//------------------------------//
// Chapter 2 The Great Escape 
// Story: Fallout Equestria: Jakintsu 
// by Clint Ambrose 
//------------------------------//


Chapter 2
The Great Escape

“If you want total security, go to prison. There you’re fed, clothed, 
given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking… is freedom.” 


1230 CY, 23 years post-war
Alien  vessel

“Hey, you awake there?” somepony asked me. I opened my eyes, and saw an earth pony mare (spiked black mane, short cut tail, blue coat, red eyes, Cutie Mark of a bull whip) in makeshift armor (leather and… tractor tires?) staring at me from the far side of an oval room. A quick examination of the room showed walls of an off-white beige that were curved beyond all necessity, one doorway, a hole in the ceiling, and some sort of electric green film that covered the latter two. No beds, food dispensers, or features on the walls that could be picked apart. My weapons, armor and equipment was gone, including my tech goggles, but I still had my PipBuck.
“Where are we?” I asked groggily.
“How the hell should I know? One day I’m escorting sl—serfs and then bam, I’m up here! I don’t know what these two legged bastards want, but… Shit, get down!”
There was a whirring noise from above, and I looked up to see a robotic arm slide along an overhead rail past our cell.
“Whew, it’s not for us,” the mare stated with a sigh. “They don’t stop at a cell they aren’t nabbing from, so we’re safe from it. Just so long as you don’t cause any trouble, that is.”
“What is this, a prison?” I asked.
“No dip, Sherhoof, it’s a prison,” the mare said. “I’ve been here over a year, based off my menstrual cycle. Just stay low, and they probably won’t come after us.”
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Shasta. Yours?”
“Flag, Security Chief of Stable 68,” I said. “Where are you from?”
“Shattered Hoof Rockbreaking Camp, before the war,” she answered. “Me and some… companions found a hospital on Route 52 with a massive stash of RadAway. Not much on food, but out on the surface, RadAway is more important.”
“You’re living on the surface? How bad is the radiation?” I asked.
“Pretty bad anywhere within ten miles of a balefire strike,” she stated. “The Societies are the major players—the Twilight Society in Manehattan, and the Grimhoof Society outside of Hoofington. And the New Equestrian Army and the Steel Rangers are still out there, but as long as you aren’t shooting them, they aren’t shooting you, and that’s fine with me. We just started to see the first of the Stable ponies start emerging onto the surface about five years ago.”
I heard a faint screaming, and looked back up at the overhead track just in time to see the robotic arm slide past, with a familiar colt squirming in its mechanical grasp.
“Reggie!” I cried, then looked at Shasta. “How do we get out of here?”
“We can’t. The only time the door or ceiling opens is when one of them comes inside,” Shasta said cryptically.
I spread my wings and vaulted into the force field over the door as hard as I could, bouncing off like it was a brick wall. I bellowed in anger, and charged the opposing wall, hammering the unsuspecting structure with my hooves as hard as I could. After my hooves began to bleed, I turned around, shouting out the doorway. “Hey, you cunts! Why don’t you come after me? Yeah, ME! I think you’re afraid of me, you lousy fucktards! Your father was a sea anemone and your mother was a feral mutt, you limp-dicked flea-ridden bastard sons of bitches! I wanna see who thinks they can do this to me! I wanna see just how fucking tough you think you are!”
“You can rant and rave all you want, they won’t come,” Shasta said.
I turned towards her. Inspiration struck.
I went for her throat.
In a moment, three bipedal creatures were at the door, glowing shock batons raised in one of their three arms, shouting orders at me in some indecipherable language of clicks and bops. Shasta’s face was getting bluer as I keyed a command on my PipBuck with my pinion feathers. One of the creatures hit a control beside the door, and the forcefield snapped off.
I triggered SATS and lined up my shot.
I used Shasta’s body as a springboard, and shot through the air, wings tucked close to my side. My forehooves plowed into the head of one alien with so much force its head simply disconnected. I bounced off the passageway’s opposite wall and twisted midair so that I landed in a run. And I was off like a shot.
Alarms began hooting throughout the facility, which I quickly realized was massive. I came across a guard alien, shock baton raised. I leapt into the air, started a frontflip, and grabbed the alien’s head in my hooves. I snapped the creature’s neck with a metallic pop, and slammed down onto my rear hooves. I pulled the body forwards, tossing it at another guard coming around the corner. The corpse collided and knocked the alien off his feet, both shock batons dropping to the floor. I raced forward, and cinched the double straps of the batons around my forelegs. Now I was armed.
