//------------------------------// // The Bomb // Story: More Dreams // by totallynotabrony //------------------------------// Author note: This occurs directly after the events of A Canterlot Wedding, Part 2 The victory party continued long into the night. A few loose ends were tied up, and all of us generally had a good time. Drunken Princesses make great hosts. Unfortunately, the morning sun revealed just how much damage the Changelings had done to the infrastructure of Canterlot. Debris was strewn everywhere. So, the battle-winning combat robots were repurposed as cleanup machinery. “I feel like a janitor,” I muttered from the cockpit. “A highly-advanced robo-janitor, but still...” “Well, somepony needs to do it,” said Twilight, using magic to lift some rocks that had been knocked off the castle walls. “It wouldn’t need to be done if Equestria had its shit together with defense from lovesucking, shapechanging freaks.” I angrily punched a hole in the boulder I was handling with the robot. “But Valiant, we’ve never fought anything like them before,” Twilight reminded me. “Once again, we wouldn’t need to if we had something to stop them.” I paused for a moment, thinking. “Some kind of...deterrence.” “What’s that mean?” asked Apple Bloom as she and her friends came trotting up. The three of them had declined to help with the cleanup effort. “Deterrence is something that makes a pony think twice before making a bad choice,” said Twilight. “That’s a great definition,” I said. “What kind of things like that do you have for national defense?” Twilight thought. “Well...I’m not sure. My brother would probably know more.” “All right, I’ll go find him.” I glanced at the three fillies. “Do you want to take over here?” “Uh...” said Apple Bloom, looking away. Sweetie Belle coughed. “Um...” “I don’t know,” said Scootaloo. “Twilight, supervise them,” I said, climbing down from the robot. “They know what they’re doing with the heavy machinery, but they’re probably the only three ponies in the universe who could make an even bigger mess out of this place.” I found Shining Armor making out with his new wife. They were kind of upset that I interrupted them, but I figured the defense of Equestria would get his attention, since he’d failed so badly at it the day before. “Do you have some kind of national defense plan?” I asked. “What in the world are you talking about?” demanded Princess Cadance. “We don’t get attacked by any regular enemies or organized forces,” Shining said. “It’s kind of hard to cope with all the smaller threats.” “Have I got a deal for you,” I said excitedly. “Check this out: Strategic Nuclear Deterrence.” “What?” he said flatly. “Is this some kind of scheme?” I made a calming gesture with a hoof. “Don’t you worry, I’ll get everything taken care of. Just get me all the uranium you can.” “I don’t-” he started to say, but I was already walking away with a smile. My very own Manhattan Project. J. Robert Oppenheimer would be so proud. A robot went stomping by with a screaming Twilight at the controls. The Cutie Mark Crusaders were gleefully hanging on and shouting advice. I shook my head and kept going. I’d already decided to visit Pony Joe’s shop. This called for a victory donut. Once I got back to Ponyville, I set up a lab in Twilight’s basement. As an earth pony, I figured I might as well be resistant to the radiation from rare earth metals. Just in case, I made sure to wear a lead-lined suit while the work was conducted. Superpowers might be cool, but unplanned mutations are bad karma, man. Speaking of Twilight’s basement, I wondered where she was. Building a nuclear weapon was not exactly a quick process, and I was surprised that she hadn’t disturbed me with all her “ethics” this and “extreme danger” that. As the only pony with enough brains to really understand my explanation of fission, she was the only one in the country who expressed distrust of the new kind of weapon. The actual building of the bomb would have gone a lot faster if ponies knew what the hell U-235 was. I just wanted to make a simple atomic device, not a freaking boosted-yield H-bomb. I stopped my work for a while that night and went outside for some fresh air. I thought I detected a faint glow from the basement windows, but attributed it to being tired. Real great, Valiant. Handling fissile materials while sleep-deprived and no hope for caffeine in sight. Or was there? I couldn’t remember how late the coffee shop was