Chapter 4
Paper Trail
"Only a day after enduring a ferocious assault by the forces of the private armed organisation Celestial Being, the leadership of the Buffalo Free Army, the anti-government guerrillas operating in the Appleoosa region, has declared a provisional ceasefire and offered to open a dialogue with the government and the settlers in the region.
In a statement, the BFA leaders said that if hostilities broke out again in the region the fault would not lie with them, but with the-"
Rarity turned off the television before bringing her full attention back to her sister. She was sitting at the vanity in Sweetie Belle's bedroom, and with the small television set off she could give her little sister her full attention. "I hope you don't mind, Sweetie dear, but I have to live in that world too much as it is, I'd rather not bring it home with me."
Sweetie Belle sat on her big sister's lap, a contented smile on her face as Rarity ran a comb through Sweetie's hair. "It's fine. I get it. But aren't you proud of what you're doing, Rarity? You're really starting to change the world!"
"One victory, just the one," Rarity said. "I don't deny it's good news, especially for all those poor people in Appleoosa, but it's only a start, not an ending. We have such a long way to go."
"When will it be over?"
"I wish I knew, Sweetie," Rarity murmured in reply. "Only Twilight knows the full extent of VETA's plan, and she won't say. I do wish that girl would be more forthcoming, sometimes. All I know is that we have a lot of work ahead of us before we can call it a day."
"Is that why you have to go back into space again?" Sweetie Belle asked plaintively.
Rarity nodded, even though she knew that her little sister couldn't see her. "Partly. The other reason is that the Harmony needs the Gundams to be docked with it in order to recharge its power, but there is also the fact that it is easier to launch for an armed intervention from space."
Sweetie Belle made a disapproving noise from the back of her throat. "I was hoping you could stick around longer."
"So was I, darling, believe me. But, orders are orders. That's what it means to be a Gundam Meister. There, all done."
Sweetie Belle examined herself in the mirror. "Thanks, Rarity! Say, Rarity, can I ask you something?"
"Of course. What?"
"Why did you decide to become a Gundam Meister?"
Rarity hesitated for a moment, considering how she best say it. "I had no choice."
"What do you mean?" Sweetie Belle asked, climbing off Rarity's lap. "Did they make you?"
"No, it isn't like that at all," Rarity said quickly. "I meant...when I was approached by the princesses, when they explained to me that I was a match for the Generosity Gundam, when they explained the stakes to me, the plan...there was no way I could refuse. We're fighting to end war, Sweetie Belle, to bring about peace for the whole world. Millions of people. I have the chance to make a real difference to all their lives, to change things for the better. Or I can sit here, do nothing, and let the suffering continue. Faced with a choice like that, what option did I really have but to agree. For a goal like that, even the hardest work is worth it."
Rarity sighed, then smiled. "Now, if you don't mind, I've had quite enough of Celestial Being for one night. Let's talk about you instead. How's school?"
"Oh, it's fine. Me and Apple Bloom take care of each other."
"Don't you have any other friends?"
"Not really," Sweetie Belle admitted. "It's kinda hard, you know, having a secret like this...and there's Diamond Tiara."
"I'm sure she can't possibly be as bad as you make her out to be," Rarity murmured. "If she were she'd be a worse monster than any of my opponents."
"She really is!"
Rarity chuckled. "If you say so. And what about boys, is there anyone you like?"
"Rarity! Come on!"
Rarity kept on laughing.
In the middle of the southern desert, in the disputed territory between Advanced Unicornia and the Diamond Dog Republic, Thunderhooves pointed his rifle up into the air ad fired off a few rounds in frustration.
"Dammit," he growled.
The private military company Nightmare had been hired by the Unicornian diamond cartel to fight off the Diamond Dog raiders plaguing their gemstone mines in the area. But of course, even when they were fighting on the other side of the world Celestial Being had found a way to spoil their day.
