and they were both trying to take over Equestria!”
“Dearheart, we’ve talked about this before,” Zecora said, saving the two pegasi from he daughter.
“You said-”
“I said that Vhanna is not a villain,” Zecora interrupted, a little more firmly than Rainbow thought was necessary. There were unspoken words on the zebra’s face. Her eyes fell on the new ambassador with renewed scrutiny.
Fluttershy shuffled her wings, drawing Rainbow’s attention.
“We really should get going.” Fluttershy extended her wing toward the door, inviting Zecora and Teak to step outside. “Twilight’s usually in the cafeteria near the labs around this time and I was hoping to make introductions. You know how she is.”
Rainbow watched Zecora lead Teak outside, offering a smile and nod as they disappeared into the hallway.
“That’s the problem,” she said, her eyes turning to Fluttershy. “None of us knows how she is.”
She could tell the words stung her friend, but the truth was the truth. More often than not, Twilight was too involved in her work to give Rainbow the time of day. After a while she had stopped going down altogether.
Fluttershy had the grace to smile at the floor and shrug as if she hadn’t caught the entire meaning. She turned toward the hallway with the door held in her wing. “All the more reason for you to make the time. She misses you, Rainbow. She just needs to be reminded sometimes.”
Rainbow looked away, rubbing her lip with her hoof as she tried to think of an answer to that. It turned out she didn’t have to. Her door clicked shut and Fluttershy was gone, leaving her alone once again.
She blew out a long sigh and reclined in her chair. Her eyes drifted aimlessly to the air conditioning vent in the middle of the ceiling and she instinctively pulled the sides of her jacket together. It was always too cold down here. She looked down at her Element, the immensely powerful gemstone warm against her chest. It glinted at her as she tilted the bottom up with her hoof.
If Teak only knew what they were doing down here, she would understand why they couldn’t use the Elements to end the war. Why the rest of the girls put them away behind display cases and inside safes. The problem wasn’t that they hadn’t tried. They had, and it hadn’t worked. The six of them had watched helplessly as zebras and ponies slaughtered one another from the trenches in Vhanna. Try as they might, the Elements didn’t answer their call. The Tree of Harmony, the mysterious intelligence behind the gifts that defended Equestria, wasn’t on their side. Not for this fight.
Rainbow let the ruby fall back to her chest with a soft thump. None of them had expected it. They had collectively asked a question and gotten an answer that they weren’t ready to hear. That what they were doing might not be good. That they might not be any better than the zebras they were researching new ways to kill.
Her chair creaked as she sat up and she dragged the blocky terminal in front of her. She stared at the blinking green cursor for several minutes, thinking hard about what she was going to write. Whether it was another waste of time. Zecora’s words, even though she’d been covering for her daughter, burrowed into her head like a tick. “Vhanna is not a villain.” It was so much easier to see them as the Ministry of Image made them out to be. Invaders. Murderers. Savages. They all knew better than that, but it was easier to sell a stereotype than admit they might be destroying families.
She opened a new message.
Outgoing Mail :: Crusader Encryption Enabled
To: Jet Stream
From: Rainbow Dash
Subject: SOLUS
06/28/1075
Dear Jet Stream,
I wanted to inquire whether your company has found funding for the SOLUS contract we discussed this past spring. If not, I’d like to make time to review your proposed budget. I realize you and the princesses haven’t been on great terms, but maybe we can work out a way to get the numbers down to a point where they can’t refuse to sign off on it. I want to end this war, and you’re the only one with a plan to do it peacefully. Please work with me on this.
Let me know if tomorrow works. I’m free for dinner.
“DAMN IT!”
Aurora shot through a pocket of cool air that shoved her dangerously close toward the terrain below. She threw her wings down hard enough to hurt, bending fragile bones and aching muscles against a gale of her own making. She didn’t care. Jagged rocks and desiccated soil streaked beneath her hooves fast enough to shatter them at the barest contact, but she kept pouring on speed. The tears barely had time to form before the wind lifted them away.
She should have killed Autumn. The chance had been right there in front of her and she’d blown it. Uncut rage pushed her back into the sky like a missile. She had to fix this, but there was no time to get help from the Bluff. No time to convince the Steel Rangers to follow her back.
She leveled out, breathing hard, and searched the terrain. She found it near the horizon. A dark smudge on the edge of an unnaturally straight line in the dust. The Red Delicious restaurant. Her feathers pulled taut as she made a bee-line for it.
This was her fault. If she had said something sooner, told somebody back in Junction City the truth instead of letting Ginger bear the weight of a bounty meant for her, Ginger wouldn’t be strapped to a chair enduring Autumn’s twisted version of punishment.
She grit her teeth and angrily choked down a sob. Her vision smeared. You just keep making things worse. She pushed aside the dark thought and focused on what was ahead of her. Autumn wasn’t the only mare in Equestria who wanted revenge, and she wasn’t above burning the bitch’s house down around her to get it.
The Red Delicious was the same as when she’d left it. She circled low around the parking lot, wary of the deathclaw that lurked beneath the collapsed roof as she scanned the ground. She spotted what she was looking for at the edge of the road, its silver grille still crumpled from where she’d planted her hooves.
Out of breath and fresh out of options, Aurora landed a few feet away from the Enclave spritebot. She prayed to Celestia that it still worked.
She hefted the buckball-sized surveillance bot under her wing and set it down on the hood of the one carriage still waiting for its order beneath the drive-in awning. Facing the mangled grille toward her, she took a steadying breath and said, “Hello? Is anyone there?”
The bot stared back at her in silence.
Aurora thumped the top of it with her hoof, desperately wishing she still had her tools. She turned the spritebot around and verified that while a couple of its antennae were bent, none of them were broken. She bit her lip and straightened the kinks from the two just in case. “I need help,” she pleaded. “Please, is anyone listening?”
She waited.
Silence.
The cavalry wasn’t coming.
She crinkled her nose and furiously swatted the dead machine away. It crunched against the ground and tumbled into the rusted post of the menu board like a broken toy.
Aurora walked back to the edge of the road and sat down. The smoldering rage in her gut cooled to a dull ache. Of course this had been a bad idea. She was clearly filled with them. She wrapped her wings around her legs for comfort, trying to think of something else. Anything.
There had been that town a half hour’s flight north that she passed on the way down from the Bluff. If it was abandoned, maybe she’d be able to find something to improvise as a weapon. If it turned out it was occupied, maybe she could find someone there willing to help.
“-ENTIFY YOURSELF.”
She flung herself onto her hooves with a surprised yelp and spun around. The spritebot was hovering next to the menu board, facing a faded picture of a double-decker hayburger. Her heart leapt into her throat and she hurried over to it. “Hello?”
The bot sloshed around to face her, and almost got close. The drop from the carriage must have jarred something back in place enough that it cold boot back up, but it pivoted like a blind pony in a busy Atrium. “IDENTIFY YOURSELF,” it droned.
She hurried over to it and grabbed its chassis. “My name is Aurora Pinfeathers! I’m not with the Enclave but I need your help! Please, let me talk to the pony from before!”
Something she said triggered a reaction from the little bot. It ticked and chattered, processing the data flowing into its antennae. Aurora thought better of clutching it by its damaged shell and let go, watching it wobble under its own meager propulsion.
“VERIFIED. AURORA PINFEATHERS. SHELTER PROJECT. STABLE TEN.”
Her jaw dropped. “How did…”
“OVERMARE SPITFIRE REQUESTS YOUR IMMEDIATE-”
Pop.
A stallion’s voice crackled through the bot’s chassis. Aurora blew a sigh of relief that it wasn’t the mare from her first encounter. “-must have repaired it somehow,” he said distantly, then more clearly, “You there. Name and serial number.”
This again. “I-I don’t have one,” she said. “I’m not with the Enclave, but please, I need your help.”
The clatter of a keyboard filled the spritebot’s speaker. “Aurora Pinfeathers. Female. Age thirty-three…” he listed each off with an Appleloosan drawl that carried as much emotion as if he were reading the news. “Stable Ten. Huh. Ma’am, what’re you doing all the way out here? And why did Parry log you as a dustwing?”
“I…” she hesitated, her train of thought flung well clear of its tracks. “Wait, how do you know who I am?”
“Ma’am, do you not remember giving the bot your name?” His voice took on an edge of genuine concern. The bot skidded around her on manual control. “It’s got a busted lens but I have you on infrared. Do you know where you are right now?”
She eyed the bot as it bobbed gently from side to side. They knew who she was. Worse, they knew where she came from and thought she was senile. Who were these ponies?
“I need help,” she repeated. She took a deep breath and steadied herself. “My friend is being held at the JetStream Solar Array. Autumn Song is going to kill her. I tried to stop her I can’t fight that many ponies alone. Please, you have to send someone.”
A pause. “Ma’am, that area is under protection.”
“Whose?”
“Ours,” the stallion said flatly.
Aurora shook her head at the sky in frustration. It was like the world was conspiring against her, trying to push her to the breaking point. It didn’t know she was already there.
Then she remembered something. “Are you aware she’s forcing a caged pegasus to find coordinates to something called Solace?”
The spritebot hovered silently for what felt like minutes. Aurora tried her best not to look nervous as a hoof muffled a far away microphone and the hums of multiple voices drifted from its speaker. She couldn’t understand what they were saying but the hurried tones read like an open book. She’d his a nerve.
The stallion’s slow drawl took on a serious edge. “Ma’am, could you repeat that last part for me?”
Jackpot. Fuck you, Autumn. “Autumn Song is looking for Solace. A green pegasus mare named Julip is caged under the main building with some servers and a terminal. I watched Autumn break her wing in half today. Best I can tell, she’s one of yours.”
The stallion muttered a curse to no one in particular before returning to the mic. “Has she found it?”
Aurora shook her head. “Not yet, but Autumn is pushing her hard for it. My friend Ginger is there, and she’s going through worse.” A pause. “We can help each other.”
“Ah…” he said, “it’s a little more complicated than that.”
She frowned. “Is that a no?”
“It’s not a yes.”
She grabbed the spritebot in her wing and glared at the cluster of spider-like electronic eyes behind its grille. “Then tell me what I can do to change your mind.”
The black eyes clicked and whirred as they drew her into focus. “You could start by letting go of my bot.”
She flicked the spritebot away with a noise of disgust. It spun like a drunken top before righting itself, eventually puttering back to her side. She stared past it in the direction she came. Toward the solar plant. Toward Ginger. “So you’re going to do nothing.”
Another pause. “You need to go back to your Stable, ma’am. You’re a pureblood. You don’t belong in the wastes.”
The laugh that rolled out of her was both bitter and exhausted. Her shadow, little more than a long smudge on the dusty ground, laughed with her. She sat down and shook her head. It was getting late and she was exhausted.
The Enclave wasn’t going to help. She took a moment to watch the bright scar of sunlight cut lower toward the cloud-choked horizon. The spritebot hovered nearby, occasionally turning to presumably monitor the surrounding area. She was a little surprised that its operator hadn’t disconnected yet. It wasn’t as if he had any reason to stick around.
Beneath the collapsed restaurant, the creature that had nearly killed her two hours earlier shifted within the debris. She watched over her shoulder and watched the lump of rotted roof raise and settle again, throwing a low plume of dust into the breeze. It had begun making a new den to replace the one she caused it to destroy. She looked up at the spritebot and notice it was facing the same direction.
“That’s a deathclaw, ma’am. You should find somewhere else to rest.”
“Uh huh,” she answered, her brow knitting together as a new plan formed in her mind. It was arguably the worst idea she’d had since… ever. But it was something. The more she rolled it around in her head, the more convinced she became that it might be workable. She got back onto her hooves with a grunt and started toward the section of restaurant that wouldn’t sit still.
“Ma’am, what are you doing?” the stallion said from behind her.
“If you’re not going to help, the least you could do is shut up and let me do what I need to do.”
The spritebot drew up beside her, the Enclave stallion’s voice becoming more urgent. “Ma’am there is corrupted wildlife under there!”
She flicked her tail at the bot and continued toward the deathclaw’s den. “I’m aware.”
