//------------------------------// // Chapter 22 - The Spirit of Radio // Story: Fallout Equestria: Blue Destiny // by MagnetBolt //------------------------------// The art of stealth is at its core about not being heard. It’s relatively easy to go unseen. Go around a corner, behind a cloud, or just get around to where a pony isn’t looking and you’re basically invisible. Not being heard is a lot tougher. Hooves are loud on all but the softest surfaces, flying isn’t nearly as quiet as you’d think unless you’re in a glide, and though we couldn’t teleport, Destiny promised me it sounded like a balloon popping. So really in some ways it was good that the firefight had already started before I got there, because no way in Tartarus was anypony going to hear me over the chatter of large-caliber automatic weapons. I got right behind one of the raiders and tapped him on the shoulder where something like cloudball armor was working its way out of his skin. He started to turn around and I grabbed his head and gave it a single sharp twist. There was a crack, a sensation of bone moving, and he sort of stopped and stretched. “Oh hey that felt kind of--” I huffed and stabbed him before he could tell me something stupid like I’d worked out a kink in his neck. The way he was dressed I didn’t want to think about any kinks he might have had. “I told you you can’t just break somepony’s neck by twisting their head,” Destiny whispered. “It doesn’t work like that!” “Okay well, you were right. You don’t have to rub it in!” I pulled the gun out of his limp hooves to look at it. It was still distressingly alive, like holding onto a rifle infested with ants. I tossed it aside in disgust and kicked his body down the hill, rearing up to look over the chest-high cover he’d been using. To even get here, we’d had to follow stairs set into the rock wall of the rift, wooden planks secured with pitons and wire that creaked whenever weight was put on them. Scraps of colorful cloth were tied to the shaky railings, and I could just imagine foals running up as far as they dared and marking it before fleeing back to the safety of the ground. Not that I was going to go up a bunch of stairs. I’d been born with wings so I could fly, not so I could walk demurely up some rickety stairs. I’d come in for a landing right at the top, dropping Walks-In-Shadow into a snowdrift and landing behind an unsuspecting raider. Which more or less brings us to the present. “That was really cool,” Walks whispered. He shivered a little in the chill. The air had gone from the wet warmth of spring right back into the cold of winter as soon as we got up high enough. He shook snow off his coat and joined me in looking over the cover. The Iron Temple wasn’t what I had expected. To be honest my expectations were pretty low. So far all I’d seen were some small houses in the Ghost Bear village and a lot of debris and rusted-out hulks along the ruined highway. It was pretty clear that the surface didn’t have the same sense of style or grandeur that we had in the Enclave. I don’t know if it had been a police station or a prison before the war, but it was the first time I’d seen the brutalist Stalliongrad style of building. It looked like an invincible fortress made of huge seamless slabs of concrete, and that invincibility was being tested. The parking lot in front of it was dotted with barricades and flags, turning the cracked asphalt into something more like the sort of showy garden that was in front of so many Enclave military buildings. The main difference was that it centered around a huge bonfire that threw a plume of smoke into the air instead of a rainbow fountain. Raiders were trying to push their way through the barricades, but whoever was inside the Iron Temple was doing a good job holding them off, the heavy thud of a machine gun sending shells over their heads and picking off any of them that stood up for a second too long or dashed for different cover at the wrong moment. A huge wing cut through the smoke, and the ground rumbled with the wake of a dragon’s passage as the massive metal shape swooped overhead, pulling up at the last second to stall out and crash down deliberately at the far end of the parking lot. “Chamomile,” Destiny said quietly. “Yeah, I know,” I said. I could see the beast clearly now. It had a hide of green patinated copper and huge horns that were almost as wide as its wingspan made of thin spars supported by wires held in tight tension like some kind of massive antenna array. It glowed from within with acid-green light, and just looking at the thing I could tell it wasn’t good to be this close. Most importantly, I didn’t recognize it. “It’s not my mom,” I said. “How can there be two of these things?” “I’m not sure,” Destiny admitted. “We should retreat and regroup. We’re not ready to face a SIVA dragon now. We don’t have any weapons that will kill it.” “We can’t do