The next guard to come around the corner got a shock baton driven through each eye socket. I could smell his brains cooking under the electrical discharge. I hurried along, my front legs sparking as the shock batons slammed into and discharged against the floor. I rounded a corner into some kind of storage bay, right where my PipBuck was placing the RFID tag of 68 Laws. I snapped on the pinging feature and waved my PipBuck around the room, quickly determining that the drielling was in chest-like structure on my left. I tapped the button on the chest, and a plane of light popped into existence, displaying hundreds of pictographs. I felt lucky, and punched out a sequence with my pinion feathers. “Ice cream cone, camera, bird, umbrella, clover,” I muttered as I hit the corresponding symbols. The chest hissed open, and I saw all of my gear inside. My guns were even loaded! I started to give a whoop of excitement…
A thatch of tendrils wrapped around my neck, and pulled me off my hooves. I slammed into the floor, and the tendril monster moved to position its armored carapace above me. Tendrils ripped the shock batons off my hooves as it studied me with those three blazing orange eyes. The nightmare slammed me into the ceiling, a wall, the floor, a rack of chests, the ceiling again, the floor again, the ceiling again, and then the sole window of the storeroom, all within a second.
Dammit, I needed my PDW! I mentally screamed against the pain of so many broken bones, staring at the weapon that lay twenty feet across the room, uselessly out of reach. It wouldn’t put this bastard down, but it might loosen its grip so that it couldn’t choke me to death! The monster wrapped two more thatches of tendrils around my chest, constricting me as I choked. The fourth tendril thatch reached to its belt and drew one of those impossibly chubby rifles. I kept staring at the PDW, willing it to float int—
Son of a bitch.
The creature leaned its head closer, retracting tendrils to reveal a three-part maw of plaque-yellowed teeth as it screamed into my face. I struggled to focus as my vision narrowed. Satisfied with the positioning, I hit SATS, and put fifteen incendiary shredder rounds into the back of the bastard’s head.
The nightmare creature dropped me, tendrils clutching at its head. The burst had launched my PDW from my newly discovered telekinetic grasp; I had no idea where it had gone to. But I did know where the monster had dropped its rifle, which was easy enough to pick up in my forehooves.
Turns out aliens use triggers like everyone else, and that triggers are easy to pull telekinetically.
The world filled with a flash of blinding cyan, and steaming hot gore coated my body. I shook myself like a wet dog trying to get it off. My vision returned with a severe red afterimage, intensifying the scene of boiled viscera coating the room. The only thing left of the creature was the back of its carapace. I knew from the battle at the drill head that these things were insanely though. 
If this is what their weapons do to them, I shudder to think what would happen to a pony.
I was able to don my hazmat suit and barding and restow my gear. I set my tech goggles to 80% polarization, and grabbed the chubby rifle. My EFS labeled it a “karabin fulmen,” and it had 99 shots left in the magazine. I cradled it in my arms and started following my PipBuck’s routing to get me to Reggie.
“Oh, you made it,” Shasta said from the doorway. “Holy fuck, you killed a tentacle? How’d you pull that off?”
“Incendiary shredder rounds to the head,” I stated. “Then I stole its gun.”
Shasta whistled. “You find your gear in there?”
“Yes. Grab yours if you can find it.”
“Finding it’s not the problem,” she said as she trotted up to a chest. “I’ve never been able to hack the lock.”
“Allow me,” I offered, and pushed keys with my pinions while I covered the doorway. “Frowny hexagon, catfish, pyramid of gold bars, ice cream cone. Bam, said the lady.” And the chest hissed open.
“How the hell… you know what, I don’t want to know how you did that. Can you open any other chests?” Shasta asked as she pulled a battle saddle and two LMGs out of the chest and set about attaching them. 
“I don’t feel lucky with any of the others,” I stated. “I figure release everypony we can, grab every weapon we can, grab Reggie, and GTFO this trash heap.”
“Who’s this Reggie, your kid brother or something?”
“He’s from my Stable. I came out here to rescue him, and that’s what I’m doing. Might as well free everyone else along the way. You’re free to take them on yourself and leave now, but you’d have a pretty hard time killing the tentacle ones with a machine gun.”
Shasta sighed. “Your goody-two-horseshoes attitude will get you killed out in the Wasteland, but I’m in. Let’s go.”


***      ***      ***


“So you’re Apple Bumpkin?” I asked the tan filly we’d just rescued. She had three candied apples for her Cutie Mark.
“Yep,” she said. “Hey, are you Colonel Cosmos?”
“I’m not familiar with Colonel Cosmos,” I answered.
“Now that she mentions it, you do resemble Cosmos,” Shasta said. “Pre-war teleBuck program. My little filly used to spend hours watching it. Unique in that it had a male lead.”
I looked at Shasta curiously. “Shasta, how many years do you reckon it’s been since the war?”
“About five—no, ten years. Why?”
“Nothing,” I lied. “Your age didn’t line up, is all.”
“You’re lying, I can tell,” Bumpkin said.
“Fine, I’m lying,” I said. Kids, sheesh. “You just look really good for your age, Shasta. That’s all. Come on, Reggie’s this way.”
“Oh, you don’t want to go that way,” Bumpkin said. “That’s where they torture people and grow new things. If you want to escape, we need to head to the bridge.”
“And why should we listen to you, short stuff?” Shasta asked.
“Cause I escape all the time, silly,” Bumpkin said. “It’s really fun to go crawling around the inside of the ship. The bridge is really fun to watch, it’s almost like Colonel Cosmos! But the torture chambers aren’t fun, and if they find you’ve escaped there, they don’t take you back to your cell, they strap you into a chair.”
