There’s no way anyone named Bernard is on that list. It was only a matter of seconds before the unicorn's little green horn started glowing.
The fence behind you is cold against your back. “Oh, I know you can, I know you can. I, uh, I’m on a special mission from the Princesses to, uh, throw you a party.”
The ponies look at each other, shrugging and scratching their chins with their hoof tips. Some of them are murmuring. “Party? At a time like this? Who is this guy?”
Think quick, Isaac. “Yeah, listen! The Princesses know how hard you, uh, guys are working, and they wanted to help relieve some of the stress. A little entertainment, you might say.”
“Well, we did make, like, thirty-five new friends in, like, the past hour.”
Thirty-five men and women. Thirty-five people turned to shit by a worthless alien disease.
If they could see you grinding your teeth, they must be mistaking it for a smile. “See! I’ve got just the thing to break the tension. Wait right here, I’ve got to get my supplies. I’ll be right back.”
“This better be good!” Voices call out from behind as you jog past the cluster of frowning faces and swishing tails, back to the lobby’s entrance. “Yeah Bernard, I’m really stressed!”
You’re going to be stressed when I rip your little legs off you … no. No, no, no. Have to stay focused. Kindness is killing, killing is kindness. Not a bad mantra, considering the new way of doing business. And oh the plan that had come to you was a case study in compassion. If their “Princess” loves sweets so much, it’s a safe bet that the little bastards do too. The pastry cart was the missing factor in the equation: the lardasses that were grazing from it weren’t likely to give it up without a fight.
The gray-tiled corridor winds back up to the upper lobby, the flashing emergency lights still whirling across the empty inclines and corners. Well, if they got a couple of pie tosses off at you before you blew them to hell, so be it. They weren’t ponies yet, so the ‘be nice’ rule didn’t apply to them.
The hallway outside their door is still empty, and there’s no sign of imminent danger. Probably best to hold up and listen for activity.
A minute or so passes before something scuffles inside. Then a weak voice groans softly, muffled by the walls, “Ugh, Rick, my stomach! I feel like I’m going to pop.”
“I hear ya, bud. How are we gonna fit into our new Royal Bakers’ aprons?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know. I’m …” There’s a pause, then a yawn. “I’m so upset. She trusted us, was going to give us the world! Royal bakers? Now we’ll be lucky if she lets us scrub dishes in her under-kitchen!”
“Tell ya what, Keith, let’s take a nap, sleep on it. Maybe we can come up with some way to spin this so we don’t end up looking like primetime doucheba … I mean, knobs.”
“You’re right. Sleep on it.” Another yawn. “Good idea.”
There might have been some more munching, and maybe a fart. Whatever had actually happened to these guys, outside the gingerbread house of your delusions, it must have been extreme even for the usual necromorph butchery. It’s not long before muted snores and mealy-mouthed lip smacking seep through the sealed panels of the entrance.
The time had come. You wave your hand in front of the door’s motion sensor to open it and pivot around the corner.
There they are, laid out like drunks, mouths ringed with sponge cake and icing. They’re wearing matching thermal mitts, and oh Christ. Mitts on their feet too. No fingers, just round flat stitched bottoms, white with a yellow sun emblem. Their bellies are distended, pointed up at the ceiling and heaving in labored sleep.
These poor fuckers gave a whole new meaning to human waste. And shit, their pastry cart is almost stripped clean. You creep into the room, the plasma cutter ready. There could be ponies incubating in those jelly guts. You couldn’t put anything past the necromorphs.
You tie the cutter to a rear loop in your straightjacket and take hold of the cart, carefully turning it through the mess. The wheels skip and slide through the half-eaten sweets. Yeah, that was exactly what you needed; slimy purple and pink mares squirming out of the squelching innards of these corpses, getting the jump on you. Surprise, Papa Isaac! It’s my birthday! Can I have a hug?
No. No you can’t. Isaac’s getting out of here, and he’s exterminating every one of your feather duster asses while he’s at it.
