Matterhorn heaved their captive to his hooves by his neck, causing him to hack in pain before he returned to his strange giggling. This wasn’t at all how Access and Sheet Rock thought he’d be, and they found themselves dwelling on the interaction between them for a time.
Access slipped the terminal he’d found into a small pocket on his Cyberdeck’s harness, being sure to keep it out of sight of the two crown agents as they climbed the staircase that led back up into the hallway beside the platforms.
He made a mental note to examine it later when a feeling of overwhelming dread overtook him like a tidal wave. Something wasn’t right, no way Riot was captured that easily, especially after his strange phone call, the one that the crown agents had supposedly worked to prevent.
“Was that your handiwork back there?” Sheet Rock said suddenly to Matterhorn. “We saw the piles of bodies and wrecked gear, not to mention that smell…”
“They had ample chance to lay down their weapons and back off, and many of them did.” Matterhorn said darkly. “As I understand it, they scarpered long before we got there and those that didn’t have quite the same level of common sense as the rest of them died as they lived, as flaming piles of garbage in pony form.”
“You could have just shot them, would’ve been quicker, cleaner, and far less cruel.”
“Scum like this doesn’t deserve a chance, that was why I swept and cleared while you screwed about upstairs, we knew you wouldn’t understand.”
Riot stumbled up the stairs and chuckled to himself madly. “Spoken like a coldhearted killer, tell me brother, do they still instill their playthings with emotion, or do they leave you an empty husk devoid of all feeling?”
“Just get up the damned stairs already.” Lucky grunted. “You’re lucky we didn’t break your legs.”
They slowly made their way up the stairs and past the room with the loungers, into which Access gave another brief peek. He felt he was being watched for the briefest of moments and looked up at Riot, who had been looking over his shoulder for some time with a weird smile on his face, like he knew something they didn’t.
When they reached the platform, the air was thick with smoke and dust that obscured their view of the entrance beyond the subtle glow of the lights at the very foot of the staircase. Gunshots suddenly rang out followed by armored hooves rapidly descending the stairs, prompting quick action.
“Lucky, we’ve got company!” Matterhorn barked, diving behind an overturned marble counter top. “Looks like those marines hadn’t left. You might want to get yourselves out of here, if they capture him all this will have been for nothing!”
Bullets flew over Matterhorn’s head and into the floor behind him. Sheet Rock had already began dragging Access away from the rapidly escalating situation with Riot’s binds gripped in her magic, dragging him roughly toward the makeshift platform built into the side of the platform.
“If I leave you here the Director will kill me!” Lucky barked. “You can’t take on a squad of marines with your magic chained, you know that as well as I do.”
“The Director removed my limiters, she thought something like this might happen.” Matterhorn said as the bullets thudded into the marble behind him. “Get going, I’m a juicy target for these ponies and they’ll focus on me, that’ll let you lot get out unhindered.”
“Fine.” Lucky relented. “But you need to promise me you wont go overboard.”
“No promises there.” Matterhorn said as he darted out of cover and conjured a glittering barrier in front of him. He threw it like a pane of glass at one of the marines who had hid behind a large concrete column, and the barrier resounded with a dull thud against the marine’s skull as it struck him, shattering his skull.
If he wanted their attention, he most certainly had it now and quickly sought out more cover as the bullets started to fly once more in his direction.
“Let’s go.” Lucky said blankly.
“Wait we’re just gonna leave him?” Access said in disbelief. “How cold can you be, he’s your comrade, isn’t he?”
“I know what his plan is.” Lucky said, galloping over to the two runners to grip Riot’s bindings in her magic. “I’ll deal with this idiot so the idiot over there can cover our asses, Riot’s as much my responsibility as much as it is his.”
She produced a small combat knife from a harness on her flank and cut him free from the plastic ties that bound his hooves together, but not with a severe warning that she’d shoot him in the head if he so much as walked in a direction he wasn’t supposed to.
Surprisingly, he was amicable to that arrangement despite the multitude of ways he non-verbally cursed her name.
Lucky spared another look at the platform before she vanished down the tunnel. Matterhorn was putting up one hell of a fight, and had already lanced more than a few marines with some expertly placed beam spells, but despite this he looked to be having trouble keeping his barrier up and the marines drew ever closer to him with each and every moment that passed.
“Seven, six, five, four…”
“What are you blabbering on about now?”
“Oh nothing.” Riot said with a smirk. “By the way, you might want to cover your ears.”
“What’re you…?”
Before she could even finish her sentence, a loud boom followed by the sound of buckling concrete could be heard from the platform area as large pieces of the ceiling started to fall into rough heaps.
The marines let out shouts of terror as a few of them were crushed by the falling debris. Visibility waned quickly as more and more concrete started to pile up, and Matterhorn galloped over piles of fallen debris and headed toward the tunnel only to be blocked by a mass of twisted metal and concrete that had once been the rails.
The only opening he could peer through was far too small for him to squeeze through and panic quickly started to take hold of him. More rumbling booms came from below, it was as if the earth itself could crack open at any moment.
