//------------------------------// // Chapter 12 - Breaking The Law // Story: Fallout Equestria: Blue Destiny // by MagnetBolt //------------------------------// Thunderbolt Shores wasn’t like anywhere else I’d ever been. That probably doesn’t sound very impressive, but remember that I’ve been to more places than most ponies in the Enclave. I’d been to mountains, cities, small towns, and even a volcano prison. I don’t recommend that last one. Thunderbolt Shores is part shipyard, part town, part debris field, and constantly in the middle of the biggest thunderstorm I’ve ever seen. From the windows of the cargo ship we were taking shelter in, I could just make out the shadow of the SPP tower at the center of the storm. It was a huge dark presence, lit up from behind by flashes of lightning cracking across miles of sky. It wasn’t a place fit for anypony to live. The town itself was a chaotic maze. With all the lightning, standing on the clouds was asking for trouble, so ponies had built streets out of anything that would protect their hooves. Most of the roads were rubber-coated steel that sparked where the coating had worn away, but there were sheets of wood, plastic, solid rainbows, even bridges made out of braided wire. A network of steel rods and hanging wires like a crazy spider web kept the worst thunderbolts from reaching the city, but meant flying much higher than the rooftops was asking for trouble. The buildings were mostly just ships, docked more or less permanently after the most valuable parts had been repurposed, sold off, or lost. The biggest had been cargo ships, but ponies were living out of anything that would keep the rain off their heads. The Raven’s Nest, where we were now, was one of the few ships that could still move under its own power, but it was less good at keeping the rain off. Large parts of it were made of nearly-petrified wood, and they leaked like crazy. I could count three buckets from here catching the drips. “How are you holding up?” Destiny asked. I turned away from the window to look at her. The armor was standing in a hydraulic frame with all kinds of wires and stuff sticking out of it. Quattro’s golden suit and Emerald’s damaged armor stood next to it. Emerald’s standard Enclave armor was half-disassembled. More than just her radio had ended up needing repair after the treatment she’d gotten. “I’m fine,” I said, scratching at my right foreleg. It felt painfully itchy, like one of those rashes the doctors tell you to stop touching but it’s really hard to listen and you start worrying at it in your sleep and end up bleeding. I tried to change the subject. “Meeting Quattro’s rebel friends wasn’t what I expected.” “It’s funny, it’s been almost two hundred years and ponies still say ‘I’m fine’ when they mean ‘I’m not fine at all and I’m trying not to think about it.’” I sighed. “I just feel like I have a little feather flu, okay? My joints ache, I’m tired, and I itch. It’s not a big deal, so you don’t have to worry about me.” “Sorry. Without power, there isn’t much I can do to help,” Destiny said. “I know,” I groaned. “And the storm doesn’t help! My mane feels like it’s standing on end.” “You may be able to find a fusion core in the market,” came a voice from the other end of the room, at the center of a circle of half-disassembled equipment connected with wires and tape. The pegasus stood up, settling her square glasses back on her snout. She had a heavy accent that I absolutely couldn’t place. “But if you go, leave the Exodus armor here. The design is fascinating!” “Ten years ahead of anything the MWT was making, Herr Doktor,” Destiny boasted. “Ten years?” Doktor scoffed, shaking her head. “Ten years was the gap between the Ministry of Awesome designing some foolish overpowered underoptimized prototype and the military refining it and bringing it to mass production. This is a generation ahead of what they were doing. This ‘Thaumoframe’, as you call it, is absolutely astounding!” “Take it from me, it does things we never expected.” I had a feeling they were about to get into a really nitty-gritty nerd discussion about stuff so far over my head I’d need a telescope just to see it. I was not in a good enough mood to sit and chat. “I’m gonna go down to the market,” I said. “Maybe I can find that fusion core.” “What was that?” Quattro asked, pushing aside a curtain and looking in. “Glad to see you’re still with us, Chamomile.” Emerald stepped in beside her. She held a box of parts. “We were able to get some decent scrap metal and circuits.” “It’s a start,” Doktor said, motioning for them to put it to