They settled on five guards (Flash, Bon Bon, Spearhead, Fleetfoot, Welded Aegis), plus Spike. Spitfire had said she wanted to go with them, but needed to stay behind and keep the cargo bay calm, especially with a changeling drone that had once been Twilight locked into one of the storage units. Fair enough. Applejack figured five ponies and a dragon ought to be enough to protect her.
For Applejack was going with them. Sure, she could stay in the cargo hold, all nice and safe and cozy, but she wanted to help. She’d be moving. She’d be following her plan through. And she felt responsible for Twilight’s predicament. Absurd, she knew, but that was the way it was. Getting Twilight out of that predicament would help put her fears to rest. Luckily, the guards had accepted her when she’d volunteered.
Spitfire paced back and forth in front of the assembled group. After their preparations — food, water, getting ammo, making sure all their limited equipment was up to snuff — she was ready to give them one last pep talk. “Mares,” she said, “stallions, drake. Your mission is simple: get to Neurothaumatics, find a certain neuromod, get to Habitation, find Twilight, and get back here. But changelings are still all over the station, so you need to do this as fast as possible. Don’t let yourselves get distracted by anything. This mission might be our last chance of surviving this nightmare.”
She stopped and looked at each individual in turn as she kept speaking. “Now, by now, you’ve heard about Lightning Dust and Blueblood. The jury’s still out on him, but as far as I’m concerned, Lightning has joined forces with the enemy and should be considered a threat. If you see her, kill her. Because she’s more dangerous than she looks. She’s armed, she’s shot herself up to the gills with enough neuromods to teach an army, and she’s got some sort of anti-magic devices-”
“Nullwave grenades.”
Everyone turned to look at the voice. Trixie was standing near the doorway, watching them. “Nullwave grenades,” she repeated. “They’re some of the prototypes the scientists were working on. They don’t do anything physical, but they keep magic from working in a small area for a little while. Kind of like magical flashbangs. It’s been very, you know…” She smirked and winked. “Hush-hush.”
Spitfire blinked, shrugged, and returned her attention to the guards. “She’s got nullwave grenades,” she said, as if nothing had happened. “Watch your backs, or you might find yourself without magic. And if you think you can handle something as trivial as that, you probably haven’t lost your magic before.” (Spike conspicuously shifted his weight around.)
“And Applejack here thinks she saw something on video,” Spitfire continued, “that even Princess Twilight ran from. You’re all familiar with what she’s done since ascending, so I don’t need to tell you what that means.” She paused and shuffled her wings. “Stay sharp and keep watch over each other, and you’ll all get through this. Dismissed.”
The ponies and dragon saluted her (Applejack included; it felt right) and turned for the exit. But just as they were leaving, Trixie yelled, “Wait!” and galloped up to Applejack. She seemed more serious than Applejack had seen her before. “Hey. Um.” Trixie looked at the ground and twisted one of her legs. “Just- Be safe, okay? Trixie would miss you if you didn’t… come back.”
“I’d miss me, too,” said Applejack. “Thanks for your help gettin’ me here to start with. Trust me, I’ll be back.”
Trixie smiled and nodded as the door closed between them.
They didn’t go through the GUTS. It’d take them too close to what Spike only described as a “hive”: “They’re swarming everywhere,” he said, “we’d be dead before we got ten feet.” Applejack decided she didn’t want to know. And so they had to take a detour through Life Support.
Applejack had never been in Life Support, never heard of any problems in it. Which, since Golden Oaks was a space station, was good. Hearing about life support in a space station out of nowhere was like hearing a doctor start talking about your heart out of nowhere: never a good sign. The only real interaction Applejack had had with the ponies who worked in Life Support was to tell them that a bunch of plants had just been planted in the arboretum, so they might see a very slight drop in CO2 levels around the station (apparently, they didn’t).
Right before they entered the Life Support module, Spike held up a hand to stop them. He’d been sort of unofficially designated the leader by virtue of being in front and the one among them most likely to survive being shot in the face. “If you see anything moving, watch your shots. These systems have plenty of redundancies, but let’s not test them.” The guards nodded. “Just as a reminder, we’ll be heading right through and taking a maintenance stairway into neurothaumatics. Simple.” Another set of nods, and Spike punched the button to open the door.
The first thing Applejack heard was a lot of fans. Like, a lot of fans. It was like the entire room was a giant HVAC machine. Then she noticed a nearby sign: Atmosphere Control. So she was pretty much right.
Two giant, square columns, each with the footprint of a house and double the height, stretched up to the ceiling of the massive room. Walkways stretched around them, leading to the occasional door, and most of the humming was coming from inside them. Applejack could only imagine what was going through those columns: all of Golden Oaks’ air, recycled and cleaned and purified over and over. She had no idea how that was being applied, but then, she wasn’t working there.