“My friend is there, Bumpkin,” I said. “I swore I’d save him, and I do everything I swear to do.”
“OK, that was definitely Colonel Cosmos right there,” Shasta said.
“Come on, we’re headed for the torture chambers,” I said, and set off.


***      ***      ***


“Alright, this is it,” Bumpkin said as we came up to massive door. “The growing rooms and torture chambers lie on the other side of this door. Let me crawl through and unlock it!” And with that, the filly shimmied into an air duct faster than you could say, “Hey!”
“Where’d she go?” Hazard, the unicorn medic we’d picked up, asked.
“Nani o itte orunoda,” our samurai friend asked. “Kono chi ni mioboe no nai. Ittai sessha ni nani wo shita?"
“Toto, we can’t understand you,” Brindle Young, a genuine cowpony, said very slowly, as if that would help comprehension. “Why don’t you learn Equestrian like everypony else? Aliens like you and the Lexicans are bad enough, but with these aliens walking around, I don’t need your shit.”
“Brindle, when he’s from, there is no Equestria,” I said.
“What do you mean by that?” Shasta asked.
“I mean Toto, as he’s affectionately known, is a real Neighponese samurai,” I said. “His sword he was so happy I found? I know metallurgy, and that is real pre-Celestia steel. So either he’s the richest cosplayer in post-apocalypse Neighpon, or he’s been on this ship over a thousand years.”
“What are you saying, that the aliens snatched him out of time?” Hazard said. “If they snatched him out of the past, then… Sweet Celestia, who knows what year it actually is?”
“It’s the Year of Celestia 1230,” I said. “Even though Celestia died 23 years ago. PipBucks use a quantum chronometer, it always shows the date as it actually is at the place it’s at.”
“Horseapples, no way Celestia can die,” Brindle stated. “She’s the Goddess of the Sun.”
“Yeah, and what about Princess Luna?” I asked.
“Ain’t no such pony. Celestia’s the only Princess,” Brindle stated. “Wait, you ain’t talking about that Nighmare Moon stuff, are you? That’s just an old mare’s tale, and an excuse to wear funny clothes and get candy once a year.”
“Hazard, what’s the last thing you remember in the news? Not a day-to-day thing, but the last big thing?” I asked.
“Well, MacIntosh’s Marauders had just got back from Dawn Bay,” Hazard said. “Missed the stripe they were gunning for, though. There was talk of a peace summit, a real one—Celestia was supposed to go to that one. I volunteered—anything to shorten the war, right?”
“But Luna was the Princess in charge, right? The Ministries had been formed and all of that jazz?”
“Oh, yeah, all of that had happened, sure,” Hazard said. 
“Shasta, he’s pre-Shattered Hoof Ridge,” I said to the mare. “Obviously, they can negate time or permanently stall aging. Toss up as to which, but these critters can do it.”
“Incoming!” Hazard said, firing his assault rifle on full auto, dumping an entire clip into the alien that had come around the corner.
“Hazard, conserve your ammo!” I ordered. “Short bursts, the little ones die pretty easy. Remember, leave the big ones…” Three tendril monsters came around the corner. I triggered SATS, aimed center of mass of what the targeting spell called an oodalekka, and fired the karabin fulmen twice. The cyan bolts were much more tolerable with my tech glasses polarized. I lined up on the surviving oodalekka, and pumped a bolt into a leg-like thatch of tendrils. Damn, this thing was hard to aim manually. I fired again, this time dead center of the carapace, and the monster exploded in a flash of vaporizing flesh, fluids, and gore.
“Leave the big ones to me,” I said, the barrel of the karabin fulmen glowing white-hot. Three more worker aliens came around, and this time Hazard kept it down to a ten round burst for the two targets he engaged. Toto charged forward on his hindlegs, his blade grasped between his forehooves. With one powerful uppercut, he bisected the remaining alien.
Young finally figured out the trigger on the pistol I’d given him, and shot Hazard in his flank armor.
“Brindle! Keep that thing pointed at the enemy!” I shouted. The cowbuck nodded, and pointedly kept the pistol in his teeth pointed aimed the hallway.
The door behind us irised open. “High guys, did you miss me?” Dumpling asked.
A brace of workers and seven oodalekka chose that moment to attack. “Get through, now!” I pumped out two shots with SATS, then pulsed the trigger as rapidly as I could. As soon as I counted four ponies through, I stepped back, ordering Dumpling to shut the door. It irised down to about a three foot gap and stopped with a clang. “Suppressing fire!” I shouted, dropping the karabin fulmen and drawing my PDW. Shasta and Hazard lined up beside me, and we rained lead with our combined automatic fire.
“Shirizoku!” Toto shouted, and shoved Dumpling aside before he plunged his blade deep into the control panel with a mighty crack. An armored panel snapped into place over the doorway, negating the jammed main door.
“That works too,” Dumpling said.
“They probably have a way to get through from their side,” I said, checking my EFS. Damn, the karabin fulmen was at less than a third of its maximum condition; it’d just been nearly full before that last engagement. “Guess these things don’t take rapid fire very well. Sure am glad we have spares.” I reached into my saddlebags and pulled out a second karabin fulmen I’d picked up earlier.
