So. Applejack needed to replace a component she’d never seen before of a device she’d never worked with before while working with the stress of aliens trying to come in and eat her face off. Easy-peasy.
Wham. Outside the door, the queen screeched.
“Hurry!” yelled Twilight. “There’s a lot of them!”
Easy. Peasy.
“Look around,” Applejack said to the guards. “There’s gotta be an off switch or somethin’. ’Cause I sure as sugar ain’t goin’ in that-” She pointed at the magnetosphere generator just as the lightning flared up again. “-while it’s workin’.”
“You two!” Spitfire said, pointing at a pair of guards. “Keep on the door, get ready to fire if the princess’s shield fails. Everypony else, fan out!”
Wham.
There were a lot of workstations around, but everypony moved methodically. Applejack found herself examining the area around the columnic shield generator itself. In spite of the importance of her mission, her gaze kept getting drawn back to the generator. The glass cylinder was massive, almost fifteen feet across and over three stories high. Even as she watched, the runewheel passed near her and her hair stood on end. It almost felt like something she shouldn’t be messing with. But messing with it, she would do.
She ripped her gaze away from the column and went back to searching. She found what she was looking for on a nearby wall: a nice big red button labelled, Rapid Magnetosphere Shutdown — FOR EMERGENCY USE ONLY.
Wham.
“I’d say this is an emergency,” Applejack said, and hit it.
Immediately, the lightning within the magnetosphere’s shield generator began dying down. The runewheel slowed and slid to the bottom of the column, little bolts of electricity still twined about it. “Operation suspended,” crooned a computerized voice. “Please wait for runewheel discharge to complete before entering the chamber.”
WHAM.
“Yeah, that ain’t happenin’,” muttered Applejack. She’d just have to avoid the thing. Or tough it out. She’d toughed the rest of this out, hadn’t she? “Got it!” she yelled to the guards. “Now I just gotta-”
-skrtskrt-
Applejack’s ears pricked up. She’d heard a hollow scraping, just barely on the edge of hearing, coming from the walls. Like-
“Watch the vents!” she yelled. She bolted up the staircase to the maintenance catwalk. “Watch the vents! They’re in the walls!” She reached the top of the stairs, ran for-
A vent cover burst open. Applejack didn’t look at what was inside before blasting it twice. A dead changeling drone flopped out, pushed from behind by another changeling coming out. She charged, whipped around, and gave it the strongest buck she could manage, right in the head. The changeling crumpled like a balloon. Applejack didn’t spare any time to be disgusted before running to the generator’s access door. She wrapped her hooves around the handle keeping it shut and pulled.
And jerked to a stop. The handle didn’t budge. Applejack blinked at it, then tugged again. Still nothing. She looked up; above the door was a readout: Runewheel discharge complete in 9:38, the timer always clicking down. Stupid security measures. Applejack groaned, mumbling, “Sonuva-”
Bang; a changeling screeched and Applejack was splattered with ichor. She whipped around to see a guard with a bloody nose pointing a smoking gun at where a changeling had once stood. Keeping his eyes on the changeling, he asked, “What’s up? What’s wrong?”
“Door’s locked,” said Applejack. “I can’t get inside for another nine minutes. Safety measure.”
The guard did a double-take. “Nine minutes? I don’t think we have that sort of time.”
“Yeah, well-”
Metal screeched from the entrance and Applejack heard Twilight scream in effort. “Ah, Tartarus,” muttered the guard. He bounded back down the stairs; after a moment, Applejack followed him.
In spite of Twilight’s best efforts, the door to the control room was slowly getting pulled open, millimeter by millimeter. Several guards were on the floor, pointing their guns through the crack, ready to fire if a changeling tried to poke through. Twilight herself was sitting on her tail, sweating and breathing heavily as she forced more and more magic at the door.
Yet still it inched open.
Applejack glanced around. Over a dozen changeling drones lay dead on the ground, but two guards were dead as well. If the changelings got in, they’d overrun the ponies in less than a minute.
