//------------------------------// // 8 - Hazard Pay // Story: The Black Between the Stars // by Rambling Writer //------------------------------// “What’s it like bein’ a volunteer?” One of Trixie’s ears went down. “Pardon?” “Bein’ a volunteer,” repeated Applejack. “Or tester or- whatever you’re called.” After only a few moments of walking, Applejack wanted to break up the silence. It sat too heavily. Trixie shrugged. “It’s not much. The labcoats pick a neuromod, inject it into you, and you test the limits of it. A clinical trial usually takes one to four weeks. Trust me, it’s not as interesting as it sounds.” “D’you like it?” “It’s a job, so: not really. It’s all moral, if that’s what you’re asking. We all get free room and board, a salary, and any tested mods we want to keep. Applejack, Princess Twilight comes up here biannually. She would freak if we were treated like lab rats in a bad sci-fi movie.” She lowered her voice dramatically. “And you know what Twilight is like when she freaks.” Applejack nodded. She knew. She waited for Trixie to continue, but Trixie didn’t say anything. Not very talkative or out of things to say about neuromod testing already? Probably the latter. Whenever it came to her skills, Trixie seemed ready to wax poetic about them and dare you to not do the same. Talk about her, and she’d talk for hours. Talk about her job, and you wouldn’t get much, if only because it was boring. A line jumped into Applejack’s mind from a certain file: convicted felon. CelesTech wouldn’t let anypony dangerous on board… would they? Maybe she could find out. “So, uh,” Applejack continued, “how d’you, uh, get t’testin’ neu-” Trixie sighed and rolled her eyes. “If you’re interested in Trixie’s felony, just say so. She knows it’s in her file.” Applejack opened her mouth, ostensibly to protest, but instead said, “Fine. It said you stole somethin’. What’d you steal?” She wouldn’t do anypony any good by trying to figure it out in some roundabout way, and Trixie would probably figure it out eventually. How many other ponies had tried asking her what she’d done without actually asking her? Rather than looking away and lowering her ears, as Applejack expected, Trixie held her head a bit higher and the corners of her mouth actually went up. “Something very valuable. Very, very valuable.” The small smile grew into a full-blown smirk. “Equestria’s crown jewels.” “Wait, what?” Applejack spun around to boggle at Trixie. “That- That was you?” It’d been all over the news for a year almost a decade ago. Crime of the century, or so the news sites said. In fact, once the regalia had been recovered and the pony responsible had been found, the Stellar Thrones had put down a nationwide gag order to prevent anyone from revealing the thief’s name and deny her infamy for her deed. It had worked; she’d been tried, convicted, and sentenced without anypony hearing her name. “That was Trixie, and Trixie alone.” Trixie’s smirk grew even more pronounced. “Performed flawlessly in less than an hour and without anypony getting hurt or even noticing. A good theft, no?” “Um… I guess.” Sure, stealing the crown jewels was impressive, but Applejack didn’t really want to praise crime, even if it was nonviolent crime. But the file had said Trixie was trustworthy and she hadn’t done anything to hurt Applejack, so at least she wasn’t dangerous. “It brought Trixie much satisfaction.” Trixie’s smirk faltered, but only slightly. “And two years in jail before I was paroled.” She drew herself back up. “Still, worth it. Trixie was able to join a security firm to exercise her… ahem, talents in a way less likely to lead to prison. Several years later, she was approached by CelesTech to be the source of some security neuromods and-” “Wait, the source? How’s that work?” “Brain scans. The skills must come from somewhere, no? And what better source than a master thief? Anyway, Trixie accepted and decided to also volunteer for testing. One somewhat boring year later, here we are.” “Huh. I guess there are worse ponies t’get stuck in here with. Like me. I’m a gardener.” Applejack grinned sheepishly. “A gardener who knows guns.” Trixie pointed at Applejack’s shotgun. “Guns that I ain’t got bullets for.” “We’ll raid a security booth. There’ll be one right inside Central Research.” Sure enough, once they passed through a door labelled Central Research and into a hallway just as ransacked as the ones before, they saw a booth for security officers like Rainbow Dash (Applejack twitched; was she still alive?) set into the wall ahead of them. The door was open, so Applejack wormed inside. Just like Rainbow’s booth, it was smaller