that!” Walks-In-Shadow grabbed my hoof and tugged. “Wolf-In-Exile is alone in there! He’s the last of his tribe! We have to do something!” “Right, do something…” I scratched at my increasingly itchy skin. “First, give me the Dartura again. Being this close to the dragon is killing me.” I said it like it was a joke but I’m pretty sure it was killing me in a literal sense. I took the gourd from him and finished off what was left. I doubted it was going to get worse than it was right at that moment. “Before you ask, I don’t have enough of a magical charge to do more than deflect a few bullets,” Destiny said. I ignored her and looked at the raiders, trying to use my big dumb brain, or at least the somewhat smarter computer bits she’d jammed in there. Dad had always said I needed to think things through, and from here at the edge of the battlefield I actually had a chance to do that. There were two distinct groups of raiders. A few of them had guns and were shouting orders and moving around and sticking to cover. They were mostly shouting curses, but it was at least language. The other group were like shambling zombies, much closer to what I'd seen in Cirrus Valley. They were skeletal and wasted and moved like they were broken inside. They mostly just charged right into the machine gun fire and got chewed to a pulp. The dragon made a sound like a hissing boiler about to explode, and with a screech of stressed metal it opened its maw and vomited out a mass of twitching limbs and ruined flesh that broke apart into a lurching horde of at least a dozen of the skeletal infected, which immediately charged at the Iron Temple like they were eager to be mown down by automatic fire. I narrowed my eyes and came up with a terrible plan. “Kid, you stay here,” I said. “Destiny, you keep him from getting shot.” “Wait, me?” Destiny asked, confused. “You said you can deflect a few bullets, right? Make sure he doesn’t catch a stray.” “What about you?” I shrugged. “What are the chances I’ll get shot twice in the same day?” I didn’t let her give the obvious answer, and took off up and over the cover. I had two advantages the raiders didn’t. First, they were all looking in the same direction, so they weren’t going to see me coming until I was right on top of them if I came at them from the right angle. Second, I didn’t have to go around all the concrete barricades and old planters. The path was a lot shorter as the pegasus flies. One of them who was extremely underarmed with just a pistol held between his teeth noticed me and took a few shots at me that I ignored. I was after a bigger fish. One of the raiders had a nice big cannon, and I dropped down with all four hooves right onto his back, driving him down into the asphalt. Maybe I should have said something clever to him. Maybe I should have tried to make him surrender. I didn’t have time for mercy or playing around. I stomped on his head and winced at the noise and mess that made, then tore the big weapon he’d been aiming at the Iron Temple from his twitching hooves. It was the kind of thing that really needed a stand and about three ponies to operate it, but I was going to improvise. I hefted it up on my shoulder and ignored the feeling of things crawling on my hide and something dripping down my back and wires snaking around on their own. I took aim at the dragon’s massive set of horns and fired. A big, slow shell boomed out of the cannon and exploded on the side of the green dragon’s face, shattering copper scales and twisting the antenna out of shape. Wires snapped and delicate-looking spars came out of alignment and I could feel the effect. The SIVA inside me twisted and groaned in sympathetic pain like a radio homing in on the dragon’s frequency. I fired again, trying to think of anything else but the feeling of a knife twisting up into my guts. The second shot hit almost the same place as the first, and the dragon screeched in anger, shedding more of its metal flesh. It leapt into the air, flapping hard, the wind alone enough to send my third shot way off target, hitting nothing but dirt and ice. The dragon flew off, horns sparking, and things dropped down to near-silence. Even the machine gun had stopped. I threw the cannon away. It took two tries. I had to pull it out of my coat where it had tried to burrow into my flesh like a parasite, yanking long curling worm-like wires out of my skin. Just looking at them made me feel sick. The raiders had stopped, the smarter ones fleeing after the dragon and the skeletal infected just collapsed where they’d been standing. I took a deep breath. “That sucked,” I said, sitting down on a chunk of crumbling concrete and letting the blood just run down my hoof. It wasn’t a dangerous amount, just enough that it was going to be a bother cleaning later. “Sky Lady, that was amazing!” Walks-In-Shadow yelled, waving to me and running up, trying to hop over the