Rounding the building, she spotted a dull green mass plugging an open section of wall that bore deep, fresh claw marks. The deathclaw had been busy hollowing out the rubble while she was away, creating a new makeshift warren to hoard its meals. In the waning sunlight, she could make out the deformed plates that studded the length of its spine. It would be some time before she forgot how determined it had been to kill her. How easily it had shredded through the restaurant’s kitchen like it had been tissue paper. She remembered the wet mass of carcasses it had slept in before she wandered into its home. The smell of rot and decay.
She dipped her wing into the edge of the rubble and scooped up a broken half of brick.
“Ma’am,” the stallion hissed, “put that down before you get yourself killed. You have a responsibility to survive!”
“Does that mean you’re going to help me rescue my friend?” She tossed the brick into the air and caught it in the curl of her feathers. It was plenty heavy enough.
A deep, thudding growl rolled out from the ruins of the restaurant. Aurora watched as the creature’s spine slid into the darkness of its den and a broad, jagged maw appeared to taste at the open air. Its nostrils flared at it scented familiar prey.
The stallion’s voice had reached the peak of frustration. “I am not authorized to disclose details of ongoing operations…”
She stopped listening at not authorized and arced her wing backward. Feathers blurred and the ruddy chunk of masonry whistled through the air. It cracked against the deathclaw’s snout with a meaty thud. The spritebot was silent.
Aurora took a tentative step back, her wings open, ready to fling her skyward.
The ruins went off like a bomb and a beast born out of a nightmare boiled toward her in a fit of rage.
Blue was hungry.
She listened for the wind from before but it was gone now. The wind woke her up sometimes. It brought something into the dark that tickled behind her eyes and smelled like copper even though she didn’t remember what copper was. It was quiet now. It had been quiet for a long time.
Her leg hurt so she moved it. He sometimes moved it for her when it hurt but now she had to do it. She didn’t know where he went, only that he was gone too. Everyone was gone.
Blue’s belly clenched because it was empty. She knew that from before, back when she remembered things. She rolled over on her sleeping bag and listened some more. She was good at listening. She hadn’t been so good before.
Something skittered. She lifted her head to see but it wasn’t here. It was outside. Behind the door that he had closed when he went away. He closed the door a lot, but that was okay. It was okay to be alone.
She closed her eyes.
She opened her eyes.
Her leg hurt so she moved it. She screwed up her face and looked at her leg. It was hard to remember sometimes. Sometimes she went away from herself for a while. She didn’t know where. When she came back, she would be somewhere different.
There were rocks under her head. She lifted her head and tried to remember, but she couldn’t. She was in the tunnel now. She didn’t like the tunnel. Bad things happened in the tunnel one time.
A bug lay on the rocks next to her. It was empty now, except for the shell. She looked down at her stomach and saw that it bulged slightly. She wasn’t hungry anymore.
She looked around and saw the door to the small place standing open. It was safe there. Nothing bad happened in the small place. She got up and flexed her wings. Sometimes she didn’t move them for a long, long time and then it hurt when she did. Sometimes she had to be reminded. The good pony did a lot of reminding, though he wasn’t really a pony. But that was a secret.
Blue bumped the bug with her hoof and it tumbled down the hill of rocks and onto the parts that didn’t hurt so much to walk on. She followed it and looked inside, but it was empty. Someone had eaten it all. She stared at it, trying to remember, but it was too hard.
She walked toward the small place. Then she stopped and listened. Hooves, deep in the tunnel. Then they stopped. She frowned and tried to remember but she couldn’t. She faced the tunnel and started walking again. The other hooves started walking again too.
Then she remembered. Echoes. He told her not to chase the echoes.
She continued walking, hoping to find him. Hoping he would tell her why she shouldn’t chase the echoes. She didn’t look at the big pictures on the walls. They were bad pictures. They made her remember too much.
Sounds that weren’t real sounds got stuck in her ear again. Bangs and screaming and crying. Ponies that weren’t here anymore slept next to the pillars. She wanted to go back to the small place. Back to the sleeping bag and the book and the shiny thing that made it safe to sleep. She looked at her chest. She didn’t know why.
She climbed the steps of the big platform at the end of the tunnel. She had to be quiet. There were ponies sleeping here too.
The round door was still closed. It was always closed. Always and always and always. She lifted her hoof and touched it, trying to remember why.
She frowned. The skin around the corner of her lip split and it hurt. She licked the little wound.
No.
The round door hadn’t been closed. Not always. The Bad Pony had taken her inside once, a long long time ago. It hurt to remember. Not like how her lip hurt. A different hurt. The Bad Pony had done something she couldn’t remember. But she tried anyway.
She tried and tried and tried.
She gave up. It was hard to try.
Blue turned around and started walking back to the small place. Down the steps of the big platform. Back into the tunnel.
Of course they’re on the list, Dash. Your parents will be the first inside.
Blue whipped around, her tattered wings outstretched.
Her face was wet and it was harder to see. She squeezed her eyes shut and opened them again like when she went away and came back, only this time she stayed here. It was easier to see now.
Remembering hurt but she couldn’t stop it. She remembered lights and machines and lots of dust and ponies looking at blue paper. The Bad Pony had been there. The one who lied. The one who tricked her. The one who made her have to go to the small place while all the other ponies she tricked cried in the tunnel until there was nobody left to cry except for her and him.
She stared up at the big round door and screamed at it. She ran back and hit it with her hooves, trying to make it move. Hoping someone inside would see her and let her in. Mom and dad were on the other side with the Spitfire and they weren’t safe. They didn’t know, but Rainbow Dash knew. Rainbow Dash knew everything.
She battered her hooves against the same smudges she made every time the memories came back. It was all her fault. She’d been too late. She was always too late. Her withered chest convulsed with heaving sobs until the exhaustion made it hard to think. She pressed her head against the great door and watched tears slide down a muzzle she didn’t recognize.
She frowned and touched her chest, expecting something to be there but unsure what it could be. She blinked, her eyes drying, and put her hoof down.
She was forgetting again. She tried not to. It was important that she didn’t forget. But she couldn’t help it. It felt better when she forgot.
She lay down on the cool platform and went away for a while.
Blue opened her eyes.
Her leg hurt so she moved it.
Autumn woke to the sound of quiet murmuring and the acrid scent of disinfectants centuries past their shelf life. As soon as she became aware that she was awake, she also became aware of the shooting pain behind her eyes. Her breath hissed through clenched teeth and she winced at the shot of lighting that went through her jaw. Broken. Or nearly broken. She couldn’t focus enough to decide whether she wanted to know which it was.
She opened her eyes and squinted at the criss-crossing lines of a drop ceiling. The plush white cushion of the lobby couch cradled her right side, stained deep crimson where she had swiped a bloody hoof against the pristine leather. She could taste copper in the back of her throat and between her teeth.
The geometry of the ceiling made her dizzy and she shut her eyes. In the renewed darkness she saw that damned pegasus, Aurora Pinfeathers, bearing down over her with murder in her eyes. She only remembered pieces of what happened. The syringe shattering against her face like a glass missile. The two of them crashing into the far wall, and the sickening realization that the pegasus wouldn’t stop beating her until she was dead.
But she was alive. At the receiving end of a one-sided brawl, Autumn hadn’t been able to focus on much. She remembered the dread she felt when she reached out to her magic only to have her concentration scattered by Aurora’s hoof. The only weapon she had to rely on were her lungs, and they had saved her life.
Embarrassment washed over her but she managed to resist the reflex to grit her teeth again. Screaming for help. Her. She didn’t want to think what that was going to do for her reputation. Probably nothing substantial, she decided, but the fact of it happening at all stung. A well-oiled cluster of gears in the back of her head began to turn, already considering ways to spin this disaster of a day to her advantage.
She wrinkled her nose and forced herself to sit up. Unsurprisingly, the nearby murmuring was replaced by approaching hooves. If this were one of the prewar medical dramas Cider had inflicted on her since he discovered a stash years ago, she supposed this would be the part where she blearily ripped off sensors and set off keening alarms to the dismay of the medical staff. Except the luxuries of clean hospitals and confident physicians were gone. They lived off the dregs of what had been left behind, and that was all they would have.
And what Autumn had right now was questions.
She opened her eyes a second time and lifted them to the only two other ponies in the lobby. She quietly thanked Celestia that neither of them were Quincy.
Buck stood pensively beside the arm of the opposite couch, the twin barrels of his battle saddle auspiciously absent from his charcoal back. His eyes were fixed on the disheveled blue stallion standing close enough to her that she couldn’t ignore the smell coming off him. When she saw the collar fixed around his neck, she knew why. Autumn shot Buck a questioning look.
“He’s a doctor,” Buck said, as if that was all that needed saying.
Autumn eyed the slave before returning her gaze to Buck. “Is?”
“Was,” Buck conceded.
She sighed and swung her hind legs toward the floor, ready to be seen on her hooves rather than on her back. A blue foreleg appeared against her chest, preventing her from getting down.
“You shouldn’t walk until your leg is healed,” the slave said. He deflected her withering glare with the passive confidence of someone who thought they knew better. He didn’t. Her horn glowed with a weak light and she pushed the obstructing hoof away. She leaned forward, letting her front legs drop toward the carpet. “Miss Song I don’t think-”
Her right hoof landed on the soft carpet with a crisp click that she didn’t hear so much as she felt. White-hot pain detonated up her shoulder as if she’d stepped on a landmine. Her right hoof shot off the carpet to take the weight off, leaving her to sway unevenly on her left.
“You need more rest,” the slave half-heartedly reminded her.
Autumn glared down at her leg, her once-pristine mane clotted with blood like a tacky curtain that draped over her face. Her leg was wrapped tightly in strips of heavy canvas. Two rusted lengths of rebar poked out of either side of the makeshift bandage, creating a makeshift splint. Keeping her hoof off the ground was going to become tiring.
“I don’t need to be coddled by a pony in a collar,” she said, her eyes lifting to Buck with accusation. If he wasn’t wearing his battle saddle, then something had gone wrong. “Where’s the pegasus?”
If she hadn’t been watching so closely, she would have missed the flash of nervousness on Buck’s face. She didn’t. She watched as a stallion twice her size avoided her eyes like a chastised foal. She had his answer before he opened his mouth.
“We weren’t able to catch her,” he said.
Autumn let the silence linger rather than fill it with the pointless tirade that boiled in her gut. Buck stiffened as the seconds ticked by, clearly waiting to be berated or worse. It was better that he worry. It bred loyalty. A small price to pay for a bit of restraint on her part.
But not enough of a price to quell the malignant anger that grew inside her.
“Were any of our people injured?” she asked.
“No,” he said.
“Do we still have Miss Dressage?”
Buck nodded.
“Good,” she said. At least something hadn’t gone to shit today. “Take the doctor back to his pen. And give him some food and water for his services.”
She turned toward the slave stallion and moved him aside with what magic she could muster. He refrained from commenting as she limped past him with her broken leg bent toward her belly, but he did offer a small nod to her for the extra rations. She didn’t return it. Her good leg was far from “good,” but it was serviceable enough to let her walk. Bruised muscle cried in protest at every stumping hop toward the door.
Buck cleared his throat as her magic reached for the handle.
“She was unnaturally fast,” he said.
She looked back at him and saw the shame in his eyes. Her lip lifted away from her teeth in disgust. “She was motivated. Now she’s gone. Your job is to figure out how to keep it from happening again.”
Buck straightened. “Yes ma’am.”
Her eyes lingered on him for a moment longer. “When you’re done with the doctor, come find me at the holding tank. I’ll need a pair of hooves to carry Miss Dressage.”
“You’re moving her?”
She shook her head. She was good and ready to move past this whole fiasco. “I’m going to kill her. I’ll leave it up to you where you see fit to dispose of her.”
Buck’s tension lifted as a new normal settled into place. “I’ll see to it.”
Autumn tipped her horn to him and stepped outside.
The darkness caught her off-guard. She stopped momentarily to let her eyes adjust before hopping forward on her functional foreleg. It was slow going and she had to work to keep her temper at bay as the guards of the night shift carefully averted their eyes.
