I picked up the armored sleeve and shook it gingerly. Bones and dust fell out, rattling against the floor. I was rapidly becoming less okay with what I was doing. When a pony died, the body was just a thing. It wasn’t anything special or sacred, because the special part had gone on to whatever came after.
Or at least that was usually the case.
“If it helps, I’m giving you permission to desecrate my corpse,” Destiny joked.
“That isn’t actually comforting at all,” I said, my head still pounding. The pain got worse every time I moved my head, or exerted myself, or walked around, or did basically anything at all. I needed to lie down somewhere and just rest, but that subtle vibration in the deck under me was a good reminder that I didn’t even have time to be dead right now. I needed to keep moving.
“The size controls are near the wrist,” Destiny said. The button was highlighted in my vision, a red light surrounding it. "Tap twice to reset to maximum size, then once you have it on, once to shrink-fit."
“Thanks,” I said. “But I remember what to do.”
“You remember?” Destiny asked. “There are only a few suits like this in the world, unless somepony went and started mass producing them while I was gone.”
“I saw you putting it on in the… memory… thing,” I said.
“Oh, the Remembrancer. It was sort of an improved recollector. You saw my last log?”
I almost nodded, but there was a good chance that would make my brains fall out, and I remembered just in time to stop myself.
“Then you know more about the current situation than I do,” Destiny said. “How rude am I being? Wow. I didn’t even ask for your name and here I am talking your ear off just because I’ve been stuck alone and dead for way too long.”
“It’s Chamomile,” I said.
“Like the flower? Easy to remember. Good name. Sorry if I’m chatty. I haven’t even had a decent conversation in… it has to be years. How long has it been?”
“Been since what?” I asked, half-distracted as I tried to figure out what to do with my wings.
“Hold on, let me--” A status window opened up in my vision, and I saw a few menus pop by in rapid succession before the armor changed in my hooves, small blue plates sliding against each other into a new configuration, letting my fit my wings through. “There we go.”
“Nice,” I said, moving a wing carefully to check the range of motion.
“When BrayTech builds something to be one-size-fits-all, we mean it,” Destiny said proudly. “But how many years has it been since the bombs fell? Is the war over?”
“Oh. Well, uh…” I hesitated.
“It’s okay, I can take it. I know I was stuck there for a long time keeping the SIVA core contained. Five years? Six? I was sort of comatose for almost the whole thing.”
“More than that,” I said.
“Ten?”
“More like… a hundred. And seventy-nine.”
I could feel the ghost stunned to silence.
“I usually just call it two centuries,” I added, trying to fill the silence. “Sorry.”
“Almost a hundred and eighty years and… nopony came to get me?” Destiny asked weakly.
“Hey, your ship is buried in a volcano, cut us some slack!” I said. “Besides, it’s not like it’s been a good couple of centuries. I mean, better for us up here than down in the wasteland, but still.”
“The zebra won, didn’t they? I knew we should have struck first, but--”
“I don’t think anyone actually won the war,” I admitted, fitting the last of the armor into place. “I think everyone lost.”
“That’s a depressing thing to say,” Destiny sighed. “Two hundred years…”
“Sorry.”
“What you should be sorry about is unsealing the SIVA core,” Destiny said, her voice becoming more determined. “I did all that work and you had to go and muck it up!”
“It’s not my fault,” I protested weakly. “I got shot trying to stop it! Basically. Sort of. I tried to talk Mom out of it.”
“Family always makes things difficult,” Destiny said. “Okay, that’s the last piece of the suit. How does it feel?”
“Heavy,” I said, trying to adjust the weight across my shoulders.
“It’s going to take a while for it to come online. The fusion core got drained pretty badly maintaining the thaumoframe. I was wondering why it was so low, but if it’s really been that long since the war…” Destiny trailed off. “Anyway, I’m bringing the rest of the medical suite online.”
“Thaumoframe? You know what? Explain it later. My head hurts too much already.”
“No problem, chief. Speaking of which, try not to get shot in the head again. There’s two of us in here now. I patched it up as best I could, but I had to improvise a little.”
That sent a shiver down my spine. “Improvise?”