the side. “I will have your armor working again, do not worry.” “It was working before you took it apart,” Emerald said sourly. “It was two hundred years old and had just been through more use in a week than most suits see in their lifetimes,” Doktor corrected. “It was working mostly out of habit. Most of the military gear I see is in a similar state of languid disrepair, as if things never need to be maintained just because they’ve been sitting on a shelf! Disuse and rot is just as dangerous to complicated modern machines as being in the field!” “If you say so,” Emerald sighed. She looked at me with pity. “How are you holding up?” “I’m--” I sighed. “I need a walk. I want to stop feeling like a sick pony.” “I don’t think there’s much chance of that,” Quattro said. “Para-Medic, when was her last shot of Med-X?” I groaned “Quattro, come on, don’t start calling more ponies over to baby me…” A pink pegasus dappled with white and red hopped over the curtain without bothering to push it aside. “Did you call me?” she asked. “Is everything okay? Can I get you another kale shake? They’re really good for infections!” “Kale isn’t going to solve my problems, no matter how good it tastes,” I groaned. “You have a very serious condition,” Para-Medic warned, trying to guide me over to a cot. If she had her way, I wouldn’t be allowed out of it. “It’s similar to rejection syndrome sometimes seen in ponies who are given prosthetic limbs. Thankfully, I know how to treat it properly!” “Quattro, did I ever tell you your rebel friends are annoying?” “We prefer to be called Ravens,” the last member of the crew said, as she stepped in. Captain White Glint was stark white, her cutie mark just barely visible when the light played across the silver sparks on her flank. She was super hot, especially with the eyepatch, and had made it very clear that I had zero chance with her. “Captain,” I said, giving her a sloppy salute. “Permission to go ashore. I need to get out of here for a while. You’ve got a great ship and all--” that was mostly a lie. The Raven’s Nest was a cargo carrier so old it had a gasbag instead of modern cloud props. “--but I need a change of scenery.” “Can you avoid attracting attention?” Captain Glint asked. “I mean, I’ll try my best.” I shrugged. “Quattro, go with her to keep her out of trouble,” Glint said. “I’d rather not have a bored pony pacing the deck. They usually find some way to entertain themselves and I already had two fires aboard ship this month from Herr Doktor.” “I’ll come too,” Destiny said. I looked at her, raising an eyebrow. “I’m not dragging that armor around everywhere when it doesn’t have power. Do you have any idea how heavy it is?” “You don’t have to,” Destiny said. “I figured out a little trick to make things easier.” Her magic aura surrounded the helmet and lifted it away from the armor, levitating over to me and bobbing slightly up and down. “See? No problem. As long as I’m not maintaining the armor’s T-field I’ve got more than enough magic to do this.” “It’s probably not the strangest thing ponies around here have seen,” Quattro offered along with a complementary shrug. Captain Glint rolled her eye. “Just be back soon or I’ll assume something happened to you and I’ll send Para-Medic out to find you and bring you back on a stretcher. Understood?” “Perfectly,” I said. “Don’t start any fights, be back by eleven, and no kissing boys.” Everypony stared at me. “What? They’re the same rules my Dad made me follow.” “Just go,” Captain Glint sighed. “Oh wow, is that a--” I pointed to what looked like a cannon bigger than I was. It was one of the largest guns I’d ever seen. I wanted to try shooting it. “Try not to make a scene,” Quattro said. “Ponies will think it’s your first time at the black market.” I nodded. She was right. I had to try to be cool and fit in. I could feel eyes on me from the crowd. Most of the ponies were wearing stained, dirty jumpsuits in various shades of repair. I was pretty sure they were dockworkers and salvage ponies, because they seemed to be here to sell, dragging skiffs of parts across the rusting iron floor and arguing with merchants at the stalls about barter and prices. I tried not to look too hard at the numbers on the signs showing prices and weights. They didn’t make my head hurt, but I could feel myself doing math on them. “Some of these ponies are military,” I said, careful not to point at the uniformed ponies being given space by the rest of the herd. “If a pony needs something, it can be easier to come here and get it than to go through official channels,” Quattro said. “A place