Even with the aid of the sleep spell, Pincer's night seemed to last an eternity. He tossed and turned fitfully within the confines of his restraints, and his dreams were turbulent variations of the day's events. In one he broke down and told them everything, in another his legs had healed so he could escape, and in yet another the ponies locked and abandoned him in a darkened room to die. He awoke from the latter sometime in the middle of the night, and for several fear-soaked moments his tiredness and shock at waking up in such a place had led him to think his dream was real. It wasn't until he found and touched the buzzer that his fears eased. Even then, he lay awake in the darkness and silence for a while.
Finally the time came when he was roused from his sleep by Nurse Clean Bill switching on the lamps and greeting him with a clipped "good morning, sir." She served him breakfast, another meal of trout as satisfying as the first. Under the supervision of two unicorn guards, the restraints on his front legs were temporarily removed and he was given a few minutes to stretch them. He was glad for the opportunity; they'd gotten rather stiff and sore from being held in place overnight.
"Doctor Hooves should be here with your reading material momentarily," Bill told him after he had finished stretching and the guards had left. Pincer suppressed the urge to glance towards the door, secretly anticipating what she would be providing.
"All right. What else have you got in store for me today?"
"Nothing out of the ordinary. We can't start the next step of treatment until we know if you would have a harmful reaction to the bone restoration potion. The tests for that should be done within a few days. In the meantime, all we can do is rest your legs."
"No questioning?"
"Not until you can walk again."
Pincer eased his head onto his pillow. No questioning until he'd healed. That was what the guard had told him when he was first being captured. He hadn't believed him at the time, but now it looked like he really would have a reprieve before he ever had to stare down the Royal Guards. Even so, he had to be careful; doctors and nurses had ears, after all.
The door creaked open, and Pincer heard the now-familiar clumping, squeaking and rattling of a cart towed by a pony. He turned his head, and as he'd expected, Hooves had arrived. Behind her were the books, piles of them packed onto the cart, small and large, thick and thin, new-looking and yellowed with age. He nearly smiled; he'd never been much of a reader, but surely there was something there that could take his mind off of his situation.
"There you go," Hooves said, wriggling free of her harness. "You have non-fiction, fantasy, adventure, science fiction, everything is there. Did you need anything else?"
"No, this is plenty for now."
Hooves nodded. "Now, as long as I'm here, I'd like to talk to you about your x-ray results," she said. She trotted over to the far end of the room and grabbed a backlit display board, rolling it over to the side of Pincer's bed. She unrolled a pair of images and pinned them to it.
"We've got one image for each fracture. This one up here is what we got of your left back leg, the one down here is for your right back leg. We were worried that your carapace might prevent us from getting readings, but that turned out not to be a problem. The image isn't as clear as it would be on a pony, but you can still make out your endoskeletal bone."
It was strange, knowing that he was seeing in those pictures a mirror of his own body. He could see his legs, highlighted in a ghostly blue, black gaps where their hollow areas were. Inside, brighter and paler than the rest, were his bones. Even though they were part of the skeleton he'd had all his life, it was still rather fascinating to see the way they bent and curved around the hollow portions of his legs. It didn't take long to find the fractures; they were the unnatural-looking cracks where the pieces of bones didn't line up. He wasn't an expert, but the damage didn't seem to be terrible.
"You were lucky." Dr. Hooves jabbed the images with a hoof, where the fractures were. "There weren't any fragments to remove, the edges where they broke didn't puncture your chitin, and the pieces were easy to set. All you'll need to do is to rest until your legs can heal. If we can safely use the healing potion on you, then with daily injections you should completely recover within two weeks. Did you have any questions?"
"You said I might be getting injections. There's a problem with that. The needle might crack my chitin. Those can take a while to heal." He'd once again done the hated task of giving them information, but better now than when they tried to stick him.
"No need to worry, it'll fit between your plates. We'll deliver it where your kneecap meets your upper leg."
Pincer shifted. "That's all I needed to know."
"All right," said Dr. Hooves as she began unpinning the images from the board. "I'll follow up on you in twenty days, then. In the meantime, Nurse Bill will be responsible for seeing that your needs are met. If you need anything, ask her."
Pincer nodded, but there was no conviction to it. He wished he'd been given a different nurse. He didn't believe for a second that any of the medical staff cared about him as a person, but Nurse Bill wasn't even trying to maintain the illusion that she did.
