A particularly loud bang from the ventilation system startled Chrysalis awake. Some hours had passed, she was sure, but it was impossible to measure time in this place. The blue glow of the forcefield reflected off the puddle of oily liquid beside her, but at least her wound looked to have largely stopped contributing to it. Her head ached and she was weakening fast, but she could manage to keep going a little longer. She had no other choice.
Chrysalis fought to stand, but her wounded leg collapsed instantly when she put weight on it. She stumbled, slamming her other foreleg down to recover, and accidentally planted it right in the spilled soup. Instantly she lost traction and slipped, and after the briefest moment of weightlessness her shoulder hit the ground hard.
Her wet, ragged mane stuck to her face as she lifted her head to look at the dimly-lit ceiling. Just as she’d hoped, the air vent was on her side of the cell, and it wouldn’t take much to reach it. She struggled to think back to her earlier escape attempt, and the information she’d gathered while guised as Anderson—if the base lost main power, then the ventilation system became a viable means of escape. The thing said to be blocking her way, a giant fan that would chop anything it contacted to bits, was located near the exit; therefore, it should be possible to use the ventilation system to travel distances around the base interior even while the power was on. At the very least, she could cross over into another cell. None of the other cells were likely to have this sort of elaborate forcefield set up, and she could kick a regular door down pretty easily.
She wasn’t fitting through the vents in her current condition, though. Her wounded leg was almost useless, and she was far too big to get through the opening even if she could move around properly. She needed to shapeshift into a different form, but she was weak. Whatever form she chose had to be small enough to get through the vent, but still capable of figuring out how to shut down base power and carry it out. She briefly considered Colonel Autumn, but his shoulders would probably be too wide to get through the vent easily, and any of the other males on the base would have the same problem.
Her thoughts went back to the first form she’d taken in this place, the dead woman whose house her saucer had taken out. She was thin and agile enough to get through the vents, and yet still capable of operating her captors’ technology. She wouldn’t blend in, but the soldiers wore full-body armor and she’d seen similarly identity-obliterating bodysuits worn by the science types at the crash site. If she could find their barracks or equipment storage, she could go unnoticed even in this form.
She pictured the woman in her mind, and channeled what little strength remained within her into the transformation. Her horn sparked brightly. Green flames erupted out of thin air all around her, and quickly consumed her whole body. Her legs tingled as the holes filled in, her chitin softened into skin, and the flat hooves morphed into hands and feet. Her torso narrowed, and her wings folded in and dissolved into her back. Her neck shortened, and her ragged mane twisted and curled into a tangled mess. Finally, her horn retreated into her head, and a ragged outfit made of leather and cloth materialized all around her.
The magical fire dissipated, and she picked herself up into a standing position. She wobbled a bit, nearly losing her balance. The unsteady stance of two-legged creatures always required a bit of getting used to, and her headache only made it worse. Her forearm was sore, a residual effect of Autumn’s bullet, and she was dangerously lightheaded, but she was still breathing and standing upright and therefore capable of continuing her plan.
Her stubborn confidence was immediately challenged, however, when she looked back up at the ceiling. She’d shapeshifted both her horn and her strong changeling limbs away before removing the grate covering the ventilation duct that was to be her escape. Not only that, but she was far too short to jump and catch the duct even if it was open. Changing back wasn’t an option, not in her condition. She had to think of something else.
The food cart Autumn had hurled at her was still on her side of the cell, so she pushed it over to line it up directly beneath the vent. That took care of the height problem, but she still had four screws to deal with that her current form wasn’t nearly strong enough to break. She had no tools on her, and she’d lost the sharp edges of her hooves.
She glanced around for something she could use as a tool, knowing it was probably pointless, but the edge of a broken piece of soup bowl caught the light of the barrier spell just in front of her. That might do. She picked it up and turned it over in her hands, examining it. The roughly triangular fragment’s shortest side had come from the rim of the bowl, which was curved and rounded and of no use to her, but the clean corner break opposite formed a sharp enough edge to fit into the groove on the screws. It wasn’t perfect, but it came close.
Satisfied with her choice, she stepped back to the cart. Two legs were shaky enough standing on level ground, though, let alone a wheeled platform that was top heavy by itself. As soon as she tried to climb onto it, it would roll, and she’d be sent tumbling. She had to stop the wheels from rolling somehow, and the best solution to that was to chock them with more fragments of the bowl. They were easy to find, scattered all over the floor as they were, and a few of them were near enough to the barrier to catch some of its light. In seconds, she had rounded up four of the largest fragments, including one which was roughly half the bowl all by itself. These pieces she kicked up against the tiny caster wheels of the cart, wedging them in as much as possible.