She’d never liked the dark. Ever since she was a filly the all-encompassing blackness that fell after the twilight hours smothered her with a quiet fear that she never grew out of. It made her miss the days before she and her brother moved from home to start what would become the business venture that surrounded her now. Back home, they could stoke a small fire in the shattered hearth that propped up the remains of their family’s houses. They had just enough to pay their tithe to the local raiders and so they could afford a little light at night. Now she sat on just enough influence and wealth to keep the raiders under her hoof, and her biggest concern was always the local predators. They flocked to light like insects, and the ones that called this barren region their home tended to be larger than a cloud of bloatflies.
A pair of guards walking the opposite direction passed her with a polite nod, the larger of the two carrying an energy weapon that gave off the faintest green glow of magic-infused plasma. Cider had acquired a small cache of the old tech from one of his contacts within the Steel Rangers. She vaguely remembered the argument that spawned from that decision, but whatever her point had been wasn’t worth dwelling on anymore. It wasn’t as if she had anyone left to debate it with.
She returned the guards’ nod and continued toward the general direction of the holding tanks. As the amorphous walls of black grew taller, her priorities solidified. Whatever chems the slave stallion had been allowed to administer had no doubt come from their regular stock. Slow-acting and incomparable to the few remaining syringes of unadulterated magic that she hoped still remained. She would use that magic to heal her wounds. Then she would kill Ginger Dressage.
A broken neck, maybe. Something simple, quick and final. Much as she wanted to savor Ginger’s death, the day had been spoiled. She just wanted to be done with it.
With Ginger out of the way, she could finally focus on the important work. Julip was a stubborn mare, and Autumn had no illusions that there was anything she could to to force the Enclave pony to give her the coordinates to whatever this "Solace" was. All she needed was for her guest to know what she was looking for, and she would inevitably seek it out herself in an effort to bury it. It had been nearly a month since Julip failed to return home. It only took a week for Julip to begin digging through the cloned servers she’d been provided.
A tiny smile pinched the corner of her lip. Once this was over, she could finally sit down and see exactly where Julip had been digging.
The guards posted outside Ginger’s prison noticed her approach and the unicorn among them lit his horn to better see her. The door to the tank was badly warped in the center. Bright gashes of scraped steel reflected the unicorn’s red magic like bloody wounds. The padlock, for all the trouble it had caused when it failed to work, had been discarded. The battered door was more symbolic than secure. It had to be physically levitated off its hinges and set aside to let Autumn inside.
A single gray feather lay inside the doorway. She regarded it with a frown and stepped over it.
The unicorn outside lit his horn to put the door back on its hinges, but she stopped him. “Leave it open. I won’t be long.”
The red glow faded, replaced by the bright glare of the single bulb that glowed at the roof of the tank.
Autumn approached the chair in the center.
The coffee colored mare that occupied it stared back at her with those ocean-blue eyes she’d grown to despise. They were the eyes of a murderer. The last ones Cider had no doubt stared into before he was unceremoniously drowned. It infuriated her to watch Ginger sit there, tired from her ordeal but physically intact thanks to the numerous doses of prewar healing magic sloshing through her veins. All the punishment Autumn had inflicted, erased because of a single interruption.
She forgot about her injured jaw and clenched her teeth. The shot of pain made her tense as if she’d been shocked. Any one of her staff would have had the presence of mind to look away. Ginger stared. There was no malice in it. No sarcastic grin. Just quiet observation of a mare who had been gifted precious time to contemplate her end, and accept it. It was like seeing fresh fruit go rotten. She’d wanted Ginger to die in the throes of fear.
Autumn slid her tongue over her molars in an attempt to sooth the pain and approached the tool chest. It lay toppled over onto its back, empty syringes scattered behind it. Evidence of the sudden and unexpected attack from the pegasi. The ghost of pain tickled the side of her face where the syringe had shattered. The cuts had healed in her sleep, but the sensation was still raw in her memory.
“Is Aurora alive?”
She ignored her and tried to lift the tool chest upright, but the strain poured fuel onto the migraine already forming behind her eyes. She dropped it with a heavy thud that echoed against the walls of the tank. Ginger waited for her answer as Autumn pulled the bottom drawer entirely out of the cabinet and sat it roughly atop the void it left behind.
“I’m told she escaped, yes.”
She tried not to react to Ginger’s sigh of relief and snatched up one of the remaining unused stimpacks from the drawer. A quick jab and it fired into the meat of her hind leg. The cool flush of healing magic rushed through her body like a thirsty sponge soaking up water. The sensation of broken bones seeking each other out made her shudder, but the relief that it brought kept her complaints at bay.
“Your brother was a monster.”
Autumn sighed. This again.
“So I’ve heard,” she said. The migraine was beginning to subside. She made a mental note to keep the last two stimpacks someplace safe once this was over.
As she waited for her head to clear, it occurred to her that her ears had turned toward the open door. She followed them with her eyes and noticed that both guards had moved from the narrow rectangle of light cast by the tank and had shifted into the shadow, voices low as they distracted themselves with idle conversation.
Pop. Pop.
One of the guards hushed the other and they went silent, listening. Autumn felt the tension rising in her shoulders.
Pop. Pop-pop. Pop-pop-pop.
Autumn took a slow breath and listened as the sound of gunfire became more persistent. Then another rifle joined. A crackling takka-takka-takka of an automatic. With each passing second more weapons joined the growing chorus. The glow of the tank dimmed in abrupt increments as spotlights bloomed to life outside. Somewhere in the rising din of chaos, a pony flipped a switch. An ancient air raid siren began to wail, low at first and then high as a dying animal.
They were under attack.
She turned and looked at Ginger. Then past her, at the wrecked pens where Aurora had pinned her. Her revolver glinted atop the bent links.
Peach Medley hated his name. It had an feminine undertone that he never grew used to. His parents, when they were alive, had been traditionalists. His whole family was that way. Old names from days long past. Prewar ponies had a strange fixation with naming themselves after food. He never understood that, but then again he wasn’t the creative type. As much as he wanted to change his name, he was never able to decide on anything that stuck. It wasn’t until he got hired on as security for F&F Mercantile that his coworkers gave him a nickname.
Everyone at the solar array called him Sweets.
He was a big stallion. Bigger than most, standing a full head taller than Autumn’s chief of security. The job was a natural fit even if the pay left something to be desired. He knew it was the best he could hope for and the job came with a bed and relative safety. But the biggest perk was the variety of goods that drifted in and out with the trade wagons. Sweets was particularly fond of a mare who owned a prosperous hard candy business not far from Canterlot. He made a point to visit her cart every time she rode in with her monthly dues. It didn’t take long for the nickname to stick.
Sweets’s jaw popped in the midst of a long yawn that he’d been fighting down. He hadn’t been this tired during a night shift since he first took the job. He preferred the nights because it was easy work. Every so often a radscorpion might wander too close to the wire, but all he was required to do was radio it in to the nearest of the four cardinal guard posts and the snipers would put the critters down. His job was to walk his section of the perimeter fence and observe. He didn’t even have to carry a weapon.
Easy work.
But damned if he wasn’t tired.
Everyone had been shaken out of their bunks early today when some pegasus attacked the boss. It still irritated him that he’d been pulled out of sleep just in time to do a whole lot of nothing. The pegasus was long gone by the time he’d gotten outside and the adrenaline kept him from falling back asleep. And he wasn’t the only one suffering. All the perimeter staff were traipsing on the edge of sleepwalking.
Sweets reached the marker on the fence that denoted the end of his section, a cue ball with the center drilled through so it could be strung up at eye level by a length of wire. Behind the lenses of his night vision goggles, it looked like a tiny green sun. Not that he knew what the real one actually looked like. He was pretty sure it didn’t have a hole in it, at least.
Further down the fence, he could see Tabby patrolling the next section with her neck bent low with exhaustion. The thought crossed his mind to radio in a comms check to nudge her awake before someone saw her, but another yawn snuck down his jaw and the idea faded with it.
He pressed a hoof under his goggles and lifted them up to his forehead. His eyes needed a break from the green-white sameness of his patrol, and it would give him plausible deniability for not reporting Tabby for taking eyes off her route. They deserved a break.
He closed his eyes for a little bit.
“Section 3. I have something on approach.”
Sweets’s head jerked up, startled. His chin was damp with drool. How long had been asleep?
His hoof felt like lead as he slid his NVGs back down, drowning his eyes in too-bright light. With his other hoof he pressed the toggle on his shoulder radio. “Uh, Section 1,” he half-mumbled. “I didn’t copy.”
It occurred to him that the ground was shaking.
“...ogey on th…” the radio crackled out, then sputtered to life again. The speaker was breathing hard as if he were running. “Section 2 it’s coming to you! Tabby you need to move!”
Sweets looked left, down the fence, and spotted the bright green form of Tabby leaning against the chain link with her nose inches from the dirt. Her goggles hung loosely around her neck as she dozed. Her ears didn’t so much as flicker to her radio. She must have turned it off. He turned his head to the fence, to what lay beyond, and spotted the almost white mass of infrared heat thundering toward her. His eyes went wide.
He punched his radio. “Section 1. That’s a fucking deathclaw!”
At that utterance, the radio lit up. Sweets bolted forward, yelling at Tabby as he made a bee-line into her section.
“East Gate. We have a deathclaw inbound. Wait, I have visual on a pega…”
A rifle shot cut through the night like a hatchet. Tabby jerked awake, clearly confused.
“North Gate. Say again, East?”
Another shot, the muzzle flash from the roof of the eastern guard post bright enough to temporarily blind his night vision. Then another. He looked away, risking a glance through the fence and he suddenly knew everything he needed to know. He wouldn’t get to Tabby in time. The deathclaw was close enough for him to make out its individual limbs as it hurdled toward Tabby’s section.
He keyed his radio with his chin and kept running. “Tabby, move!”
Tabby’s ears perked up with recognition and she turned toward Sweets. She almost had her hoof to her radio when the deathclaw exploded through the fence and lit on her like something out of a nightmare. Sweets almost fell as he skidded to a stop. He could only watch as the deathclaw bent down and closed its jaws around Tabby’s middle. Mercifully, she was too dazed to understand what was happening as it bit clean through her.
Light strobed from the east gate. Someone opening up on the beast from a laughable distance with automatic fire. Puffs of dust danced up from the dirt all around the deathclaw, some pitiful few actually hitting their mark. A spotlight flashed on and swiveled toward the carnage, whiting out Sweets’ vision. He squeezed his eyes shut and ripped the goggles off with an abrupt “Fuck!”
When he opened them again, he saw the deathclaw standing in the center of a wide beam of light. It stared at him, its misshapen mouth pouring with gore that had once been Tabby. It didn’t seem to care that it was being shot at. It barely registered anything when a bullet found its mark. The beast watched him, its nostrils flaring wide from exertion. Sweets had never seen an exhausted deathclaw before, but now that it had a meal in its gullet it would be a matter of time before it caught a second wind.
A gush of smoke from the east gate caught his eye and a bright point of light hissed through the night sky. Light, noise and flaring heat overwhelmed his senses just in time for the shockwave to punch the air out of his lungs. He opened his eyes and found himself lying on the ground. His ears were wet. He couldn’t hear anything except for a piercing whistle behind his torn eardrums.
Sweets tried to get up, but his hind legs wouldn’t listen. It occurred to him that everything was too bright again, but his goggles were gone. Wisps of smoke and dust coiled through the shaft of light that had once been trained on the deathclaw but was now aimed at him. He stared at the long drape of his shadow for several seconds, trying to piece together why it was moving when he wasn’t.
Something warm blew against the nape of his neck. He blinked and lifted his head.
The deathclaw’s open maw met him halfway.
Getting the deathclaw’s attention had been the easy part. Keeping it on her had been much more unpleasant.
Aurora’s wings ached from overuse. Muscles used to manipulating machines and lifting broken parts all but screamed in protest of having to bear her weight against the wind for hours on end. The mutated horror beneath her didn’t make things easier. While it easily outpaced her on the ground, it couldn’t keep up with her for long when she took to the air. As darkness began to fall it got harder to judge how far she was from the monster. More than once she flew too far and it lost interest in the chase, favoring the easier prey that began to emerge with the arrival of night.
She had to land several times over the course of the two hour trip, either to regain its attention or to let it catch up so it wouldn’t start hunting something else. It was like herding a gigantic, murderous toddler.