Spike waved the group forward and they crept into the room. The guards swept their guns around with practiced efficiency. Did they have drills? Applejack wondered. For the most part, the station was peaceful. The last major disturbance had been seven moons ago, when two doctors got into a shouting match over some of their work in the lounge. So major that Applejack had had to move to a nearby table. The horror. Yet these ponies moved like they’d seen this every day.
Nobody spoke. It let them hear things better, even if those things were mostly the atmosphere units. The ponies’ ears were swiveling every which way to pick up every sound possible, but Spike didn’t have any ears, as far as Applejack could see. She found herself moving her own ears about, not out of nervousness, but to fit in. Just in Case.
A small skittering wafted into Applejack’s ears and she froze. So did everyone else. Just as she was trying to figure out where it had come from, Welded Aegis said, “On top of the vents, left side high.” A few ponies, including Applejack, looked up. Indeed, ventilation was hanging from the ceiling up there, shrouded in shadow. It’d be the perfect place to hide if you were into that sort of thing.
“I’ll watch it,” said Bon Bon.
“Copy that.”
They inched onward, Bon Bon keeping her gun aimed upward. The atmospheric processors slowly moved along, and soon they rounded the far corner. Spike stayed at the head of the group, striding confidently along, but never moving so fast that the rest of the squad couldn’t keep up. In fact, Applejack was sure-
BANG. Applejack flinched at the gunshot, then flinched at the dead changeling drone that fell from the duct above. “One bug down,” Bon Bon said tonelessly. “Still looking up.”
No one responded and everyone kept moving. For the first time, Applejack couldn’t help but feel a little out-of-place. Sure, she knew how to use guns thanks to neuromods, but it was in a rote, muscle-memory sort of way. These ponies knew the ways to use guns beyond “point and shoot” and the best situation for each gun. These ponies understood guns.
“Coming up on a door,” Spike said. “Might be a chokepoint.”
Applejack glanced over her shoulder. It was one of the few doors in the outside wall, rather than leading deeper into the processors for control stations or whatever. She looked at the sign above the door. Waste Processing; she wrinkled her nose on pure reflex.
At the door, Fleetfoot and Spearhead took up places on opposite sides of the frame and another prepared to open it on their signal. The second the door was open, the two of them swept their guns across the room beyond. A few rapid-fire gunshots, and they both yelled out, “Clear!” Flash and Aegis moved forward to cover them while they reloaded. When the squad moved into the room, they stepped past three still-bleeding drone corpses.
For a place labelled “Waste Processing”, the room didn’t smell that bad. In fact, Applejack assumed the pine air freshener dangling above the doorway was a joke. It smelled like… well, any other part of the station. The room was quite long and most of it was taken up by several horizontal cylindrical machines — probably pumps — that, while large, weren’t the gargantuan behemoths of the atmospheric processors. Pipes snaked out from them, above and beneath the floor, and-
A drone jumped out at Spike from behind a pipe. He grabbed it, crushed its head against a beam with his bare claws, and tossed the body away in seconds, all without breaking his stride.
-and Applejack could hear water rushing through them. More pipes reached up for the distant ceiling, either taking water from the plumbing all around the station or moving it to the waterworks for further purification. Various control and analysis stations were scattered around the room to examine this or that specific aspect of the treatment process.
“Hold up,” Flash said. “Two of the same toolbox over there.” He pointed off at one of the stations. “Bon Bon, you take left, I’ll take right.”
“Got it.”
Two near-simultaneous gunshots later, the two guards had destroyed a toolbox and a disguised changeling without going anywhere near them. Applejack hadn’t fired a shot yet. Not that she was complaining, of course; the less she felt like she needed to use her gun, the better. The professionalism of the crew and general lack of pony bodies was also a plus.
The group moved between two of the pumps, down an aisle narrow enough to prevent four ponies from walking side-by-side. They organized into a nearly single-file line and kept moving. “You know,” Aegis said, “this would’ve been nice the first time around.”
“Yeah,” said Fleetfoot. “Just one or two changelings at a time, all lined up nice and-” She whipped her gun up, paused, and blasted a barely-visible changeling off a pipe drenched in darkness. “-nice and neat. Why do they gotta ruin that?” A small burst of tight laughter rippled through the group. “I mean, if they sat where I expected-”
Every light in the room went out.
The group froze and all talk stopped. They fanned out into a circle as best they could, pointing their weapons in every direction. Soon, half a dozen flashlight beams were sweeping across the room. They provided light but were no proper substitute for the room’s actual lighting. Applejack’s skin began to crawl. There were too many places to hide; who knew what was lurking a few inches outside the beam’s circle?
“Is that the reactor again?” Fleetfoot asked quietly, preempting Applejack’s first question. “Did it-”
“No, look at the door.”
With a rustle of uniforms, everyone turned to look at the door they’d entered the room from. Light was leaking out from the edges, easily visible in the gloom. They all looked at the door they were heading to; same deal.