than a cubicle in there, narrow and everything within easy access of a single swivel chair. On the other side of the booth, a strongbox had been opened and several boxes of shotgun shells were strewn across the counter. Most of them were empty, but two of them were still full and closed, sitting side by side. Applejack reached for the closer one- Two boxes of shotgun shells. Side by side. “Hang on,” said Applejack. Trixie pushed her way into the booth behind Applejack. “Why? What’s wrong?” “Those.” Applejack pointed at the boxes. “One of ’em ain’t right.” “Applejack,” said Trixie in a voice that was only barely holding back a long-suffering sigh, “sometimes there are two of something in the same place. It happens.” “I don’t trust it,” Applejack snarled. She nudged Trixie back and drew her wrench. “Stay back.” “Fine, I’ll get it myself,” said Trixie. Her horn glowed a pinkish aura enveloped the box. “NO!” Too late. The box rattled and exploded into a ball of black goo before it’d risen an inch. It hooked its legs around the edge of the desk, pulled itself from Trixie’s magic, and leapt at them, chittering. Trixie screamed and stumbled backwards, her magic vanishing. “Sweet Celestia, WHAT IS THAT?” she shrieked. Applejack swung the wrench blindly and as best she could in the cramped space, clipping the changeling and smashing it against the wall. It flattened out and rebounded like a superball, again hurtling at Applejack. She pushed backwards, shoving Trixie with her. The changeling landed on the floor in front of Applejack, but as she brought her wrench down in an overhead swing, it rolled away, hopped up onto the desk, and squeezed through the item slot with no problem. It ran off down the hall, deeper into Central Research. “What WAS that?” shrieked Trixie. “You ain’t seen it before? C’mon, we gotta follow it!” Restowing her wrench, Applejack yanked Trixie to her hooves and pulled her down the hallway after the changeling. “What? No, I haven’t seen it!” Trixie yelled as she stumbled. She wrenched her mane from Applejack’s mouth and kept running. “I thought the aliens were these- equinoid things! They looked a little like alicorns, but-” “Well, that thing — Twi called it a changelin’ — that thing’s also an alien and it can turn into anythin’ nearby.” As Applejack watched, the changeling jinked into a room. “Well, that’s just great!” Applejack slid to a stop outside the room and pulled her wrench out. “Short version, if’n y’ever got two or more of somethin’, one of ’em’s pr’y evil. Like twins in bad sci-fi shows.” “Look for suspicious pairs of things.” Trixie’s voice was getting less frantic and panicked. “Okay. Okay, I can do that.” She nodded and pulled out her improvised flamethrower. Applejack nodded back and they barged into the room, weapons at the ready. They were in a wrecked conference room, over a dozen identical chairs set up around a larger table. No other exit from the room. No sign of the changeling. “I’ve only seen one and I already hate them,” Trixie said flatly. “So how do you figure out which one is which?” “…Uh… Smack ’em with somethin’?” Applejack shrugged. “I dunno.” “Oh, perfect. Perfect! We don’t even- Hang on for just a teensy moment.” Trixie stared at her lighter like it held the meaning of life. “Are we actually in a situation where ‘burn everything’ is the correct answer?” She tilted her head. “Huh. I always thought that was the domain of jokes and edgy teens.” “That why you’re carryin’ those around?” Applejack pointed at Trixie’s hairspray and lighter. “Most living things run from fire,” Trixie said defensively, “and these make a lot of fire.” “Sounds about right. But, ehm, don’t go all arson-y on me yet, ’kay? I dunno if the fire suppression systems still-” There was a faint sound, almost like a cat purring. In near-identical motions, Applejack and Trixie plastered themselves with their backs to the wall. To her surprise, Applejack’s hoof wasn’t shaking that much as she raised the wrench. She surveyed the room carefully, looking at each chair in turn, looking for one of them that was out of place or off in some way. It was easier than she thought it’d be. “That one,” she said, pointing. “The only one that’s been knocked over. At the head o’ the table, see? That’s the changeling.” “I’ll believe you,” Trixie said quietly. “Why don’t, um, you figure out if it is?” “Was plannin’ on it.” (Trixie twitched in surprise.) “Get ready to magic it off me if I’m right.” Applejack slid along the wall towards the head of the table, inch by inch, until she was only a few yards from the chair. She swallowed and lunged; when her wrench hit the chair, it caved in