By the time the mirrors of the solar plant came into view, her nerves were worn down more than her wings. The last bits of daylight had sunk beneath the overcast horizon and everything below her was inky black. Each time she landed to let the deathclaw approach, she worried the uneven terrain would foul up her takeoff. Or trap her hoof. Or that she would land too close to the creature and not know until it was too late. If she survived this, the nightmares would chase her dreams for weeks.
Whether it was good luck, good instincts, the good grace of the goddesses or a combination of all three, she managed not to get eaten.
With less than a quarter mile left to go before she reached the perimeter fence, Aurora took a calculated risk and bent her glide vertical. The deathclaw barreled forward along its path like a torpedo, not yet aware that its prey had vanished above and behind it. Happy her little ploy had worked, she pitched forward and settled into a silent glide high in the air. For a moment it she thought she could see it beginning to slow down like it had done so many times on the way back. Worry clawed into her gut.
Then the snap of a rifle caught her ear and the monster barreled forward.
She watched with a mixture of horror and satisfaction as the deathclaw burst through the fence and onto a guard on the other side. This high above the ground, the gunfire below sounded like the crackle of popcorn. Spotlights snapped on and a siren wailed as she slid past the fence and down the gentle obsidian slope of mirrors. An explosion shook the air behind her and the shockwave rang through the steel posts of the mirrors like strange bells. There was no turning back now.
Somewhere behind her, a stallion screamed and a bellowing howl split the night.
The urge to turn around and help them kill the monster she’d worked to bring to them was almost impossible to ignore, but she sharply reminded herself why she was here and who her enemies were. The guards down there would just as soon turn their weapons on her as they would a deathclaw. They may not all be bad, but they were no friends of hers. She wasn’t about to trust Ginger’s life to the hope that they might show her charity.
The last of the mirrors slipped behind her and she squinted at the dark complex of buildings and winding pipes, trying to make sense of it all over again. She drifted low, carefully avoiding the temptation to flap her wings as she dipped toward the roof of the stubby building where she first met Autumn. Her hooves skidded across the dilapidated roof, kicking up old gravel and dirt as she slowed to a wobbling trot.
She walked to the edge and risked a peek over the side. Small groups of ponies gathered near the doors to several of the smaller outbuildings, none of them armed except for the odd flashlight that the passing guards yelled at them to douse. Aurora hadn’t seen this side of the facility before. Wagons and carts bearing versions of the F&F Mercantile insignia sat parked wheel to wheel in two neat lines down the side of the largest of the stubby structures. Several ponies were organizing an effort to carry supplies left in the carts for the night back into the building. More than a few guards had stayed to assist.
Thankfully, none of them had heard her scuffed attempt at a quiet landing. Their attention was split between emptying the wagons and listening to the distant chatter of gunfire. Though it was starting to sound a little less distant, now that she stopped to listen.
Move your hooves, she told herself.
She ran to the opposite side of the roof and stopped short of the ledge. Almost immediately she heard the frantic whisper of a familiar voice.
“...fucking bullshit, this isn’t my fucking job…”
She leaned forward. Directly below her, Quincy’s head poked into the night from the dark doorway of his lobby. A lit flashlight dangled from his lips as he complained. Even in the near-blackness of the unlit facility his perfectly white coat shone like a diamond in a coal pile. Aurora didn’t know much about him other than he was waifish for a stallion and a little on the quiet side. Right now, he didn’t seem much of either.
He stepped into the night as if it were waiting to devour him. Then, with a litany of profanity dogging his heels, he followed the wall of the building and vanished around the corner. Aurora frowned after him but didn’t have time to puzzle out what he was up to.
Another explosion lit the night sky and Aurora shrank away from the edge of the roof to avoid being seen. The battle had moved deep into the mirror field now. Flaming chunks of solar collectors littered the dirt and more tumbled from the beasts claws as it raked them at the ponies determined to kill it. Weapons crackled in earnest and fell silent, one after the other, only to be replaced by reinforcements arriving from the further reaches of the facility.
Her distraction was working better than she’d hoped.
She turned her attention back to the maze of buildings and girders in front of her. Ginger’s tank had been on this side of the facility, that much she was sure of. She scanned the darkened structures for something familiar. Something she could remember seeing when she was gracelessly carried to the tank. Seeing nothing besides a tangle of silhouettes, she opened her aching wings and hoisted herself back into the air for a better view.
A low structure slid to her left. Behind it, a bright square of orange light pouring through an open doorway. A doorway sitting at the base of a silhouette that looked like four banded grease drums minus banding. A quartet of tanks. Ginger’s tank.
Her heart beat her ribs.
She steeled her nerves and dove toward the tank with a hard pulse of her wings. Damn the noise. Damn anyone who noticed her. She was here to fix a mistake. To save a life that would make up for all the ones she’d taken. Her wings billowed open, braking her descent barely two yards from the empty doorframe and scaring a yelp out of the two guards she hadn’t seen standing just outside the light.
Time slowed.
Aurora’s mouth hung open in dismay. Two stallions, a unicorn and an earth pony both armed with stubby black submachine guns shielded their eyes from the sudden blast of grit thrown up by her landing. The unicorn’s horn was already beginning to glow with magic. The earth pony was spitting dust from his mouth, his mind far from his weapon with its strangely modified trigger. She had a brief window to act that was screaming shut. The unicorn’s weapon had begun to lift. She could feel herself starting to panic.
A memory rattled loose in her head. Advice Sledge had given her when it seemed like everything was going wrong at once. Take a breath and fix one problem at a time, Pinfeathers. Divide and conquer.
One at a time.
Her eyes locked on the recovering unicorn and she whipped her wings toward the dirt. She crashed into him with her hooves outstretched, latching around the barrel of his chest and hoisting him skyward with a second beat of her wings.
His eyes went wide as saucers as the ground sank away from them. His earth pony counterpart fired wildly into the sky but without light to see by, the staccato of gunfire was wasted. The unicorn’s voice came out several octaves higher than normal as he screamed, “What the fuck put me down put me down I won’t do anything I swear just put me down!”
It crossed her mind that it would be faster to drop him, and she couldn’t convince herself that it hadn’t been her initial plan, but his hooves had locked around her back in sheer panic. She couldn’t let go of him if she wanted to.
Far below, his counterpart’s weapon blended into the chatter of the larger battle in the mirrors.
She slowed her ascent and settled into a wobbling hover. His added weight threatened to throw off her balance and her wings railed against the sudden workload. “Get rid of the gun and I’ll land,” she ordered. His horn flashed and he wriggled the strap out from between them. He gave it a furtive throw and she watched the weapon tumble into the night. Good.
“If you try anything, I drop you. Understand?”
“I won’t! I promise!” he wailed.
Not that she had much choice. Quickly as she could without risking turning an unsteady landing into an abrupt impact, she dropped back toward the facility and the chaos below. She touched down on a rooftop far from the tanks and the unicorn collapsed on shaking legs, sputtering thank-yous even as she took off again.
One down.
She found the earth pony where she’d left him, except now he was pacing in circles with worried eyes fixed on the black sky. He held his weapon by the strange protrusion she’d seen before which set neatly between his teeth. Some sort of trigger mechanism for earth ponies, she guessed, just like the one Buck had for the rifles he’d worn on his back.
He spun in circles, spooking at ghosts in his vision and firing quick bursts into the sky to chase them away. She wheeled silently above him in a wide arc, waiting for an opening. It didn’t take long. The lone guard spooked and squeezed off a burst of gunfire that ended with an abrupt click. When he spat out the trigger and fumbled through his pockets for another magazine, she snapped her wings back and plunged toward him.
Leveling out, she swept open her hooves, readying herself to grab him around the midsection and lift off like before. Instead, the frantic stallion looked up at exactly the wrong time and flinched backward. Her right hoof hooked around the back of his neck, sending the two of them sprawling over the dusty concrete.
A stabbing pain shot through her foreleg as she forced herself up. “Celestia’s sun,” she muttered. The stallion was rolling onto his hooves as well, his head whipping left and right as he searched for something. Then he looked back toward the shaft of dingy orange light leaking out tank’s empty door frame and he practically tripped over himself getting up. She followed his eyes toward the tank and saw the unmistakable black shape of his gun.
“Shit,” she spat and hurried to her hooves while he broke into a full sprint. She wrenched her body around to face the fallen gun and thrust her wings tailward. They rewarded her with a sharp sting of pain and a dizzying burst of speed that she subconsciously knew wouldn’t feel great when she landed. It didn’t disappoint.
With concrete blurring by her muzzle, she sailed past the guard and snatched up his rifle with feet to spare. She clutched it hard against her chest, doing the best she could to keep the muzzle away from her chin, and braced for the fall. Concrete dug into her shoulder like a belt sander and she rolled over and over again like a carnival ride gone horribly wrong. She came to a stop a good dozen yards beyond the stallion, who stood bewildered in the light.
She winced and pushed herself onto her hooves. The world pitched and wobbled as if she were a rowboat on some unforgiving sea. The stallion didn’t move, as if waiting out of some misplaced courtesy.
She squeezed one eye shut at a time, left then right, to force them to focus. The stallion frowned, and patted the flap of his jacket pocket. From it he lifted the slender black rectangle of a magazine. He looked toward her with indecision on his face. She glanced down at the empty submachine gun held in her wing.
“Call it a draw?” she offered.
He didn’t answer immediately, and suspicion crept into the back of Aurora’s brain. He took a deep breath and she widened her stance, waiting for him to rush her. He looked into the tank, swallowed, and dropped the magazine onto the cement before turning around and galloping away.
She blinked surprise as he made a bee-line away from the deathclaw’s roars.
A few long strides and she was alone at the entrance to the tank.
Finally.
A lump formed in her throat when she saw Ginger still there, her eyes shining with relief. It occurred to Aurora that Ginger had heard everything. The deathclaw, the ever-nearer sounds of battle in the mirror field and the scuffle outside her makeshift prison. Shame and pride fought their own small battle in her chest as she stepped up onto the tank’s rusted surface.
Aurora’s attention was so firmly fixed on Ginger that she didn’t spot the emerald glow just below her left ear or the slender muzzle of the revolver peeking through the curtain of her fire-tinted mane. She realized too late that the tears in her companion’s eyes weren’t from relief, but horror.
The first shot struck flat against her right shoulder with enough force to kick her backwards onto the hard concrete. Her jaw flung open with a scream.
The second shot went off like a bomb, amplified by the hollow walls of the massive tank. The bullet slapped the concrete barely an inch from her face, peppering her with enough concrete shrapnel to blind her left eye. Blood sheeted down her face as she tried to get up to run away, but her foreleg gave out beneath her damaged shoulder and she crumpled back into the dirt. She looked at the disaster of pulped flesh of her shoulder and felt panic rising into her throat. She could feel the third bullet coming for her, vividly aware that she wouldn’t register the sound before it tunneled into the back of her head.
Fear is a great motivator, and Aurora was feeling extremely motivated.
Half-blind and unable to use her leg, she kicked hard at the concrete to spin her back half away from the doorway. She screamed again as shattered bone and damaged nerves ground into each other, unaware of the third round that exploded through the open doorway and burrowed into the patch of concrete her head had occupied less than a second earlier.
She twisted her hips, rolling the rest of her body with them until she was completely out of sight of the doorway. She bit down on her lower lip hard enough to draw blood, tearing her attention away from the throbbing pain radiating from her ruined shoulder. She touched the wound with her good hoof and a shock of pain forced her to jerk it away.
“You are nothing if not a tenacious little cunt,” Autumn’s voice sang through the doorway. It carried the thrilled excitement of someone who had every advantage the game would give them, and she wanted Aurora to know it.
Aurora clamped her mouth shut as she pushed up with her good foreleg. The crippled one hung uselessly beneath her. Carefully, she slid a wing beneath it and held it to her chest in a makeshift sling. Blood seeped into the corner of her lip from the slices left across her face from the second bullet’s shrapnel.
With her good eye, she spotted the black shape of the submachine gun she’d dropped at the edge of the doorway. She reached out with her wing, hooked the strap in a feather and dragged it towards her. She shifted her weight with a grunt of pain and reached a bit further for the magazine the stallion had dropped before running away. Now she understood why he looked into the tank before leaving. He’d known Autumn was waiting for her.
