//------------------------------// // Chapter 30 - Crush The Industry // Story: Fallout Equestria: Blue Destiny // by MagnetBolt //------------------------------// “Now that he’s in the Auto-Doc, all you have to do is hit the green button,” I told Walks-in-Shadow. The zebra nodded, listening intently and staring at the control pad and obviously trying to memorize it. “It should take care of everything else by itself.” “Ay ya,” Walks sighed. “The technology the ponies had before the war must have been amazing, if a miracle like this was just left in a basement!” “I guess?” Destiny said, with a mental shrug. “When I was alive I never trusted them. I’d rather have a real doctor. Somepony with a cutie mark for medicine and a degree from a decent school.” “Sky Lady, please tell your friend not to say that kind of thing while I’m strapped into this thing,” Smoke-in-Water said, his voice strained. I could tell the metal arms surrounding him were unnerving the zebra. “Sorry for her pessimism,” I said. “Don’t worry about anything, okay? This is gonna work just fine. It patched up the kid already, and he’s great! Please tell him you feel great.” “Ah, aff!” Walks said, blushing. “There’s not even a scar! I really thought I was going to die, but it saved me!” Smoke took a deep breath and steadied himself. He nodded to Walks-in-Shadow. “Show the Sky Lady that you’ve been listening to her instructions.” I stepped back and let him do the honors. He reverently and deliberately pushed the big green button. The pod closed, and there was a soft hiss as it started to get to work. “How long is it going to take?” Walks-in-Shadow asked. “Start counting down from ten,” Destiny said. “Ten… nine… eight… seven…” he started, and then the general anesthetic kicked in and he went out like a switch had been turned off. I patted the side of the pod gently so I wouldn’t break anything and sat down. I wasn’t nearly as tired as I expected to be. A haze of fatigue and soreness had been clouding everything, rolling in like a thin fog that builds up layer by layer until you can’t see your hoof in front of your face and the air is too thick to push through. “You were really brave coming in here, Sky Lady,” Walks-in-Shadow said, sitting next to me. “This place is cursed! Did you see the walking dead?” There were still a few skeletons left. I’d left some of them alone on my way through the building because they’d seemed harmless, and the bones were still milling around aimlessly. They hadn’t molested us when we’d dragged Walks-in-Shadow through the place on a stretcher. “You should have seen some of the stuff that I had to clear out,” I said. “It was spooky enough to turn you white!” “But I am white. With black stripes. And your coat is white too, Sky Lady!” “It’s a metaphor.” “I heard about this place,” Walks said. “It’s part of the history of our tribe that the Elders have to learn. I thought they were telling tall tales but it’s worse than any of the stories.” “Yeah? We have a little while to wait. Tell me what you know.” “It all started just before the sky closed and the old world ended…” Like all tragic tales, it is a story of misunderstanding and fear. A great and terrible battle had been fought, and the ground was soaked with blood. It was a horrible siege, and full of monsters and heroes, but it had come and gone and in its wake a fresh and new type of fear had been found. Many of those who had fallen in battle, dying in the ice and cold mud, were alive again. Or at least their bodies were alive, forced back from the very brink of death by pony magic and forced to fight again with the taste of their own mortality still on their tongue. Our ancestors were the lucky ones, the zebra that didn’t fall into the abyss when they stood on the edge. They tasted death and chose life, and in having faced death, they became kind and abandoned their lust for war. But the nature of luck is that for there to be a lucky few there must be many unfortunates. The fallen ones scorned the kindness of the ponies. They believed they were still dead inside, and filled themselves with darkness that drove them to take the lives of others. They crossed lines that should never be crossed. Like they always do, the ponies did not listen to our wisdom, and they tried to solve the problem without understanding it. They took in the ones with darkness where their hearts should be and tried to make them well again, but it was not just shame or stress or fear that drove them, it was blackest hate untempered by any sense of morality or kindness. One of the three leaders of the fallen ones allowed themselves to be captured and brought here, tricking the ponies into taking them in. They were named Savathun, and her strength came from the power of deceit and the death of truth. The place the ponies took her, their grand house of