“They cut the power…” Flash said. “And only to the lights of this room…”
“Do they know how to do that?” Aegis asked. “Aren’t they animals? Maybe it’s just Lightning.”
“They’re smart enough to do this,” said Spike. “Trust me.” Pause. “We need to keep moving.”
They crept down the aisle, more slowly than before. They kept their breathing quiet. In fact, aside from humming machinery, the entire place seemed unusually quiet. Time after time, Applejack thought she saw something moving, only for it to turn out to be a notification light winking in the black or somepony else’s light moving about. She wanted to break into a run for the next room, but that was probably what the changelings wanted: for them to panic and separate. No. They were not going to split up.
Something dripped on Applejack’s face. She grimaced and instinctively looked up; nothing but steel pipes and darkness her flashlight had trouble reaching. She moved to wipe the stuff off.
When her hoof touched it, she froze. It was sticky.
She scraped some of the goop off and squinted at it in the dim light. It was clear, like water, but it clung together weirdly. It was tight and stringy and bubbly and beady and warm and-
-and it was saliva. No, not just saliva. Drool.
Silent as a whisper, something massive fell from the ceiling above her.
Applejack yelped and brought her gun up, but the thing had already landed on Fleetfoot, the guard at the end of the line, sinking its teeth into her neck before she could cry out. In the mere second it took the rest of the guards to focus on it, she’d been yanked off her feet and into the darkness with barely a sound. Beams of light swept back and forth, but a lot of things could hide in those shadows.
“Hold your fire!” barked Spike, even though his nostrils were smoking. “Hold your fire until you see it!”
But although the guards weren’t shooting, they didn’t seem to be paying him much attention, either. Panicked phrases were being thrown back and forth. “-you see it?” “-big as Celestia!” “-fangs! I’m telling-” “-totally black-”
Applejack hadn’t seen enough of it to make a guess. It’d been vaguely equinoid, but far too thin and spindly. It might’ve had wings; it was hard to tell. She had her gun up, but her leg was shaking too much for her to properly aim.
“Keep! Moving!” yelled Spike. He was trying to sound in control, but Applejack caught a hint of a waver in his voice. “Get to the door, keep your guns up! Whatever it is, it’s too scared to face us in a straight fight!” Somehow, it didn’t sound all that convincing.
The squad shuffled down the aisle, their flashlights flicking across the room. Nothing was moving except them. The breathing of everyone was suddenly very audible, Applejack noted. Including her own. The blank smell of the room was slowly tinged with the aroma of blood.
They reached the door. Bon Bon smacked the Open button, but nothing happened. A curse, and she punched it several more times. Nothing. “Door’s shut,” she said. “Must be out of power, too.”
“Great,” mumbled Spike. “Can we pry it open?”
“I don’t kno-”
Something banged in the dark above them, too loud to be accidental, and everyone reflexively whipped around to look. But as the numerous flashlight beams converged, they didn’t reveal anything. Just pipe after pipe after pipe, snaking up towards the invisible ceiling. More bangs, hidden just barely out of sight.
Fleetfoot’s body was flung down at them.
Fleetfoot’s head followed an instant later.
Gunfire filled the air as the ponies, Applejack included, unloaded at where the body had come from. In a burst of green flame, Spike literally opened fire. But Applejack couldn’t see anything, and, when the barrage died down, didn’t hear anything dying. She glanced at her ammo counter; she’d expended five shots in a few panicked seconds.
“Someone get that door open,” Spike growled.
“On it,” Bon Bon whispered. She scrambled past Applejack and to the door. Metal started groaning as she pried it open with induplicable earth pony strength.
“Everyone else, hold,” said Spike. “Stay calm. Remember your training.”
“Training never covered this,” mumbled Flash, low enough that Spike couldn’t hear it.
For a few interminable seconds, Applejack felt like she couldn’t move. She didn’t know where her target was and she couldn’t breathe without inhaling gunpowder fumes. She couldn’t even run. All she could do was sit here on her rump, surrounded by ponies just as scared as she was, waiting for a monster to jump from the dark and eat her. The dark outside their flashlight beams twisted around itself, creating shapes where Applejack knew there weren’t any. It was all too easy to see an army of those monsters, prowling on the pipes above, waiting for the best moment to strike.
Light flooded the room as Bon Bon pushed the door up three feet. “Got it!” she grunted, holding it on her shoulder. “Hydraulics trying to push it shut! Go!”
Spearhead rolled through the gap. Flash. Spike grabbed Applejack and shoved her through. By the time she was on her feet again, Aegis slid on through. And finally came Spike.
But then something slammed into the floor on the other side of the door. Before anyone could react, dozens of tiny, glinting, hair-thin tendrils whiplashed around Bon Bon’s neck, hard enough to draw blood. She tried to pull away, only to get yanked into the darkness, the door slamming shut behind her.
The squad backed away as her screams echoed through the room. But they only echoed for a moment.