like this smooths out the supply chain by getting rid of paperwork.” “They won’t recognize us, will they?” Destiny asked. “I doubt it. They’re almost all from second-line ships and support vessels. Not the kind of crew that would even be told we exist.” Quattro sniffed the air. I tilted my head and tried to catch what she was smelling. My stomach rumbled at the scent. Quattro smiled at me and motioned for me to follow, leading me to a stall where ponies were cutting up cloud potatoes and deep-frying them into chips. “I’m a little short on cash,” I said. “Don’t worry about it. I’ve got a little left over from the shopping trip Emerald and I went on,” Quattro said, getting us a basket of fries. The pony behind the counter covered them in white sauce and dusted it with spice before handing them over. “Let’s go sit over there,” Quattro said. “We should talk.” “About what?” I asked, following her. We sat down, and I grabbed a few fries, devouring them. They tasted heavenly. The white sauce was some kind of oily, cheesy paste, and the spice was hot enough to tickle the back of my throat. “These are still steaming, doesn’t that hurt?” Quattro asked. I shrugged and took a few more. Solid food was a luxury after the trip to Thunderbolt Shoals. I’d eaten so many meal replacement shakes I was starting to forget how to chew. “We need to find a fusion core for your armor,” Quattro said. “Destiny, are you sure it’s the only thing that will work? The one that you were using drained so quickly…” “It wasn’t properly calibrated,” Destiny said. “The suit, I mean. It was using my magic instead of Chamomile’s, but the core was too low to run the calibration routine. If we can find a fusion core with a decent charge, I can make it last an order of magnitude longer.” “So a few months instead of a week?” Quattro asked. “Maybe more. The energy drain isn’t linear.” “I have a source that might have a fusion core but I didn’t want to bring Emerald along,” Quattro said quietly. “I was going to talk to them alone, but you’ve got a right to come.” “Why didn’t you want to bring Emma?” I asked, around the fries. “The pony I’m thinking of? He’s not trustworthy. He can probably get us what we want, but the problem is the price.” “What kind of price?” Destiny asked. “I don’t know yet. He has some kind of job lined up.” Quattro sighed. “It’s probably going to be the sort of job Emma shouldn’t be involved in.” “I’m not gonna kill anypony for it,” I said. Quattro nodded. “Good. I wouldn’t ask you to. Neither will he, if he has common sense. He’s probably going to want us to steal something, or cause a distraction, or something like that.” “Oh.” I nodded sagely. “Crime stuff.” Quattro shook her head and slowly raised her hooves to her face. “Are you sure this is the right place?” I whispered. I didn’t feel like I could afford to stand in the room. The shop had been some kind of yacht in its previous life, opulent and plush and with gold and fake marble everywhere. Whoever lived in it had taken good care of it, too. Things were clean and the decorations had been polished until they shone. “What were you expecting?” Quattro asked lightly. “A junk shop filled with rusty scrap?” “Sort of, yeah,” I admitted. “Look at this,” Destiny said. She was hovering near a shelf full of gems. “These are all talismans. I can’t even identify all of them.” “You have an impressive robot.” A pony stepped out of the next room. The pegasus dressed exactly how a pony living in an expensive yacht wouldn’t. He had a shirt printed with the loudest floral patterns I’d ever seen, like he’d just dyed it moments ago with liquid rainbow. He walked up to Quattro and shook her hoof. “It’s always a pleasure,” Quattro said. “Usually an expensive one.” “Expensive, but I make sure ponies get what they want,” the pegasus said. He looked at my bandaged hoof when we shook. “I see you brought a friend, and both of you have seen some excitement?” “Something like that. Chamomile, this is Double Nothing. He’s the only pony I know who can be exceedingly rich and vanishingly poor at the same time.” “How does that work?” I asked. Double smiled. “It’s easy! Just have a warehouse full of priceless treasure and no way to sell it.” “No way to sell it legally,” Quattro corrected. Double tilted his head in acknowledgement. “It’s awful, isn’t it? If I tried to move to somewhere with a better night life, I’d have to fill out all sorts of forms, and I hate paperwork.” “Chamomile, look at this!” Destiny said, floating over and nudging me. She pushed me gently to another shelf. “Memory orbs!” “They’re very rare,” Double said. “Most