The doors slide shut behind you as you backtrack to the ER lobby and the waiting gang of necromorphs. Now to work out the details of the plan. What remained of the array of pastries was meager at best. Was there anything left that might tempt a pony’s palate? Crepes loaded with cherry glaze and powdered sugar, candied apples, chocolate strawberries with mint leaves, all kind of cookies, tortes and pies, all bitten and slobbered on, except for …
The centerpiece. A two-foot diameter pound cake with white cream-cheese frosting, and another one of those damned sun patterns on the top in golden fondant. It wasn’t completely intact, but it would be enough to convince hungry ponies.
The bottle of sleeping potion clanks against the polished metal of the cart. Yes, yes, of course. Why not seal the deal?
You sweep away the crumbled chunks of the smaller treats with your sleeve and hustle down the inclines. Half the bottle should do it. The stopper pops away from your thumb, and the thick liquid begins to gurgle out over the cake, turning the white frosting an odd shade of pink.
There. The rest might come in handy later. You retrieve the stopper from the cart top, close the bottle and hang it back in its loop. How much further was it now?
You nearly crash into two pegasi who had been posted at the entrance of the lobby as you round the final corner.
Suspicious little fuckers. “Oh, excuse me! Didn’t see you there. Bernard’s back, and boy are you going to like what he’s cooked up!” You show them your pearly whites again, trying to channel a hired party clown at a kindergartner’s birthday party.
One of the pegasi licks his lips, his eyes taking in the enormous cake. “Whoa, look! Cake!” His partner crowds close, trying to sniff it.
“Well it’s about time.” The olive unicorn was tapping her hoof and checking her … watch. Sorry sweetie, didn’t mean to keep you waiting. I hope snacktime sends you into a permanent coma.
She stays put, eyeing you as the others smile and gather around the pastry cart. They hold out their hooves, shoes up. Guess you had to improvise when you didn’t have opposable thumbs, or even fingers.
After a few moments watching you break off pieces of the cake and dole them out to her companions, the unicorn’s expression softens. She sighs and comes to join you.
Good, they’re buying it. “That’s right. The festivities start with a little something for your tummies, then some games, then … let’s take a vote: songs or dancing?”
“Both! Both!”
“Fantastic! We’ll do both. Now why don’t you dig in and take a well-earned break?”
They gobble up their portions, licking the tainted frosting from their hooves and mouths. It’s hard to concentrate with the chomping jaws, grinding sideways, clapping together and pausing for the orange-pink tongues to slurp out and clear the way for more. If you could focus, maybe you could catch a glimpse, just a few seconds of the real action; of your fists hammering rancid chunks off their twitching bodies, of their all-too human screams fading out as …
“Gosh, I think I ate too much. I feel so sleepy!”
The unicorn was wobbling on her hooves, looking up with bleary eyes. “Um, Bernard, is it OK if we take a nap before we play games?” Her friends were already kneeling down and tucking their snouts under their forelegs, drifting off to dreamland. Just as planned.
You grab one more handful of cake and stride over to her. All the time in the world, now. You catch her by her squishy chest as she falls and lift her to eye level.
You lean in close, avoiding her messy mouth. “Does the word ‘personnel’ mean anything to you?” you whisper into one sagging ear.
“Wuh?” Her neck tilts to the side, her eyes drifting in different directions.
You cram the glob of cake into her mouth and let her fall. She hits the floor, tumbling into in a snoring heap.
“Nighty night.” You scan the battlefield. The security lockdown siren fades, and the whirling lights die away. Sweet silence. Judging by how quickly the creatures had fallen asleep, they were going to be out for a while.
You’d gotten lucky. If the cart hadn’t been an option you would have been hosed. You needed an ally if you were going to make it through this. A longer-term plan would help too. You tap the telecom button on your armband as you crouch over the unicorn’s saddlebag.
“Daina? Daina! OK, you’re right. I do need your help. Talk to me.”