That was as good as it was going to get. She steadied herself as best she could, then heaved one foot up onto the cart. It wobbled and rocked in place, barely affected by the chocks, but she had no choice but to continue. She leaned forward, then kicked off with her grounded leg. The cart slid its makeshift chocks a few inches sideways as soon as she put her weight on it, but she quickly brought her other leg up and onto its surface, and stood as still and centered as she could manage. The cart settled, and Chrysalis let out a breath she didn’t even realize she’d been holding.
With the easy part out of the way, Chrysalis set herself to the task of getting the grate off. She slowly raised the hand in which she held the fragment, lining it up with the furthest screw to reach—figuring it was best to get the hardest part out of the way first—as best she could in the low light. Changeling eyes were optimized for low-light conditions, and weren’t nearly as hard to see through as her current ones. Still, she managed to make out the faint shadow of the screw’s center groove despite the darkness, and with her arm fully extended and the fragment wedged between her middle and ring fingers to truly maximize her reach, the narrow tip of her improvised screwdriver barely clicked into place.
She rotated her hand, struggling to apply enough torque with just the one far-outstretched hand to overcome the screw’s stubborn resistance to motion. She twisted hard, until the fragment was about to slip from her grasp entirely, but then the screw finally gave. The fragment then rotated freely until the screw dropped down from its mounting and clattered around on the floor for a moment before settling down somewhere out of sight.
One down, three to go.
The cart wobbled a bit, but held against its chocks as she set her sights on the next screw. The fragment went into its groove much easier this time, and she was spinning it freely counterclockwise in no time. The other screws were even closer to her, on the side of the duct she’d have to try and jump and catch once the grate was out of the way, so it was smooth sailing from here.
The screw dropped out of the grate and bounced off her wrist, making her flinch in surprise and throw the cart hard against its rear chocks. She panicked, throwing her weight forward to regain her balance, but she overcompensated horribly and the wheels hit their forward chocks hard enough to break the half-bowl fragment in two and shove the other one aside. The cart rolled freely forward, and as Chrysalis realized she was about to fall she tucked the bowl fragment into her pocket and jumped for the grate. Her thin fingers slipped into the gaps in the metal, and her bodyweight pulled the grate down like a lever, breaking the heads off both the remaining screws and sending Chrysalis herself tumbling.
Her shoulder hit the ground first, followed by the rest of her as she slid a foot or so across the still-wet floor. She heard the cart bump weakly against the opposite cell wall, and as she began to pick herself up she realized that she was holding the grate in her hands. Chrysalis allowed herself a smile, as she’d at least saved herself from having to undo two more screws.
Chrysalis tossed aside the cover and went to reset the cart for the actual escape. It rolled smoothly back into place beneath the opening, and the defeated chocks were easily replaced. She was getting the hang of two-legged balancing acts now, and her second climb went much more smoothly than the first. She put one leg on the cart, steadied it, then heaved the rest of herself up after it and held perfectly still until the rocking settled. Then she turned to face the closest edge of the duct, reached up with both her arms, and bent her legs into a bit of a crouch. The cart wobbled a bit more, and so she waited for it to steady itself. Then she kicked off hard, leaping up and grabbing the edge of the opening.
Her current form was barely strong enough to lift her own weight, but she grunted and struggled against the burn and forced herself up enough that she could slide her forearms into the vent, and then her whole arms. With the better leverage, she could pull her torso in easy, and drag her legs in behind her. Then she was there, in the duct. It was an uncomfortably tight space with a cold wind blowing in her face and suffocatingly close walls, but getting here was the crucial first step towards escaping the base.
She had barely enough room to extend an arm to drag herself forward in the direction of the cell door. It got traction, and so she pulled the arm back at the same time she kicked forward with her feet to shove herself along the line a few inches. It’d be slow going to actually get anywhere, but she was moving.
Up ahead, yellow-orange light shone up into the duct from another grate, in the middle of what appeared to be a four-way intersection. She knew there was only one grate in the cell, and the distance seemed too short to correspond to another cell on the opposite side of the corridor. Besides, she hadn’t seen any cells over there in the brief moment she was being carried to the cell with the barrier spell, and she had only seen a blank wall through the door whenever it was opened by a visitor. That grate probably was the corridor, then, and if Dr. Forrester’s threats of leaving her completely alone were true, it was probably a very lightly guarded corridor.
Quite a bit more struggling brought her up to the intersection, and she breathed a sigh of relief. She was indeed above the corridor, and no guard had been posted immediately outside her cell. The grate here was in much worse repair than the one in her cell. One screw was missing and another was loose, and a few exploratory prods made it wobble flimsily on what little support it had. If she put her full weight on it, she was nearly certain it would give.