She readied her gun. Might as well go down swinging.
“We will rend your bones from your flesh!” screamed the queen. “We will feast upon your thoughts until reason itself flees from you! You won’t even-”
Then it stopped. Changelings started screaming outside and the door slammed back into place, Twilight wincing. Nobody moved. The screaming faded, replaced with… laughter?
“Ah ha ha! Flee, foolish aliens!” A deep fwooshing rippled through the door. “Flee before the awesome, fiery might of the Great and Powerful Trrrrrrrixie! …And also Blueblood.”
Oh, no. No way.
A moment of silence, then somepony rapped on the door. “Hellooooo? Trixie believes it’s time for you to thank her for driving away the changelings!”
Spitfire and Twilight exchanged glances. Then Twilight let the door slide open.
Trixie and Blueblood were standing just outside, Trixie doing so proudly, Blueblood self-consciously. In their magic auras, they each held a lighter and several cans of hairspray. “Greetings, friends!” Trixie immediately said. “Rejoice, for we have-”
The guards yanked them inside in an instant and Twilight slammed the door shut again. Huffing, Trixie brushed some of her mane out of her face as she got back to her hooves. “A ‘thank you’ would be nice,” she mumbled.
“For what?” asked Spitfire. But Applejack was looking from Trixie and Blueblood to the door. The door where countless changelings had been trying to get in. They couldn’t have possibly… Could they?
“We, ah, drove the changelings off,” said Blueblood. He kept switching his gaze between the ponies and his hooves as he shuffled his weight around. “It was Trixie’s idea.” (Trixie preened.) “She thought that the changelings would try to pin you down, and if we came at them from behind some time after you left-”
“Shock and awe!” Trixie interrupted. “All of their focus was on you, so when we came at them from behind, blasting great balls of fire, they panicked and fled. Simple psychology, really. And you got some breathing room.” She nodded in a very self-satisfied sort of way.
“And you-” Twilight groaned and rubbed her temples. Applejack wasn’t sure it was from the stress of keeping the door shut, the stress of dealing with Trixie, or both. “How did you even come up with that idea in the first place.”
“Hairspray was lying about the cargo bay,” Trixie said. “Hairspray is flammable. Animals flee from fire.” She shrugged. “The conclusion was obvious.”
“That,” hissed Twilight, her ears turned forward, “is immensely dangerous, especially in zero-G.”
“If Trixie lived the safe life, she wouldn’t be up here. Besides, she used more than manespray. Some fireworks-” Trixie’s horn sparked. “-helped.”
Twilight opened her mouth again, but Spitfire shoved her. “Your Highness, we don’t have the time to be picky. If she wants to drive off dozens of bugs by doing something risky, let her.” She glanced at Blueblood. “So what’s your excuse for being here?”
“I started this mess,” declared Blueblood, “and I would rather die trying to fix it than survive cowering in-”
“Good enough.” Spitfire pulled a shotgun from one of the dead guards and tossed it to Blueblood. “You know how to use one of these things?”
Astonishingly, Blueblood caught it easily and strapped it to his leg with a practiced ease. “Of course,” he said as he checked the ammunition counter. “Target shooting is a favorite pastime of the idle rich.”
“You any good at it?”
“Above average.”
“Good enough. Stick with Applejack, make sure she doesn’t get taken by surprise. Speaking of AJ…” Spitfire switched her focus. “What’s up?”
“The door to the generator’s shut tighter’n a whistle,” said Applejack. “Gotta for that wheel thingamabob to power down.”
“No, you don’t,” mumbled Twilight. “Runewheels are great at dispersing energy. Don’t touch it and you’ll be fine.”
Applejack continued, “We’ve still gotta wait somethin’ like eight minutes ’fore-”
“Where’s the main computer?” Trixie immediately demanded. “Trixie can fix this.”