healing, became twisted by her power and her lies until it was a tomb. It was the work of our tribe and a few ponies who sought out our wisdom that stopped her grand design, for on the day the bombs fell, she was preparing a ritual that would have wiped out what few survived the great purge of balefire. Blessed talismans were hung to hold back her power, and she was sealed away, forever. “I guess it didn’t actually last forever,” I groaned. “She tricked me into destroying the talismans. But all of the other zombies were trying to kill me. Why would she make them try to kill me if I was doing what she wanted?” “Ay ya,” Walks-in-Shadow shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe her lust for killing was so great she couldn’t hold it back. Or maybe she couldn’t control them while she was sealed away.” “I just hope she stays dead,” I sighed. “Who can say? The legends about the fallen ones describe them returning from death again and again, but they don’t say how. It might be good for me to bring the Elders here and have them bless everything, quiaff?” “Good idea,” I agreed. “I don’t know much about magic, but it probably wouldn’t hurt to dump bleach over everything, too. This place is filthy.” The pod beeped an alert and slid open. “That was fast,” I said, standing up. It was a good thing I did, because Smoke-in-Water practically fell into my hooves. He looked pale and drained, and maybe a little thinner, like someone who’d spent a month resting in bed after a serious bout of the feather flu. “I feel like half the life was sucked out of me,” he groaned. “It essentially was,” Destiny said. “According to your post-treatment results, the Auto-Doc gave you a full round of dialysis and added a few pharmaceuticals on the return trip. It reports purging unknown zebra combat drugs.” “Does that mean it worked?” I asked. Smoke nodded. “It did. I might feel weak, but I also don’t feel the spirit of the bear nipping at my heels and waiting for the right moment to take over. My soul can finally rest.” “When you say it like that it sounds like you’re dying,” I said. He snorted and stood up, puffing out his chest. “Don’t be silly! I’m better than ever, and I have fought ten times harder and ten times longer than you, Sky Lady. I don’t feel like hoof-wrestling you, but once I’ve had a few mugs of mead to steady me, I could take on any foe!” “Good to hear it,” I said, smiling and giving him a gentle pat on the back. “If we ever get free time and nothing is trying to kill us you can teach me a few tricks so I won’t be so embarrassingly green.” He nodded stiffly. “Does this mean you’re not a Companion any more?” Walks-in-Shadow asked. “No,” Smoke-in-Water said more gently, ruffling the kid’s mane. “It means the Sky Lady has given us a great boon. The Long Walk is a price we are willing to pay to protect the ones we love, but it is a steep one. This was a house of healing, and with the curse broken, it can be one again.” “The other wounded zebra back in town could use the help too,” I said. “I don’t know how long this thing will last, but I’m pretty sure I saw a manual on the workbench, and there are all the tools you could ever need.” “These things use a lot of Stable-Tec technology,” Destiny said. “It should be easy enough to repair. Even if you run out of spare parts, they used off-the-shelf components for practically everything. A little scavenging in some of the ruins we’ve seen around would get you anything you needed.” “We’ll safeguard it,” Smoke said. “It will always be a haven for you as well, Sky Lady. From the way you fight, you’ll probably need it again soon.” “I’d take offense to that but you’re absolutely right,” I admitted. “I doubt I’ll be able to take down a giant machine dragon without scraping my knee.” “Speaking of that, I was thinking about some of the issues we’re up against,” Destiny said. “We’ve got two pretty intractable problems. You can’t get close to the dragon because the control signal it’s giving off will make your infection run wild and tear you apart from the inside. And even if you could walk right up to it, you can’t actually do anything to permanently hurt it.” “When we actually ran up against it, I did pretty well with the cannon the one raider was carrying,” I noted. “You’re right. But we can’t really do that again. The thing was trying to burrow into your body the whole time you were holding it.” “So I’m guessing you figured out a solution?” “Of course I did! I’m a genius. Do you remember the High Priest?” “Sure. Fornax. Amazing hat that was probably part of his head. Tried to convince me to join him then ducked out and had his bodyguards try to kill me instead of doing it himself. I remember him.” “When we were close to him I could detect a SIVA broadcast from him. Not just a repeater like the antenna in the forest, one that