“Thanks, Mr. Toto!” Dumpling said as she hugged the samurai pony’s foreleg, which did not offset the fact that his sword had snapped at the hilt.
“Looks like your sword broke, Toto,” Brindle said, the pistol in a holster I’d provided. I laid my forehoof upon the samurai’s shoulders. Sure, the sword was just a tool, but a tool that serves you well… it’s like it becomes a part of you.
“Naze imana no ka, kekkyokunotokoro, wareware wa susumete kita?” he whispered as he clutched the hilt of his weapon to his chest.
“It’s OK, Mr. Toto, we can fix your sword. Here, let me show you!” Dumpling said, pulling at the warrior buck’s forehooves. “Come on, Mr. Toto, I can fix it, just let me show you!” The samurai finally relented, and the filly positioned his hooves so that they held the hilt snug against the snapped blade. Then Dumpling pulled out what looked like an oversized alien toothpaste tube, and squeezed out the contents onto the blade. The clear gel smoked and whined, but as it evaporated, I saw the fracture sealing itself. The gel spread up and down the length of the blade, and quickly dissolved away. 
Toto gave an exploratory tug, and the now intact sword pulled free. In fact, it was missing the knicks in the blade it’d had when I first found it.
“Some sort of repair potion?” Hazard asked.
“I don’t know, but its damn good stuff,” Shasta said.
Toto gave his sword a few experimental swings. I turned to Dumpling. “You have any more of that stuff?” I asked.
“Sure, right here,” the filly said, digging in her Stable-Tec lunchbox saddleboxes and pulling out several tubes that she deposited into my saddlebags. I activated my PipBuck, and saw the tubes labeled as “alien epoxy,” with a value of over twenty thousand each. Twenty thousand what, I had no clue, but if it was in pre-war bits… Insert wolf whistle here.
“Grab all of these things you can,” I said, glancing back at Toto just in time to see him drop his sword to the ground and start walking off.
“What’s with him?” Shasta asked.
“Hey, even the Neighponese know to stay away from dark magic,” Brindle muttered.
“It’s not magic, it’s technology,” I stated. “Technology beyond your wildest dreams.”
“I’ve heard this technology horseapple before,” Brindle Young said. “Even seen me a train powered by a giant tea kettle, and that was mighty impressive. But son, technology can’t do that.”
I sighed. “You don’t have to agree. You just have to fight alongside me,” I stated as I picked the sword off the floor with my teeth. I walked up behind Toto, and slipped the sword into its scabbard across his back. Toto spun around, anger on his face.
His anger paled in comparison to the determination on my face.
“You can’t understand me, but I think you can understand tone,” I stated. “Let me make this clear. I need you fighting with me. And I need you armed with your sword, understand?”
Toto was silent a moment, then stood back up on his hindlegs and drew the sword.
“Alright, everypony, Reggie’s this way. Follow me.”


***      ***      ***


“What in tarnation…” Brindle muttered.
“Dumpling, you said that they… grow new things, right?” I said, staring out at the massive foundry floor in front of us.
“Yeah, at least, that’s what I call it,” the filly said. “See all the clusters of seven big fish tanks? They’re all full of that fixin’ glue stuff. They put what they want in the middle tank, and then the robot arms drop baskets into the tanks. Then the baskets get pulled up, and there’s six perfect copies of the original. It’ll make anything: toys, Giddyup Applejacks, Bucking Brahmin, Sweetie Bots, scooters, those sparky pain sticks. It doesn’t do food, though. Or spark batteries.”
“Replication,” I said. “Any inorganic substance inside the master tank is copied perfectly. They only ever need to make one of anything, and the alien epoxy does the rest. Remarkable.”
“What are those… things?” Shasta asked, pointing a hoof at a group of tanks making some sort of mechanoid.
“They look kinda like the really old zebra combat robots,” Hazard said. “The ones that stood on their hindlegs and moved like a baby dragon. I only ever came across one. It was missing its arms, rusty as hell. Sarge said it was probably a relic of an old battle, been unable to fight for years, only able to find the enemy.”
“I have a theory about those,” I said. “And I’m a-hopin’ I’m a-wrong on that un’. But I think we can use those tanks to our advantage.”
“How?” Shasta asked.
“Ammo,” I said. “We pop a handful of bullets in the center tank, and scoop them off the baskets before they get whisked off. We could also copy Hazard’s combat armor, after we use some alien epoxy to fix the original. Let’s get down there.”
After twenty minutes on the foundry floor, we’d quintupled our ammo supplies and placed everypony but Dumpling and Toto in combat armor. Toto had stood to the side and watched nervously. Once we were done, I checked my PipBuck routing on my automap. We were to follow the robot’s assembly line into another chamber. While the foundry floor had been a stunning display of what the alien’s technology could do, the “stockyard,” as my PipBuck called the next chamber, was an expression of the alien’s grotesque side.
“Cows,” Dumpling said as we entered the chamber. “We got cows!”
“Good granny, what is that smell?” I asked, covering my nose with my foreleg as I surveyed the cages of animals.