Within moments, Trixie was at a computer, tapping her way through the systems as Applejack and Blueblood hovered behind her. “The function to open up the doors is somewhere in here,” she said, half to herself. “All Trixie needs to do is-”
“ ’Scuse me,” said Applejack. “But when y’all sent the changelin’s runnin’… d’you see where they ran to?” Because there’d been a lot of changelings out there and only two ponies.
“Oh, you know,” Trixie said vaguely. “Away.” She waved her hoof off in some vague direction.
“Further down the GUTS,” said Blueblood. “Towards the… top, I suppose. There were numerous changelings attempting to get in here, but they fled with a little fire. Animal instincts kicking in, I presume. Fire does that.”
“Numerous” changelings attacking the magnetosphere. Not anything like “countless”. Just “numerous”. Hmm.
“We didn’t run into any coming up from the cargo bay, if that’s what you’re asking,” Trixie said. “If you’re going to kill the changelings with this plan, the changelings wouldn’t bother trying to get into the bay. Trixie certainly wouldn’t waste her time- A-ha! Boop, boop, boop.” She hit a few buttons and Applejack heard something click somewhere above. “You’re good,” Trixie said smugly.
“Great,” said Applejack. But as Trixie showed her how to restart the shield generator, her thoughts were distant. It couldn’t have been that easy, could it? All of those changelings suddenly fleeing from a little bit of fire. But Trixie and Blueblood hadn’t taken a look at the mass of changelings and decided they couldn’t handle it — which meant the number of changelings at the door had to have been far smaller than the number of changelings first swarming down the GUTS. And-
A bad thought suddenly made her stomach churn. “When y’all were attackin’ the changelings,” she said, “did y’see any… real big ’uns? I mean, Queen Celestia big?”
Trixie and Blueblood looked at each other for a moment. “No,” Trixie said. “At least, Trixie certainly didn’t.”
“Nor did I,” said Blueblood. Unlike Trixie, his voice was low and his ears were twitching.
“The queen was attackin’ us seconds ago,” Applejack murmured. “Where’d it-”
There was more than one way into the control room.
Changelings could move quietly. Why’d they made sound in the vents before? To make the ponies associate that sound with the vents. To make them pay attention to the vents when they heard that sound and make them not pay attention when they didn’t hear that sound.
Like now.
On reflex, Applejack’s head snapped up. There was a vent cover right above her.
Without thinking, she yanked Trixie and Blueblood to the side. Silent as a cat, the queen dropped from the vent, landing right on the floor where Trixie had been sitting. It was already facing them by the time Applejack hit the floor, murder in its eyes. It didn’t hiss at them, didn’t taunt them, it simply spread its wings and-
BANG.
Applejack clapped her hooves over her ears as Blueblood’s shotgun went off. Not wildly, not in some random direction; right in the queen’s face. Pellets ripped through its flesh and splattered ichor everywhere as the stench of gunsmoke filled Applejack’s nostrils-
BANG. The next shot went into the queen’s chest. More ichor and smoke. The queen barely even resembled itself anymore, its body was so mangled. Where once had been a face and oily chitin, now there was not much more than ground pulp.
The queen didn’t even notice.
It dove for Applejack, legs up, ready to crush her. Before she could move, a haze of Trixie’s magic surrounded Applejack and she was yanked to one side; the queen hit nothing but floor. Its body was already flowing back together as it glared at her.
One of the guards yelled and fired; they hit, Applejack could see the impact, but the queen didn’t twitch. Fangs bared, jaws snapping, it lunged at Applejack. She rolled over and the queen ripped a hole in her suit, but missed any actual flesh. She bucked blindly, nailed the queen in the face, and scrabbled to her feet. She knew what she needed to do, and she needed to do it as fast as possible.
The queen roared, but before it could move, Twilight grabbed it in her magic and tossed it against the wall. “Run!” she yelled across the room. “I’ll hold it-”
With a grinding screech, the control room door began sliding open again. Twilight cursed and forced it back shut with her magic. But the diversion of attention was enough to let the queen break free.