was actually originating from him.” “What does that mean for us?” “The SIVA onboard the Exodus Blue had a central control core. It was sort of like a queen bee for the rest of the hive. It controlled the rest of the swarm through a certain type of near-field broadcast that… well, the technical details aren’t important, but what is important is that the High Priest has something similar. I don’t think it’s as powerful as a full control core, but it’s another node in the network with administrator-level access.” “Wait, I think I figured out the rest of the plan. You want me to steal it.” “Sort of. It’s probably inside his skull, so you’ll need to ask very firmly if you want to borrow it.” She paused. “Just in case this is a Chamomile having brain damage moment, I mean you’re going to have to--” “I get it, I get it. I have to kill him,” I said, rolling my eyes. “You don’t have to convince me. He’s a creep and he needs to go down. I’m just not looking forward to poking around in every dark hole around the forest trying to find him. Being in there is literally a pain.” “You think I wouldn’t suggest this idea if I didn’t already have a solution in mind?” Destiny asked. “I told you, I’m a genius. The Auto-Doc uses off-the-shelf Stable-Tec parts, right?” “Right. You said that like, two seconds ago.” “The thing about Stable-Tec gear is that it all networks together automatically and seamlessly. PipBucks, terminals, maneframes, even Auto-Docs. Since their network security is about as tough to crack as a screen door on a bank vault, we can find basically any node on the network as long as we have the tags. Tags that are listed in the maintenance records right here.” “...High Priest Fornax had an infected Auto-Doc pod with him. It’s how he ‘recruits’ new members to the cause,” I mumbled. “Right! I bet he got it from here! If we track the pods down, we track him down. Then we just shoot him a bunch.” “And take his head back so we can salvage the control node from his skull and put it in the armor?” “Something like that,” Destiny said. It seemed like a simple plan. Just follow the arrow on the map. I still hadn’t learned my lesson about the way simple plans always go wrong. “How does it look?” I asked. “We’re right at the edge of what you can tolerate,” Destiny said. "I wouldn't hang around long-term." We were just inside the Cosmodrome. It was a massive place, more like a small city than anything else. Buildings poked through the treeline here and there, stark and crumbling concrete set against the green of the jungle defying every law of nature and growing in the tundra. Right now I was following a twisting road, crowded with abandoned, ruined carts of every shape and size. “Looks like the biggest traffic accident in the world,” I mumbled. “They must have been trying to get into the Cosmodrome at the last minute.” Destiny sounded subdued. “It wasn’t a secret that we were building giant airships to evacuate Equestria. The Exodus Arks were too big to keep secret, and too many ponies worked on them. Nopony really believed they’d ever need to use them. A lot of ponies considered just building them to be close to treason, like we were saying Equestria was doomed.” “I mean…” I motioned at the everything. Destiny snorted. “Yeah. The Boss Mare said Equestria was too naive and jingoistic for MAD to work-- you ever hear the MAD theory?” “Just about everything I hear from the war sounds pretty mad.” “You’re not wrong. The idea is Mutually Assured Destruction. Everyone sitting on a stockpile of worlds of mass destruction, combined with agreements between countries and people that if they’re attacked by someone using a weapon of mass destruction, their allies will retaliate. A promise that if one person dares to drop the bomb, the whole world will end, and making sure that absolutely everyone knows the stakes.” “...Why?” “According to the theory, it means no one will ever actually use their weapons, because they face destruction if they do.” “What if one side doesn’t care? Or if they’re able to attack before the other side can retaliate?” “I guess we found out the hard way. Everyone loses.” “Who shot first, anyway?” “Tartarus, Chamomile, you’d know more about that than I would. When I heard the bombs were dropping I was too busy worrying about getting the Exodus Blue off the ground to worry about that! What do they teach you in school?” “The zebra attacked first and we retaliated.” “There you go, then. It’s probably true!” “You just don’t like zebras.” “You’re right, I don’t. Speaking of which, we’re getting some radiation, but it’s nothing you need to worry about. It’s probably just from that crater over there where they dropped a megaspell and tried to kill as many ponies as they could.” I winced at that. “I’m going to divert extra power to our signal dampening,” Destiny said. “It