“I’m a rocket scientist, not a brain surgeon,” Destiny said defensively. “But I’m sure I got everything right when I reattached things. It's basically as simple as plugging things in as long as you have the right parts.”
“You were messing around in my brain?!”
“Okay, look. You were dead, and now you’re alive enough to worry about how much brain damage you might have!” Destiny huffed. “I think I did a great job. If anything, the new parts should make you even better at math.”
“New parts?!”
“Technically new to you, but that's good enough. Speaking of which, you know you’ve got an unprogrammed SIVA infection, right? I didn’t even know that could happen. I think as long as you’ve got the armor running I can run a local suppression field to keep it from doing anything unexpected.”
“Can you do anything about the pain?” I asked.
“Sorry, the suit’s medical supplies are zero,” Destiny said. “It must have used everything trying to keep me going as long as possible. It’s probably for the best I don’t remember much after setting up the barrier. There's a low-level healing talisman running now that's keeping you stable, but some healing potions would go a long way to making sure you don't fall apart on me.”
“So if I get more medical supplies you can do something?” I asked.
“Sure. I can direct you to the medical bay if you think you can walk that far.”
“It’s even further than you think,” I muttered, looking around slowly. The lighting was all messed up. Whatever had happened while I was out, it had taken most of the decent light with it. There were just a few working, flickering bulbs, but what I wanted to find was designed to be spotted easily.
I made my way to the wall after spotting the red-edged panel.
“Oh right, the supply caches,” Destiny said. “Good thinking, Chamomile!”
I grunted and yanked at the edge with my good hoof. It came away easily, popping off the wall. Inside were a few tools and what I really wanted to see - a first-aid kit. I opened it and looked at the potions, then realized I had absolutely no way to drink them with the helmet on, and taking it off still didn’t seem like a great idea.
“Uh…” I hesitated.
“Hold on, let me get the vector trap online,” Destiny said. Windows popped up, and I saw her make more selections.
“What’s a vector trap?”
“It’s something we developed that makes saddlebags look last century. Or… last three centuries, I guess. Watch this.”
Indicators flashed green, and the kit and its contents disappeared from my hooves.
“What?” I blinked in surprise, which actually hurt. I was in really rough shape.
“They’re in your vector trap. It’s an area of space linked to the suit that loops vectors and routes space around it like a-- you know what? You just had brain surgery. From somepony who was a rocket scientist. You don’t want the math. It’s a magic teleporting backpack. Makes pipbucks look like the obsolete junk they are.”
“Teleporting backpack,” I nodded. I could just about understand that.
“And the suit can access anything inside the vector trap. I’m adding the medical supplies to the suit’s supplies, and you should start feeling better right away. A few healing potions and a little Med-X will perk you right up.”
She was right. The effect was almost instantaneous. I felt something tickle my neck, there was a pneumatic hiss, and the pain cranked down by an order of magnitude.
“That’s a lot better,” I sighed.
“Great! Now, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but we’ve wasted a lot of time getting you in fighting shape. I don’t know how much longer the Exodus Blue is going to hold together, and I’d rather both of us be somewhere safer when it finishes falling apart.”
“You make a lot of sense for a dead pony,” I said. And because my head was starting to clear up, I grabbed the largest wrench in the toolkit behind the panel, hefting it in my hooves.
“Are you an engineer?” Destiny asked.
“No, but I’m pretty sure I can fix any problems we might run into with this thing.”
“And you can’t just fly over the lava?” Destiny asked.
“My wings are clipped,” I said, pulling myself up the ladder in the heavy armor. So far she’d managed to get a few sensors online and not much else, so I could tell the lava below me was slightly radioactive. She’d promised me that was normal, even before the war. The heat was crawling up my back, and the armor was getting itchy with my sweat.
“I’m surprised the healing potions didn’t do anything about that,” Destiny muttered.
“It was done by an expert, so he probably knew how to keep them from growing back.” I paused, hanging onto the ladder. “Did you hear that?”
“The audio sensor picked it up. It’s coming from up ahead. Be careful. I’ll focus on trying to get something more useful than the compass online.” The ghost’s voice cut out, and I made my way up the last length of the ladder, ears peeled.
Yeah, that sure did sound like somepony shuffling around up there. I peeked over the edge. I saw somepony shuffling around in the dim emergency lighting. The overhead lamps were out, but strips along the walls were working in flickering pulses, giving me a glimpse of what I was looking at.