This was too easy. Chrysalis looked left and right, but the duct carried on indefinitely, until the warm orange glow from the grate dissipated completely. Ahead, the duct went up a slight incline, and she couldn’t see beyond the first few feet of it before her line of sight was blocked by the ceiling. If she wasn’t mistaken, there was a laboratory there, the same laboratory she woke up in. None of those options were particularly appealing, since the lab would likely be fully staffed and operational, and she could hear the rattling of a worn-out fan coming from somewhere; meaning one of the paths was likely blocked. Apart from guessing blindly, she really had no options but down into the corridor.
The dilapidated state of the grate and the relative ease with which she’d escaped her cell made her wary, but the more she studied her surroundings the less strange it seemed. The fan she was hearing sounded like it was well beyond its last legs, and the duct walls all around her had the slight dusting of rust common to truly ancient metalwork that had been carefully maintained but was nevertheless wearing out. This, in a military base where the soldiers wore giant suits of powered battle armor far superior to the wildest dreams of gryphon armorers. Ironic, then, that a people so confident in the strength of their advanced technologies could be foiled due to their stubborn refusal to replace basic infrastructure components when they wore out.
Chrysalis carefully fished the triangular bowl fragment out of her pocket and slid it halfway through the gap in the grate. She did her best to tune out the rattle of the ventilation system and listen for any sounds coming from below. If she was lucky, anyone who heard the sound would come wandering over to investigate, and give her a clean window to break through the grate and attack. But even if they were smarter than that, surely she’d be able to hear the telltale whine of the soldier’s armor as he instinctively turned towards the sound, and at least she’d know what to anticipate. She released her grip and the fragment slipped through the grate, speeding silently through the air for a second before exploding loudly into shrapnel on contact with the floor.
Five long seconds ticked by, and still she heard nothing but the rattling of the ventilation system. If anyone hadn’t made their presence known by now, it wasn’t going to happen. She crawled forward a bit more so her torso was over the grate, then arched her back as far as she could in the tight space. With just a couple of inches to work with, Chrysalis twisted her hip into the strike and hit the grate hard. An explosive bang destroyed the silence, and Chrysalis followed the grate down into the corridor. It hit the ground and broke apart into its separate rusty components an instant before she rolled herself upright to land on her hands and knees.
Silence returned to the corridor as if nothing had happened. No alarm sirens sounded to alert the base of her escape. No hurried footsteps signaled the approach of nearby soldiers who’d heard the crash. The muffled rattle from above persisted, but otherwise she was clear.
Nothing on the map she’d found earlier had made any mention of where she might find how to shut down the base’s power. She remembered a room on the upper level, farther away from her position than any other room in the base, labeled “Control Room,” and certainly she might find what she needed there, but the map had curiously omitted mentioning the actual source of the base’s power. Surely it wasn’t routing in power from the outside, with some giant power plant above ground supplying all of the base’s demands. Building underground bases like this was hard, costly work—Chrysalis knew this from experience—and was only something to be considered when discretion and survivability were key concerns. Seeing into a mountain was no easy task, nor was blowing one up, but all that natural defense was for nothing if the base relied on a ventilation system powered by an external generator. Even casual passersby would notice the thing, alerting them to the presence of something consuming that power, and any attackers could simply blow it up and wait for the base to suffocate.
No, they had to have a power plant deeper down, below the cells and below the hangars. There had to be some way of shutting down power at the source itself, rather than risking the trip up to what was most likely the most heavily guarded area in the base. Bumbling around without knowing exactly where she was going wasn’t perfect, either, but she was more prepared than last time. She knew that following the corridor left out of her cell would take her through the tech lab and eventually to the hangars, so she set off cautiously to the right.
The hallway hooked left ahead of her, then jogged right to avoid the Bio Lab storage closets and exam rooms. One of the ceiling tiles here was missing, and the rattle of ventilation fans grew louder as she passed under it. Bundles of hoses drooped down from the gap like jungle vines, and one of the things had cracked and was spewing a jet of steam at the wall. Chrysalis ducked underneath, dodged a hanging work light, and carried on. She made it another dozen or so steps before she heard a voice and froze.
“Almost got it, Major. Just one more minute.”
The source was a small room up ahead on the right. Its door was open, and just beyond that was a window. It looked like a security office of some kind, certainly not another cell. Chrysalis flattened herself against the wall and looked up, scanning for ducts and finding none in the immediate area. It was pointless anyway; she had nothing to boost her up to their height, and no way of loosening the screws once she got up there. She could backtrack, loop around the entire cell block and cut across the other side of the Bio Lab, but her odds of remaining hidden were going to plummet if she did. Someone had clearly been working on the exposed hoses recently, and they had to come back eventually. Certainly the Bio Lab had guards posted by the doors, and scientists would be moving in and out. A skinny female with dark skin and tattered clothing was hardly going to be a good enough disguise.