barricades and eventually deciding to go around the long way. “Wait until the Companions hear about this!” “Not the worst plan you’ve come up with,” Destiny admitted. “Get a big gun, shoot the monster. It’s hard to argue with.” “I’d say it’s foolish to attack a monster like that head-on,” said an echoing voice from the direction of the Temple. I looked over my shoulder at the stallion walking towards us, obviously not in any hurry. He was wearing the heaviest-looking barding I’d ever seen, steel plates that were practically as thick as tank armor over leather and fur. “Come inside before the cold does what the raiders couldn’t.” I was about to say I wasn’t cold when I noticed how much Walks-In-Shadow was shivering. I groaned and got up. “Here. It’s not Dartura root, but it is warm,” the stallion said. He’d removed his helmet, and I was having a hard time figuring anything out about him. He didn’t look quite like a zebra, or a pony, and he had faint stripes, but I couldn’t tell if they were scars, or if they’d faded with age, or if they’d just always been gunmetal on silver. I took the cup of tea from him. The mug was ceramic and as old as the building. Apparently someone had won an award for being the number one grandpa in the world and it was an award for their achievement. “Thanks,” I said. He gave another mug to Walks-In-Shadow. The zebra was pretending he wasn’t cold while edging a little closer to the campfire and pulling the silvery blanket Wolf-In-Exile had given him tighter around his body. He sat down heavily on a concrete bench. The inside of the Iron Temple really was more like a temple than a proper place for ponies to live. It had a few small side rooms where I suspected he was hiding supplies and whatever cot he slept on, but the main area was some kind of memorial, a wide-open space with benches and a statue that I could tell without even needing to look was a tribute to the great heroes of the Battle of Stalliongrad. It had the same very direct imagery that the Enclave used to honor their heroes, though the steel and concrete ponies lasted longer than the cloud statues I was used to. Their heroes probably lasted longer, too. “If you’re looking for a cure for that infection, I can’t help you,” Wolf-In-Exile said bluntly, pointing at my silver-covered leg. “By the time there are symptoms it’s too late to do more than a mercy killing.” “We came up here to ask about the dragon, actually,” Destiny said. “Cute little robot,” Wolf-In-Exile said, looking at the floating helm curiously. “Never seen one like that. Some kind of custom job?” “I’m not a robot!” Destiny snapped. “She’s a ghost,” I explained. “It’s a long story.” “I do like ghost stories,” Wolf-In-Exile said with a small smile. “Most of the stories I’ve heard have been about unfinished business. Something so important they couldn’t allow themselves to pass on entirely.” “That... sounds about right,” Destiny muttered. “And you’re planning on slaying that dragon as part of that unfinished business?” he sat back, his armor creaking. “I’m not sure how much I can help. It’s all I can do to fend off the worst of the raiders.” “That’s Steel Ranger armor, isn’t it?” Destiny asked. “And you had at least one heavy machine gun.” “It was Steel Ranger armor,” Wolf-In-Exile said, nodding. “But only parts. When I found it, it was too broken to repair and none of us knew how to use it even if it had been working. Still, good steel is good steel.” “Us?” I asked. “It was… a long time ago. Before my tribe was wiped out.” He left it at that. “You’re different from the other zebra I’ve met,” I said. He laughed, and the mood lightened a little. “That’s not surprising,” Wolf said. “I’m only half zebra, for one thing. My father was a, ah…” he hesitated. “Equestrian doesn’t have a word for it. I suppose the closest translation would be ‘Bonded One’. He was a scavenger who tried stealing from the Wolf tribe and ended up captured. He served as a slave for a while to repay his debt, and then he was freed. He ended up staying with the tribe anyway. He’d made too many friends at that point. He taught me and the tribe about things the elders didn’t know. Technology, tactics, the secret of iron. That sort of thing.” I nodded. “Sounds like a good dad.” “Compared to yours it’s not a high bar to clear,” Destiny muttered, just quietly enough that she probably thought I couldn’t hear her. I blushed and decided to change the subject, but only because I was embarrassed. “What can you tell us about the dragon? It’s not the one we’re looking for, but… there’s no way it’s not related,” I said. “It’s not something that should exist in this world,” Wolf-In-Exile said. “I’m not sure if it’s leading the raiders or if they’re in control of it. Tartarus, the thing might just be attracted to all the fighting and shows up like someone rang the dinner bell for it. It’s attacked here a few times since it appeared. It