It was a pony in powered armor, or at least what was left of it. The armor had been torn open and I could see gunmetal silver underneath mixed with the angry red of infected flesh. The pink and yellow patch on his shoulder stuck out. It was the medic who’d helped me before. Or what was left of him.
He looked like he was being dragged around like a puppet and was trying to fight it, twitching and pulling in one direction before being yanked the other way.
“Please… help me…” he moaned, his voice distorted.
I pulled myself a little more up the ladder, trying to stay out of sight, but before I could act one of the wall panels fell down, and Quattro rolled out into the open from the space behind it, holding a pistol in her teeth.
The infected medic turned to her and lunged, its motion stuttering in time with the three thunderous bangs as Quattro shot it at point-blank range. A fourth shot ended with a click instead of a bang, and Quattro threw the gun at the still-approaching horror to even less effect than the bullets had had.
“Run away!” the monster rasped.
That seemed like my cue. I clambered up the rest of the way and abandoned any attempt at stealth, roaring to get the former medic’s attention. He turned from Quattro and looked at me. I brought the heavy wrench down on his head, cracking the helmet and sending him stumbling, but not down. A second and third blow put him on the ground.
“He was tougher than he looked,” I said, panting with the effort. I don’t know if it was the steel shell I was wrapped in or the head wound, but that had really winded me.
“Chamomile?” Quattro asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “Looks like things got worse while I was unconscious.”
Quattro stood up and brushed herself off, nodding. “A lot worse. I’m guessing your Dad was right about that armor having some kind of built-in life support?”
“Seems like it saved my life,” I confirmed. “I don’t think I want to take it off until I can get a doctor to look at my head.”
We both looked at the fallen medic.
“A different doctor,” I said. “This one is broken. What even happened?”
“When the shield went down, a monster came out,” Quattro said. “That little shining swarm started growing and turning into something awful.”
“Cool, cool, no wait, not cool,” I said. I was admittedly still swimming a little from the Med-X. It was like a nice happy sweater around my brain that was keeping the pain away. “That doesn’t explain him.”
“It ripped right through the soldiers on its way out.” Quattro nodded to the torn armor. “It didn’t really seem to care about us as long as we weren’t in the way, but the ones it took out didn’t stay dead, either.”
“Did it… are my mom and dad…?”
“Good news about your dad, he’s fine, last time I saw him. We got separated, but the plan is to meet up at the docks.”
“And my mom?”
Quattro shook her head. “She was standing right in front of it when the shield dropped. It went for her first.”
I swallowed and nodded. At least it had probably been fast.
“Anyway, this whole place is coming apart. When that devil woke up it started eating up all the nanometal.”
“That doesn’t seem bad. That stuff was dangerous.”
“It was also the only thing holding some walls together. You saw the lava down there,” Quattro nodded back the way I’d come. “We have to hope there’s still a way back to the surface.”
“I have a working compass in this thing, maybe I can keep us pointed in the right--”
The fallen medic moaned, and that was the only warning I got before he started getting back up, the tail-sting lash on the powered armor whipping for my chest. I was too slow to stop it. There was a shower of sparks when it scraped against the blue plating over my ribs, trying to find purchase.
“Much tougher than he looks!” I yelled, grabbing the tail before it could find some way inside and using it as a lever to throw the medic’s broken body over the edge I’d come from. He screamed all the way down to the lava. It was probably a mercy.
“They’re not easy to keep down forever,” Quattro said. “We need energy weapons. Something to burn the bodies, otherwise the infection just props them back up. Speaking of which… are you going to be okay?”
“Huh?” I asked, confused for a second.
Quattro looked significantly at my right forehoof.
“Oh, right,” I said. “Well, uh… I think so? Probably? I’m okay right now.”
“She’ll be fine as long as she’s wearing the armor,” Destiny cut in.
“Woah, what was that?!” Quattro demanded, taking a step back.
“A ghost,” I said. “She’s friendly.”
“I’m running the suit for her, and I did a little brain surgery. I’m very talented!” Destiny said.