She didn’t have time to appreciate the deception. She flicked her wingtip and the magazine clattered across the cement with the reassuring sound of neatly stacked bullets.
“Miss Pinfeathers, your friend is becoming distraught,” Autumn chirped with mock concern. “I think she’d appreciate knowing whether you’re dead or not.”
Aurora sat herself up, sucking in shaky breaths as the pain washed through her like ice water. She settled the submachine gun between her wings. Its black surface took on a wet sheen as blood smeared over the stock. She fumbled the magazine, her feathers trembling from shock.
A mangled roar echoed through the facility. It was much closer now, she thought, and the constant chatter of gunfire keeping it at bay had dwindled to sporadic bursts.
Autumn began to hum.
Aurora set her jaw and tried to ignore it. It was an unsettlingly pleasant tune and the sadistic mare had an excellent voice for it. The notes had a strange cadance to it that resembled a lullaby, or something near it. She wiped her bloodied eye against her good shoulder and forced it to open. Through her imperfect vision she fumbled her feathers around the base of the bite trigger, trying to work out the mechanism that would release it.
She could hear the smile on Autumn’s lips. “Are you still with us?”
The words fell out of her before she could stop herself. “Will you shut-”
A bullet punched through the tank wall before she could finish and spat the submachine gun out of her wing. She jumped back and the weapon clattered to the cement, bearing a bright silver scar behind the barrel. It was little more than scrap now. She wanted to scream.
She hobbled away from the holed section of tank as quietly as she could, feeling the barrel of Autumn’s revolver following her hoofsteps. Everything was going wrong all over again.
“You’re out of cards to play, Miss Pinfeathers.” The mare’s hooves echoed against the floor of the tank as she strolled around its circumference. “Do the smart thing and give up. She isn’t worth dying over.”
Aurora disagreed. Near the rear of the tank she came to a vertical section of pipe that rose from the concrete pad and bent ninety degrees to connect to the uppermost lip of the tank. A feed line for whatever the container had been designed to hold. She steeled herself and limped to put it between her and where she thought Autumn was standing.
She was disarmed and badly injured. The only chance she had was to goad Autumn into making a mistake. How it would help her, she didn’t know. Even if she could get inside the tank without taking another bullet, she wasn’t sure if she had the strength to disrupt her magic. She felt like a string preparing to fight scissors.
“I could say the same thing about Cider,” she called.
A crack, a spark of metal and the descending whine of a bullet spinning off into the night. Aurora took a shaking breath and exhaled it. Autumn couldn’t have many shots left.
“Maybe I should have given him my Pip-Buck like he wanted.” She held her breath and braced for the next shot, but to her surprise it didn’t come. Several seconds passed in silence. Aurora frowned and realized just how quiet it was. The nearby gunfire had stopped, meaning either the deathclaw was dead or there were no other guards left to attack it. She wasn’t sure which reality she wanted to be true.
When Autumn finally spoke, the musical quality of her voice had shifted to something more suspicious. “You don’t have a Pip-Buck.”
She’d taken the bait. Aurora risked a tiny grin. “I did when I met him. He wasn’t happy when I refused to sell it.”
Autumn’s hooves moved toward the hole she’d shot through the steel wall. “You’re a liar.”
She continued as if she hadn’t heard her. “He followed me back to Junction City and cornered me in Ginger’s shop. She convinced him leave,” she said, deliberately leaving out the part where Ginger had threatened to emasculate him with a shard of her own ceiling tile. “So he waited behind her store until I came out to use the outhouse. I think he wanted to kill me, but once he took my Pip-Buck off he started to get more familiar with me than I liked.”
Aurora let the words hang there for a moment, waiting to see if Autumn would waste her sixth and final bullet. She’d seen enough Appleoosan movies to know why a six-shooter was called a six-shooter, and her best guess was that Autumn’s revolver was one in the same. After she fired Aurora would have a narrow window to react. There were no guards to save Autumn now. If she could get around the tank and close the distance on Autumn before she could reload, she stood a slim chance. It was better than nothing.
Instead, the answer she got was more pensive silence from the other side of the wall. She sucked on her teeth and kept searching for the exposed nerve that would get a reaction from the unicorn. “He said something to the effect that my Pip-Buck would change lives. I didn’t know what he was talking about. I didn’t even know who he was. All I knew was what he was going to do to me, so I did what I had to do to stop him.
“I kicked him in the throat,” she said. It felt good to say it outloud. To admit it. Her words had their own momentum now. “He was good as dead at that point, but I helped him along anyway. I beat him to death with my Pip-Buck while he choked, and then I dropped him into the outhouse. Your brother was a problem that needed to be fixed, Autumn. I’m glad I was there to do it.”
A slow breeze slithered through the facility, carrying with it the tang of spent gunpowder and blood. Aurora listened to the shaking breaths coming from the narrow beam of light that pointed out from the perforated tank. She’d found Autumn’s exposed nerve and driven a red hot nail through it.
“So it was you.”
The deadly chill in her voice pulled Aurora’s hackles upright. She leaned to see around the pipe at her back and realized the finger of light spilling from the hole was gone. Her stomach dropped when she saw Autumn’s narrowed eye glaring back at her.
Her vision went emerald and a familiar dread washed over her.
She couldn’t move.
No, no, no, she thought.
Autumn backed away from the bullet hole and a small ring of the same light covered its sharp edges. The steel panel began to groan as the hole warped along a growing network of fissures. Aurora could only watch as quarter inch steel peeled outward like the petals of a blooming flower until the gap was wide enough for Autumn to drag her inside.
Aurora struggled as she was carried over the crumpled pile of chain link where she’d come so close to killing Autumn hours before. Ginger strained to see over her shoulder, her eyes wide with renewed fear. Tears spun down her cheeks as she strained to open her mouth, and Aurora understood why Ginger had been silent for so long. Autumn’s magic glittered dimly along her muzzle, keeping it shut.
The suppression ring lodged around Ginger’s horn was still there. The air around it shimmered like waves off a stovetop.
The world pivoted and Aurora was facing Autumn. Her hooves struck the ground hard, shoving a wave of pain through her shoulder. Autumn held her firmly like a foal’s toy and stared at her with murder in her eyes. This was what Ginger had been forced to look at since the moment she arrived. Those green eyes, empty of remorse or sympathy, promising a slow death.
The muscles in Autumn’s jaw went tense.
Her horn burned with searing light and Aurora hurtled backward like a thrown grenade.
She spun like a ragdoll and the far wall struck her with an echoing boom. She woke up on the ground, dizzy and lost. Blood had pooled beneath her muzzle and she could taste more of it in her throat. Behind her, Ginger had finally been given her voice. She was screaming for her to get up.
Autumn’s magic scooped her off the ground and pitched her before she could brace herself. Her body crashed through the pens and slammed into the corner of the tank hard enough to startle a weak cry from her lungs. She tried to speak but her voice rolled out in a half gargle, choking on her own blood. She coughed into the air and it rained down on her face in thick gobbets.
Ginger’s voice rang in her ears. “Stop!”
Distantly, Aurora knew this was going badly. It was getting hard to breathe. Something in her chest wasn’t working right. She opened her eyes and suffered through the dizziness until she found Ginger. The mare was flailing against her restraints, the ring on her horn taking on a dim red glow. Aurora blinked the blood out of her eyes and thought she saw a grey streamer of smoke coiling above the unicorn.
She tried to straighten herself on the mangled fence but the world slid around her and she slumped back down.
The tank took a nauseating pitch downward. It took several seconds for her to understand she was being held up by her outstretched wings and even longer for her eyes to focus on the blood-crusted mare grinning in front of her. Autumn stood inches from her drizzling muzzle. To Aurora’s right, Ginger shook against her chair hard enough to make the feet dance against the metal floor. The ring on her horn glowed red like freshly smelted iron.
It’s burning her, she thought despairingly. The ring is burning her.
Aurora struggled to hold her head aloft. She watched as Autumn produced her revolver and slapped open the cylinder. One round left out of six. She blinked slowly. At least she’d gotten that right. The cylinder rotated until the single round lined up with the firing pin. It clicked shut and the hammer bent backward with a metallic crunch.
“Open your mouth.”
Ginger was intensely aware of two things. The first being that Aurora, a mare whose courage she’d grossly underestimated, was about to die. The second being that her skull felt like it was about to catch fire.
It started as soon as Trotter hammered the suppression ring onto her horn. At first it came in brief waves, like a headache that wasn’t sure whether it was committed to sticking around. But it got worse. Her first reflex to danger was to use her magic, and Autumn had spent close to twelve hours bringing her to the brink of death only to jerk her away at the last moment. She’d lost count at how many times her horn had tried to light, only to have the impulse pounded back into her head like a short circuit.
The stimpacks were making it worse. Something about them was wrong. It was like they were simultaneously trying to heal her and kill her. The headache had evolved into a migraine. For the last few minutes, the migraine had become something undefinable. The pain was a living hell that grew worse by the second. She’d lost track how many times she’d lost consciousness only for the residual healing effect of the stimpacks to wrench her back to the present. It was a never-ending slideshow that she had no power to stop, and now Aurora was back to watch it happen.
She watched Autumn fling her against the walls of the container as if she were shaking a bug trapped in a jar. The sounds Aurora made were too much to bear. Magic and raw emotion made for a potent combination, and the suppression ring was fighting against the massing pressure like a floodwall against a storm surge.
“Open your mouth.”
She jerked at her restraints, knowing what was coming next. She needed to get out of this chair. Aurora dangled by her wings close enough for her to touch, crucified on the very air that had carried her here. The pegasus was bloodied and beaten. Barely alive. Autumn’s gaze flicked to Ginger for a moment to ensure she was watching, and she smiled.
Aurora didn’t have any fight left in her. Autumn’s pistol levered itself between the mare’s teeth, lifting her head straight as the barrel slid into her mouth. Ginger heard Aurora gag and felt a sob rise in her throat.
Ginger didn’t want to watch. She lashed out at the pistol with her magic and shook violently as it rebounded.
“I want you to think about how much damage you’ve done,” Autumn seethed.
Aurora was looking at her and her breath caught in her chest. Her bloodied left eye, the one focused most intently on her, streamed with tears. Her mouth worked around the barrel of the gun, forming the words I’m sorry.
“How many lives you’ve stolen,” the mare continued.
Ginger grit her teeth and tried to take the gun. Her magic battered against the ring and rebounded off, but she wrinkled her muzzle and pushed back. Tears escaped the corners of her eyes as she gathered all of her pain, all of her regret and funneled it into the bottleneck. She could feel the pressure building in her skull. The odor of burning bone scratching her nose. The shape of something she didn’t understand taking form in her mind.
“And the fact that no matter how hard you tried, you died a pitiful little failure.”
Dark tendrils of smoke sputtered from the red-hot ring. Behind a black wisp, a flicker of something bronze.
“Goodbye, Aurora.”
Ginger screamed.
The ring exploded.
And then there was light.
It was blinding.
Aurora opened her eye and realized she was on the ground. In front of her nose, the handle of Autumn’s pistol, the hammer still cocked. She coughed hard, painting the back of the revolver with blood and spittle. The wet sound echoed strangely, as if the walls of the tank had grown much closer. She blinked to clear her vision and tried to make sense of what she was seeing.
Past the revolver, laying on the ground near the pens, Autumn stared at Aurora with open confusion. Her coat was a different shade than it had been before. Slowly, Aurora realized everything was the wrong color, like a terminal after someone screwed up the hue value. She looked at her foreleg, seeing no difference, then back up to the tank around her. Everything else had a faint hint of bronze to it. Everything except for Ginger, Aurora and a perfect circle of untouched steel that surrounded them.
Autumn staggered to her hooves, blood pouring freely from her nose. “What the fuck did you do?”
Confused, Aurora followed Autumn’s accusing glare. Still bound to the chair, Ginger had her head bowed in deep concentration. Bronze light thrummed around her horn, creating a gentle wind that stirred her mane. A charred stripe stood where the ring had been.
“Ginger?” Aurora croaked.
The unicorn shook her head once and said nothing. Aurora gathered herself and stood, uneasily, pressing against the floor with her wings to keep her balance. She flinched as Autumn lifted a broken padlock from one of the pens in her magic and pitched it at Aurora’s head, but something struck it halfway between them and it bounced harmlessly to the floor.