has a nest somewhere out in the Plaguelands. That’s all I know for sure.” “The Plaguelands?” “It’s a cursed place,” Wolf-In-Exile said quietly. “It’s where my tribe is buried now, because we were fools. If you’re thinking of tracking it down, it’s practically a suicide mission.” Destiny shook herself slowly in a negative. “One thing at a time. First we need to figure out how to kill it even if we do find it.” “I don’t suppose you’ve got a spare megaspell lying around?” I asked. “Unfortunately not,” Wolf said. “But if there’s something that can hurt that beast, it has to be where it came from.” He stood up and walked to one of the thin, slit-like windows, pulling a curtain made from the hide of some animal aside. “If you look that way, you can see the road continues on to the west. The Plaguelands are that way, in the shadow of the old Cosmodrome.” “The Cosmodrome?!” Destiny perked up and flew over to the window to look. “Are we really that close?” “The way is difficult,” Wolf said. “In good conditions you can almost see the blight on the land from here. A few hours by hoof, less than that flying. Once you get there, though…” He shook his head. “It’s difficult to describe. There aren’t words for it in Equestrian because no pony would have conceived of it. It’s false beauty. Death disguised as paradise. The deeper you go, the worse it gets.” “If the Cosmodrome is right there, there are Braytech labs, too,” Destiny said, ignoring Wolf-In-Exile’s gloomy warnings about death and fates worse than. “Chamomile, this is exactly what we need!” “If you’re going to try your hoof at being a hero, don’t go alone,” Wolf warned. “The Companions sometimes hunt there. They might be willing to help you. I’d go myself, but this chokepoint is the only thing that keeps the bulk of the raiders from the valley. I can’t leave it undefended.” “Thanks for the help,” I said. “You pointed me in the right direction. That’s all I can ask for.” “There is one thing,” Destiny said quickly. “I don’t suppose you have a spare battle saddle? Trying to salvage one from the enemy doesn’t seem like a brilliant idea.” “It’d probably try to burrow into your flesh,” Wolf-In-Exile agreed. “And it’s too late now anyway. The bodies that weren’t burned are gone.” “What do you mean ‘gone’?” Destiny asked. “They crawl away to lick their wounds when no one is looking,” Wolf-In-Exile said. “By now they’re long away from here and healing.” “So much for thinning their numbers,” I sighed. “Even so, I might be able to help you. I’ve got a small stockpile of equipment, I’m sure I can afford to lend you a battle saddle.” “That would be great, thanks,” I said. Wolf nodded with a tight smile. “And you, little bear, keep that blanket.” Walks-In-Shadow looked up in surprise. “It’s a relic from before the war. Survival gear, good in any weather. You’ll make better use of it than I could.” “Thank you, Wolf-In-Exile! I’ll treasure it.” Walks-In-Shadow bowed. “Good. Things belong where they’re appreciated. I wish both of you luck.” “Dragon-hunting, huh?” Two-Bears said, sitting back and sipping mead. “That does sound like a good time, Sky Lady.” “We’ll need to find a weapon that will actually kill it first,” Destiny reminded her. “Even anti-battleship weapons will probably just drive it away or make it angry.” “So that cute little thing isn’t much use, then,” Two-Bears nodded to DRACO where it hung at my side. “It’s good against raiders,” I said. “Maybe monsters, too. I haven’t had a chance to fight any yet.” Two-Bears rubbed her chin in thought. “A weapon to surpass an immortal dragon… I doubt any of our blades are up to the task. They’re fine weapons and forged well, but made for mortal enemies. You need something with the old magic in it.” “We’ve got some good prospects now that we’ve confirmed our position,” Destiny noted. “Old labs and server hubs. We should be able to find something, but there’s one tiny little problem…” “That problem being that you’re from the sky and have no ideas of the dangers of the land, quiaff?” Two-Bears smirked. “If the dragon is attacking the Iron Temple, it is a threat to the entire valley. We will lend him aid. I will take a warrior or two with me to help Wolf-In-Exile hold his position. That should free you to find your weapon.” “I’ll go!” Walks-In-Shadow volunteered instantly. He was wearing the survival blanket like a silver cape. I had a feeling he was going to wear it for a very long time. “No, little one. You stay here and guard the elders,” Two-Bears said. “You can seek out honor when they aren’t pestering me to make you study the spoken lore.” Walks-In-Shadow groaned. Two-Bears patted his mane and waved him off. The zebra colt walked away, muttering about studying and singing. “There’s a place I’d like you to go first,” Two-Bears said. “It will put the Companions greatly in your debt. Easier to convince warriors to help you if we’re in your debt