“Every time she talks the eyes on the armor flash,” Quattro said. “That’s so weird…”
“If it’s weird for you, imagine how it is for me,” Destiny said. “Anyway, the armor should keep Chamomile safe. It’s designed to create a telekinetic field around the user to boost strength without the need for the heavy equipment in Steel Ranger armor. I don’t have everything online but I’m using the T-field sheathe to broadcast a local signal that’s keeping the SIVA from spreading, and locking out control from outside.”
Quattro nodded along. I only understood about half of what Destiny said, but the rebel mare seemed to get a little more out of it.
“So you’re a glorified tinfoil hat right now,” Quattro said.
“I’d like to think I’m more than that, but if you want to be rude about it…”
“Wait, you said it boosts strength,” I said, catching up belatedly. “How come it feels so freaking heavy, then?”
“I had to prioritize something. The armor can’t do everything at the same time, and it was either keep you from being in agony and controlled by a chunk of out-of-control tech, or making you a little stronger,” Destiny said sharply. “If you want, I can switch those around and you can be a super-strong armored zombie.”
“I, for one, am okay with things how they are,” Quattro noted.
“I’ll, um, I’ll let you make the decisions,” I muttered. “Don’t blame me, I got shot in the head today!”
“If we can find our way out, I heard the soldiers saying there was a Raptor that could get us out of here,” Quattro said. “Does your new spooky friend know her way around this ship?”
I could feel Destiny’s smug radiating across the veil between life and death. “I helped design it.”
“I’ll take that as a big yes.”
Destiny was kind enough to highlight the supply panels we missed along the way. Unfortunately, while they had a decent amount of ancient medical supplies and spare parts, nopony had the foresight to put guns in any of them.
“I’m just saying they’re good emergency supplies.” I tossed a box of fuses and lightbulbs behind me, looking around behind it to see if it had been hiding anything we could actually use.
“Our psychological studies suggested that if ponies were trapped onboard a ship for years at a time, giving them easy access to firearms was a really bad idea,” Destiny said. “Look at how bad it went even without ponies going around shooting each other.”
“What did happen, anyway?” Quattro asked.
“My brother reprogrammed the SIVA and tried to turn it into a weapon. He couldn’t do much but… he managed to twist the protocols we designed for disaster recovery. As far as I can tell it thinks it can only fix Equestria by getting rid of anypony and anyzebra who might start the war again.”
“Lovely,” Quattro said. “And it has some way to do that?”
“Who knows? It’s been undergoing self-evolution for almost two hundred years. If it wasn’t trapped in a bottle there’s no telling what it would be like, but it’s definitely making up for lost time.”
The deck shook under us again, and I felt it tip back the way we came.
“The nanometal must have been doing more than just keeping the walls together,” Quattro said. “It feels like a cloud house that lost its foundations.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “One wrong move and it’ll turn over.”
“I’ll try and find you a faster route,” Destiny said. “I’ve been trying to take us through Medical but every path seems blocked.”
“Medical is in the other half of the ship,” I said. “We can’t get there from here! It’s on the other side of the mountain!”
“...Oh,” Destiny said, her voice growing somber. “I didn’t think the Exodus Blue was in that kind of shape. Let’s try this way, then. Take the next right.”
I kicked the vent out and dropped down, looking around.
“Oh hey! I know where we are!” I said. “This is where I fought that big robot!”
Quattro dropped down next to me, glancing around at the steel tubes stacked in rows across the massive room.
“I know this is asking a lot, but we need to wake up as many of the sleepers as we can,” Destiny said. “We have to evacuate them. They didn’t ask for this. They thought they were going to take a nap and wake up with everything back to normal.”
“Can we even do that?” I asked, walking over to one of the tubes.
“Lean in closer to the controls,” Destiny said. “My range is pretty limited right now. I’m burned out in more than one way.”
I nodded and got in close to the control panel. I guessed she needed the helmet sensors to read what was written on the buttons, but she surprised me. A red glow appeared around a few buttons and switches, flickering and just barely hanging on long enough to manipulate them.
“That was harder than I thought it would be,” she said, her voice fainter. “Okay, now all we have to do is--”
The tube slid open, and with a pneumatic hiss of releasing pressure and a cloud of condensation, bones slid out onto the floor, the mummified remains of a pony just barely holding them together in one piece.