Chrysalis stuck her right foot out sideways, then inched the rest of her body sideways to catch it up. She carried on, moving inches at a time, until she was right beside the entrance. She could hear someone inside rustling around. Metallic clinking, like the sound of fiddling with machinery. A fainter clink when a wrench or something was set down on the floor and traded for another tool. Whoever was in there was working, and probably not paying attention to the door, meaning now was a perfect time to dart across the opening and carry on. If he was looking, then she’d charge inside instead of passing by, hoping the element of surprise would compensate for whatever physical disadvantage she certainly had. She could grab the wrench he’d set down and beat him with it, maybe. Either way, she had to go fast.
Her chest swelled visibly as she sucked in what she hoped wouldn’t be her last breath. Then she sprang, jumping sideways in front of the doorway and snapping her head to look inside. His back was turned. She cleared the doorway and pitched forward, catching herself with her hands as she came to rest below the windows. Only then did the rest of what she’d seen really register—inside the room was a soldier, in black cargo pants and a grey sleeveless top, kneeling down before a removed access panel in a wall otherwise full of little rectangular screens. From the fading snapshot her eyes were able to take in that tiny snippet of time, she knew she’d seen images of several jail cells on some screens, the main room in the Bio Lab on another, and a room with a bunch of what looked like hospital beds on another still.
Chrysalis chanced another look through the door. Sure enough, she’d seen correctly. This base had all manner of odd technology, and she felt confident in the assumption that a room with apparently base-wide monitoring technology might also have more specific information about the place’s layout than the crude map she was currently operating from. The soldier inside was unarmed and unarmored, and a heavy metal wrench lay just behind him and to the side. He was buried in his work, his whole upper torso inside the wall and oblivious to the world around him.
Cautious feet crept inside, careful of making any noise. Chrysalis sneaked right up on him, kneeling down behind his unsuspecting body. She was grateful for the slender, long-fingered hands at the ends of her arms; even if she had the energy to start beating people to death with her magic, unicorn horns made a faint magical twinkling sound that would have compromised her instantly. With this body, she was able to simply pick the wrench up, carefully lifting it straight vertically so it didn’t clink or make noise.
The soldier grunted as he twisted whatever tool he was working with one final, difficult time. All the screens flickered over with static, then returned to their normal picture. The tiny red buttons next to each monitor all lit in unison as a horrible cacophony filled the room, the din of multiple layers of vent fan rattling and hissing pipes and mangled bits of conversation all mixed together and amplified over hidden speakers. It only lasted for a second before the lights all blinked once and extinguished themselves. Chrysalis herself froze perfectly still, her hand on the wrench right in front of her. The soldier reached up and hit a control on the intercom panel right above where he was working.
“That did it, Major,” he said, pulling up his shirt and mopping his forehead with it. “Presidential uplink’s offline, Eden is blind. You’re on, sir.”
Chrysalis hesitated for a second; if the Major replied with a question or something the soldier would be expected to respond to, knocking him unconscious first wasn’t the best idea. But instead, Chrysalis noticed a figure on one of the screens nod upon apparently hearing this information, then start off down the hall he was standing in. if that was Fairlight, he wasn’t wearing his armor, and had instead opted for a similar light-colored casual uniform like the soldier in front of her. Unfortunately, the image quality was too poor to tell what he looked like beyond the darkish color of his hair. At least he wasn’t talking, though, which meant now was the perfect time to beat the soldier unconscious. Chrysalis raised the wrench and prepared to swing, but the intercom warbled out a weird sort of ringing tone before she could attack.
“Security desk,” the soldier answered.
“Corporal, I just lost my connection to over half the base cameras,” a new voice stated, its tone mixed with equal measures of surprise and annoyance. “All I’m seeing is static, for cell blocks, medical, laboratories…”
“Sorry about that, Mr. President, that’s my mistake. My monitor for camera 6 has been acting up, and I was just checking the connection myself before I called engineering. I must have disconnected something by accident.”
“Can you fix it, Corporal?” the voice had shifted fully into annoyance.
“That shouldn’t be a problem, sir, I just need to dig around in this mess and find out what I broke. I’ll get on it right away.”
“See that you do,” said the president, and his voice went silent over the intercom.
The soldier put his hand on the floor as if he was about to stand up, but Chrysalis stopped that with a stiff whack to the side of his head. He crumpled, and Chrysalis was alone with the monitors as well as her own questions about the nature of what she’d just witnessed.