A dim ripple of light spread from the point where the lock had struck, tracing the faint shape of a dome around them.
Aurora’s eyes widened. “It’s a shield.”
“How?” Autumn barked.
Ginger didn’t answer. Flickers of bronze sparked off the heavy buckles holding her straps in place, and they fell away. Aurora limped toward her to help her down, but found herself being pulled into a hug instead. Ginger buried her face into Aurora’s good shoulder and held her there for a beat before parting without comment. The expressions passing between them were enough.
She stood aside as Ginger turned toward Autumn.
The color drained from Autumn’s face as two narrow crescents of tangible magic peeled away from the surface of the dome. Aurora recognized the motion. She’d done the same thing with Cider, only then she’d sheared off a piece of her shop’s tin ceiling to create the blade. The shield flowed into the gaps as two bronze lengths of magic swept down and settled against either side of Autumn’s neck. The mare froze in terror.
“Don’t,” she pleaded.
“Why.”
Ginger was panting now, the exertion taking its toll. A narrow rivulet of blood trickled down Autumn’s neck where the blade sank below the skin. Autumn tipped her chin up slightly, too afraid to move. Too afraid to answer Ginger’s question.
“You took my livelihood from me,” Ginger continued, breathing hard. “Kidnapped me. Put a gun in my mouth and pulled the trigger.”
Aurora hadn’t known that. She stared at Autumn as if she’d become a new kind of monster. Kill her, she thought.
“I know more ways to die because of you than I ever wanted to. And you just stood there, torturing me over and over again, telling me how you were going to make this world safe.” Ginger’s voice shook. “And you had the audacity to think you have a place in that world?”
Autumn straightened, but only a little. “Sacrifices have to be made before Equestria can be healed. Just look at what you’re doing, Ginger.” She tipped her chin toward the shield, then looked down at the crescents pressed under her chin. “S-structured magic. No unicorn’s been able to perform it since the bombs fell.”
Ginger’s lip curled away from her teeth. “Do you expect me to thank you?”
Autumn shook her head, the motion drawing fresh blood from Ginger’s blades. “N-no! But maybe I could help you. This whole ordeal with my brother was clearly a mistake on my part, and it would only be fair if…”
Aurora bent her mouth to Ginger’s ear. “She’s stalling.”
Ginger took a deep breath and nodded. She stared at Autumn through the shield, her lips forming a white line. “It’s like you say, Autumn. Sometimes we have to make sacrifices.”
In perfect tandem, the twin blades swung away from Autumn’s neck and snapped back shut. Autumn’s body went rigid. Then she screamed.
Her horn tumbled across the floor and rolled to a stop against Ginger’s shield.
“No! What did you do?!” Autumn scrambled to the ground and scooped up her horn in trembling hooves, staring at it in abject horror as blood traced dark lines across the bridge of her muzzle. Emerald sparks crackled from the stump of her horn, cleaved clean as if done with a pipe saw.
Ginger released the shield with a gasp. It ruptured at its apex and dribbled away like a waterfall without a source. The blades hovering behind Autumn faded, the blood that stained them landing on the rusted steel floor like rain.
Gentle bronze light lifted the horn from Autumn’s hooves and set it down on the bloodstained chair. Autumn’s face screwed up with rage. Her mangled forehead flickered weakly. The two mares watched Autumn absorb the fact that what had happened couldn’t be undone.
She stared at them. Then past them, her eyes becoming unfocused. Like that, the fight was gone from her. “Just kill me,” she muttered.
Ginger sighed and picked up the revolver in her magic. The cylinder opened with a click and the last bullet slid out. She set the pistol down in front of Autumn, and the bullet beside it. “Do it yourself.”
Autumn stared up at Ginger, her mouth hanging open. Then she looked down at her revolver. Her stump sputtered and she shuddered a quiet sob as she awkwardly knocked the bullet over with her hoof. It rolled away toward the pens. Slowly, she got up to chase after it.
Aurora looked at Ginger and was surprised to see tears pooling in her eyes. She nudged her, getting her friend’s attention, and tipped her head towards the door. “We should go.”
Ginger blinked rapidly and nodded. “In a second.”
A light bloomed within the tool drawer set atop the toppled cabinet and two familiar syringes leaped toward them. Ginger pressed the injector tip into Aurora’s good leg and the sharp pop-hiss of its centuries-old pneumatics pumped the healing serum into her bloodstream. The swift rush of painkillers and long-forgotten spells felt like crushed ice tumbling through her veins.
The sensation was relief in its purest form. The narrow gashes across her cheek sealed together and her vision began to clear. She shuddered at the sensation of the shattered bones in her shoulder drifting into place like a puzzle determined to solve itself. Severed nerves knit themselves together. New muscle grew where Autumn’s bullet had carved a path of destruction. It startled her to see the flattened bullet pop out of the wound and she looked away as new skin flowed over to close it on both sides.
Her eyes landed on Autumn who had managed to get the bullet onto the flat of her hoof. Autumn stared down at the nugget of brass, oblivious to Aurora’s restoration. She wondered if she would still be here whenever the Enclave got around to paying her a visit.
A hoof patted her on the shoulder, pulling her attention away. Ginger held the last of Autumn’s stimpacks out to her. “Here. In case you need another dose.”
Aurora curled her wing around, her feathers glowing with Ginger’s magic for a brief moment. Her shoulder was a mottled collection of bloodstains and new skin. The pain was melting away with each passing breath. Using it would be a waste.
“Actually,” she said, “there’s someone else here who might need it more.”
The security door at the bottom of the stairwell waited patiently for the correct keycard. Aurora knew where that keycard was, but she didn’t feel like rooting through Autumn’s pockets. Besides, she knew this type of door. It was the same model that blocked off the machining floor from the generator room back home. No matter how fastidious they were about keeping the ground swept, metal shavings inevitably got caught in the seams and jammed it shut. This door had a sibling she loved to hate.
“Straight up?” Ginger asked.
“Straight up, then let me push. I’ll let you know when to set it down.”
The heavy door took on an amber glow and Ginger let out a short grunt. It slipped up into its frame by barely an inch, just enough for the pins to lift out of the sockets on the other side.
“Hurry up, this thing weighs a ton!” Ginger complained.
It weighed a third of that, but Aurora didn’t think Ginger would appreciate the object lesson. She leaned her recently healed shoulder into the door and pushed. The bottom edge caught the rubberized mats on the other side and she had to extend her legs to force them out of the way.
“Julip, cover your ears! Ginger, shove it over!”
Ginger gasped and shifted her magic to the top of the door, pushing it free of its frame and sending it toppling into the room like a felled tree. Three hundred and some odd pounds of metal slammed flat against the floor with an explosion of noise that shook Aurora’s chest and threw a choking cloud of dust toward the caged pegasus on the other side.
Aurora and Ginger squinted as some of the dust washed back into the stairwell, stinging at both their eyes. Julip arguably got the worst of it, her green feathers dulled with a fine coat of grit as she shielded her face.
“That’s her?” Ginger asked.
Aurora made a face, a little unsure of herself now that she was here. “Yeah, that’s her.”
Julip lowered her wing and watched the two of them approach the cage with distrust. “What the fuck is going on up there? Why the fuck are you back here? And who the fuck is she?”
Ginger pursed her lips into the forced smile Aurora had begun to expect when she was withholding a cutting response. Aurora cleared her throat. “We’re letting you out.”
Julip backed away from the cage, her shattered wing held tightly against her side. “If you open that door, I’ll kill you.”
Energy spiraled up Ginger’s horn and Aurora had to quickly settle a wing over her shoulders to ease her. Ginger looked at her for reassurance. “It’s fine,” Aurora said, and brought the edge of her wing to her teeth. She nipped a feather out with a wince and sat down to work on the old lock.
Julip glared between the two mares in turns before walking to the corner of her cage where the terminal sat, covered in fine dust. She swept it off the screen with her working wing and grimaced as static pulled the dust back in. “I’m not giving you the encryption key. And you didn’t answer my question,” she said, and began pecking at the keys with a primary.
Aurora scraped the inside of the lock with the feather clutched between her teeth. “Whifsh wun?”
“The one about what happened up there,” she said flatly. The fire in her voice was gone now that Aurora had called her bluff. She wanted to get out of here worse than they did. “Either I lost my mind down here or I heard a deathclaw earlier.”
Aurora nodded, gently raking at pins. “Thash mecause I let it here.”
Julip looked up from the screen at Ginger. “You speak ponish?”
Aurora felt the silence settling in the room and glanced up at Ginger. She was staring down at her with deepening concern.
“You led a deathclaw here?” she asked.
The lock clicked. She snapped the end of her feather off inside and gave it a twist. Old hinges creaked as the mesh gate swayed open. Julip looked over her shoulder at the open door and frowned before turning back to peck at the terminal.
Aurora dropped the feather and stood clear of the cage. “Well, yeah. I needed a distraction.”
“Celestia’s sun, Aurora.”
“Kind of hard to believe, given there’s no deathclaw nests around here for miles.” Julip said. The terminal flickered and a black bar began to gradually fill with green. Above it, a simple graphic displayed a sheet of paper fluttering into a trash bin. “Where’d you find it?”
Aurora watched the familiar display screen. “An old restaurant. Delicious Apples or something like that.”
“Red Delicious,” Julip corrected. “That’s Mac’s territory.”
She made a little shrug. “He’s dead now.”
“Doubt it. Mac’s a legend. Been around for at least a century or more,” Julip said. “He doesn’t die, he just gets meaner.”
Aurora tried not to think about that.
The progress bar finished and prompted Julip with a simple Y/N prompt. She pressed a key and the terminal stuttered for several seconds before shutting down. Behind her, the trio of servers ticked off one by one. She stood up and turned around. With a swift kick, her hoof caved in the terminal’s plastic shell and the monitor shattered with a pop.
“I wasn’t kidding about that key,” she said.
Aurora glanced at Ginger for clarification, but the unicorn shrugged. “I have no idea.”
Julip looked between them. “He didn’t send you?”
“Who?”
“The little shit-for-brains Autumn keeps around as her maid. Quincy.”
Aurora frowned at the floor, remembering seeing Quincy cursing into the night like someone had set his tail on fire. “Why would he have sent us?”
“For the same reason Autumn dragged me here,” Julip said. She flicked the terminal’s debris off her hoof and cautiously approached the open gate.
Aurora held out her wing, offering the pegasus the last of Cider’s stimpacks. Julip’s eyes went wide. “Bullshit,” she whispered.
“For your wing,” Aurora added, as if to clarify why she was giving it to her in the first place. “I’m not interested in whatever Autumn was trying to do here. All I wanted to do was fix a mistake.”
She snatched the stimpack out of Aurora’s wing and lifted it close to her nose, squinting at the faded labels printed across the syringe. They waited patiently as she held the glass up to one of the lights on the wall, tipping the liquid this way and that to examine the flow for impurities. Inevitably, she found none. “What’s the catch?”
Aurora shook her head. “There isn’t one. I just didn’t want you to starve down here.”
Julip looked at the two of them, the doorway behind them, and then at the syringe. She sighed and sank the injector into her hip. She hissed through clenched teeth as the medicine went to work straightening the uneven fold of her wing and mending week’s worth of older traumas. When it was finished, Julip carefully lifted her wing. Slender green feathers ruffled against the inside of the mesh as she stretched it to its full wingspan.
Ginger noticed the question on Julip’s face and answered before she could ask it. “Autumn had a stash of them from an early exploit. That was the last one.”
Julip shook her head, unwilling or unable to make sense of a charitable gesture coming from two ponies who owed her nothing. She stepped out of the cage, slowly, and shook her head again as they made room. “I’ll… put in a good word for the two of you when I’m debriefed. It’s the best I can offer in return.”
Ginger thanked her with a polite nod, still visibly uncomfortable being in such close proximity to an agent of the Enclave. Aurora smiled a little more broadly. “Safe travels, Julip.”
“Likewise,” she answered, stepping atop the toppled door and into the stairwell before stopping. She looked back at them as if deciding whether to add something. Whatever it had been, she decided against it and hurried up the stairs.