“Can you teleport out?” Lucky said quickly. “At the rate the ceiling is coming down, we wont be able to clear the blockages in time.”
“Looks like you got played, again.” Riot chuckled from his spot near the tracks. “Unsurprising, considering you couldn’t even tell you were being led on.”
Lucky marched over to the red haired stallion and delivered a punch straight to his jaw, sending him reeling into the floor with a disturbing crunch. She went in for another when a burst of green flame made her jump back, and her look of sheer anger was replaced with the color draining from her face.
The stallion in front of them wasn’t and had never been Riot at all, but a Changeling drone, it was hard to mistake the black carapace and green eyed bug-like pony for anything else. Nobody had seen a Changeling in decades, at least not in their true forms, and the realization hit her like a speeding truck into a brick wall.
She’d been tricked, and it had all been an elaborate ruse with no benefit for anyone on either side.
Lucky pummeled the Changeling with more and more punches in blind fury, getting more angry with each passing second until Access pulled her off of him. It took the combined efforts of both Runners to get her to calm down for even a moment due to the Changeling’s continued gasping laughter.
A loud crack came from the platform, and peering up, Matterhorn noticed the rest of the ceiling start to fall, and in a panic, he charged a teleport spell as quick as his horn would let him. It didn’t matter where it took him, only that wherever he ended up wasn’t here.
Just before he was buried alive, he vanished in a blast of bright blue light and the tunnel was completely blocked off with loose concrete, smoke, and dust. All was silent, apart from the subtle sound of settling dust and the Changeling’s increasingly weak laughter.
“I am so dead.” Lucky said to herself repeatedly, pacing back and forth. “There’s no word for just how completely fucked I am.”
“I dunno about that, it looked like he got out before he got buried.” Sheet Rock replied. “Look we need to get out of here, the rest of the place could come down on us at any moment.”
“Not yet, I have business to attend to.” Lucky said, unholstering her sidearm.
“What’re you going to do, shoot m-” the Changeling said before he was perforated by a couple of rounds from Lucky’s sidearm.
Bright green ichor leaked from the now silent Changeling’s body, and in that moment she felt a little better, but also felt a little pity toward it. The thought of how the Director would react when she reported not only her failure, or the loss of a multi-billion Eurodollar agent, but the stallion the Director saw as her own flesh and blood.
“This is just as much our failure as yours, we were supposed to provide support.” Sheet Rock stressed. “You couldn’t have known that the pony you found was a Changeling, that’s kinda the point of them.”
“Doesn’t that indicate a larger problem?” Access pointed out. “If he’s as much a master sweet-talker as he gets made out to be, he could have literally anyone under his sway at this point, nowhere’s safe now.”
“Access, have some-”
“No, he’s right.” Lucky said, cutting of Sheet Rock’s protest. “Think about it, how many Non-Equestrian ponies do you see around Canterlot anymore?”
“Very few.” Sheet Rock confirmed. “Apart from the odd Griffon, Kirin, or Thestral I suppose.”
“Well, they had to have gone somewhere, and I think we’ve just found precisely where they went.” Lucky said, peering at the Changelings corpse. “Underground, in places like this, where they can live in peace until a madpony comes and whips them into a frenzy.”
“Can you blame them?” Access replied as gently as he could. “Not everyone gets the benefit of a good education or safe upbringing, heck, me and Sheet were born in the sprawl back in Canterlot.”
“Sometimes I wonder if it was worth joining the crown, we seem to have done more harm than good.” Lucky said, gesturing around at the destruction wrought by the detonations.
“Don’t think about it now, we need to get out of here.” Access said in an attempt to steer the conversation. “You said there was a motor pool down the tracks a ways, we can use one of those vehicles right?”
“Yeah, yeah, sure.”
“Director.” said a silver Stallion with a Tablet clutched in his hooves. “May I have a word?”
“Yes… Chip, was it?”
“Yes, there’s been a… development, I thought you’d want to be told directly.”
“What kind of development?”
“Matterhorn’s transponder signal has… well… for lack of a better word, vanished.” Chip remarked fearfully. “Handler Lucky’s is still functioning however, and it looks like she’s heading this way at speed.”
“Good, have her explain herself when she arrives.”
“Our spies within the Arcology also have given reports of explosions as well, it’s not entirely certain as to what caused them, but it can only mean one thing.“
“That someone is putting up a fight, yes, I get it.” Luna growled. “Dismissed.”
Chip nodded and scuttled away as quick as his little legs could carry him. The Director didn’t show it, but she was beyond angry, not necessarily with Lucky but with herself. Riot had garnered many allies with his honeyed words and the blame laid solely with her that he’d been allowed to move unchecked for so long until now.
It seemed that he may simply be too slippery and too cunning for them to completely contain, and the best they would be able to manage is undo him where they could to mitigate the amount of damage he could do.
But now their best agent was missing, there was little they could do right now but to try to find him.