like it was papier-mâché. The changeling shrilled in pain as its form unravelled, so Applejack gave it two more thwacks to shut it up. “Got it,” she said needlessly. Wiping slime off her face, she looked up. There were still a lot of chairs in the room. “Think we oughta… test the rest?” “Oh, sure,” Trixie said in a high-pitched voice. “Let’s stay in here, where there are probably other shapeshifting things waiting for us.” She aimed her not-flamethrower at a chair. “It’s not like we can-” The chair next to it jittered. Trixie shrieked and sprayed. A giant plume of fire jumped from the lighter and engulfed the chair; heat blasted out and made Applejack put up a hoof to block her face. Something screamed, screamed like Applejack had never heard before. It was hard to tell if it was Trixie or the changeling. She forced herself to look. The changeling, back in its four-legged form, writhed on the floor, smashing aside other chairs in its throes and tossing burning droplets of liquid about. Trixie shuffled away on her rump, shooting another fireball every few seconds. She hit the wall and reared so it was flat against her back, her not-flamethrower shaking even though she was holding it in her magic. Still the changeling thrashed and wailed. But soon it was over. The changeling went still and… decohered, becoming less of an animal and more of a blob. The burning hairspray flickered, popped, and went out. And there was silence. It had all taken less than ten seconds. “Uh… nice one,” said Applejack. “Thanks!” squeaked Trixie. She didn’t put her tools down. Something in the station creaked. One of the other chairs caught fire. “Guess the fire suppression ain’t workin’.” “I saw a fire extinguisher outside. I’ll get it.” Out, back, spray, and the fire was out. “Thanks,” said Applejack. “Sure.” “…Let’s go back and get me some shotgun shells.” “Yes. Let’s.” “Check the other drawers, too,” Trixie said as Applejack re-entered the checkpoint. “Every good thief knows to look everywhere. There might be goodies in there.” “Really?” Applejack grabbed the closest box of shells and loaded them into her gun with a practiced ease she’d never felt before. “Everythin’s goin’ to Tartarus on a tannin’ rack, and you’re thinkin’ of lootin’ the place?” she asked as she pocketed another two boxes. Trixie rolled her eyes. “Trixie is obviously talking about survival goodies. Medkits, more bullets, maybe just some candy so we don’t get hungry. She stopped thinking about committing theft years ago.” “Right.” The drawers — the ones that were unlocked, anyway — yielded mostly junk: scratch paper, pens, a few bags of Big Bang candy. However, Applejack did what she thought was a tiny stun gun. It was only a few inches large, cylindrical, and had a set of nasty-looking prongs on one end. She pulled the mental trigger and tiny bolts of lightning arced between the prongs. Well, maybe the batteries would be worth something. She stuffed it and a pile of spare power cells into a pocket. When Applejack walked back outside, the increased weight of her loaded shotgun was weirdly comforting. She wouldn’t have felt that way before; a side effect of the neuromods? But she had protection and that was what mattered. “So, d’you know where Time Turner’s office is?” “Ah…” Trixie rubbed the back of her neck and looked away. “No.” Applejack could’ve rolled her eyes, but she didn’t want to get Trixie’s morale down at all. “Alrighty then,” she said casually. “Let’s get lookin’.” She marched forward into Central Research as if she knew what she was doing. Almost immediately, she came to an intersection, with one hallway each going straight, left, and right. The changeling had led them down the right hallway. None of the halls looked particularly different from one another, but the boardroom implied executives of some kind, so- “Which way d’you wanna go?” Applejack asked. “I vote right. Whenever we come to a branch, we keep goin’ right.” “Sounds good,” said Trixie. She whirled around and held up her flamethrower. “Tell me if you hear anything, okay?” “Yep.” By now, Applejack wasn’t surprised at the state of the hallways. Gashes dug into the walls and floors and she was a-okay with it. Or at least not shaken by it. Most of the room placards were still up, so she didn’t need to look in every single room they passed. A small lab, a small lab, a conference room (the conference room they’d just been in, as a matter of fact), another small lab… They turned a corner and were immediately confronted with a security door that had been forced open, violently, from the other side. The metal itself had been bent outward and a hole ripped clean