than you asking favors and making promises, quiaff?” “I, uh… I guess?” I shrugged. “Sort of like I help you and you’ll help me?” She nodded. “There is an old place, built by ponies during the war. It is… a kind of shrine. Like the Iron Temple. A place to remember the past. It was sealed, but I fear the raiders might break the seal and plunder what was buried within. I want you to go there and retrieve what we left in the deepest part.” “Why can’t you do it?” Destiny asked. It sounded more like the suspicious kind of question than the confused kind. “I can’t be in two places at once, little ghost,” Two-Bears said. “And… we swore as a tribe not to open it up ourselves. But if an outsider were to open the door, a warrior might go with them to make sure they didn’t cause trouble.” “A loophole in the superstition, huh?” I asked. “Call it what you want. You’ll need someone to show you the way…” Two-Bears looked around. “Hey, Falls-the-Axe!” Two-Bears waved, and a zebra stallion trotted over. He looked tired in a sort of world-weary way. “Yeah?” he asked, his voice low and gravelly. “Remember what we were talking about with the bunker?” Two-Bears asked. “The Sky Lady has agreed to bid her honor on it. I want you to go with her. To make sure the rest of the tribe knows she acted with honor, of course.” “Right,” Falls-the-Axe said, looking me over. “You look like you can handle yourself.” “Am I going to have to wrestle you, too?” I groaned. “If you fought her in a circle of equals, I don’t know who would win,” Two-Bears said. Falls-the-Axe looked at her in surprise. “Of course I haven’t seen her in real combat yet. You’ll have to tell me how she does.” Falls nodded and offered me his hoof. “I’m Falls-the-Axe.” “Chamomile,” I said, shaking. “If you impressed Two-Bears, that’s good enough for me. I’ll lead you to the bunker.” “Okay so let me get this straight,” I said, as Falls walked and I flew slowly at his side. It was a little more exposed if anyone was going to take a shot at me, but it gave DRACO a better view and I was enjoying stretching my wings. “You got your name because your mother literally fell over an axe lying on the ground and went into labor?” “Mostly I got it because of how much she yelled at my father for leaving it there,” he replied. I’d say growled, but his normal voice was a low growl. “And it has nothing to do with the battleaxe you’re lugging around?” He glanced back at the steel at his side. “Other way around. I learned the axe because of my name. It seemed like the right thing to do.” He smiled a little, not looking directly at me. “At least I’m not named after a delicate flower.” I blushed. “My cutie mark story is touching and meaningful.” “Actually, that’s something that never made sense to me,” he said, eyes still focused ahead. “How do ponies get their names? It always seems like their name is related to their special talent and cutie mark, but their parents couldn’t possibly know what their kids would be good at ahead of time.” “Oh well, there’s a very good reason for that,” I said. “You see--” DRACO interrupted me with a beep. “I’ll have to tell you later. Looks like there’s something up ahead.” Falls pulled out his long-handled axe, balancing easily on three hooves. We pushed into the brush just off the trail and looked around. He’d taken us close to the canyon wall, and there was something very peculiar there. Old, broken pipes jutted out from the rock face like tree roots. Where the stone was weathered away, I could see steel and concrete. There was no sign of anything dangerous, or at least nothing pony-shaped and dangerous. “Some kind of bunker?” Destiny guessed. “It must have been caught right at the edge of the rift when it opened up. Talk about bad luck.” “That’s the place,” Falls said. “There should be a door.” “There probably should be,” Destiny agreed. “Looks like something didn’t like being locked out.” It had probably been an interior door at one point, just a hatch at the end of a hallway, but the other end of that hallway was gone, and only traces of rebar and concrete remained. From out here the parts I could see were like somepony had sliced up a house like a giant cake. My stomach grumbled. Now I was hungry for cake because I’d thought about it too hard. “The hatch isn’t supposed to be torn open, right?” I asked, just in case. “No. We sealed it tightly when we left.” Falls frowned. “I hope we’re not too late.” “I’ll take a look, since this is supposed to be my job. You can follow me and keep me out of trouble.” He nodded, and I hovered out into the open, looking around. “See anything?” Destiny asked, floating behind me like she was going to use me for cover despite the fact that she was a ghost and currently inhabiting a chunk of bulletproof armor. “Well, uh…” I flew over to the ruined door, hovering just outside it. I was vaguely aware from old stories that you could find tracks on the