“That is the smell of money,” Brindle said, taking a deep whiff. “Finally, something I understand. Boy oh boy, looky here, these would fetch a fine price in Dodge Junction, a fine price.”
There was an explosive blast of Neighponese cursing from Toto. I turned around to see the samurai pony sprawled on his back, having stepped in a fresh cow pie and lost his footing. I slung the karabin fulmen and helped the swordspony to his hooves, then proceeded to wipe the dung off his armor with Dumpling’s help. Don’t ask me why, but the filly liked the Neighponese fellow, and I think he liked her.
“These are all pre-war cows,” Shasta stated.
“How can you tell?” Hazard asked as we started moving again.
“They only have one head.”
I raised my eyebrows at that one. “Only one head? What the hey?”
“Don’t ask me why, but all the cows born after the war have two heads,” Shasta stated. “They ain’t nearly as smart as they used to be. I guess the heads split the smarts and don’t share it no more.”
“These certainly ain’t as smart as a run-of-the-mill cow,” Brindle said. “Ain’t one of them try to talk with us.
“I’m calling horseapples on two-headed cows until I see that one for myself,” I said. A moment of silence followed as we walked past rows and rows of cages.
“I still can’t believe they blew everything up,” Hazard said. “I mean, sure, things were bad, but what did the zebras gain by using balefire on us?”
“The way I hear it in my Stable, Equestria came up with several war-changing systems all in the last few weeks of the war,” I said. “Shields that could protect cities against balefire bombs. Combat cyberponies. Undying soldiers. Add in the SPP towers being activated and the influx of pegasi combat personnel, and the zebras are said to have faced certain defeat. Not immediately, but soon. The Caesar’s job was to protect his people. With megaspells, the only way he could ensure Equestria didn’t defeat his people was the guarantee that Equestria would be laid to waste as well. It didn’t seem like that was possible anymore. So, if the zebras couldn’t win, the Caesar made sure Equestria couldn’t either.”
“What were the SPP towers?” Shasta asked. “I see them all over the place, and they survived the war intact, but what do they do?”
“They control the weather,” I said. “Don’t know the specifics on how, but what used to take most of the pegasi race now took a few dozen. And our pegasi were the best fighters we had, and when they had to go back home at each season change, the zebras had gained ground. Thus, the Ministry of Awesome made the Single Pony Project.”
“We should be quiet now,” Apple Dumpling said. “We don’t want to be heard on the other side of that corner.”
“Fire only when fired upon,” I ordered, and slid the silencer for my PDW out of my saddlebags. I didn’t like the reduced muzzle velocity, especially with the incendiary shredder rounds I was using, but better to use a few more bullets than get a few words said over your casket. Although I severely doubted that if I died there I’d get a casket.
Dumpling need not have silenced us. What I saw around the corner left me speechless.
Four horseshoe-shaped troughs, each several hundred yards long, had been cut into the floor of the room. The overhead assembly line of mobile robotic arms held replicator baskets with the robots we’d seen being made back in the foundry. Each arm dipped it’s basket into the buttery yellow sludge in the trough as it traveled, and at the end of the line picked the basket back up.
“I thought so,” I whispered. “The guard aliens… they’re cybernetic.” I spooled up SATS, and locked onto the contents of a finished basket as it came by. The targeting spell pipped the creature as a ‘Cylonic combat platform,’ instead of just ‘alien’ like it had before.
“Those black pipes supply the troughs,” I observed, pointing with a foreleg. “They run overhead and merge into that big pipe, which goes over there.” I consulted my PipBuck’s automap spell. “Which just so happens to be where my PipBuck is routing us.”
“So we just follow the pipe, right?” Hazard asked.
“The pipe is the only thing that leaves this room,” Dumpling said.
“I’ll bet you five bits that that gunk is flammable,” I said, lifting my PDW and firing a burst into the nearest trough. Sure enough, the gunk ignited, but I hadn’t foreseen the fire suppression system. Every robotic arm jerked it’s basket into the air, and twin covers snapped shut over the trough as alarms began whooping.
“No oxygen, no fire,” I said as I switched to the karabin. “But I bet they weren’t expecting this.” I slipped into SATS, lined up my shot, and deactivated the spell to save charge. Repeating this cycle, I pumped five bolts into the junction of the overhead pipes. By the second round, the metal was glowing cherry red. By the third, it was white hot. The fourth breached it, and the fifth ignited the material. The pipe burst at several points, which I ignited with rounds from my PDW. Soon, the entire pipe was awash in fire.
Then the wall exploded into foot-thick sections of shrapnel. The flame front of the conflagration washed over us without much harm, then the water deluge kicked in, pouring hundreds of thousands of gallons of water a second onto the stockyards floor. Despite the onslaught of water, the fires in what remained of the pipes just kept burning.
“Quickly, let’s get there before we all drown!” I shouted as I activated my PipBuck light, trying to find everypony in the haze of the downpour. “Everyone, form a line and bite the tail of the pony in front of you. This way we don’t lose each other when they cut the power. Make sure Toto gets in on it, too!”
“I ain’t biting your tail,” Shasta said.