should last long enough for you to get the job done, but be careful. It means less power to structural integrity and less available to the enhancement talismans. I’m testing some refinements from the inhibitor Kulaas was broadcasting around my mom’s old lab, so, um, let me know if you feel anything weird!” “Right,” I said. I wasn’t really looking around much. I was mostly flying just watching the compass and following the direction the arrow was pointing. It started growing in my vision, and I slowed to actually see what I was doing. “What is this place?” I circled down towards the big building I was being directed to, landing in a clearing made of cracked concrete shot through with silvery weeds. There was a dull sound in the air and I thought the deep hum was in my head until I touched down and felt it through my hooves. “It’s a munitions dump,” Destiny sighed. “I didn’t like being in the weapons business--” DRACO chirped. “--but there were some exceptions,” she finished. “The Arks needed weapons, for security onboard the ship and after landing. We couldn’t ask the army for them since they were busy fighting a war, so we made our own. We tried selling some models, but they never got adopted by any of the armed forces. A few civilian sales to collectors, but it never turned a real profit.” “I can’t believe you couldn’t make money selling guns during a war.” “You have no idea how frustrating it is trying to cut a government contract when they’ve had nepotism running everything for a thousand years.” The doors were huge sliding shutters, but one corner was bent and twisted open. I ducked my head and squeezed through, careful not to scrape against the steel. As soon as I got in, that hum doubled in strength. It wasn’t some weird energy field or deadly transmission. It was industry. Bizarre almost-organic shapes like exotic fruit rendered with polygonal plates of copper hung from vines as thick as my thigh and pulsing like they were pumping something from one evil-looking bunch to the next. One near me opened up like a flower and spat something onto a moving conveyor belt. I looked at it as it went past. “That’s an explosive charge,” Destiny whispered as it went past. “Look at this place. They’re synthesizing high explosive and bomb parts, then pumping them around and assembling them. Those fruits are miniature SIVA factories!” “Let’s see where they’re going,” I hissed back, crouching down and following the conveyor belt. It looked more like something built by ponies, so I guessed it was original to the factory. I could feel Destiny’s disapproval. This place might have just been a factory, but it had been something her family had built, and it was overrun and mutated into something alien. Shipping containers were lying on the ground in no apparent order. Maybe they’d once been neat and lined up, but trees had broken through the concrete floor and reached towards the roof, pushing them out of the way, and others had clearly been shoved aside by scavengers or raiders. All the cover meant I didn’t see him right away, but I felt a chill down my spine just before taking a turn with the moving belt. Fornax was standing on a catwalk hanging above the factory floor. He had the same armored cloak made of jangling plates of metal concealing his body, but I’d recognize the giant metal hat anywhere. From the low angle I was at, I could see that it came right down over his eyes, leaving only his nose and mouth exposed. “Looks like we struck gold,” Destiny said. “Now we just need to-- Chamomile, what are you doing?” “I have a really great idea,” I whispered. I grabbed one of the explosive charges off the conveyor belt and jammed it into the Junk Jet. This was going to work really well and there was no way it would go wrong. I thought about saying something dramatic, but a sneak attack worked better when you didn’t give the target warning. I launched the charge right at High Priest Fornax’s back. It would have been a perfect shot if it wasn’t for the shield that appeared in the air between us. It looked like the air itself was boiling right before the charge went off, shoving the Priest forwards into the railing but not doing any real damage. “An intruder!” Fornax snapped, the edges of his cloak glowing. “Stop them!” “What was that?” I asked, running for better cover than what I had. Raiders started to pour into the room, dropping in from the trees overhead and doors that presumably led to offices and other rooms deeper in the factory. “That should have blown him in half!” “DRACO got a spectrogram reading from the light. It’s a cloud of SIVA particles. It set off the charge because it was actually starting to deconstruct it. If you get too close to him, that cloud will start eating you alive.” “So much for my backup plan of stabbing him a lot,” I groaned. “How are we supposed