through to give its users passage. And on the frame above: Changeling Containment — Authorized Personnel Only. Applejack came to a stop when she saw that sign. This must’ve been where everything had started. Where the changelings had gotten free. Was going in there safe? What if the entrance to Time Turner’s office was in there? What if there was something else in there? Other ponies? More changelings? Whatever Trixie had seen? Something nopony had experienced before? Trixie, glancing over her shoulder, bumped into Applejack. “Hey!” she squawked. “Why did you- Oh.” She stared up at the sign and swallowed. “Um. Hmm.” “What d’you reckon?” Applejack asked. “Well. Um.” Trixie tugged at a lock of her mane. “I… think that… Twilight had said that changelings were discovered four months ago, right? So they weren’t originally planned for. Or maybe Time Turner also took up changeling analysis. So there’s a chance that maybe his office is in there, so we kinda have to… y’know, go in, but once we do, we should be very careful about what we do.” The problem of doing things without a plan was that you had no plan for when things weren’t going your way. Applejack wanted very much to turn around and nope it right on out of there. But if that was where their office was, she was only delaying the inevitable. But if the office wasn’t there, what was the point? But if- “How ’bout this.” Applejack raised her gun. “I go in first, just a little, and see what it’s like. If it’s bad, we skedaddle.” Trixie stress-laughed. “Heh. ‘Skedaddle.’ Who says-” “I do. If it ain’t bad, we search it, stickin’ together, no matter what.” “Okay, uh, that sounds good. I’ll… keep watch, okay?” “Right.” Applejack kept her shotgun up and awkwardly shuffled three-legged towards the door. After five seconds that lasted for ten minutes, Applejack stuck her head in through the hole. On the other side, the lab was worse than she could’ve imagined. It was clean, spotless, sterile. Normal. Untouched. No sign of any changelings or bodies. No debris. It was like everypony had just got up and left for the day. She squinted around. No suspiciously-paired objects. No dead bodies. Nothing. She took a step back and looked at the label for the room again. Changeling Containment — Authorized Personnel Only. But if this was where they’d escaped from, then why did it look so… not-escaped-from? Applejack hesitantly clambered through the hole. Nothing jumped out at her and the room didn’t look any different. In fact, it looked even more like a perfectly ordinary lab. Something wasn’t right, but she didn’t think the place was dangerous. Was it? “You can come in,” Applejack called out to Trixie. She swept her gun across the room; nothing moved. “I think.” “You think?” Trixie inched her head inside and frowned. “Oh.” She climbed on through, walked up right next to Applejack, and waved her flamethrower about. “So what gives? This is where it all started, right?” “You’d think so.” Applejack examined the room more closely. This main section wasn’t too big — she could see a door back to the rest of the hallway on the other side of the room — but another door was on the side wall, leading Celestia-knew-how-much-deeper in. Most of what was here was workstations, computers, centrifuges, instruments she didn’t recognize. Nothing that could hold a changeling. No offices, either. “But if changelings weren’t known when Golden Oaks was made, how-” “Some of the staff up here are… basically construction workers,” said Trixie. She didn’t lower her flamethrower. “Time Turner told me once upon a time. Since CelesTech doesn’t know what we’ll be studying next, the labs are built on the fly as needed. There’s a lot of empty modules and spare material down in storage and a new lab can be built in about a week. Usually less.” “Huh.” Applejack hadn’t heard that before. She probably would’ve found it more interesting if she hadn’t been in the middle of an alien invasion. Her gaze fell on the side door. “We’re goin’ in there.” She pointed at it, though the only other way out was hard to miss. “But not real deep. I don’t think Time Turner’d be that far back and…” She looked around again and tried to ignore the way her coat stood on end. “…and I don’t like the look o’ this place.” “You and me both,” Trixie muttered. The door was unlocked. Beyond was a narrow hall, not quite as pristine as the lab, but still in far better shape than the rest of the station. It had some scuff marks on the floor and walls, not much more. Even the lights looked untouched. On either wall were more doors, all without keypads. Applejack tested the first one without looking at the plaque. Unlocked. She