Chrysalis quickly scanned the screens for where Fairlight had gone. All the cells were empty. A few soldiers in heavy armor stood guard outside of various doors on other screens. A scrawny kid clutching his arm was the sole occupant of the medical room. Then she saw Fairlight, striding up to an office of some kind. The camera showing the interior was right next to it, and despite the blurry image quality she could clearly identify Dr. Forrester sitting inside. The whole office was tidy and organized, a definite contrast to the cluttered, hoses-spilling-out-of-the-walls look of the rest of the place; the only clutter visible in the whole office was an open folder from which Forrester was reading.
The door opened, but Chrysalis couldn’t hear it. Even if the video quality was good enough to read lips, only Forrester would be facing the camera if Fairlight took the seat on the opposite side of the table from him. One side of the conversation wouldn’t be ideal, but she was prepared to try and squint through the fuzzy picture all the same when she remembered the buttons next to each monitor, and the awful noise they made when every one of them was lit. Of course they’d be manually activated; listening to conversations was less important than being able to see all the base activity at a glance, and it would be important to pick and choose what rooms to listen to at what time. Chrysalis pressed the button next to Forrester’s office, and the speakers added a layer of ventilation rattle to the real one already in Chrysalis’s ears.
Forrester looked up from his paperwork. “Major?”
The half of him visible on screen hesitated in the doorway for a moment, scanning the hallway as if to make sure no one saw him enter. “Forrester,” he said at last, shutting the door behind him. “Got a minute?”
Forrester tried to bury his nose back into the paperwork. “Not really, Major, I’m right in the middle of—don’t sit down…”
Fairlight was already seated, leaning in on his elbows like he was about to share a secret. “You know Colonel’s plan for this alien thing, right?”
Forrester looked flatly over the rims of his glasses. “Seeing as I’m the one he put in charge of executing it, yes.”
“He wants her to fight for us,” Fairlight continued as if he didn’t even hear. “He wants her to join us.”
A weary frown flashed across Forrester’s face. He took a deep breath, and set aside the papers he’d been reading.
“Major, I get the feeling this isn’t the last time I’m going to hear these asinine objections raised by the various forward-thinking intellectuals around this base, so please let me be completely one hundred percent frank with you: this alien is exactly two things as far as I’m concerned, and neither of them is an Enclave soldier. First and very much foremost, she’s a blunt instrument with which to bludgeon super mutants into submission. Maybe we can learn something about how her horn or her disguising works and duplicate the ability ourselves, but that’s not immediately likely and therefore a secondary goal. It’s also Anderson’s department, so the likelihood of it ever seeing fruition is effectively null.
“Either way, I see her as a weapon, and you should too—did your plasma rifle ‘join’ the Enclave? Did it swear any oaths? Does it have a rank? No, Major. It’s a tool, and using tools does not make us less human—in fact, that’s what defines us as human. ‘But she’s dangerous,’ I hear you say. ‘She killed a bunch of people!’ And that’s certainly fair, but if it’s possible to take something as awesomely dangerous and destructive as a nuclear fission chain reaction and harness it, stick it in a bottle, and use it to power a toaster oven, then certainly there’s risk-justifying potential in that alien.”
Fairlight remained motionless for several seconds. Clearly, he hadn’t intended the conversation to take this route. Forrester broke eye contact almost immediately, picking up the papers again to continue reading where he’d left off.
“And so you’re going to starve her to death until she fights for us,” Fairlight said at length.
Forrester looked up with a knowing smile. “It’s not quite that simple, Major, but let’s preserve some element of professional courtesy here. I’m the engineer; you and Colonel Autumn are the soldiers. I make the weapons, but it’s up to you to decide where to point them. Let’s leave it at that, shall we?” Up went the paper again.
Fairlight was obviously struggling for what to say next. Even Chrysalis, who only had vague speculations to go on, knew this wasn’t what he’d intended when he orchestrated the uplink sabotage.
“You know, I risked a lot by setting up this meeting,” he said.
“Oh?” Forrester didn’t look up.
“My man in the camera monitoring room, by the holding cells, cut the uplink to Eden’s office just before I stepped in here, and he’s waiting on me to leave before he repairs it. Since all the logs are stored on his computer, there won’t be any record of it anywhere, either. As far as anyone outside this room is concerned, this conversation isn’t happening. You can speak freely, without putting on any act. Now, Colonel Autumn’s decisions with this alien thing—”
“Major, you’re not suggesting what I think you’re suggesting.” It was a statement more than a question; before, Forrester had been mostly dismissive and irritated, but the mention of subterfuge had really made him attentive. “Please tell me you’re not staging some kind of idiotic mutiny because you disagree with something your superior did…”
Fairlight leaned in a bit closer. “We’re not doing anything like that yet. This is me and a few other men who disagree with some of the colonel’s decisions lately. It’s a problem, and if it continues then we’ll have to do something about it. But for now, we’re just spreading the word to people we want on our side.”