to hurt him?” “I think you had the right idea the first time. Explosives! If you hit him with enough, the cloud should disperse. Theoretically.” “I think this is the first time we’ve had all the bombs we could possibly ask for,” I said, grabbing another from the belt. One of the raiders spotted me and started barking orders. I launched the charge at Fornax before grabbing the only other bomb in reach and ducking into cover. The charge impacted on the SIVA shield and I saw it burst in the air, a little closer to Fornax this time. A few bullets bounced off my armor with more force than usual, bruising me even through the barding. I winced and stayed low, moving from cover to cover with the deadly hail coming down around me. I turned and fired at the biggest concentration of raiders. “Chamomile, you need to--” Destiny didn’t get to finish what she was saying. The charge hit the ground right in front of one of the raiders and went off. What I hadn’t been thinking about was the big coppery SIVA factory right next to him. It exploded like it had just been looking for an excuse to go off, sending a plume of fire across the factory floor. The pipes connecting it to the wall ruptured and sprayed their contents into the air, and whatever they were pumping it was also apparently flammable, because it and the fire became best friends and a real blaze started ripping through the assembly line. “I was going to say you need to be careful, but it’s a little late,” Destiny grumbled. “That’s not good, is it?” I asked. “You started a fire in the middle of a bomb factory! You tell me if it seems like a good thing!” “Probably less good since I’m still in the bomb factory.” Bullets plinged off the shipping container next to me. It was my only warning before a raider jumped on top of me. He had a gun in his mouth -- no, actually, once he was right in my face I could see the gun was bolted to his mouth. He tried to grab my left forehoof and shove me to the ground and shot me at point-blank range, the bullet hitting hard enough to be painful. “Knock it off!” I yelled. I stabbed him in the face before I was even aware of what I was doing, twisting the knife and tearing the gun free from his muzzle. He screamed and clutched at the run of his face, falling to the ground. I kicked him away and tried to spot Fornax through the growing blaze. Another one of the fruit erupted, adding more fuel to the fire. The heat was already unbearable, and I was covered in sweat even through the Exodus Armor. It was enough to start setting the charges off, the conveyor belt coming to a halt as charges started bursting apart in a chain reaction. Fornax was thrown off his hooves for a moment, and I saw the last of his shield evaporate. He was standing right in the middle of the worst of the disaster, but didn’t even seem to notice his metallic hooves starting to glow with heat. “You interlopers have no idea what you’re doing!” High Priest Fornax shouted in his synthesized voice. He reared, and there was a pulse of energy that rattled through me all the way to my bones. The wildly pumping pipes creating the inferno quieted, going still. “That was a shutdown command!” Destiny said. “I was right! He’s got a control node that’s giving him access to the SIVA swarm!” “Sounds like it’s time to end this,” I said. A lot of the floor was still on fire and busily eating through the rest of the chemical slurry spilled across the concrete. The raiders were broken, trying to put out fires, taking cover, or just abandoning their posts and fleeing from what looked like it might still become Equestria’s newest crater. I took to the air, winging over the maze of containers. The raiders didn’t have time to deal with me no matter what their master was ordering. Fornax spotted me and I could feel his hateful glare. A pale aura appeared around me and I stopped dead in the air, held by his magic. “I should have known. You’re the apostate that denied my offer to join us,” Fornax said. “It was not enough to merely be a fool, but you had to be a dangerous one. You destroyed good, loyal members of the cause!” “Get over yourself!” I yelled. “Who would want to join your crazy cult?!” “Everypony will, eventually,” Fornax said. “I have seen the wasteland that stretches across the world! This gift was meant to turn the world green again and I will spread it from horizon to horizon!” The glow around me sputtered out. “You’re free!” Destiny yelled. “I used the thaumoframe to break his grip!” “No!” Fornax yelled. I didn’t give him a chance to try anything else. I fired, and he turned to the side, trying to get his armored cloak between us. The charge exploded and tore his cloak apart, shards launching everywhere like hoof-sized triangular knives. Fornax collapsed to the ground. The blast had torn through him, shredding his stomach. Oil