“It’s my tail that was washed in the last week or somepony’s that hasn’t,” I stated, swooshing my tail back and forth. “No time to argue. This place is already filling up. Come on!”
Shasta sighed as I turned around, and after a moment I felt a tug on my tail. “Everypony ready?” I asked.
“MM-HMPH!” was the chorus’s answer. I turned my head forward and set a firm but manageable pace. We needed to do this quick; the water was already over the tops of my hooves and rising, and the lights…
Had just gone out. We were left in eerie purple emergency lighting that didn’t really penetrate the thick spray of water. I kept us walking forwards, my eyes scouring the PipBuck’s automap feature that I was displaying on my EFS by draining SATS. I really didn’t need to walk us into a trench full of water; I suspected most of us, like me, couldn’t swim. Normally, a PipBuck didn’t have the processing power to accomplish this, but mine was still set to overclock from the TubeScooter races. 
With the water now past my knees, we finally made it to the wall the hole was in. Except the hole was at least thirty feet up, and we were on the floor. “Circle up!” I shouted over my shoulder, and everypony released the tail of the pony ahead of them with a gagged breath. I looked up, trying to remember the details of the hole when a pocket of the goop exploded into a fireball. “This water isn’t stopping the fire. That gunk must be oxygen rich. When they run out of water, they’ll probably gas the place with argon or somesuch, under the assumption that all of their kind has had time to leave. When the gas goes off, we won’t have any air left to breath, and our lungs will be frozen solid. So we have to climb up to that hole and then get through a door before that happens.” I pulled a long leather beltstrap and a rappelling line off my barding. “We’re gonna make a pony ladder. Dumpling, I want you to climb up there and loop this rope around a piece of undamaged pipe. Then throw the belt end down. We’ll work it like an elevator to get us all up there, and ya’ll will pull me up last.”
“Why not just fly up there and do it yourself, airhoof?” Shasta asked.
“My wings and armor are waterlogged,” I said, the water now up to our bellies. “I can’t take off like this. And the rope is integrated into my barding. I can’t pull you up with my own strength.” There was another explosive fireball to accent the urgency of the situation. “This’ll work, now let’s do it. Brindle, you’re the strongest, you’re on bottom. Shasta, get on top of him. I’ll explain this to Toto.” I grabbed the samurai pony’s shoulder and pulled him close. I swept my hoof to point at Brindle, Hazard, Shasta, Toto, and myself. I mimed piling my hooves one atop another, pointed at Dumpling, then mimed climbing a ladder.
Toto was silent a moment, then nodded, and walked over Brindle and Shasta. And shoved them over.
“What’s the big idea?” Shasta asked in anger. Then Toto braced himself against the wall, and nodded at Brindle.
“He’s gonna be bottom rung,” I said. “Brindle, get up there! Shasta, you’re next! Hazard, you’re after that! Dumpling, climb on my back and get your hooves around my wings. This ain’t gonna be easy, so let’s make it quick.”
The water was lapping at my saddlebags when I climbed up after Hazard, who had apologized the whole way up the pony ladder for stepping on everypony. I nearly slipped on Shasta’s water slicked leather armor, but the tractor tire shoulder pieces made excellent footholds to use to crawl over Hazard. Damn, Dumpling was getting heavy. Something about the leverage of her hold against my wings was very tiring. “Alright, my little pony, up ya go,” I said once I was braced. Dumpling shimmied up my back and over the lip of the explosively formed hole. We all stayed there a moment, waiting.
“Why are we still standing here?” Brindle asked. “Not all of ya are made of feathers, ya know.”
“You saying I’m fat?” Shasta asked.
“No, ma’am,” Brindle said. “You are a picture of petite beauty and femininity. With a scattergun.”
“So which of us is the fat one, me or Flag?” Hazard asked.
“You straining to keep me up, Hazard?” I asked.
“Not really.”
“Then you da fatty,” I said jovially as Dumpling came back over the edge of the with the belt in her mouth. “Good work, Dumpling. Now throw me the belt. There we are. Everypony, we’re disassembling the…”
At that moment, Toto’s strength gave out, and we all plunged into wither-deep water. After spending a moment spewing, I grabbed Toto and wrapped the belt around him. 
“He’s heaviest in that waterlogged armor, he goes first,” I ordered. “Grab on, and let’s pull him up, quickly!”
Everypony grabbed the rope in their mouth and pulled as I pulled backwards against my barding’s built-in harness. Toto grabbed at hoofholds as he ascended, then scrambled over the lip and tossed the belt back down. We moved Shasta and Brindle up as fast as we could, with those on top helping to pull.
“Alright, soldier buck, you’re up,” I stated, tying the belt around Hazard.
“Oh fuck!” Hazard screamed, back pedaling in the water.
“You kiss your mother with that mouth?” Dumpling asked.
“Don’t listen to her, Haz, I’m proud of ya,” Brindle called down.
“What’s wrong, Haz?” I asked.
Hazard raised a hoof above the chin-deep water. “Something’s in here! Something with lots of…”
I triggered SATS, telekinectically readying the karabin fulmen as I panned for…
Oh shit, lots of TEETH! I thought as I locked SATS and fired.