Trixie shoved Applejack towards the stairs and yelled something; Applejack didn’t bother listening as she ran. She didn’t have time for that. Something exploded in purple and green behind her and gunshots rang out. She didn’t look back.
The door to the generator still had the timer counting down above it. Praying Trixie’s hack had done the trick, Applejack pushed on the latch, so hard she nearly fell over when it swung open easily. At least one thing was going right. She yanked the door open and jumped inside.
The area inside the glass column was a zero-G zone; Applejack was briefly struck with vertigo as her sense of balance went nuts and a static electric hum made her coat stand on end. But she quickly managed to reorient herself: this way was up and that way was down. To change the shield generator’s catalyst, she needed to go up.
Trying to ignore the sounds outside, Applejack bounded back and forth up the column. This close, she could see the circuits printed onto the crystalline pillar in the middle and it almost looked mechanical, with the crystals just being a covering. The neuromodded part of her was a bit curious as to how the design actually worked, but the rest of her kept pushing her upwards.
At the top, she yanked open a small hatch on the pillar. Some metal formation she didn’t recognize rested in the alcove, nestled in a confusing bramble of wires and cables and control panels: the current catalyst for generating the magnetosphere. Guided by her neuromod’s knowledge, Applejack fiddled with the controls to disengage the catalyst, plucked the wires from their sockets, then yanked the catalyst out without a second thought and let it bounce away. A quick look-over of Twilight’s improvised catalyst yielded no problems. Good. Applejack put it insi-
The entire pillar lurched and the new catalyst slipped out of its slot. Below, the queen had charged into the generator and slammed into the pillar at exactly the wrong moment, dislodging Applejack’s grip. Its gaze snapped up and locked on her.
Fear shot through Applejack. Acting on instinct, she kicked off the central pillar to the outside wall as the queen twitched; that twitch was a prelude to a pounce, and the queen missed Applejack, soaring past her to alight on the “roof”. After a moment of reorientation, they both pushed downward. This time, the queen planned for Applejack’s dodge and caught her in mid-air, right around the trunk. She yelled and twisted, trying to wriggle free, but it had too tight a grip on her.
Suddenly they jolted to a stop; an agonizing buzz shot through her as the queen twitched and screeched. For a second, its grip slackened; thanking her lucky stars, Applejack managed to squirm out, kicking the queen in the face as she did. They’d hit the runewheel at the bottom of the column and been slapped with a massive electric discharge, the queen apparently taking the worst of it. Applejack could smell something burning and her entire body ached, but adrenaline pushed those thoughts to the side before they’d fully formed.
As the queen struggled to put itself together, Applejack spotted the nullwave catalyst drifting around above them. She pulled herself up the pillar in spite of the way her muscles screamed and her tongue was dry. The room seemed to rotate around her. She didn’t care. She didn’t have the energy to care. Snatching the catalyst from the air gave her a brief burst of satisfaction, then she kept crawling. A quick downward glance told her the queen — which was smoldering — still hadn’t fully recovered from the jolt.
Top of the pillar. Praying it wouldn’t be a repeat of the first time, Applejack pulled the hatch open again. Her hooves were shaking, but by some miracle, she managed to slot the catalyst into place. Red lights began winking to green as she plugged the wires back in, changing ports to account for the design of the new catalyst and altering parameters on the control panels. Without her neuromod, it could’ve taken minutes rather than seconds, there were so many, but she flowed through it with the ease of muscle memory. She shut the hatch with no problems (for once). Okay. Okay, good. Now she just needed to turn the generator back on. She turned her head to look outside the pillar.
Changelings were crawling from vents into the control room, one by one, just as fast as the pony guards were taking them out. Bodies and blood and ichor were in every corner and gunshots flashed intermittently. By some miracle, the ponies seemed to be mostly holding, but it was only a matter of time before they were overwhelmed and Twilight was clearly struggling to hold the door shut.