open. I decided to head in that direction. Along the way, I tried to remember whether the masonry shop was open so I could buy a brick to throw through the coffee shop window if it was closed. Purloined espresso, oh yeah. I had no idea what I was going to do if the masonry shop was closed. With a wail of an unhappy unicorn, a robot went whizzing by. I assumed it was Twilight and kept walking. That mare got herself into the darndest situations. The coffee shop turned out to be open, and I spent a few minutes with the trendy ponies who hung out there to read poetry. They thought my line about “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds,” was pretty cool. Refreshed, I went back to the library to work on my little nuke. It wasn’t quite suitcase-sized, so I couldn’t go inventing words and call it a snuke. Twilight would probably throw a snizz-fit if she found out I snuck a snuke into her basement. Oh, snap! When I arrived, a small crowd had gathered. “What’s up?” I asked a stallion who was peering into the windows of the library. “Not sure,” he shrugged. “Somepony said it was the cool thing to do, so I decided to do it.” Confused, I asked the rest of the crowd. I eventually got the story that they had been promised the show of a lifetime by a particular blue unicorn mare. I suddenly got a bad feeling. I kicked open the front door like a badass and stormed down the stairs to the basement. I got tossed back upstairs like a ragdoll by a burst of magic. “We meet once more!” shouted the mare who had blasted me. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” I grumbled, getting up. “The Great and Powerful Trixie does not kid!” she announced, walking up the stairs from the basement with the bomb in tow. The device was incomplete, with wires and junk protruding everywhere, but at the moment even a slight gust of wind could cause the complete destruction of Ponyville. “What the hell do you want with a nuclear weapon?” I demanded. “The Great and Powerful Trixie has no need to tell you!” she said haughtily. “In fact, why are you still here?” Her horn began to glow, and I realized that I was about to be on the receiving end of some kind of spell. Hating spells as I do, I dodged to the side and grabbed some equipment that had been piled in the corner. It was a loose piece of wire mesh and a long grounding cord. It sucked as an improvised Faraday Cage, but I was counting on the element of surprise. I tossed the mesh at Trixie just as she released her spell. It didn’t ground the magic like I had intended because the strap wasn’t secured, but instead seemed to rebound the spell back. With a surprised squeak, she disappeared in a flash of light. The bomb went with her. I heard polite applause from the crowd outside. I shut the window blinds and dropped onto the couch despondently. I had no idea where Trixie had been planning to send me and where she had ended up herself. I didn’t much care, either. The nuke was the big problem. “Broken arrow,” I muttered. The door slammed open to reveal Twilight and the robot. The machine came charging into the library, knocking books off the shelves. “Don’t know which is worse,” I heard her scream. “The fact that you lost it, or that you lose enough of them to have a code name for it.” In spite of the situation, I laughed. Fortunately, Trixie couldn’t stand to be out of the spotlight for too long, and we heard about her latest show within the hour. It was billed as “The Mother of All Fireworks Shows,” and would be held in the desert a little bit west of Appleloosa. “Didn’t you say somethin’ about fallout?” asked Applejack, looking at the showbill flyer. She and Twilight’s other friends had gathered in the library. The unicorn herself was gone again. She’d pleaded for advice to get the robot to stop, but I’d been busy putting together a murder plan to use on Trixie. “Yeah, fallout,” I said. “The westerly winds will probably blanket the town with radiation and kill every living thing.” The mare nodded. “Good. The town ain’t worth nothin’ since the buffalo took over.” “Will there be injuries too?” asked Fluttershy. “Probably,” I told her. “All kinds of animals.” “I’ll bring my medical supplies,” she promised. “So, the land will be bare?” said Rarity. “Nothing to impede the digging up of gems?” “It seems likely,” I confirmed. “Maybe the mother of all fireworks will create the mother of all updrafts!” said Rainbow Dash excitedly. “I bet I could set a new altitude