Ginger waited until Julip’s hoofbeats faded before looking at the ruined terminal she’d left behind. “She certainly knows how to keep her secrets.”
Aurora scanned over the trio of unfamiliar black machines and the thick bundles of faded wires. Somewhere within that purged data had been the coordinates to something Autumn had called Solace. It was a mystery she didn’t have time for, but it didn’t stop curiosity from nibbling at the crumbs she’d been given.
“I don’t think I’d be able to hold out as long as she did,” Aurora agreed. She bent her neck from side to side, enjoying the relief as it cricked. “I think I’m ready to get out of here.”
Ginger sighed and followed Aurora to the stairs. “I don’t suppose we can ride your deathclaw back? I’m not looking forward to the walk.”
Aurora laughed. The first real laugh she’d enjoyed since they arrived at the gate of Blinder’s Bluff the night prior. She couldn’t shake how strange it was that one day could feel like months. As their hooves echoed up the steps, an idea formed in Aurora’s head.
“Actually, I was thinking we could skip the walk,” she said. “How strong is your grip?”
It took ten minutes for Ginger’s chokehold to relax into something approaching a headlock. It took another twenty for her to stop screaming at the abrupt adjustment Aurora made when they passed through the unpredictable crosswinds that the pegasus insisted were weaker than the ones she’d flown in on. It took several agonizing miles for Ginger to believe that she wasn’t going to accidentally slide off the mare’s back and fall into the endless void.
Gradually, reluctantly, she admitted that for a pegasus who hadn’t known how to fly barely a week earlier, Aurora had taken to the skill like a duck to water.
That said, she wasn’t about to loosen her vice grip around Aurora’s neck. Resigned to enduring the trip with as little complaint as she could, she pressed her head between Aurora’s shoulders and watched the rhythmic fluttering of the mare’s outstretched feathers.
An hour into their flight, Aurora turned her head and yelled, “How’re you doing?”
Ginger had to play back the words in her head to make sense of them over the deafening wind. “Better,” she yelled back. “Aren’t you tired?”
“A little,” Aurora said. “Wind’s a lot calmer, though. We’ll make it. Can you see the fires back there?”
She made a face. “Where?”
Aurora laughed beneath her. “Everywhere.”
Ginger didn’t appreciate being laughed at, but the genuine excitement in Aurora’s voice made her curious. She pulled herself forward and peeked over Aurora’s shoulder. Below them flickered a dozen or more points of orange firelight, some close enough to see the long shadows they cast and even more so far away that they barely registered against the black. She imagined this must be what it felt like when the ponies of old looked up at the stars.
“You can truly see everything up here,” she said.
“What?”
“It’s beautiful!” she said more clearly. And she meant it. Watching the fires drifting below gave her a sense of perspective she’d never experienced before. They were all little tribes, hiding around their little lights in the dark hoping to be unnoticed by their neighbors. She felt a pang of grief for something that had never been hers to lose. Philosophizing on why the war happened and what went wrong was grossly out of fashion, but here she lay wondering why ponies who had a beaming future chose to exchange it all for ash and sorrow.
“You okay?”
Ginger nodded against her shoulder. “Sorry, just lost in thought.”
Aurora turned her head to look back at her. “Anything you want to talk about?”
She hesitated, then shook her head. “It’s fine. It’s nothing.”
Aurora’s gaze lingered on her for a moment before she nodded, facing back into the wind.
Something sour twisted in Ginger’s gut. She tried to distract herself with the distant campfire below but her discomfort didn’t subside. Aurora had risked her life and the lives of the ponies at her Stable to save her. And after she failed, she came back again. She lured a deathclaw, a predator twisted into existence by the very balefire that ended a civilization, with no guarantee that her second attempt would fare any better.
The sight of the deathclaw dragging the wreckage of shattered wagons into the warehouse had chilled them both. Mac, as Julip called him, had stared up at them as they lifted into the air. The ground around him looked like the canvas of a painter at the edge of insanity. Bodies - pieces of bodies - lay bent beyond the limits of their anatomy. Sprays of blood covered everything like wild brush marks. The warehouse had been where the carnage came to its gruesome finale simply because Mac had run out of ponies to slaughter. And so when two ponies slipped through the air above him, he looked up and watched.
She had seen an intelligence in the creature’s eyes that belied its bestial reputation. It made her wonder whether Aurora had lured the deathclaw, or if the creature had simply known she would lead him to a feast.
She was grateful when they spotted the caravan of ponies trickling north from the solar array. A few carts had made it out along with dozens of haggard looking ponies carrying little except the skin on their back. Aurora had flown low enough for Ginger to make out the iron glint of collars around many of their necks, easily outnumbering the ponies without.
Ginger’s stomach twinged with guilt. “It’s…” her lip twitched with unsurity. “It’s not nothing, Aurora. I’m sorry I lied to you.”
Aurora glanced back at her. “When?”
She cautiously worked her jaw. “At the cabin. When I told you I didn’t have a mark. You deserved better than that.”
“Autumn said you used to be a slaver,” Aurora hedged.
Shame filled her chest like a ball of lead. She nodded. “I grew up with it. I never stopped to think…” She realized she didn’t know how to finish the sentence. Aurora gave her time to consider her words. The old defenses buzzed around her head like flies and when she recited them in her mind they felt just as worthless. I didn’t know what I was doing. I was too young to understand. It was a long time ago.
They flew through a crosswind and Aurora tipped into a gentle bank to compensate. For a moment Ginger thought she was falling. Her heart thundered against her chest and she took a shaking breath, her mind suddenly clear.
“I never apologized to any of them,” she said. The wind swept her tears away as they formed. “And I never did anything to make up for it. I just pretended it never happened.”
They flew for what felt like hours in the silence that followed. Ginger didn’t know what else to add. Everything that came to mind cheapened the first honest sentiment she’d expressed to anyone other than herself. Aurora simply flew.
“You’ve done awful things,” Aurora finally answered. The words caught her off-guard like a slap. “You’re going to have to own up to that at some point. Make it right.”
Ginger nodded. “I know.”
“The way I see it, you’ve already taken a step in the right direction.” Aurora looked back at her with a warmer smile than she thought she deserved. “You did a good thing. A lot of those slaves have a shot at going free.”
Ginger pursed her lips. “That was mostly you, darling.”
She felt Aurora chuckle more than she heard it. “Learn how to take a win, Ginger. I don’t know a lot about magic, but that shield you made had Autumn shitting bricks and that mare knew how to hit. You did something significant.”
“I know,” she admitted. “I think the stimpacks had something to do with it.”
Aurora turned back into the wind. “Shame we don’t have more.”
“Maybe. I feel like I could do it again without the stim. It’s kind of like… I don’t know. It’s hard to put into words. I could feel how it was supposed to work.”
“Ah, maybe not while we’re flying.”
Ginger smiled. “No, definitely not. I really don’t know how to explain it.”
“Well, let me know when you do. I’d like to hear it. But for right now, if you want to forgive your past you’re going to have to do something with your future.” Aurora’s wings widened as they slipped into a weak thermal, pushing them into each other. “It’s something my dad used to tell me, at least.”
Ginger smiled. “I like him already.”
She felt Aurora shrug. “I was a pretty shitty to him when my mom died. I like to think that if I can keep our Stable from collapsing, I might be able to look him in the eye again.”
“I doubt you need to set the bar that high, Aurora. He’s your father. I’m sure he still loves you.”
“Yeah,” she said thickly. A moment passed, and she cleared her throat, powering over the wave of emotion. “He told me so right before I left. Still doesn’t change the past, though. So I move forward. Same goes for you. You’re going to move forward. No more hiding what you did and no more lying about your mark. First chance you get to negate some of the evil you’ve done, you do it. Deal?”
Ginger tightened her grip around Aurora’s neck. “It’s a deal.”
The next hour went by in companionable silence. Ginger still felt a twinge of guilt for marring what Aurora no doubt intended to be a shared experience with the scars of her own past, but the sting was lessened by Aurora’s own admission. The two were far from equivalent. Ginger knew the road she had to travel dwarfed Aurora’s by comparison, yet Aurora had come from a place of genuine remorse. It was a rare salve that helped more than any prewar chems ever could. For the first time in years, she felt like the future might hold something brighter.
“Hey Ginger?”
Her ears perked up as much as the steady wind would allow. “Yes?”
“When was the last time you saw the sky?”
She quirked her head at what sounded like a nonsense question. The sky was there every day of her life. It wasn’t anything anyone ever bothered paying attention to except for when the odd radstorm moved in. The sky was so unchanging that most ponies forgot about it entirely. You could only see the same endless expanse of clouds before it just blended in with the scenery.
Ginger opened her mouth to ask Aurora what she meant when she saw the pegasus had her nose turned up toward the dimly illuminated masses above them. She watched them with her. They seemed close enough to touch. Then it occurred to her what Aurora meant and her heart quickened.
“Never,” she said. “Not once.”
She felt a shiver run down Aurora’s back.
“Me neither,” Aurora said. “You up for a detour?”
They began their slow ascent toward the dense ceiling of clouds one wingful of air at a time.
Aurora could feel Ginger’s anticipation grow as they drew closer and closer to the billowing black mammoths overhead. Her grip tightened by degrees as the approached, her chest swelling against Aurora’s back as perspective changed the clouds from an amorphous ceiling to a hazy line that divided the world of nightlit fires below and a shifting mass of black above.
They coasted along the hazy edge for a couple miles so that she could rest her wings, slipping in and out of the natural boundary between the cooler layer of air that the clouds had slid across without interruption for two centuries. Even with the remnants of Autumn’s pilfered stimpack in her blood, carrying a passenger this high was hard work and the familiar burn of overworked muscles had returned. Once it subsided enough, she pulsed her wings and took Ginger into the clouds.
The mist wrapped them like a cool blanket. Beads of water formed on Aurora’s nose and her dappled gray coat turned a darker shade as the moisture soaked in. The air felt thicker and her wings were definitely heavier, but the chilling moisture gave her a second wind. Her wings pounded against the damp air, leaving swirling trails of mist in their wake. They slipped higher and higher into what felt like the depths of an impossible ocean in reverse. Aurora started to worry. She could feel the ascent. She knew it was happening. But the unchanging mass of fog gave no clues to how high it went. It occurred to her that she might not be able to do this.
“Ginger, this might’ve been a...”
The words caught in her throat.
As if waiting for its cue, the mist abruptly sank below Aurora’s hooves and the night sky erupted with stars. There, lay before them like diamonds, was eternity.
Aurora’s mouth hung open with awe. Thousands upon thousands of stars glittered in perfect clarity. From one horizon to the other, a breathtaking band of lavenders and pinks clustered dense with starlight hung above them like a lost treasure. To the west, Luna’s moon was well into its descent, the unique geology of its craters forming the mythic silhouette of a mare in crisp detail. Aurora had never seen anything so perfect and pure. Even her father’s gardens paled in comparison to the vast beauty that encompassed them.
The wind changed against her wings and she realized she’d begun to stall. It took a force of will to tear her attention off the night sky - the true sky hidden from the world below by her fellow pegasi - and concentrate on flying again. She dipped back toward the sheet of clouds below and leveled out a few meters above with a flap of her wings, pushing them into a gentle glide.
Ginger shuddered against her and her grip slid from around her neck to her shoulders. Aurora looked back, expecting her to be shivering from the damp. They both looked like drowned rats from the ascent and Aurora already had a few quips ready to lighten the discomfort. What she saw wasn’t anything she expected to see.
Ginger was nearly sitting upright, brought short only by her tenuous grip on Aurora's shoulders. She peered up at the sky with unguarded wonderment, her jaws clenched and her eyes shimmering with windswept tears. She swallowed, gasped, and bit down on the sob that lodged in her throat as she drank in the last vestige of natural beauty Equestria had to offer.
Aurora cleared her throat and faced forward, the stars smearing in her vision.
After several minutes, her swell of emotion seemed to level out. Aurora subtly adjusted to the change in drag as Ginger settled back down between her wings, her forelegs once again weaving together around her neck. Then Ginger leaned forward, close enough for her mouth to brush below Aurora’s ear, and pressed her lips into her cheek.