“And you thought I would support this endeavor, even after everything I just said that directly contradicts its goals and ideals.”
He shrugged. “I hoped. It would help to have you on board, since you’re the best scientist on the East Coast. If and when this gets big enough for us to have to act, I don’t want you to do something stupid, like, take a bullet for the colonel or something.”
“Major, you can’t be serious.” Forrester’s expression shifted into genuine anger. Even through the fuzzy monitor image, Chrysalis could tell that comment had touched a nerve. “Augustus and I grew up together, Major. On the Oil Rig, back in California. We went through schooling together, we swore into the Enclave together, and the whole time we were there we ate this same idealistic ‘pure humanity’ melodrama right out of President Richardson’s hands. When we were twenty years old, an uneducated tribal walked into our home and blew it up. Just like that. Richardson and most of Congress bought it, our entire presence in the region was wiped out, and those of us that were left had to flee before that New California Republic pipe dream killed us.
“The two of us followed General Autumn across the full breadth of the nation, two kids whose prospects of a career spent rebuilding the West Coast to its former glory had been quite literally sunk to the bottom of the Pacific by an idiot wastelander in a Vault-Tec jumpsuit. You weren’t even born until a few months later, as we passed through western Utah and Mormon territory, and you went the rest of the way as an infant. By the time you could walk, we’d already crossed half the continent, and I’ll call you a liar if you say you remember anything west of Virginia. For you and the other children we carried with us, Raven Rock has been your entire concept of what the Enclave is.”
Fairlight leaned back and crossed his arms. “What’s your point?”
“You lack perspective, Major. You grew up hearing Eden’s speeches, this idealistic ‘purity’ dream that, if you’d seen the nation as the generation before you did, I can guarantee you wouldn’t be clinging to so dogmatically. I know this because I was you once, Major, but I’ve since grown older and wiser. Don’t get me wrong, we need presidents who believe in the cause that severely and are willing to fill our soldiers up with patriotic bluster, but a bit of worldly awareness and pragmatism—Colonel Autumn—is an equally necessary foil.
“You’re running with this dogma to the same sort of extremes we did when we were young, and that’s a good ideal to strive for, but now you’re asking me to choose between a man I’ve respected my entire life, a man I’ve been across the nation with, a man willing to sacrifice a percentage of his idealism if it means achieving his goal, and another man who can’t see such a decision as anything but high treason. Plus, you shot Charlie in the arm.”
“Oh, come on, you can’t seriously hold that against me!” Fairlight threw up his arms defensively. “I told you, I wasn’t aiming for him, and I had to get him out of the way before the super mutant—”
“I know, Major, you thought it was necessary to save our lives and on paper I agree with you, but my point is we’ve all done things another person disagrees with, and we’ve got too few people left for that to justify sabotaging each other. I had to watch you shoot my lab assistant—a fellow member of the Enclave—in the arm in order to drop him out of a Vertibird. I’m probably never going to be able to fully trust you after that, and you’re just going to have to live with that.
“Besides, I’m with Colonel Autumn on this one, and I’ve got no interest in joining your little mutiny operation,” he finished, picking up his papers again. “In the interest of minimizing drama, I won’t tell anyone about your plans, but I highly advise you to abandon them immediately. I don’t want to see internal politics and power struggles added to the list of things this base has to deal with. We’ve got our hands full with aliens and water purifiers, and my silence will be broken if I hear any further talk of mutiny.”
Fairlight stared at him for a full ten seconds, as if waiting for him to suddenly go back on everything he’d said, like it was all some elaborate practical joke or something. When he didn’t, Fairlight stood up and stepped back from the table. He left his chair angled and pulled out, the only disordered object in the entire office, and started to leave without a word. Forrester abruptly slapped his papers back down on the desk.
“Push your fucking chair in, Major, don’t bullshit me with this passive-aggressive behavior because I didn’t immediately take your side.”
“As you wish,” he said, returning just long enough to slide the chair back against the desk. Then he was out the door.
Chrysalis was stunned. Passive intelligence gathering while wearing a disguise was often a part of her work, but it was rare to stumble into exchanges like this one. The top two leaders of the Enclave not seeing eye to eye? Autumn’s right hand man secretly planning to overthrow him? Canterlot politics were never this interesting, and Chrysalis was almost sad to have to leave. She switched off the audio for Forrester’s office and turned her attention to the screen in the exact middle of the wall. In all the excitement, she’d nearly forgotten what she came to this room for in the first place.