Get back to the computer. In that. Great.
Applejack only realized she was sweating when some of the droplets wicked off her coat into zero-G. And had her heart always been beating that hard? She did her best to ignore it. She pulled herself back down the column, aiming for the exit.
The queen was back on its feet, avoiding the runewheel. It glanced at Applejack, then its eyes flicked to the exit. Applejack tried pulling faster, but the queen moved like a blur. It reached the exit in seconds and placed itself right in Applejack’s way, looking up at her with a wide leer. It was actually licking lips.
Then something barrelled into it from out of the control room. Blueblood had awkwardly tackled it around the trunk, just enough to dislodge it from the doorframe. He yelled something, but Applejack couldn’t make out what; she was too busy rushing for the exit. It was hard to imagine that that was the whiny Blueblood she knew, yet she found herself imagining it anyway. She’d need to say something to him once this all was done.
Her head reeled once she re-entered gravity, but she quickly found her hooves. The sounds of fighting were still coming from down below, but the entrance seemed safe. She turned around; the queen was wrestling with Blueblood, pulling him off itself. Almost contemptuously, it tossed him away and snapped to look at Applejack. It spread its wings to move-
Blueblood’s horn glowed and the entrance door slammed shut, its latches clicking into place.
Applejack gasped in surprise and jumped back. She instinctively reached forward to undo the latches. She couldn’t just leave him there.
Then Blueblood plastered himself against the glass on the side of the door. Even muffled, through the wall, Applejack could tell what he was screaming.
“Turn it on! TURN IT ON!”
And Applejack found herself running back down to the control level. She gawked at Blueblood, true. What was he thinking? He was still in there. There was no way he’d get out in time. But at the same time, she knew exactly what he was thinking. And why. If he thought it was worth it, it was worth it.
The queen reoriented itself, pushed off the glass, and barrelled into Blueblood. They rolled around the inside of the pillar, and every time it had the chance, the queen smashed Blueblood’s body against the glass, over and over and over. A dotted trail of blood soon smeared across the interior of the shield generator.
Applejack reached the floor, slipped on ichor, stumbled for the main computer. The lights continued to flash, the alarms continued to blare, ponies continued to grapple with changelings, guns continued to roar. She could barely tell where the workstation was in the sensory overload, yet she found her way there, somehow. She slammed her hoof on the button and a computerized voice rang throughout the room. “Rebooting…”
For a moment, it was like everything stopped. All the changeling sounds went quiet and the ponies stopped moving. Even the queen froze. Then it slammed what was left of Blueblood’s body against the glass and darted for the door. But the safety locks were already secured; the door didn’t budge.
The column began glowing again, the runewheel spinning once more as its spokes sizzled. The queen smashed against the door again, to no avail. It whirled around and grabbed at the runewheel, clearly intending to break it.
The spoke wasn’t moving that fast, yet it cleaved through the queen’s legs like a plasma blade through butter. The queen withdrew, howling, its wounded leg dripping like melted slime. In desperation, it lunged again, only to backpedal when the same result happened.
The runewheel suddenly lit up like a firework: only for a moment, yet so brightly. An empty sort of feeling washed over Applejack for that one moment. No magic. It was working. Around her, changelings suddenly began screaming, lurching drunkenly, twitching spasmodically.
The queen was catching the worst of it, its entire body jittering and its skin moving in ways nothing ever should. It saw Applejack and, eyes full of fury, lunged at her in one last vain attack. It scrabbled at the glass in front of Applejack in impotent anger, regardless of how little damage its legs did. Up close, Applejack could see something she knew she’d never want to see again: the queen’s body was bubbling.
The queen banged on the glass, shrieking at Applejack. In rage, in fear, in hate, in desperation, in everything. It was a harsh, discordant wail that danced across frequencies in an unnatural manner. All she could do was watch as the queen began boiling and decohering.
The shield generator fired again and Applejack went numb.