"Okay," Hooves said. "We'll be leaving now, but the buzzer is still there to call Mrs. Bill if you need help. In the meantime, you're free to read any of the books we've provided."
Dr. Hooves and Nurse Bill turned away and began trotting out, Hooves in the lead. "If you don't call me before then, I'll see you again when I bring your lunch," said Bill curtly as she stepped through the doorway, only slightly slowing her stride.
With something to occupy his mind, one of his restraints removed, and the promise of being undisturbed for several hours, Pincer was at the most spirited he'd been since he'd fallen in the ravine. That he was relatively happy with his current situation was a mark of how far his standards had fallen; even now, the fact that he was trapped and forced to neglect his duty at The Hive gnawed at the back of his mind. His thoughts turned to escape. Even unsupervised and with his front legs unbound, though, his back legs were still broken, and he couldn't so much as get out of bed by himself until that changed.
After trying and failing to find a clock somewhere in the room, he yanked a book off of the stack at random, a thin paperback with a bold, flashy cover illustration titled Daring Do And the City Of the Sea Ponies. Daring Do. He recalled overhearing the name during one of his infiltration missions. As he flipped through it, he quickly realized that he had little interest in a story of a pegasus thwarting villains and finding treasure. He thought to toss it away carelessly, but they might not trust him with any more books if he mishandled them. He set it down gently on the floor and picked out a small but thick blue hardcover.
Traditions And Codes Of the Canterlot Royal Court. He smiled and set it on the floor; Scarab had made his pod practically memorize that one before the mission. He picked out another hardcover.
From Beyond the Firmament. This, too, was discarded after a brief scan; there was generally little useful to gain from science fiction, especially an impossible story of primates smart enough to develop spacecraft. It was clearly meant to appeal to a pony's sense of wonder, and Pincer had long ago smothered his.
The Lady of Las Pegasus. He set aside this one without opening it. Judging by the pose of the unicorn mare on the cover, it would just make him hungry.
He'd slid another dozen or so books to the pile on the floor by the time he finally pulled one he could seriously consider reading: A History Of Modern Equestrian Theatre, 701 Y.S. to 1 Y.R. Judging by the second date, it had been published last year. While he doubted it would give him anything useful about Equestria to report to The Hive, he had to admit to some curiosity about how ponies took different roles without the ability to alter their appearance like a changeling could. How convincing could costumes and makeup be? If nothing else, three hundred years of history would pass plenty of time if it could keep his attention.
He skimmed over the pages, reading paragraphs and sections as they caught his interest. His gaze slid away from the script excerpts, playwright biographies, and thematic analyses in favor of the costumes, the props, the appearance-altering spells, the actors, and everything and everyone else that made the plays come to life. He learned of a spell that changed the color of a pony's coat. He learned of another that could give a pony wings, for plays with alicorn characters, though this was rarely used; more often artificial wings were used because the spell was impossible for all but the most talented magicians. He felt a grudging admiration for an earth pony actor who delivered his character's dying soliloquy flawlessly even though he had actually been wounded after being stabbed by an overly-sharp prop lance.
Every new item he read about was tinged with brief concern, however, because he couldn't help but consider whether or not the transformative and deceptive abilities of changelings were truly beyond those of ponies. They could certainly alter their appearances and act out roles better than he'd given them credit for. Was the gulf as wide as he'd believed? Suddenly, this innocent read meant to pass the time seemed to have become a matter of military intelligence.
He shook his head, scolding himself for being so quick to doubt The Hive. Changelings might not have a monopoly on such skills, but they still surpassed ponies. Ponies couldn't show and hide horns and wings at will, couldn't all change the colors and styles of their manes and coats in a flash, and certainly couldn't take up assumed identities for weeks or months at a stretch among different species. Even if they could have, not reading any further wouldn't change things; learning more could only help The Hive. His concerns eased, he continued reading.
So absorbed was he in his reading that he jumped — or at least the closest he could manage within his restraints — when the infirmary door creaked open. He heard the familiar squeaking and clopping of a pony pulling a cart. Was it that time already?
"Your lunch, sir."
It was salmon this time, a welcome source of variety after two meals of trout. He ate this meal quickly too, though this time his haste stemmed as much from his desire to return to his reading as from his enjoyment of the food. Within minutes, he had finished eating and once again had the book spread open in front of him.