In front of Thunderhooves lay a discarded mobile suite, abandoned by the Diamond Dogs in their retreat. Fear of Celestial Being had prompted them to withdraw and consider their position. Thunderhooves would as soon have pursued them and slaughtered the whole lot of them, but now the cartel had decided that they didn't want to draw an armed intervention near their mines, and so the mercenaries had been informed that their contract was now void.
Which was how the company found themselves stranded in the middle of an arid desert with no money and no transport out of here.
"Dammit," Thunderhooves repeated. He fired some more bullets not the air.
Sunset Shimmer sat perched on the cockpit lid of her custom Tieren, a souped-up model she had painted red and dubbed the Solar Flare. Her legs swung idly as she rested her chin upon her hands.
"Well, this sucks," Sunset murmured. "Hey, maybe if they aren't willing to pay us fight, they'll pay us something to stop fighting?"
Thunderhooves considered it, turning around so that he was facing the rest of the camp: twenty mobile suits and more than a hundred men trying to keep warm in the cold desert night. "You know, you might actually have something there. If we started terrorising their damn mines they'd pay to get rid of us fast enough."
"Or they might simply allow Celestial Being to finish us off," Nightmare Moon said. The commander of the company was sitting at the foot of her ENACT, scrolling through her touch screen.
"After they brought us here?" Sunset said. "Celestial Being might call it karmic justice if we turned on them."
Nightmare chuckled. "Perhaps, but I'd rather not take the risk."
"I thought we were going to fight Celestial Being?" Thunderhooves reminded her.
"Oh we are, certainly," Nightmare replied smoothly. "But on our terms, and at a time of our choosing. For now, patience is the order of the day."
"Patience?" Thunderhooves demanded. "Patience isn't going to make us any money."
"Probably not," Nightmare Moon replied, neither raising her voice nor taking her eyes off her computer screen. The commander was a tall, lithe woman with dark blue skin and a face that she hid behind a silver mask covering the top half of her face. She smiled. "Patience will, on the other hand, reward us with a chink in Celestial Being's armour." She chuckled. "Oh, Celestia, you are not nearly so inscrutable as you believe."
"Celestia?" Strongheart asked, getting up from the fireside where she had been huddling for warmth. "That's the name of the woman who was on TV, right? After Celestial Being's first armed intervention."
"The one who wants to put us out of business, yeah," Thunderhooves growled. "I'd like to put a bullet between her eyes."
"That would be quite an achievement, considering she has supposedly been dead for the past two hundred years," Nightmare Moon murmured.
"Dead?" Sunset said. "So who did we watch on television that night? Her ghost?"
"A hologram?" Strongheart suggested.
"A pre-recorded message from the past?" Thunderhooves said.
"At the moment, it is impossible to say for sure," Nightmare Moon said. "But the very fact that they revealed that, at some point, Celestia was involved in the plans of Celestial Being, to the point of giving the organisation her name, is very interesting."
"Who was Celestia?" Strongheart asked.
"A brilliant scientist and politician," Sunset answered from on top of her mobile suit. "Designed the solar array and negotiated the treaty between the three great powers to get the orbital generators built. Also did some work in cloning."
"And then she disappeared along with her sister, presumed dead," Nightmare Moon finished off the tale. "But not, apparently, before she had set in motion a plan to end war by...waging war on everyone at once."
"Whatever," Thunderhooves grunted. "What's this lead your so proud of?"
"I was just looking through the records of Celestia's solar power research. Specifically, I've been looking through the lists of her colleagues. A lot of very well known names there, who enjoyed distinguished careers prior to collaborating with Celestia and, indeed, continued to be prominent in their fields afterwards: Starswirl, Clover, Smart Cookie. But one name leapt out at me: Apple Crumble."
"Who?" Sunset asked.
"Precisely," Nightmare said. "Apparently she was somewhat well known in molecular physics, and with something of a reputation as a maverick; after the theoretical stage of the solar generator project ended and construction began she...left. According to everything that I can find out she never published any more scientific papers, worked in no institutions or indeed held down any kind of recorded job at all. She retired at the age of thirty-five into a life of complete anonymity."