leaned in and- “Sweet granny in a hickory bush.” It was another, more personal lab, with a specific apparatus set up. It looked like it was for testing light, but Applejack wasn’t sure; she couldn’t tell one end from the other, much less describe it. Wires ran across it to all sorts of little machines and computers that controlled this or that function or whatever. That wasn’t what caught her eye, though. No, what caught her eye were the sticky notes. The sticky notes stuck to just about every available surface or object, from hard drives to lenses to coils of wire to an abandoned water bottle. The sticky notes that all, every single one of them, read, “Not a Changeling.” Well, if you’d been having changeling troubles in the past, that was one way to go about it. It made the user of this lab look stir-crazy, but it worked. A quick look-over; nothing was duplicated. In fact, even the same sorts of items had different designs from each other, with this crocodile clip being a different color than that one. Probably deliberate. Once she got over the initial shock of seeing it, Applejack couldn’t help but chuckle. It was so surreal, that was pretty much the only response available to her. Trixie, however, wasn’t as sure. Frowning, she said, “Is this room safe?” “Trixie, look at it.” Applejack gestured into the room. “Everything’s labelled. There ain’t no changelings. Somepony really kept track o’ all this.” “Are you sure? How do you know one of those ‘Not a Changeling’ notes isn’t a changeling?” “Well, I… Hmm.” Applejack looked at Trixie. Trixie looked at Applejack. They both looked at the room filled with notes. The room filled with identical notes. “BURN, YOU BASTARDS!” Trixie shrieked, spraying the makeshift flamethrower everywhere. “BUUUUUUUUUURN!” Once the fires were out, the pair found twelve changeling corpses all told. The lab was trashed, but oh well. Changelings were dead. Trixie nudged the leg of one of the bodies. “Do you think they’re intelligent?” she asked. “Or just animals?” “Dunno.” Applejack was already heading down the hallway. “Pr’y just animals.” “But…” Trixie trotted up to Applejack. “Don’t you think that maybe-” “Trixie, far as I’m concerned, it don’t matter. I just wanna find Time Turner so we can read that email and figure out what Twi and I wanted to do. They’re in the way.” Trixie opened her mouth to protest, then shook her head and kept walking. After a moment, her ears suddenly went up. “Wait,” she said. Her voice was a bit quiet, like she was thinking aloud. “Changelings can only copy nearby things, right?” “As far as I can tell.” Applejack thought that if they could copy other, less suspicious things, they would; it’d be harder to find them. “So in order to copy a ‘Not a Changeling’ note, there had to be a note in the first place.” “Okay…” Applejack came to a door, looked at the sign: Changeling Observation Room. Worth a quick look. She pushed the door open and peeked inside. Nothing immediately suspicious. “Which means the scientists were having problems with changelings beforehoof.” “You goin’ somewhere with this?” The observation room was long and thin, running parallel to the hall. Desks and computers lined the wall closest to the corridor, while a long containment chamber was set against the opposite side. Its walls were glass for easy observation — or at least, had been, since one of the inch-thick panes had been smashed to bits. Glass shards still lined the floor of the containment chamber. Some sort of venting or piping was in the back wall, plenty big for a changeling. If that was connected to some sort of habitat, then this must’ve been where the changelings got out to begin with. Huh. Kinda plain for that. “But none of the other problems led to a mass changeling breakout,” Trixie continued. “So why now?” “Don’t know, don’t care,” said Applejack. Why was Trixie so focused on this? She stepped out of the room. “We got-” Then she realized what she’d seen. She ripped the door open to confirm it and her throat went dry. “Son of a-” No. This couldn’t be right. Something was wrong. But she knew what she was seeing, and she knew she wasn’t wrong. “Son of a what?” Trixie into the observation room and looked over Applejack’s shoulder. “What’s up? I want to see what’s up!” Applejack pointed at the remains of the containment chamber. She tried to talk, but the words didn’t come. Trixie got it almost immediately. “Oh.” She took a step back. “That’s what’s up.” The glass shards were resting on the inside of the chamber. Glass that had been broken from the outside. Glass that had easily held the changelings. A pony had let the changelings out.