With no timepiece, he had no sure way to tell how long passed when he finally reached the end and closed the book. Given its size, he was surprised to have completed it so quickly, but when he thought about it he realized that he'd skipped two-thirds or more of it. He set it on the floor, apart from the small pile he'd made earlier. He picked through the stacks on the cart again, and soon settled on a book of Equestrian military history. He realized unhappily that The Hive's defeat at Canterlot would probably be the basis for a lesson in the next edition.
While the book offered little useful information, it was entertaining enough to pass the time until dinner.
The days trickled by, with nothing more important happening than him receiving the news that his test results had come in and they would be able to treat him with the healing potion. To prevent his time in the hospital from being wasted in aimless lethargy, he began methodically picking through the books he'd been provided in search of useful intelligence. No changeling had ever managed to infiltrate a high enough station to get access to anything in the Royal Library short of Chrysalis herself, and their unexpected defeat hadn't left her any opportunity to recover books.
Unfortunately, it seemed that the ponies had anticipated this. He had yet to find anything more useful than the military history book, which despite his initial high hopes contained nothing about pony tactics and capabilities that wasn't already common knowledge in The Hive. As much as he would have liked to request more, he knew there was no way to do so without arousing suspicion, and that would only make things more difficult when he made his escape attempt.
As he'd expected, being under Nurse Clean Bill's care was not particularly pleasant. She wasn't abusing him in any obvious ways, but every day there were hiccups and stutters more characteristic of The Hive's medical chambers than a facility headed by Celestia herself. His meals were often inexplicably soggy. The needle would slip during his daily injections. Soapy water would splash into his eyes while he was being bathed.
Even if his pride hadn't prevented him from doing so, he wouldn't have entertained the thought of trying to bring the matter to the attention of another pony. At best he would be ignored by unsympathetic hospital staff who detested being charged with a changeling, and at worst it would get back to Nurse Bill, and she would make things even worse for him.
It was about a week after his admittance that the first hunger pangs set in. Being deprived of love was a very different feeling from having an empty stomach, one that a changeling felt throughout his or her body. He first noticed the shaking one evening when he nearly dropped a book he was pulling from the cart. The headaches started a few days later, and the occasional sensation of being electrically shocked followed close behind. The symptoms were easy enough to ignore for the time being. More difficult for Pincer to push out of his mind was the knowledge that they would only get worse over time, until...
...until he starved to death.
Like any decent drone, he'd long ago accepted the possibility that he might die carrying out his duty, but it had been very different then. Death had been something that might or might not happen to him in a battle sometime in the future, or if he were careless enough to get exposed during an infiltration. It had been something he could plan for and avert. Slowly wasting away here in the bowels of Celestia's castle meant facing an absolutely certain death that he was entirely powerless to prevent, leaving him with nothing to do but wait for the end.
This was why Pincer was unable to take any joy in the news that, twenty days after being admitted to the Canterlot Castle Secure Hospital, he was being discharged. At the end of his second week in the infirmary, he had received another x-ray. He did not need sedation for this one, and a brief, painless sweep of the scanner left him feeling embarrassed that he had ever dreaded it. As Dr. Hooves had predicted, the results showed that the fractures in his legs had completely healed.
The following day, two unicorn guards and two pegasus guards arrived to take him away; clearly they were taking no chances now that he could walk. One of the unicorns was Mystic Saber, though he gave no indication that he recognized Pincer. The unicorns moved in ahead of the pegasi, unceremoniously removing his straps with their magic. One of them slid a of silver-colored ring onto his horn, and he felt an uncomfortable tingle from it. He realized that his magic, and thus his ability to transform, had been suppressed.
"Off of the bed. No sudden movements."
Pincer stayed on the bed at first, taking the opportunity to stretch his stiff, sore limbs. Had he not had four guards silently urging him on, he might have been more able to appreciate the feeling of being able to move his rear legs without being paralyzed by pain. He eased himself off of the bed, his right legs first. When he first attempted to stand on his own he stumbled and nearly fell once on the floor, but a guard steadied him. They gave him a few moments to properly find his balance before addressing him again.
"Fall in line. Two of us ahead, two of us behind."
He stepped into place on shaking legs, and the two in front of him started marching him out. They moved silently through the cramped corridors of the dungeon, which seemed to grow darker and colder at every turn. He suppressed his growing dread by doing his best to focus on the layout and make a mental map of the area. However, his mind got so entangled in the snaking corridors and aimless turns he saw that by the time the guards were motioning him into his cell, he had only a vague idea of which direction he would need to go if — when — he managed to escape.