leaked out of him, hissing on the catwalk and smoking in the residual heat. “Got him,” I said. “That didn’t go nearly as badly as I was expecting, even with the giant fire.” I hovered over him. I wasn’t really looking forward to the next part. I was going to have to cut off his head off. I snapped my blade out, holding it like a giant pony-mantis hybrid, and tried to decide where to start-- Fornax gasped for breath, and almost instantly launched a force-bolt right into me, throwing me back into an old cargo container. I hit the doors hard enough to pop them open, and rotting cardboard boxes collapsed on me in an avalanche of pre-war junk. I fought my way free of cartons of insta-mash just in time to see Fornax vanish in a flash. “He teleported?” Destiny asked. “Not all of him,” I grunted, standing up and brushing myself off. Half of the High Priest was still on the catwalk, his lower legs twitching like they were still alive. “He can’t have gotten far like that. Let me try to trace it,” Destiny said. I nodded and poked through the boxes. There had to be something useful in there. I grabbed a few intact boxes of food and then found something special. It was sitting there like it had been deliberately hidden, lying between two boxes. It was a statuette of a smiling mare. I looked at the base and read the inscription. “From your friends at Maretini Atoll,” I read. I shook the figurine. The top half was on a spring and it bobbed a little like it was dancing, the joint hidden by a green grass skirt. “Neat!” I smiled and stowed it away safely. I was starting to see what Dad liked about archaeology. “I think I’ve got a trace,” Destiny said. “He’s using a really messy teleport spell. I think he dropped down below this level and into the access tunnels.” “Can you find him down there?” I asked. “Please. Remember who built this place? I used the access tunnels all the time to go from building to building without having to walk out on the ice!” I could hear the smirk. “AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!” It had been a mistake letting Destiny give me directions. I should have known her spotty memory was going to get me in trouble. That’s why I was in an HVAC duct trying to get a grip on anything to stop me from falling into the spinning fan blades below me. “Knife!” Destiny yelled. “Knife!” I flicked the blade out of my hoof and stabbed it into the vent wall. It cut through like I was slicing through paper. Most of the time a really sharp knife was a good thing, but it was so sharp it wasn’t stopping my fall! I grunted and twisted and sparks flew and I really felt how the blade was attached to my bones. I screeched to a halt with my back hooves so close to the fan I could feel the breeze coming off of it. “You know, come to think of it, maybe we should have gone left instead of right,” Destiny said. “You think?!” This time we dropped into a tunnel. I guess part of me had expected it to be filthy and ugly, but spending centuries unused underground had left it pristine. There were a few cracks in the walls where roots were starting to get in, but other than that it could have been built yesterday. It was tall and square, with the lighting recessed into the floor. “We’re close,” Destiny said. “I’m picking up some movement ahead of us.” “Is it Fornax?” I asked, running the way she pointed. I wasn’t sure how far his teleportation spell would get him, but if he was moving it meant he might not really have been as badly injured as I’d thought. I’d read about lizards that would leave their tails behind to confuse predators. Maybe Fornax had done the same thing with his entire lower half? “This is the right place and there shouldn’t be anypony else down here,” Destiny said. “Look at this place. The floor is still clean. There’s no way the raiders come through here.” She was right. It was so spotless you could eat off the ground. “Why is this place so clean?” I asked. “Shouldn’t there be dust?” “The automatic cleaners must still be running. They’re just some harmless little robots, nothing to worry about. Stay focused on what we’re doing -- the movement is coming from just ahead. Take the next left.” “You sure we’re not supposed to go right?” I teased. “Yes, I’m sure. This is weird. The movement is coming towards us.” I could hear it now. It was an electric sound like a storm turbine, along with the sound of metal on metal, one blade sliding against another. The ground vibrated under my hooves. Before I could reach the junction ahead, something else turned the corner, a massive black box that filled the corridor. A single glowing camera sat opposite a flickering screen like a set of mismatched eyes over a maw of blades that pulled it along the tunnel floor like deadly, scrabbling legs. Its camera flashed, and a wall of churning death rumbled right for me.