of them are probably one of a kind.” “We have to get this one,” Destiny said, lifting one up. “It’s a BrayTech orb!” “Is that what it’s called?” Double asked. “It does look a little different from the others. Could you put that down? Some of this merchandise is very fragile.” Destiny put the orb back down. “We had a different manufacturing process,” she said dismissively. “This could have important information on it.” “I thought you were in the market for a fusion core?” Double asked. “Both of us know you can’t sell these,” Quattro said. “Do you even have a way to view them? They’re just shiny baubles.” “Shiny baubles that your friend wants,” Double corrected. “But you know, I can be generous. I don’t have a fusion core-- yet.” He held up a hoof. “I can get you one, but I wanted to confirm the deal before making the trade on my end. In return for your understanding about the delay, I might be willing to part with that orb as a bonus.” “Very generous of you,” Quattro said. “We’ll do it,” Destiny said. “What are we doing?” “Oh, it’s nothing complicated or dangerous,” Double promised. “The military uses automated barges to move cargo through the Shoals. They rely on navigation beacons set up along a safe path. All I want you to do is knock out one of the beacons. The barge will go off the safe path, crash a little bit, and the cargo will be free for the taking.” “What’s the catch?” Quattro asked. “No catch! Totally automated. No ponies on the barge to get hurt. Just sneak up to the beacon and turn it off and walk away. I already have ponies who can retrieve the cargo. It’s a simple job, ten minutes in and out.” The ride out to the beacon was tense. Double had me hitch a ride with a bunch of ponies who worked out in the debris field taking apart old airships, and none of them seemed happy to have me there. At first I thought it was the, you know, the crime stuff. Not a lot of ponies are okay with crime, and that would be understandable. But after all the looks I’d gotten and the way ponies refused to meet my gaze and got out of my way when I moved, I realized it was because they thought I was military. They were giving me the treatment the military ponies had gotten at the black market. It was a relief for them and me when I hopped off at my stop. I adjusted the uniform, shaking some of the rain from the cap. It was almost identical to the one Mom had given me. I tried not to think about that too hard. Every time I did, it hurt deep inside somewhere. Was she suffering right now, trapped inside that giant dragon thing? You’d think the way my joints felt like grinding gears would be a great distraction, but for some reason it just made everything worse. “Are you sure you’re up to this?” asked my saddlebag. “Yeah,” I whispered. “Just give me another Med-X. My leg is starting to really hurt again.” A needle floated out of my pack, and I grabbed it with a wing and injected it into my shoulder. The pain abated a little and I was able to focus on what was in front of me. “It’s just that Quattro seems more, um…” Destiny hesitated, her eyes glowing from the depths of the bag. I was smuggling her in along with a bunch of tools and random paperwork so she could help me with the technical stuff if I needed it. I wasn’t too proud to admit that I needed help sometimes. I was too proud to admit I couldn’t do the job at all, though. “This is a simple job,” I said. “I need to do something or I’m gonna go stir crazy.” “If you say so.” “Besides, the fusion core and the memory orb are both for me,” I said. “I’ve got to pull my own weight.” “Technically I’m the one who wanted the memory orb.” “That’s why you’re coming along,” I joked. “Keep quiet until we’re alone.” Her eyes flashed twice, which I guess was sort of a nod. I closed the bag and looked up at the nav beacon. It was halfway out into the debris field, and from what Double had said, it was basically a big radio antenna. Drone ships would lock onto the signal and simple talismans would make them go towards the source. Put enough of them in a line, and it was like a train following tracks. I trotted up to the beacon, looking at the small cloud outpost and knocking sharply on the door. I’d used my right hoof on reflex and it made the strangest sound, more like I’d tapped a metal baton against the door than a limb. I was going to be a lot happier once I had that fusion core. “Hello?” A pony in a uniform a lot like mine but with more stains opened the door. He looked like he weighed about twenty pounds soaking wet. “This is…” I made a show of pulling paperwork out of my saddlebags, looking at