“Oh no,” Destiny gasped.
“I don’t think any of these have worked in a long time,” Quattro said, her voice low. “I’m sorry.”
Destiny was quiet for a moment.
“I can try another one,” I offered.
“No, if it broke this badly, the whole system is bucked,” Destiny said. “I just thought… I thought when I was done, I’d have my Dad and my friends there to thank me for saving the world. What does any of it matter now?”
“We’ve got to save the ponies we still can,” Quattro said. “We can’t save everypony, but we can save somepony and that’s enough.”
“...Yeah, you’re right,” Destiny agreed, after a moment. “Too bad you’re not in this armor. You seem like you’ve got a good head on your shoulders.”
“Chamomile is even better,” Quattro said, and I blushed at the compliment for the few moments before it turned into a quip. “She’s got plenty of extra room up there for you.”
“Owch,” I muttered.
“I’m just joking,” Quattro said. She turned and nodded in the right direction. “We know the way from here. The entrance to the mines should be back that way.”
“Oh that’s just lovely,” I whispered. Whatever kind of devil the SIVA core turned into, it must have gone right through the prison block. I guess there weren’t a lot of other options -- for some reason there weren’t a ton of ways to the surface for the prison slaves to use. Most of the security doors were torn off their hinges, the tunnels in the mine were so precarious it was literally a miracle they’d held up this long, and now that we’d gotten to the prison proper, it was a slaughterhouse that hadn’t figured out how to stay dead.
These zombified ponies weren’t wearing powered armor, but they were growing metal carapaces probably just to be difficult about the whole thing. They were all down on the lower level where the prison cells lined the walls, each one a metal box slapped into place as quick and dirty housing for… probably not a lot of survivors, at this point.
“How many do you count?” Quattro whispered. “I see six.”
“Seven,” Destiny corrected. “One isn’t infected, though.”
“Where?” I asked. The HUD outlined a pony sitting in one of the cells, trying to keep away from the bars. Two of the infected were at the door, trying to tear the bars free and get to her, like rabid animals that just wanted to kill.
“What’s the plan?” I asked.
“You’re the one with the fancy gear,” Quattro said.
“And brain damage. You make the plan this time.”
“First part of the plan is figuring out how we get out of here,” Quattro said. “Look.”
She pointed across the room. The tunnel we’d been marched down to get in here from the outside had already collapsed, so I wasn’t entirely wrong about things being unstable. It didn’t make sense, though -- why was that caved in when the ceiling above us was less supported and seemed intact?
“What about those doors?” I pointed to a set of security doors off to the side.
“They’ve got to lead somewhere,” Quattro said. “But they’re probably locked.”
“Can you pick locks?”
“I’m a dangerous rebel, did you forget? I can do all kinds of illegal things.”
“So you get to work over there, and I figure out a way to rescue the pony stuck in the cell?”
“I’ve got a thought about that. You might not like this idea, but they’re going to have a lot of trouble actually getting through your armor. They’re bloodthirsty, but the worst they’ve got are two shovels,” she pointed at the armed infected. “You see that space there, between those cells?”
I nodded when she pointed.
“They’re all going to come running when they see you. If you back up in there, they’ll come at you one at a time. I don’t think they’re smart enough to do anything except run right at you. Even if all you have is that big wrench you can take them.”
“It’s not the worst plan I’ve heard today,” I said. Since the plan was that I threw myself at a bunch of crazy half-metal monsters that were begging for death and probably wanted to wear my skin, the statement said a lot about the other plans that I’d been involved with.
I tried to hop down lightly. With clipped wings and wearing powered armor with most of the power turned off. It was probably the loudest landing any pegasus has managed that didn’t involve a crater, and the impact made my knees feel like jelly. Painful jelly.
“Not as graceful as I was hoping for,” Destiny said.
“Everypony’s a critic,” I groaned. “Hey, jerks! Over here!” I waved to what had been the other prisoners and they started lurching towards me, pleading for death or just sobbing in pain as they stumbled on their swollen, broken hooves.