You open the flap and take a peek. Apple, apple, ruby semiconductor chip, thank you very much, pony hit-list, goddammit, ten charges for the plasma cutter, yes yes, guh, it all reeks of pine …
Daina barks out of the static. “Look, Isaac, we don’t have to be friends. But like it or not, we’re stuck together. Tiedemann’s your enemy, not me.” There’s a break in the tongue-lashing. You collect your haul, considering looting the other bodies. Too much. Daina returns, quieter now, “Alright, I’ve found you a new route.”
She sounded pissed, but she had a right to be. You’d kind of been an asshole. “Fine. So where the hell am I? How did another necromorph outbreak get started?”
“You’re on Titan Station, orbiting Saturn. As for the outbreak … shit, Tiedemann’s jamming my signal …”
Titan Station? Wonderful. Word had been when you’d left the solar system that it was a low-budget shit gutter, and a low-budget shit gutter it had apparently remained. What could you expect from a government project built on moon chunks?
And Tiedemann continued to interfere with your efforts to make it out of the hospital. Dude didn’t even know you. Or rather, you didn’t know him. Assholes like that had explicit documentation on each and every time a man took a shit, so if the two of you ever had occasion to meet, you would be the one asking the questions. Whether or not he answered would depend on his taste for concentrated xenon plasma.
At least Daina’d had time to upload the new route. You raise your hand and send out the blue guide line. It traces out past the lobby’s glass-partitioned, empty front desk to a door you hadn’t seen on the way in, preoccupied as you’d been with the necromorphs. Maybe now you could catch up with Stross and coax some real information out of him.
It’s quiet on the other side. The problem with quiet was that it magnified every sound you made. And it usually meant that a pony was keeping mum just around the bend, about to try to tear you a new one.
The desk is clear, except for something blinking by the filing cabinets below. A power node. The chairs squawk as you shoulder them aside and heft the dense cylinder. It had been years since you’d gotten your hands on one of these. The raised spec label on the side reads 240 W, about double the output of the nodes used on the Ishimura. At least Titan Station wasn’t operating entirely in the Stone Age.
There was one loop left in your straightjacket, but it was worth the added weight; a juiced plasma cutter might even the odds if the ponies clustered again and there was no nice guy solution. Hopefully Titan Station wasn’t so behind the times that it hadn’t been outfitted with a workbench to access the node’s energy cell.
The route continues through a small biomed metrology station set up in the walls of the reception desk’s exit passage. In better times, patients would have been called out of the waiting room, little Jimmy and his mom, pointing at the cool microscope and pipettes, waiting for the doctor. Nicole loved taking care of the kids …
Nicole.
They’d chopped her up.
No, there was no evidence of that. No video, no audio log, no nothing.
Jabbed her full of alien shit. Turned her to shit.
“Fuck.” The word comes out high-pitched, broken. You stagger against the wall, covering your face with the plasma cutter.
Don’t be a girl, Isaac. No one can see. There’s no one left to see. You’re doing great.
What’s that up ahead … Triage Room … with a warning. Stasis beds in operation. Stasis beds … that meant entropy inhibitor anodes. That’s the ticket; slow the bastards down to a really slow canter and shuffle on by. Be on your merry way. Daina would be happy, you’d be happy. Maybe even Princess fucking Celestia would be happy.
You enter to a deep electric hum, the characteristic sound of stasis fields interacting with the atmosphere. It resonates in your chest like the old-style pipe organs your mother used to force you to listen to. Two cylindrical vessels lie extended across the floor, and recessed far within them you can see the pale blue glow of the zero-point energy quantum effect photon discharge. People with critical injuries could be kept stable inside these units for weeks until they could receive advanced medical care.
There’s a closed security gate barring your way at the other end of the room, looming behind a password-secured terminal. Probably there to keep crazies from getting in and screwing with the stasis routines. It was going to be a problem, but first things first.