a clipboard with deep concentration. “Navigational beacon DS-6?” “Yes?” The pony replied, sounding suddenly unsure, like he’d never had to answer a question before. “Good. Are you the only pony on shift?” I asked. I had a whole script written on the clipboard. Quattro had wanted to make sure I didn’t mess things up too badly. “Yeah?” I nodded. “I’m here to do an inspection,” I declared. “Take me to the main terminal.” “An inspection?” the pony frowned. “I didn’t hear about any inspection.” I looked at the flowchart Quattro had given me. I squinted, reading it over. “There wouldn’t be much point in giving warning about a surprise inspection.” Quattro had been pretty good at predicting what this guy was going to say. I skipped ahead to the next bit, checking my line. “You better come in out of the rain, Miss,” he said. “If you don’t let me in I’ll have to talk to your commander,” I replied. “What?” “What?” I dimly realized my response hadn’t made any sense. I might have skipped too far ahead. I was going to have to improvise. I was still holding the clipboard, so I broke it over his head. He collapsed in a heap. “That almost went well,” Destiny said. “I’d hate to see what you would have done if he’d offered you some coffee.” “Shut up,” I groaned, picking up the thin pony and stepping inside out of the weather. “It’s fine. I just have to stash him somewhere until after this is all over.” That’s when I saw the lockers. Perfect. I opened one of the doors and shoved him inside. It was a perfect fit, like he'd been made to be shoved into lockers. “Problem solved,” I said. “Now we just need to do the computer thing.” Destiny worked her way out from under the tools and scraps in my borrowed bags and floated out to look around. “Is that it near the window?” I looked up. There was a blinking screen near the shelter’s only window, a long strip of solid rainbow that was just barely tinted red. It ran the whole length along one wall, I guess so they could watch the ships pass without having to leave the building. “This interface looks pretty standard,” Destiny said. “Stable-Tec OS, so it’s full of holes. All I have to do is…” She paused. “I just have to…” “What’s wrong?” I hoped she wasn’t starting to lose it. She was literally a ghost in a machine, and the machine was out of power. Was that taking a toll on her? “I can’t seem to press the keys with my magic. Fine, I’ll just do it the hard way.” She floated closer and passed right through the cloud terminal. “What the buck?!” “You’re not a pegasus,” I said. “You can’t--” She flew through it again. “It’s made of clouds,” she said. “Yeah,” I confirmed. “Well… great. I can’t hack something I can’t touch.” She paused. “But you can!” “I have no idea how to hack terminals.” “You don’t have to know. Just press the buttons I tell you to press. It’ll take a little longer, but we can make this work.” Ten minutes later, things weren’t working. “Just do what it says on screen!” Destiny shouted “I’m trying, but I can’t find the any key!” “That just means you press literally any key, Chamomile!” “How am I supposed to know that?! I’m not a computer pony!” “This isn’t going to work,” Destiny grumbled. “No kidding. What’s the backup plan? Smash the terminal?” “That’s probably just going to mean we can’t turn it off. The radio transmitter doesn’t need this terminal to work. We need to be able to access the system.” I rubbed my chin. There had to be another way… “I got it!” I said. I went back to the lockers and opened up the one with the station attendant inside. He looked up at me. “C-can I help you?” he asked. “What’s the password for the terminal?” I demanded. “We’re not supposed to--” I reached into my bag. “I’ve got a wrench in here somewhere…” “SableSky. The ‘S’es are capitalized. Don’t hurt me!” “Thanks.” I said. I closed the door again. Then paused, opened the next locker, and grabbed the bag lunch I’d spotted there. I opened up the nerd door and tossed him the bag. “Here. For good behavior.” I closed the door more gently. As I walked away I heard the crinkle of a packet of snack cakes opening up. “That was nice of you,” Destiny said. “It felt like the right thing to do.” I shrugged and started typing the password in. The capital letters were hard. “He’s just a pony doing his job. He’s not even like, a prison guard or anything. He’s just sitting in a boring, dead-end place like this and making sure nothing goes wrong. He never hurt anypony.” The terminal made a happy beep instead of all the sad beeps it had been making before. “It worked!” I said. “Okay, now what?” “Do you see that menu right there?” Destiny