ground that told you everything that had happened. Like if one hoofprint was lighter than the rest, it meant that the pony was walking with an injured leg, or how the space between hoofprints could tell you how quickly they were running. I couldn’t tell what was natural and what wasn’t in the sand and mud around the bunker, and nothing was helpfully labeled like in the books I’d read. “I think this is pretty recent. There’s no rust on the exposed metal.” “It can’t be more than a week old,” Falls said. “We go past here once in a while when we’re going hunting outside the valley. Sort of a good-luck ritual. The door wasn’t broken last time I was here.” “Let’s hope we’re not too late to get… whatever we’re here to get,” I said. I pulled the door handle, and it was locked. That meant I could either squeeze through the twisted, knife-edged hole in the door or… I reached through and carefully jiggled the handle from the other side. The door popped open, and I swung the broken metal out of the way. “Any chance we can get some light in there?” I asked. Falls-the-Axe pulled out a torch at the same time Destiny’s horn lit up and DRACO fired a flare down the hallway to embed into the concrete wall. “Let’s go with the magic light,” I said. “It’s not going to start any fires and I have no idea how you’re going to hold on to a torch and use an axe at the same time.” “I’m not really supposed to fight if I can help it,” Falls said. “I’m only supposed to be here to watch you.” “Does that mean if I get in real trouble you’ll just leave me?” I asked. He shrugged. “Even the most superstitious elders in the tribe wouldn’t let taboos or rules get in the way of saving lives. Honor is about living well, not dying stupidly.” I nodded in approval and walked inside, trying to figure out what this place had been. It didn’t look like a Stable, but maybe the few that had been built on mountaintops were designed differently from ones at sea level. “This is some kind of military base, isn’t it?” I asked. “I guess,” Destiny said. “Even though I lived out here, there was a lot of stuff buried in the tundra. Even before the war the government owned a lot of land and wouldn’t let civilians in to see what they were doing. There were all kinds of rumors about what they were doing, strange lights in the sky, persistent humming sounds that never went away, voices from nowhere. The popular theory was alien contact but…” “But?” “It sort of lacks perspective,” Destiny said, swinging her cone of light around as we walked into what looked like an atrium. “If you look at Equestria before the war, they were practically all farmers. There was a little technology, but no mass-production. Everything was a one-off made by a genius as proof of concept. If they were testing things we’d think of as perfectly normal - cloudships or VertiBucks or powered armor - those farmers would have no idea what they were looking at.” “So they’d think it was aliens.” “Sure. It can be easier than believing ponies are capable of great things.” I looked around the large room. Falls had his axe out but he was just leaning on it and watching me. I took a deep breath. I had to act like I was in charge. “Whatever we’re looking for is probably in the deepest part of the base,” I said. Falls nodded silently in agreement. “There’s a security room over there. There might be a key or door controls.” I walked confidently into the small security office. It wasn’t much larger than a bedroom. There were some filing cabinets along one wall, broken monitors on another, a window looking out into the atrium, and a whole console full of buttons and knobs. “One of these has to do something,” I said. I stepped closer, and the broken monitors lit up, most of them showing static. The door slammed shut, and an alarm blared. “Oh that’s not fair!” I yelled. “I didn’t even touch anything yet!” “Look under here,” Destiny said, pointing her light down. I could see a faint green beam. I’d stepped in its path when I got closer to the terminal. “It’s a laser tripwire. But that’s not the bad part.” “What’s the bad part?” I got on my knees to look under the desk console. Throbbing black wires like veins connected coral-like growths of coppery green metal. “That’s SIVA, isn’t it?” I asked. Destiny bobbed solemnly in agreement. “Horseapples,” I muttered. Someone tapped on the window. I stood up to see Falls-the-Axe. “The door’s locked on this side,” he said, his voice muffled by the glass. “We tripped some kind of alarm!” I shouted back. “I think the raiders were here!” “Just my luck,” Falls groaned. “Stay there and I’ll look for a way to open the door again.” His ears perked up, and he threw himself down to the ground. I jerked back in surprise at the muzzle flashes from outside, and the bulletproof glass between us cracked and cratered as rounds slammed into it from outside. “Scratch that,” I groaned. “The raiders are still here!”