The anode would be in the black standalone junction box that fed each of the beds. You run over to it and pry off the maintenance access plate. This one would be a little more of a trick than the kinesis module. There were four beds in operation, and each one would have a lead tied into the anode. Still doable, but it would take time. You dig your fingers into the mass of wires behind the front interface.
A ceiling panel across the room drops to the floor. There’s no doubt about what that meant. Have to stay focused. The wires were tied too fucking tight, no way to get to the back …
“Which style do you like? I’ve got pack, bareback, dressage, leather stirrup, canvas stirrup, and … yup, ceremonial silk. For the exodus.”
A lemon yellow mare was toddling towards you on her hind legs, holding an array of miniature saddles draped over her outstretched hooves.
Fuck finesse. The wires gotta go. You rip them away from the anode plate, causing the beds’ power conduits to short and send spark showers bouncing and skidding over the floor. The anode cell slides out of its pocket.
“The exodus, you say?” That didn’t sound good. You clip the cell into your armband.
“You got it! So, could you, um, get a little lower? I’d like to fit you for these. Let’s start with the silk!”
Your stasis bolt hits her in the face, enveloping her in a hazy blue cloud. Her dim-witted smile slowly turns into a look of consternation as she tips in place. Hard to sell saddles or poke holes in humans when you’re putzing around in your own time-decelerated microcosm.
You take hold of her limp midsection, fling her to the back of one of the stasis beds and slam it into its slot. How about thirty years to decide which saddle to wear, Twinkler? The keypad buttons on the front of the bed each give a satisfying beep. One zero nine five zero. Plenty of time.
Now about that security gate. Its terminal had unlocked when you’d pulled the stasis module. You tap “ADMIT” on the flatscreen, and the big stainless steel plate grinds open. To be extra sure, you put it in stasis too. That camera above the doorframe was way too suspicious. Setups like this typically scanned your RIG for your ID, and could prompt responses anywhere from sounding an alarm to megawatt UV laser blasts. Better to be paranoid than sorry.
There’s an unsecured door just behind the gate. You step through just in time to catch a tawny beige stallion hugging an unstable hospital attendant, pouring some sparkling brown liquid into the man’s mouth from a wooden mug. The attendant is pumping his fist and hooting, letting it splash down his chin and neck. The stallion hiccups and starts pumping his foreleg together with his chum.
Here’s a situation that might take care of itself. You step quickly to the wall and crouch down in the shadows. Sure enough, after a few seconds of lame-ass dancing, the two stumble and collapse into a guffawing heap, trying pathetically to untangle themselves from each other.
Perfect. You scoot down the wall and slip into the lab next to them. The door shuts with a hiss.
“Well, well, well, look who made it to the party!”
Shit. That was the second time you’d backed into a room, and now you’re paying for it. You swivel and brace for the worst.
A blubbering woman was lying at the hooves of a taffy orange mare, in a puddle of what you hope is beer. The necromorph was waving around another sloshing mug.
“Open your mouth! I bet I can get at least half of this in from here!” She heaves the stuff at you in a long golden stream.
Whatever that was, you’d be jiggered if you let one drop so much as stain your fraying straightjacket. You sidestep and let it land on the body sprawled across the table next to you.
Only it wasn’t a body. It was a patient, shit-faced and giggling like a prom queen. There were other patients, all laid out on examination tables in various stages of insobriety. The ponies must have gotten to them while they were sedated. Pretty inconsiderate, given the synergetic effect of alcohol and …
A brown fan of liquid hits your chest, soaking through to your skin. The bizarre array of items strapped to your waist drips and gleams with what you can now smell is apple cider.
“Hee hee, gotcha that time. I told you to open your mouth. Let’s try again!”
“I’m not thirsty,” you growl. It was a lie, of course. You could kill for a glass of water, but you’d lick the condensation from the glycol lines before drinking that shit.