I backed up into the narrow space between the cells and waited for the first infected to get close enough to smack him with my wrench. He went down with two blows, the first staggering him and the second putting him on the ground. The next came, and went down just as easily. The two that had been pounding on the cell on the other side of the room stumbled in one after another. It wasn’t any trouble at all, really, as long as I didn’t think too hard about what I was doing, that I was beating ponies to death.
Infected ponies begging for me to finish them off. I don't know if that made it easier or harder. What definitely made things harder was that they refused to stay down for good!
The first pony got back up. I obviously hadn’t hit him hard enough. So I put him down again. And by then the second and third ponies I’d downed were starting to stir.
“They don’t stay dead!” the pony in the cell yelled. I looked up, and with the zombies out of the way I could see who it was. Emerald Sheen.
“I figured that out, thanks!” I said.
“Chamomile?” she asked. “Is that you?”
“Yeah! I’m not dead right now! You’ve got a laser rifle, can you please disintegrate these ponies?!”
“I was doing that until I ran out of ammo,” she said. That explained the piles of ashes scattered around. “I’d have twice as much, but I let somepony borrow a rifle and they broke it!”
I couldn’t imagine who would be that thoughtless. Borrowing a valuable weapon and using it like a club just to avoid being killed. So selfish of me.
“Sorry,” I said.
“I can’t get this door open!” Quattro said. “It’s not a standard lock. It needs some kind of security code!”
“I have the code for the door,” Emerald said. “We can all escape if you help me out!”
Well that made things convenient. “Quattro, get her out of there!”
“She’s military,” Quattro said from above.
“Yeah? So?” I smacked one of the infected miners back down. I was starting to worry about what I was supposed to do next. There were six bodies blocking the way out and I couldn’t swing that wrench forever. I’d either get too tired to keep going or find some way to actually break a big piece of solid metal.
“Did you forget that this is a prison? She’s the reason these ponies were here in the first place to be infected and turned into monsters.”
“Are we really going to argue about this?” I asked. “She’s still a pony!”
“And because she’s a pony and not a machine, she could have said no. No to the executions, and the slavery, and putting ponies in prison for no reason at all. But she didn’t, did she?”
“I’m not leaving without her, so either get the cell open or go on your own,” I said. I wasn’t going to have an ethics debate when I wasn’t sure if the world around me was about to explode and I already had my hooves full fighting monsters. “Since she’s the one with the way to open that door, you might have some trouble with it!”
I could hear Quattro’s annoyance and hesitation. “Fine, but keep them busy.”
She jumped down, much more quietly than I did, but apparently that wasn’t enough, because I saw one of the zombies at the back of the regenerating pack of meshed flesh and metal turn and spot her.
“Nope,” I grunted. I tried to reach the zombie, but with all the bodies in the way my swipe went wide. And with my wings clipped I couldn’t get over the twitching barricade. Or could I?
I jumped on them, hearing a moan from one of the infected.
“Sorry!” I yelled, punching down when one of them tried to grab my hoof with broken teeth slowly twisting into steel fangs. I felt bone break and for a moment I wasn’t sure if it was mine or his. Punching with my infected hoof had been a stupid mistake and all the Med-X in the world wasn’t enough to block out the flush of pain.
I stumbled my way over the rest of them to the far side of the blockage, kicking the pony who’d noticed Quattro back into the heap to corral them. Quattro had better luck with the cell door than with the security blockade, popping the lock with a screwdriver we’d found in one of the emergency supply panels.
“You two get out of here,” I said. “I’ll come after you once you’re safe!”
Emerald stepped out of the cell, giving Quattro a look. It wasn’t the kind of thankful look you usually gave somepony who’d saved your life. It was more like she was waiting to see if she was going to get stabbed in the back. Once she was out of hoof’s reach, she bolted for the door, flying up to the upper level of the room.
Quattro swore and went for the stairs, having to go halfway around the room just to reach them.
Obviously, Emerald got to the security door first. She tapped at the keys and the lock opened up. She looked down at me from where she was standing, half out the door and holding it, staring at me for just an instant too long and obviously thinking something.
The moment passed. Quattro caught up to her and she stepped aside to let the mare through.
“Hurry up!” Emerald shouted. “You don’t want to be trapped down there with those things, trust me!”
I gave one last big swing and ran for the stairs.
I was still hurting, but it felt good knowing I’d made one decent decision so far today.