The aquatic creature had six rows of teeth, half serrated triangles and half needle-like points. Twin orange eyes burned with primal rage above a snub snout. Its scaleless brown body sported razor-sharp metal spines down its fifteen feet of length, and the two pectoral fins looked like limbs meant to grasp things. SATS called it a “Fury.”
That’s all I saw before the karabin fulmen fired while still underwater. Hundreds of gallons flashed to superheated steam along the bolt’s travel line, propelling me and Hazard back explosively and flipping the Fury end for end. The rope snapped taught, and Hazard and I swung back into the water. Hard.
“What was that thing?” Hazard asked in panic.
“Hungry,” I said, gritting my teeth against the intense steam burn I’d sustained. Noticing that the barrel of my karabin fulmen had split open. I reached into my saddlebags and pulled out another karabin, holding it tightly in my hooves. Obviously not meant to fire underwater.
“Everypony, get ready to pull the rope,” I ordered. “We got a lot of open water between us and the wall for that Fury to get us.” I spotted the metal spines slipping through the water, and pumped three bolts into the area. “I don’t think I can kill this thing in the water,” I stated. “Any ideas?”
“We don’t even see what you’re talk…” Shasta started as the fury leapt up, coming straight at me. I locked SATS and fired.
The bolt just sizzled against the Fury’s skin. Then it grabbed me in its maw and pulled me under.
The monster’s jaws got stuck on the armor plates of my copy of Hazard’s combat armor, unable to penetrate. But the damn thing was very close to crushing me to death as it swept me farther away from my allies. I started kicking out with my legs, beating at it with my wings, but nothing slowed the monster down.
Damn it, I am not dying here, I thought, but nothing I tried increased my chances of survival. I could sense the blood loss through my adrenaline, and my vision began to narrow. Then it felt like I was being torn in half. I screamed, water rushing into my mouth. But we weren’t moving.
My right hindleg kicked against the rope, now strung taught. The fish had run out of line.
The Fury swung around, using it’s pectoral fins to brace itself against some beams. It thrashed wildly, trying to reverse with all its might. The teeth grated through my armor, and I knew that it’d soon saw through the harness, or have whichever half of me it deemed tastiest in its jaws. But my armor slipped, freeing my forelegs just a little.
SATS saved me again as I shoved the karabin fulmen down the monster’s gullet and triggered the targeting spell.
As a testament to the monster’s durability, it didn’t die. Not immediately, despite having all of its guts blasted out its ass. It kept trying to backpedal, but now I could feel myself being pulled away. Finally, the beast released its hold, turning tail to the prey that hurt too damn much to eat.
I felt the continued tug of the rope against the harness in my barding as my world went to black.


ooo   OOO   ooo


I was in a memory orb again. I’m not sure how I had gotten into it, but I had. Once more, I saw the mare that was my mother staring into a mirror, except…
This was different.
Instead of a castle, this was a small personal bathroom. The metal walls were painted with in a bland yellowy shade. Light was provided by a single bulb in a protective wireframe. And my mother lacked her armor and battle saddle, although she still wore the two-leg PipBuck system.
“Alright, Azienda,” she whispered to her reflection. “Time to do this.” She turned to the open hatch, and stepped into an adjoining suite, which was furnished with a pull-out couch, a bed, a large table with a lip around the edge, and a bookcase with glass cabinet doors. A stallion the color combination of a legal pad stood inside, idly inspecting his crisp crimson and white dress uniform. “How far out are we, admiral?” Mother asked.
“Fifty miles from the coast,” he stated as he looked up. “A pegasi raptor is coming towards us full-burn, and just dispatched two squadrons. One is pulling chariots, the other isn’t. ETA seven minutes. The Celestia is on an intercept course, and our early-warning keeps picking up the Luna’s rangefinder from just over the horizon.”
“As if they could stop us,” Mother said. “Or get a shell to us. Get the Maple Seeds and Pyros fueled and spooled. Get the Peregrines in the air.”
“Already being done, sir,” the admiral said.
Mother nodded and hung her head, giving me a detailed view of the floor. “Am I doing the right thing, Post?”
The admiral was silent for a moment. “It’s not my place to say, Princess, but… Yes. The Stables are a far more robust and polished design than our own shelters, and many of them are removed from likely targets. All of ours sit under major population centers. This is the best way to ensure your children survive.”
Mother nodded. “Lead me to the flight deck, Admiral.”
They stepped out of the suite into a narrow hallway that was rather tall for ponies. Hatches were swung open every fifteen or twenty feet, and the floor was swaying slightly, but my mother handled the unexpected motion with ease. As they walked, other ponies in tan working uniforms wearing crimson berets would move out of the hallways they were about to occupy. Then the admiral opened a hatchway, and they stepped out into the sunlight.
Sunlight. Glorious, warming sunlight that bathed everything in its reassuring glow. I had yet to see the sun, and after this, I could not wait to feel it on my own coat. Oh, how I yearned to fly amongst the clouds of that beautiful blue sky.