The cell had no furnishings aside from a flat, thin mattress chained to the wall and a cramped desk. On the desk sat a small stack of familiar books under which it seemed ready to collapse like a pony schoolfilly's crafts project. He'd barely passed through the iron-barred gate when it banged shut behind him, causing him to about-face in alarm.
"Now, we have some questions to ask you, and you won't be leaving this dungeon until you answer them," said Mystic Saber. Pincer turned around to face the guards and saw that the pegasi were gone; all that remained were Saber and the other unicorn, both fixing him with stern gazes. Pincer narrowed his eyes at them.
"Where is The Hive?" Saber asked in his powerful, firm voice.
Pincer's reply, carefully rehearsed, came low and cold.
"I'm not telling you."
The guard didn't bat an eye. He began asking a series of questions. No matter how innocuous, each was met by the same rehearsed, stony response.
"Are there any changelings currently operating as sleeper agents in Equestria?
"What are the limits of your ability to transform?
"Why did you join the army?
"Aside from your queen, do any of you have names?"
Many minutes passed as the guard continued to rain questions down on Pincer, quite a few of them repeated multiple times. On it went, hour after hour, neither Pincer nor Saber showing the slightest weariness or hesitation. Finally, slowly, Saber stepped back.
"Very well, then. We'll come back to this tomorrow. Unless you want to stay down here for a very long time, I suggest you be more cooperative in the future."
Without another word the two unicorn guards turned and walked away in synchrony. Their hoofsteps faded, and with them went Pincer's lone remaining lifeline to the outside. When they died away completely, he blinked, shook his head, and looked around.
This was his cell. Within these walls, behind these bars, was everything he could ever hope to experience for the indefinite future. This claustrophobic cage was his world now, but it was okay. In his mind he knew that, somewhere far away, his podmates in The Hive were safe. They would survive another day because he'd been strong.
Comforted by this thought, he turned to the books; he'd gained a new appreciation for the things.
"Your Majesty, we may be running out of time."
It was a small, plain conference room, its polished oak table seating only eight ponies and its marble walls having no decoration save for a coat of arms. At the far end was a vertical slit that served as a window, through which an orange stripe of sunset fell onto the table. Princess Cadance sat at the head of the table; Lieutenant Saber was to her left, Dr. Hooves and Twilight Sparkle to her right.
"Are you sure of this, Doctor? Even though we've treated his legs, there's still so much we don't know about changelings," said Cadance.
Dr. Hooves shifted slightly in her seat. "We can't say for certain, but it's the only clue we have. We know changelings need to feed on love to survive. We know this one hasn't gotten any since he arrived. We know he's been showing symptoms that seem to indicate some sort of hunger or withdrawal. Since we have a known likely cause, it only makes sense to try to address the problem by feeding him."
"We've been trying, Doctor," said Twilight wearily, leaning forward. "Cadance asked me to come here to help her last week, and I've been pulling all-nighters since then! I've been looking all over the Royal Library for something, anything, that can feed him! I'm checking every scroll on every shelf that so much as mentions love! We don't even know if there's a way to generate love out of thin air! There might have to be a connection between two ponies... or, well, a pony and a bug, I guess. The point is, we're already doing everything we can short of dragging some pony down and having Cadance force her to love him. Not... not that we'd ever do that, of course!"
"I'm just telling you what he needs," Dr. Hooves said evenly.
Cadance nodded. "And you, Lieutenant. You started questioning him today, right? Did he tell you anything that might help?"
Saber shook his head. "I'm sorry, Your Majesty, but we've only had an afternoon to work on him. It could take days or weeks to talk him into telling us anything valuable, and that's assuming he hasn't been trained for this kind of situation. Given his occupation, he probably has."
Cadance slowly drew in a breath. There was no way around it; she would have to make a breakthrough, and soon. "I understand. Lieutenant, Doctor, Twilight, thank you all for your assistance. This meeting is adjourned." She struck her hoof against the table.
Twilight was off of her chair as soon as Cadance had finished her sentence, trotting towards the door as Saber and Hooves were bowing customarily to Cadance. Almost as an afterthought, Twilight turned to give Cadance an apologetic look.
"Sorry, Princess. I just remembered a book in the Starswirl wing that might help! I'll let you know right away if it turns up anything useful! I'll see you later!" She barely gave Cadance time to nod before she was out the door.
Princess Cadance smiled; Twilight's etiquette might be cause for disdain among the nobility, but Celestia couldn't have asked for a better student.