There’s only the one, but she might start whining for help if you ignored her and just kept going. Your RIG is showing enough charge for one more stasis bolt. Not good, but there wasn’t much in the way of alternatives. Trying to distract and entertain a drunk pony would be a waste of precious time.
You fire the stasis module, locking her in the blue haze. Her mouth drops open as she raises her foreleg to inspect it, all in slow motion. Seeing your chance, you draw out the remainder of the sleeping potion, pop the cork, and pour the bottle down her throat. No harm no foul.
You wind through the tables. Each one bears a chortling, slack-jawed reminder of the disgrace that awaited the unwary. All of these poor fucks would be ponies before the day was through. Touching any of them might bring infection.
Flickering fluorescents blink in the silent hall beyond the exit. Other than a few tousled gurneys and some abandoned clothing, the passage is empty. To the right, a glowing white sign marks the way: Elevator to Patient Care.
You step in and lean back against the wall, tapping the butt of the plasma cutter against the cold sheet metal. You close your eyes, listening to the soft hiss of the door as it closes, then the soft swish of the elevator as it accelerates.
How could things possibly get this fucked up? We had gotten ourselves out of the cradle sure enough, thanks to ShockPoint travel. Reached out into the vacuum for its far-flung treasures. Ore, room to spread out, a chance to set the clock back to a time when there were empty frontiers. To when there was a goal. It was a diffusion problem gone wrong wrong wrong.
We’re spread too thin, and that’s the irony. All that potential, all the measures taken to control and organize, circuits in our spines for Altmann’s sake, and here we are. Titan Station, pride and joy of human enterprise. Good luck staying perky about the glorious future of humanity when you find yourself accidentally wedged up your neighbor’s keister every time you turn around.
We’ve set out into the infinitude of space, and there’s no space to breathe. There’s no master plan, no way to keep it on the rails. No common interest, no altruism, no law to respect, natural or human. Things just happen as they always have, and either you decide to put up with it and stay alive, or you, well, considering the current state of affairs, you strap on a saddle.
The elevator bumps, and the light goes out. You slip against the wall and lose your grip on the cutter. “What the fuck?”
A face, Nicole’s face, is peering out of the darkness. She’s smiling, approaching you slowly in a pale glow. She’s wearing a long white trench coat, with the sun mark on the shoulder. Her eyes are a clear rose, and she was singing something …
Though quarrels arise, their numbers are few … laughter and singing will see us through ...
Her face is beautiful, untouched by the filth and decay of the Ishimura. She’s at peace, coming back to you to start a new life.
She’s right there. You could touch her, run your fingers along her warm cheek like you used to. Nicole, baby, you’re OK. I need you so much right now …
As you lift your hand to reach to her, she leaps forward.
Make us whole!
You bury your face in your elbow, turning away from the too-bright face. It’s not real. It’s one of Celestia’s, no, the Marker’s delusions.
They’re fucking with you. Mocking you. “You know where laughter and singing get you in life?" you shout, slamming the wall with your fist. "Nine to nine every day in a fucking crawlspace, a septic discharge station you get to escape every ten days to drink yourself to piss with your fellow mongoloids!”
You wheel back. “Can you hear me, Nicole? Nopony’s laughing!”
Wait, did you just say …? Shit. You’re alone again.
The elevator light is back, and before long the door opens. The Patient Care wing, it appears, is in no better state than the rest of the hospital. Chunks of chocolate cake dot the walls, compacted and splattered just like the blood and tissue of necromorph victims. They must have worked fast here. No lingering around waiting for Scroll Whisper or whoever to show up.
A poster on the wall behind a dual cashier’s desk reads Heart to Heart Gift Shop. Only a bunch of purple heart-shaped balloons tied to the desk on the left remain untouched. Get Well Soon. One of them detaches and floats into the air, only to pop when it hits the ceiling lights. Teddy bears and toy trucks had fallen out of the shelving, lying in mounds of stuffing and broken plastic. Move along Isaac. Don’t think too much about it.