Everything on the wall of monitors had been constructed around the central screen, which displayed no room at all. Instead, it merely contained a bunch of light green words against a dark green background.
ROBCO INDUSTRIES UNIFIED OPERATING SYSTEM
COPYRIGHT 2075-2077 ROBCO INDUSTRIES
— RAVEN ROCK MOUNTAIN COMPLEX / SITE R —
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sector 3A Security Terminal Operations:
> Cell Door Control
> Remote Monitoring Station Functions
> Security Logs
> September ’77 Duty Roster
> UOS Local Settings
> _main
The entry for door control was highlighted, as if indicating what choice it expected her to make. That didn’t interest her, though, now that she’d escaped her cell. The others seemed mostly useless, too, except the one at the bottom. Vague wording? An underscore? Inconsistent capitalization? “Main” being listed last on a list that otherwise seemed to go in descending order of importance? Changelings lacked experience with technology of this sort, but deception was all about detecting patterns, and that last entry stood out a mile.
Chrysalis looked at the keyboard, which seemed similar to that of a gryphon-built typewriter. Apart from the intercom and its dedicated controls, the keyboard appeared to be the machine’s only input device. As strange as the whole setup seemed to her, rapidly adapting to foreign technologies was part and parcel of being an effective changeling. She wasted no time questioning the system or wondering at its mysteries, and instead focused on the goal—figure out what “_main” was, and if it could give her any useful information.
Typing in the word didn’t accomplish anything—she decided the letter keys probably existed for creating data, not browsing it—but the arrow keys in the lower right seemed relevant. She pressed the down arrow several times, sending the bar of highlighting down the options menu with each press until the “_main” entry was selected. A press of the next most obvious key, marked “Enter,” and a new screen’s worth of text rapidly scribbled itself across the glass.
ROBCO INDUSTRIES UNIFIED OPERATING SYSTEM
COPYRIGHT 2075-2077 ROBCO INDUSTRIES
— RAVEN ROCK MOUNTAIN COMPLEX / SITE R —
----------------------#SECURITY OVERRIDE#----------------------
> Security Door (unimplemented)
> Hangar/Launch Bays (unimplemented)
> Ventilation
> Power
> (null)
> Back
This was obviously not something a console meant to govern a bank of camera monitors should have; the menu wasn’t even finished, but it was as if a back door into an area governing the entire base had been built in to greatly expand the console’s functionality beyond its initial purpose. Fairlight’s budding mutiny plot provided a reasonable explanation; if they only managed to get a few people to follow them, and this security office was one of the few places they could operate without oversight, then perhaps they were in the process of modifying the terminal to give themselves more control over the base.
Odd that they had left it so casually exposed—why not name their backdoor access the August ’77 Duty Roster, or something most people wouldn’t even challenge? Bury it in the local settings menu, maybe, or stick it in some ancient security log from the most boring day of ’76? Although, perhaps it shouldn’t be so surprising that her captors could make such a simple blunder. A scrawny girl had just broken out of a high-security area with nothing but a hand cart and a soup bowl, and they hadn’t adequately prepared to stop that from happening. Assuming it was possible to hide their backdoor access better than they had, they were probably too cocky to think of it.
Chrysalis rifled through the menus, looking into the Ventilation subsection, but the submenu was obviously incomplete. Its only contents were “Status Diagnostic,” “System Diagram,” another “(null)” error, and “Back.” Chrysalis opened the Status entry.
ROBCO INDUSTRIES UNIFIED OPERATING SYSTEM
COPYRIGHT 2075-2077 ROBCO INDUSTRIES
— RAVEN ROCK MOUNTAIN COMPLEX / SITE R —
----------------------#SECURITY OVERRIDE#----------------------
Functional.
> Back
A pitying smirk flashed across her lips. Either the whole backdoor access idea was in its absolute infancy, or there were more limits to their abilities to monitor and control the base than she realized.
The System Diagram entry was much more helpful—a monochromatic three-dimensional rendering of the entire base, set on an angle so all the floors could be seen clearly, filled up the screen. Bright green lines snaked their way above the darker green corridors and rooms, all converging on a central shaft that led out away from the base to the south, where it presumably connected to the outside. She followed the shaft’s branches to their ends, looking for the security office and the best route out.
Eventually, she located the four-way intersection outside her cell. If she went straight from there, she’d pass over the Bio Lab before being forced to make a left turn. A fan was marked as blocking the way there, but she’d bring along the soldier’s weapon and any other tools she could find to help her break it down. From there, the duct went straight ahead until it dumped directly into the main shaft, which was completely free of obstacles until the very end. That fan was big enough to squeeze through, when it wasn’t spinning, so as long as she killed the power before making her run, there was nothing standing in her way that she couldn’t get through relatively easily.