The whirligig aircraft was wider than the ship’s deck, so instead of resting on its landing gear, it sat atop a raised platform and a shipping container. Several griffins in complicated mechanically assisted armor were standing around the deck, weapons locked down into battle saddles as three ponies inspected the whirligig.
“Good afternoon, Princess,” a one-winged pegasus (ouch—I’d wrenched my wings badly on a few occasions; removal must be excruciating) in a skull cap and flight goggles said from beside the whirligig. “Pre-flight checks are finished. Go ahead and board while we await takeoff permission.”
“Thanks, Barrel Roll,” Mother said, and trotted to the back of the whirligig. The shipping container was actually some sort of interchangeable troop bay, with twin recessed miniguns on each side and a chain gun hung off the ceiling in the back. With the pull of a lever, the back doors and side hatches would open, the weapons would snap into place, and the whirligig could start suppressing enemy positions. Coupled with the twin gatling cannons mounted under each wing, I could tell these whirligigs were not something to tangle with if you were earth bound. It’d be a pathetically slow target for pegasi, though. “Loadmaster, is the precious cargo secured?” Mother asked the pony inside the troop bay.
“Yes, sir, Princess, sir,” the mare answered. “Just got confirmation on the cargo of all the other Maple Seeds, and the Pyros are loading up.” There was a buzzing sound, and my mother turned to watch a pair of some kind of aircraft pass low overhead. She turned her gaze to the large flattop naval vessel a couple miles away, which was launching more of the aircraft off a ski jump on the bow.
“Wish we could be doing this with Peregrines, Pyros, and Centipedes,” Mother said wistfully. “These Maple Seeds are just too slow.”
“We can hold our own, ma’am,” the mare said as the admiral entered the troop bay with three aides and another servicepony in flight gear. “Alright, everypony strap in tight. If the shit hits the fan, we will snap the rotor blades off trying to maneuver. You wingless folks only have one shot, and that’s to ride it down and pray that the gods like you. Princess, you do what you want. I’d like the aimed fire your PipBuck will give us if it all goes bad.”
“I’ll stand,” Mother said, grabbing a flight helmet off the deck and donning it. “I couldn’t sit still if I wanted to.”
“Delta flight, this is Catnip Actual.” The helmet’s comm gear started to crackle out an authoritarian voice. “Begin launch operations. Be advised, two Shadowbolt squadrons will be escorting you in from your twelve and six. Gun crews, keep an eye open.”
“Catnip Control, Maple Lead is spooling up,” came the voice of the one-winged buck. “Engine one… on.” There was a whirring noise from above that dopplered through the audible spectrum. “Engine two… on. Engaging rotors.” The shadows outside started to spin as the double contra-rotating rotors started moving. “Engine three… on. Spinning to seventy... Increasing cyclic... Liftoff.”
The whirligig was humming with the engine note as it came off the ground and started to tilt right, crabbing sideways through the air. Mother walked to the rear doors of the container, and started to survey the fleet. There were frigates, destroyers, cruisers, the flat-top pegasi carriers that didn’t carry pegasi, even a surfaced submarine and a trio of dreadnoughts. But in the center of the fleet were two ships of advanced design that were obviously the crown jewels of the fleet.
The ship they had lifted off from sported three main gun turrets, one forward and two aft of the bridge tower and a separate radar mast. Each turret housed 5 medium-high caliber artillery tubes, a significant arsenal against lighter warships. Dozens of vertical missile tubes were arranged between the tower and radar mast, and several anti-dragon and anti-pegasi gun batteries adorned the deck. On the stern was a large heart-like cutie mark set in a gilded frame, and the bow read SRO Cadenza. 
Alongside her sailed another ship of the same model, but instead of three identical 5 gun turrets, this had a 5-gun turret aft, a heavy-caliber three gun turret forward, and a single colossal howitzer resting inside an armored gimbal in the central mount. This ship hadn’t received the gray camouflage stripes of the Cadenza, but instead had a bright pink underlayer exposed to the surface, like she’d been rushed from the docks before her topcoat could be applied. This vessel bore a cutie mark of a gilt flagstaff holding an empty banner. I did not need to read the bow to know its name.
The Azienda. Named for my mother.
“Strange having a warship named after me,” Mother said. “Hope her crew’s ready for the battle. They’re all green.”
“They’ll do fine,” the admiral said. “The active defenses will keep all but the heaviest blows from hitting, and the repair talismans will counteract whatever does. Besides, the Cadence is staying closer to the capital ships. Azienda will provide support.”
“Doesn’t matter. We both know the shore guns will target them, and the Luna could put a megaspell shell into the middle of the fleet anytime she wants.”
“They’ll get through it,” Admiral Post insisted. “Gods help the zebras and any Equestrian that wants to take them on.”
“May God help us all,” mother whispered as the whirligig gained altitude and a few dozen other aircraft and a gross of griffin mercenaries formed up around them. “The time of gods and alicorns is ended.”

Note: Level Up!—Comradeship is Witchcraft—You're at your best when in a team. +4% to all combat stats and an additional +3% per companion in your party, up to a max of +25%.
Spell Unlocked: Basic Telekinesis—you can now move objects and project force by thought, but the strength of your spell is rather limited.