There’s more than one way out of the room. Best to check your route. The blue ribbon winds into the East Wing hallway, around the corner. The intersection leading left out of the gift shop ends quickly in a door marked Critical Needs Patient Care. You steady your breathing. Really messed-up patients might make for mutations you hadn’t seen before.
The door opens. A small fire is burning at the far end of the room. It’s a good sign. Ponies don’t light fires. You breathe in the rank smell of melting plastic. Could the delusions be clearing?
Two rows of empty hard cots run along the walls. The room has a large plate glass viewport looking out on the towering apartment complexes of the residential sector. That was a nice touch, giving the hard luck patients a room with a view.
The lights in the windows of the distant structures twinkle in the gloom of the station’s night. Maybe the infection was localized to the hospital. Maybe you could stop it before it consumes all of those lives.
Some of the lights go out, then return a moment later. The next row over go dead. That’s odd. Power outages don’t cascade in patterns, not that quickly. It was almost like something was out there, floating in between …
Fuck. There’s a flash like lightning, and a corner of the plate glass blows out. The room begins to decompress, sending the cots slamming into the walls, pinwheeling out into the darkness.
“Holy shit!”
You hug the nearest cot before it tears free, flailing to keep your balance. A pipe hits your shoulder blade as it sails past, shattering the rest of the window.
Pressure differential? Considerable, but decreasing. Vacuum conductance? Way too fucking high. Maybe you could wait until all of the air had been evacuated, but then you’d have a different problem.
Sure enough, the air begins to thin. There had to be an interlock for this situation. The station had to have safety standards, run down as it was. Where is it? It had to be accessible to anyone in the room, easy to manipulate in case people were panicking, and visible …
Fuck, fuck, fuck … there it is, on the crossbeam above the window. A blinking red triangle, right in front of your goddamn face, Isaac.
You blast away with the plasma cutter, hitting the beacon on the third try. A steel gate falls down in place over the ruined window, sealing the hole. Humid puffs of air jet out of the vents, resupplying the room’s atmosphere. It’s still hard to breathe.
A prerecorded voice twangs over the noise. “Hull breach rectified.”
Thank you for the PSA. Too close. This had been no accident. There had been a flash that looked for all the world like lightning. But that wasn’t possible, not through empty space, unless … could necromorphs, some new form, build and focus electrical charge? Not entirely out of the question. It shouldn’t be much trouble for them to fart some ionizable gas to allow for an arc, being made of decomposing shit.
You circle around the cot and pass through the exit. Another attack was coming, any second now, and it was something new. At least you didn’t have to play by Daina’s ridiculous rules anymore. You load the cutter with a fresh cartridge.
The short passage beyond is really a divided room, opening into a separate space on the right through a doorless arch. The adjacent room is well-lit, and … was that a Store …
There’s a necromorph on the floor, lying just inside, waiting for some doof like you to rush in so it could cut them down at the ankles. A real necromorph - not a pony, not a sorry pastry-munching pony wannabe - a real monster, straight out of your nightmarish memories.
A negative and a positive equal a … dead little fucker. You stop, take a breath to steady the cutter, and squeeze the trigger. Two reports hammer the walls, rattling the dull gray panels in an echoing roar. The plasma tears into the creature’s gangrenous flesh.
It pops up with a shriek, already missing one of its sword-like arms. You put two more shots into its thigh, and another into its remaining arm. Both limbs break off in a bubbling hiss, spraying black fluid across the floor. It goes down, gurgling raw-throated cries of pain.
Piece of fucking shit. You walk over to it and splatter its head with your boot. No more make believe, Twinkler.
It wasn’t the lightning shooter, though. You step around the room’s central support column. The Shop is yours, but you’d have to make it quick if you didn’t want to get ambushed. You smooth your hands over the keyboard that folds itself out of the little alcove, hoping something good was left over from what was sure to have been a panic buyout.