asked. “The one that says ‘Nav Beacon Status?’” “Yeah,” I said, anticipating what she was going to ask and selecting it. “Now select shutdown,” she said. “And that… should be it.” “That wasn’t so bad.” “It would have been a lot faster if somepony could follow instructions,” she said. “Chamomile? What are you--” I bucked the terminal into the wall, sparks exploding out as the delicate rainbow and cloud wiring shattered. “That felt good. Now he can’t turn it back on when we leave! The lockers don’t even have locks on them. I think he’s just staying in there to be polite.” “And so I don’t get hurt again!” he said, his voice muffled. “And that,” I agreed. “Thank you!” “We got it just in time,” Destiny said. “The drone ship is scheduled any minute now.” I nodded. I was starting to get a bad feeling that I couldn’t quite shake. Not from the Med-X withdrawals, either. I had my hoof on the doorknob when the radio next to the broken terminal turned on. A thin, reedy voice came through the crackle of static and interference from the storm. “This is transport barge three. We’re having some problems with the instrument flight system. Is everything okay?” “...That’s a pony,” I said. “Why is there a pony on the radio?” “Don’t ask me,” Destiny said. I opened up the locker again. “Hey! I thought the barges were unmanned!” The stallion looked up from his snack, ears folded back in fear at my tone. “They were! For a while. The systems are too hard to maintain! It was easier to turn them off and just have ponies crew them.” “Get the beacon back on!” I snapped, pulling him out of the locker. “I didn’t come here to get ponies killed!” He took one step and stopped. “Where’s… the terminal?” he asked. “I broke it,” I said. “Just get the beacon working!” “This is the worst day of my life,” he muttered, running over to the smashed terminal and pulling it apart. He started pulling on wires and groaned. “The magic smoke got out! This is never going to work again!” “Then… use the radio to tell them to stop!” I said. “I’d love to, but with the transmitter turned off, all we can do is receive passively,” he groused. “Do you know how hard it is to find a terminal in decent shape? We don’t even have any backups because they get shipped out to--” The radio crackled again. “DS-6, can you read us? We’re having a lot of trouble out here. We can’t confirm our exact location.” “Stop complaining and tell me what I need to do!” I yelled. “Okay, um…” the stallion looked around. “There’s an emergency checklist.” He brushed dust off a poster hanging on the wall. “Transmitter down… incoming barge… aha! Here we go.” He tapped the poster. “In case all other options fail, we use the emergency flare gun to signal the oncoming barge!” He pointed to a faded yellow case on the wall. I popped it open and found a wide-barreled pistol and two flares. “Perfect,” I said. I loaded one of the flares into the gun and opened the door, the storm winds and rain buffeting me. I held the pistol carefully in my teeth, aiming generally up. It probably didn’t matter exactly where it went, as long as the barge could see it. I pulled the trigger. There was a click, a tiny pop, and a fizzling, hissing sound. What there wasn’t was a big, bright flare that ponies could see for miles. “You’re kidding me!” I groaned. “Destiny, grab the other flare!” “I got it!” Destiny said. She grabbed the flare, levitating it over to me. I grabbed it, fumbling with the flare gun. “Mayday, mayday! We’ve got lightning strikes on the engine! The props are coming apart--” The radio dissolved into hissing. I saw something explode in the middle distance. The sound of metal slamming into metal was even louder than the storm. “Buck,” I swore. And talking set the flare gun off, a green star launching into the sky, arcing into the air. I spat the gun out and stormed inside. “I’m gonna go see if they’re okay. There wasn’t even supposed to be anyone there today!” “Um…” the stallion coughed. “Before you go? No offense, but none of this is my fault and I’m gonna get blamed for everything. Could you knock me out and shove me back into a locker? I’d rather have a concussion than try to explain this to Governor Fuse.” “Oh, right. Sorry.” I punched him in the face, and he went out like a light. “This is so not worth it…” “You realize it’s not safe flying out there, right?” Destiny asked. “Yeah, but nopony else is close enough to help,” I said. “Maybe they’ll be grateful.” It was one of the dumbest things I ever said. I shoved the limp stallion back into a locker like it was high school all over again and took off into the storm.