“You really are something special, Aurora. Thank you.” Ginger said, her eyes lifting back toward the stars. “Thank you for all of this.”
A warmth filled Aurora that made her heart flutter. Her wings beat against the wind a little more eagerly. The aches from the ascent were a distant memory, replaced by something else. Something that briefly pushed the traumas of the day out of focus.
Wrapped by a moonlit vista that generations of ponies had gone their entire lives without seeing, one clutching the other, they flew north together.
Rainbow Dash pressed a blue feather against the rim of her empty glass, tilting it to one side until the remains of her ice clinked. She creased her lip, eyeing the basket of bread rolls. Any more of those and she wouldn’t have room for dinner, if it ever arrived.
As restaurants went, the Brass Bit was generally considered too middle class for the ponies that she knew from the ministry, but Canterlot wasn’t all upper crust and old money. At least, not to the degree that rumors led her to believe back in Cloudsdale. It cost a tall stack of coins to live this close to the castle, that much was to be expected, but as Rarity had recently reflected, there was always less glamorous work to be done and ponies willing to do it.
The owners of the Brass Bit had seen a niche and swooped in to fill it. Instead of serving trendy dishes and gourmet delicacies, they offered dinner without the show. Hayburgers, soups and salads were their specialty, though recently they had put meat on the menu to capitalize on the growing tourist traffic from Griffonstone. Rainbow didn’t have a stomach for the stuff and had to bite her tongue when Jet Stream requested steak.
He sat across from her, smiling with polite neutrality as he sipped from his glass. His tricolored sunset mane was trimmed short, not much different than the stallions she’d trained with on the Wonderbolts. He had requested privacy ahead of their meeting, and a fabric-lined partition normally reserved by larger groups had been rolled across the dining room to accommodate. They had half the restaurant to themselves, which was ideal for the purposes of their meeting. The other half of the restaurant was bustling with the sounds of music, clinking cutlery and conversation. All signs that everyone on the other side of the partition had been served their food.
Rainbow stared at the empty square of tablecloth between her utensils. Her stomach groaned.
“It normally doesn’t take this long,” Jet said, wearing the same half-smile that had spent more time on the front of the Manehattan Times than some of its columnists. JetStream Aerospace had taken Equestria by storm over the course of the last decade, abruptly recategorizing the concept of space exploration from fantasy to reality despite the princesses’ quiet attempts to steer public opinion - and his investors - against the idea. It almost worked, but Jet Stream had caught wind of what was happening and poured his company’s remaining funds into a mad rush to launch something - anything - into space. The move would have bankrupted him and arguably killed Equestrian space exploration in its infancy if it weren’t for his infamous tenacity.
The launch had taken place eleven years ago, in a paved-over swamp south of the glittering lights of Las Pegasus. Not everything had gone right, but that hadn’t been the point. The point had been that not enough things had gone wrong to scuttle the launch. At the end of the day, a radio beacon barely larger than a coffee can was sailing above Equestria at 17,000 miles per hour, its eerie chirp being heard in every village and city the world over.
Jet started to get up. “I’ll see if I can flag someone down.”
Rainbow motioned with her wing for him to sit. They had already commandeered half of their restaurant. Late or not, she liked the food here, and she didn’t want to be known as the ministry mare who complained about their service. “Give it another fifteen. It’ll give us time to pin down some of the terms of your proposal.”
Jet sat back down and flattened his tie across his straw-colored chest. His full attention shifted toward her like a physical weight, the food forgotten. It nearly caught her off-guard and she began to wonder if the unusual delay from the kitchen wasn’t a business tactic meant for that express purpose. She wouldn’t doubt it if it was.
He nudged his water toward the center of the table and leaned into the empty space where his plate should have been. “I’m all ears.”
“My main concern is the cost, Jet.” She picked a roll out of the basket and nipped at the buttery crust. “It’s too much. There has to be a way we can pair that down to something reasonable.”
Jet nodded. “Two billion is the pared down version. Leaving Equestria’s atmosphere isn’t inexpensive, and SOLUS isn’t small. My team expects a minimum of eight launches to bring all the components into orbit. That’s all figured into the budget I sent you.”
Rainbow chewed on the roll, thinking. “How many launch failures is your team expecting?”
“Only one, but we’re hoping for zero.”
She nodded and set down the half-eaten roll before she ruined her appetite. “I imagine you’re accounting for damage to the launch pad and tower in the event of that failure.”
His smile widened. “In fact we are. Are you asking me to remove that contingency from the budget?”
Rainbow returned his smile with one of her own. “I am. Your proposal doesn’t mention a reimbursement for unspent funds, and while I respect what you’ve done to advance Equestrian science over the years, I have a feeling that any money we give you will be spent down to the last bit.”
She could see the gears spinning in his head as he stared at her from across the table. He picked up his bindle of utensils and slipped one of his feathers under the cheap paper strap that held the napkin around them. It split apart with a gentle flick of his wing and he began laying the silverware out onto the table in neat, parallel lines.
“You’ve done your research.”
“Of course I have,” she said. “If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t be here.”
It took a moment for the compliment to register. Jet’s smile softened into something a little more genuine. “Can I assume that means you believe the data we’ve published?”
Rainbow hesitated. Not because she wasn’t, but because admitting it was taboo bordering on heresy. JetStream Aerospace hadn’t shied away from sharing its science with the world, and that included an intensely divisive publication that crowned gravity, mass and momentum the true masters of the sun and moon. It had been a widely debated theory for the better part of the recent century, but the hard data pouring down from JSA satellites offered hard proof that Celestia and Luna, while powerful, were not as powerful as they claimed.
She leaned back in her chair. “Can I assume this conversation doesn’t leave this table?”
Jet nodded. “Off the record. Not as if we were ever keeping one. I’m just curious.”
Just curious. Rainbow admitted she couldn’t think of a more neutral way of telling someone she wanted to know if they had rocks for brains. She offered a half-shrug. “It’s not even a debate. If Celestia could move the sun, she wouldn’t need the Elements of Harmony to defeat Nightmare Moon or Discord. Heck, they wouldn’t need us,” she gestured between the two of them with her wing, “to spend all year managing the weather. The princesses could do that in their sleep.”
Jet picked up his glass and took a sip. “Not to disparage the hard work of Cloudsdale’s finest cloud wranglers,” he said, “but have you had the opportunity to see the wild storms in Griffonstone?”
She shook her head. “I’ve been there, but it’s always been overcast. I’ve only heard of the storms out in zebra country.”
Jet made a face. “Propaganda,” he said flatly. Rainbow blinked surprise at how casually he placed the accusation on Rarity’s doorstep. It wasn’t inaccurate, but it was the first time she’d heard it spoken so plainly outside her own office. “The zebras have their issues, but the Ministry of Image makes it seem as if they’re backwards savages.”
“They worship the stars,” Rainbow offered.
“We worship the sun and moon,” he countered.
She didn’t have an answer to that.
Jet took a deep breath and sighed. “I apologize. I’m not being fair to your colleague or her accomplishments as an Element of Harmony.”
“It’s fine,” she said, waving him off. “Off the record, and all.”
He smiled, but it came short of reaching his eyes. “Thank you. It’s just, seeing the world from up there makes all of this seem so… petty.”
Rainbow’s eyebrows lifted. “You’ve been?”
He nodded. “Only once. Suborbital, a few years ago. We barely left the atmosphere, but it was far enough out to let me see how truly small we all are. I could hide Equestria and Vhanna behind my one hoof. The fact that we’re both willing to die for the other side’s dirt flies in the face of so much logic. That’s why I designed SOLUS in the first place. I want this war to end.”
She quirked her lip and nodded. “You and everyone else in Equestria.”
“And Vhanna,” he added.
She nodded out of politeness rather than agreement. “I’ll be honest, Jet, and this stays strictly between the two of us. The princesses won’t approve anything if it means government bits are flowing your way. You’ve already accused them of propagating a lie that has kept them in power for a millennium. You and I both know EASA is years behind what your people at JSA are doing up there, and they’re not going to want to green-light a project that makes them look worse.”
Jet’s nose wrinkled with irritation. “They would be playing a direct role in ending the war. How does that make them look bad?”
It was a non-question. He knew why, but he wanted her to say it anyway. “Because it makes you look good. I know it’s narrow-minded, and I can’t speak for…”
He interrupted. “It’s childish.”
She lifted her wings in a shrug. “Jet, they’ve ruled Equestria on their own for longer than our history books go. They think that the girls and I broke through Luna’s insanity with the magic of friendship. Why do you think they still look for help whenever these things happen? They’re children.”
Jet stared at her with an expertly neutral expression.
Rainbow felt her pulse quicken. She looked down at the chewed roll sitting in front of her, cursing herself for letting her mouth outfly her brain. She wasn’t sure if what she’d just said broke any laws, but she knew it could easily cost her position in the Ministry.
“I can’t say I disagree.”
She looked up and saw the same concern hung over his face that she felt in her chest. The princesses were easily the two most powerful creatures in Equestria, but they shied away from conflict with almost comical regularity. Except nobody was laughing at this war. It was a tragedy in every sense of the word. Even though the fighting was taking place an ocean away in the east, everyone saw the funerals playing out over the air. This war didn’t have a villain, and the princesses were ill-equipped to deal with it.
She had to work hard to keep the relief she felt from hearing him agree with her off her face. Some of it slipped through anyway.
“I can move some things around with the initial budget. It would be cheaper on the front end but I’d need you to agree to pay for any failures if they do happen, launch or otherwise.”
Rainbow nodded and picked up her glass of ice. She fished out a melted cube with a feather and popped it in her mouth. “It’s a start.”
Jet’s brow furrowed. “That’s my bedrock. I can’t cut anything else.”
That was what she was afraid of. “Do you have an estimate?”
He inhaled slowly and shook his head. “Assuming everything goes perfectly and there’s no mistakes, which has never happened in the short history of aerospace? One point eight billion. One point seven five at the very lowest.”
“Celestia won’t sign off on that.”
“What about Luna?”
Rainbow shot him a frown.
He sighed and ran his hoof through his short-trimmed mane. “So that’s it.”
She almost said yes. The word danced on her tongue for a long while as she thought about what saying it would mean. JetStream Aerospace had been floating the proposal around for half a year, but nobody had bitten. Who would? The cost was astronomical, no pun intended, and it relied heavily on theoretical science and untested magic. He was basically handing out invitations asking for someone to put their wealth in the same basket as a lit stick of dynamite.
But if it worked, it could solve the core issue that started the war in the first place. The dying could finally stop.
Rainbow Dash rubbed the space between her eyebrows and felt her stomach clench. SOLUS wouldn’t get an inch off the ground without funding, and the Equestrian government was the only single body with enough bits to foot the bill. Celestia and Luna would never sign it. Not when it would seem they were bowing to the private industry that had spent the last decade hurling mud at them.
She looked at Jet and took a slow breath. “The Ministry of Awesome can finance it.”
Jet didn’t react, but she could sense a change in his demeanor just the same. “Are you sure?”
Her resolve was already beginning to solidify. Taking risks, especially crazy ones, wasn’t a habit she’d been able to quit. “I’m sure. The princesses shovel bits into my ministry faster than I can spend them at times, and SOLUS technically qualifies as experimental technology. I’d need some time to restructure, though. Three months. Maybe longer.”
“And if the princesses find out?” he asked. “They’ll try to put a stop to it. I don’t want to get halfway to the finish line and be forced to stop running.”
She fished another cube out of her glass and pocketed it in her cheek. “I know how to finish a race.”
He didn’t look convinced.
“Three months,” she repeated. “Maybe longer, but it’s definitely doable. If the princesses do figure out what’s happening, you’ll already have bits in hoof. I’m not technically breaking any rules by helping you, either. Worst case, I lose my job.”
“Worst case,” he said, “you find out where Celestia really banished her sister.”
She shrugged. “Small price to pay for peace.”
Jet chuckled. “Well said. We have a deal, Rainbow Dash.” He held a wing across the table and her smile widened into a toothy grin. She clasped his wing in hers and gave it a firm Cloudsdale shake.
“So, where do we go from here?” she asked, settling back into her chair.
Jet took the opposite route and pushed out of his. “Right now, I’m going to go find out where our waiter went. I don’t know about you, but I’m starving.”