Chrysalis backed out of the Ventilation menu and went into Power. Predictably, the menu looked very much under construction, with a null error at the bottom and a grab-bag of random features that didn’t seem particularly helpful in the event of a mutiny. She could check the system status—another “Functional” page—or she could send a shutdown command to the main base reactor.
Reading the included instruction text—odd that they’d waste time to detail the mechanics of a system they presumably understood already, when the rest of their menu was still in shambles—only increased her confidence. Whatever “reactor” the base was drawing power from, the technology was such that its “reaction” couldn’t be toggled on and off on a whim. When given a shutdown command, it would continue generating power all through its hours-long shutdown process, during which it could not be restarted. Only after it had fully powered down could it be told to start up again, and that process also lasted several hours before the reactor would reach full power. Further, the instructions explained that the base would continue to draw power from the reactor during the shutdown sequence, except ventilation, which was designed to switch over to its internal oxygen tanks immediately upon reactor shutdown in order to conserve power. The internal fans would all keep moving the air around as normal, but the power-hungry fan leading outside would shut down.
In plain Equish, that meant that giving the reactor a shutdown command from this terminal might not cause any alarm right away. The lights would stay on, the computers and intercoms would keep working, and even the rattling in the walls would carry on uninterrupted. It might not lead to a panic right away, and they’d be unable to do anything about it for almost a whole day. She’d be dozens of miles away by then, back on track towards rescuing her hive from their technologically superior captors instead of this unfortunate diversion spent rescuing herself. She set up the power down command and hit Enter again, bringing her to a screen with a final confirmation prompt to make absolutely certain the shutdown command was not given accidentally. Below the standard RobCo header, a highlighted NO sat atop a non-highlighted YES. Chrysalis hit the down arrow, and the selection bar traded places.
Something caught her eye, though, and she turned back to the other monitors. In the room that appeared to be an infirmary, a scrawny kid was sitting on one of the beds. He clutched his arm, as he had been since she first noticed him. A white coat hunt from the rack beside the bed, and the kid certainly looked more like a lab assistant than a fighter. Certainly this was the “Charlie” that Forrester had mentioned earlier, the one Fairlight had shot in the arm.
He looked loyal enough to follow orders without question, and naïve enough to not think too deeply into what might be motivating them. Queen Chrysalis turned on audio for the infirmary and keyed the intercom.
“Charlie, are you in medical?” she asked in a perfect Dr. Forrester voice.
“Uh, yes, Dr. Forrester!” he called out to the ceiling. “I am!”
“Great. You’re feeling better, I hope? The arm is healing?”
“Yes, sir! The infection’s mostly gone, now, and it’s just really sore.”
“Great. I need to see you for something. Could you stop by my office in about, say, 45 minutes?”
“Sure thing, Doctor. I’ll meet you there.”
If all went according to plan, the kid would wander into his superior’s office, and they’d share a moment of confusion together before realizing the boundless folly of leaving a changeling prisoner unguarded. Otherwise, if the terminal’s instruction text was wrong and there was a way to get ventilation back online before she could reach the exit, or if other unforeseen complications arose, she at least had one predictable data point around which she could construct a contingency plan.
But that was thinking too far ahead, down an unlikely scenario she didn’t want to treat as a fully real possibility yet. She had to shut down the reactor, then get back to the vents to make her escape as quickly as possible. There was still the chance they’d figure out what she was doing if they had people monitoring the reactor from elsewhere, and Colonel Autumn could send soldiers to secure the outlet shaft before Chrysalis could get there. The terrain around the base had to be rough and hard to navigate, being a mountain and everything, so she probably had time, but it was better to treat every second as precious once her plan was set in motion.
A handheld spellcaster sat on the desk near the door, and a metal box full of paperwork had been tucked underneath. Chrysalis turned over the box and spilled its contents all over the floor, making it light enough for her current body to move around easily. The weapon tucked easily into the waistband of her pants, and she could hold the empty box one-handed thanks to the handles on its sides. With both of these items in hand, she could boost herself back into the ducts outside her cell, crawl through the suffocating tunnel system towards freedom, melt the one obstacle in her path along the way, and slip out into the countryside through the powered-down main intake fan. Then she was back to looking for a settlement that could be infiltrated, information that could be gathered, and other beings that could be manipulated into lending their aid. It all started with one press of a key on a keyboard, while the highlighting held steady on YES.
The unconscious soldier on the ground beside her moaned, reinforcing the urgency of acting sooner than later. She’d wasted enough time. Queen Chrysalis looked back at the center screen and its final confirmation prompt one last time, and firmly pressed the Enter key.