What the fuck is taking this thing so long? You eye the exit, waiting for the GUI to unfuck itself. After a more few nervous seconds the inventory screen pops up. A friendly cashier AI greets you. “Welcome to MicroStore. CEC Engineer Isaac Clarke. Updating inventory to CEC engineering load out.”
Hmmm. Engineering Suit, CEC variant, and nothing else. 1,000 credits. Could be worse, and it was a far sight better protection than your straightjacket.
Your RIG’s armband had already been scanned. Apparently you’d swiped 1,300 credits from the ponies. You hit the purchase button, and the viewscreen folds and retracts into the alcove. Have a nice day.
It’s going to be a hell of a lot nicer now. The back panel of the alcove opens, revealing a gear fitting station. Some time to strip off the straightjacket before the Store’s fab injectors began building the suit around you would be great, because it stank like shit, but even a few seconds’ delay might cost you your life. Being vacuum-locked inside a fitting station compartment was not a tactical advantage.
The doors close, and the liquid alloy injectors approach your chest. They start to revolve around you, stopping, extending and retracting with flawless precision. In seconds, the warm, bronze-colored shell is complete.
You step out of the alcove, flexing in your new suit. A little tight in the shoulder, but it would do in a pinch. Or a stab, as the case may be. You can’t help but smile as the three-tiered helmet self-assembles around your head.
The sign above the exit reads To Emergency Arrival Area: Watch for Incoming Patients. As the door opens, a gust of air presses against your back. You engage the magnetic soles of your boots. The walls in front of you are completely demolished, the bulkheads and reinforcement beams scored and twisted like an iron briar patch. The dark cityscape of Titan Station glimmers through the wreckage, backlit by the stars.
Whatever had attacked you back in the Critical Needs room was hunting you. It had blasted this room to hell hoping you’d be blown into space when you opened the door.
There’s a mind at work, conceiving of nothing but the best way to kill you, tracking your movements even from beyond the metal skin of the Station. You navigate through the field of debris hanging in the airless, zero-G environment. Too slow, too fucking slow …
Something moves outside, fluttering at the edges of your vision. There’s too much shit in your way, no way to get a good look at it. But it couldn’t get a clear shot at you either. You hurry to the other end of the ravaged room and slip through the wide double doors.
You’d entered a cavernous gathering hall, or some type of docking bay. There’s another door, far across the way, maybe thirty meters.
A burning pile of metal that might once have been a transport vehicle is laying near the expansive windows of the outer wall. That’s odd. There’s no blood, and nothing else in the room is damaged. You check your route. The blue guideline streaks straight towards the ruined machine.
Nothing to worry about. If you were jumped, you had the suit, the plasma cutter, and a shitload of confidence now that the delusions had cleared. You start moving, watching for signs of a trap.
A shadow mounts the hill of rubble, a dusky shape that seemed to churn and fold within itself. It’s like looking at a walking piece of the void, deep formless blue with stars, wings and pale terrible eyes that burned with an unrelenting will. Rotting, reanimated flesh frantically trying to kill you was bad, but this, this was much worse. Yet it was impossible to look away.
She was wearing a crown, and on her black breastplate there shined a silver crescent moon emblem. Her gaze found yours … she had found you.
You are mine.
My God. Your knees buckle, and you choke, just a little.
Way too many pony faces rise over the crest behind her, pink, yellow, green, purple and brown. Pegasi and unicorns are among them, all smiling, all ready to give chase. No stasis charge, no sleeping potion, no ideas – luck had run out at last.
Then there’s a laugh, ringing with surprise and delight, loud beyond belief. It’s the Princess.
Your Princess. Bow to her.
She spreads her wings wide, seeming to double in size. “Ha ha! We have found thee! Collect him, my ponies! We have sought long to claim him.”
The crowd charges, cheering with delight. In seconds they’ll be all over you, all hairy snuggles and sloppy wet-nosed kisses. Holding you down. Changing you.
“Fuck me,” you whisper, firing blind shots with the plasma cutter as you run towards the exit.