record!” “Sure,” I told her. “Woo! Fireworks!” exclaimed Pinkie. “It’s settled, then,” I announced. “Now we just have to figure out how to get Trixie at ground zero.” That part of the problem proved surprisingly easy to solve. With a burst of traveling music, we all went to Appleoosa. There were signs and flyers pointing the way to the performance, and it wasn’t hard to find the bomb. After that, it was just a matter of calling Trixie out with bait she couldn’t resist. I cleared my throat. “Trixie sucks!” The second part of the problem, getting Trixie to stay with the nuke and setting it off once we were long gone, was a lot more difficult. Trixie showed up in a huff, and while the mares scuffled with her I placed a remote detonator on the bomb. Based on my admittedly unscientific calculations, the transmitter should have enough range to keep us safely outside the blast and fallout zones. Trixie had her shields up, and deflected attacks from Rarity’s magic, Applejack’s kicks, Pinkie’s cannon, Rainbow’s dives, and Fluttershy’s admonishments. I thought it was freaking ridiculous that they weren’t able to be more effective, but this was buffalo land. The superpowered energy or whatever that ponies were able to pull from the Equestrian environment didn’t apply here. It made me kind of sad that I knew that, and hadn’t yet invented a weapon to take advantage. Suddenly, from over the horizon came a storming mechanical machine with a terrified purple unicorn at the controls. As it turned out, that was exactly the push needed to turn the tide of the fight. The robot tripped and fell over, the mare in the cockpit flying out like a cannonball. Twilight knocked Trixie over and the two of them ended up in a pile on the ground. Pinkie grinned and pulled out a camera, taking a few photos while they were still lying on top of each other. “Twixie.” “Twilight Sparkle,” spat Trixie. “Why must you show up at the worst times?” “I’m here to stop you,” said Twilight, her voice tired and hoarse from so much screaming over the past few days. They had a little magical fight. Twilight on a bad day was more than a match for Trixie, so it was pretty one-sided. I’d always wanted to get Twilight trained for combat magic, but held off because I was a little worried that she might use it on me. “Finish her!” I shouted. Instead, Twilight zapped Trixie and she disappeared. “Where did you send her?” I asked, disappointed. “We won’t have problems with her for a while,” said Twilight, tiredly. “But I wanted to kill her! That was the whole point!” I gestured to the remote detonator. “We can still have a fireworks show!” exclaimed Pinkie. “But think of the destruction!” pleaded Twilight to her friends. She turned to me. “Think of how much better this would look if you demonstrated it in front of a government panel. They might want to invest.” Darn it, Twilight was slowly learning how to push my money-hungry defense contractor buttons. I sighed. “All right, let’s pack up the nuke and go home. Twi, get me an appointment with your brother.” A couple of days later, we were sailing on a boat off the coast of Equestria. “Get your towels ready, it’s about to go down,” I said, hoof hovering over the detonator button. Twilight, Shining Armor, and a couple of high level ponies from the government had come to watch the demonstration. The bomb was located on a barge anchored a reasonable distance away. “Stop!” shouted Twilight, looking up from a pad of paper where she’d been scribbling for most of the past few days. “I just checked these calculations. With all the magic this weapon has been exposed to, it could very well be more powerful than expected.” “That doesn’t make any sense,” I pointed out. Twilight shrugged. “It’s magic. It doesn’t have to.” “So how much more yield can we expect?” I asked. “About fifty times more,” she said seriously. I whistled. “Wow, that’s amazing. This is going to be a lot better show than I thought.” She grabbed my hoof as it moved towards the button again. “That much extra power puts us well inside the danger zone!” “Why do we need this thing anyway?” asked Shining. “Most of the threats Equestria faces are from non-state actors, not organized countries with strong militaries.” The dignitaries nodded in agreement. I looked around with surprise. “Are you saying...you don’t want nuclear weapons?” They all nodded. I sat down on deck heavily, my dreams of an atomic arsenal crushed. “Peace through superior firepower indeed.”