"It happens," Thunderhooves said.
"Perhaps," Nightmare replied. "But, it might also be the case that Miss Crumble, having met Celestia on the project, became a part of her plans to achieve world peace. Remember, she was a radical thinker in molecular physics."
"And those gundams give off weird particles," Sunset murmured. "You think this Apple Crumble helped develop the Gundams power source?"
"How does it help us if she did?" Thunderhooves asked.
Nightmare smiled. "The Apple Family has continued to survive to this very day."
"It doesn't make them all members of Celestial Being," Thunderhooves replied. "I was born in Appleoosa but I'm not a member of the BFA."
"Indeed you're not, or you would have put down your gun already," Nightmare Moon remarked. "But as it happens, the current generation of the Apple family includes several family members who, like Apple Crumble before them, hold no jobs, file no taxes and have no homes to call their own. Two of them do, however, have a little sister who lives in Canterlot in the PRL, and who attends school there."
Thunderhooves chuckled. "So you're plan is to snatch the kid and make Celestial Being fight us on our own terms?"
"It may yet come to that," Nightmare said, shutting off her computer. "But I would rather not fight the gundams without more information than is available to us at present. Information I think that young Miss Apple Bloom may be able to provide, to a sufficiently skilled undercover operative."
Sunset grunted as she leapt off the lid of her mobile suit cockpit, dropping the dozen feet to the ground to make a perfect landing as her leather jacket flapped around her. "Say no more boss," she declared, striking a confident pose with her thumb up. "Sunset Shimmer is on the case!"
There was a moments silence before the camp began to resound with the sound of laughter.
"What?" Sunset demanded, her expression turning to outrage as her voice rose. "You assholes don't think I could pass for a high school kid? I'm only seventeen, you know!"
"Does that mean I shouldn't be having pervy fantasies about her?"
"I HEARD THAT, JACKASS!" Sunset roared.
When Nightmare Moon spoke, it was in between bouts of laughter. "I have no doubt that you could gain admittance into Canterlot High, Sunset. I even think that you could take it over inside a week. Unfortunately, I doubt that terrorising Miss Apple Bloom and the entire student body is the right way to go about getting the information we require. Actionable intelligence will have to be teased out of her, by a friend. Scootaloo!"
Scootaloo had been sitting by herself, cleaning out her rifle by the side of her own small campfire. She looked up at the sound of her name. "Yes, ma'am?"
"How would you like to get an education?"
Sunset looked from Nightmare to Scootaloo then back again. "The robot? You're sending the robot over me?"
"She is the young girl's own age."
"She's got no emotions, she's creepy," Sunset yelled.
Scootaloo stood up. "I'll do whatever you ask me to."
"There! There, you see, if she was a freakin' person she would have gotten upset about me insulting her," Sunset said.
"I'm sure that Scootaloo will prove more than capable of the task," Nightmare said, her voice full of self-assurance. "After all, how hard it can be to befriend one little girl?"
Rumble had gotten home before his big brother. That happened more often than not, so often that he found it more surprising to find Thunderlane at home nowadays, and so Rumble had started making dinner when Thunderlane finally did come home, huffing angrily as he closed the door loudly behind him.
"Bad day at work?" Rumble asked.
Thunderland huffed under his breath. Then he sighed as he sat down on the couch. "I suppose I don't have the right to complain. The boss liked my piece on Celestia. But..."
"But what?" Rumble called from the kitchen, pushing bits of meat around a wok with a wooden ladle.
"I think I might have a lead on Celestial Being, but the editor won't let me chase after it. He says it too much of a long shot, but what do we have right now but long shots?"
"A lead?" Rumble asked. "What kind of a lead?"
"Something that could reveal who Celestial Being really are, what they really want," Thunderlane said.
"Does that stuff matter?" Rumble said. "I mean, you must have heard about Appleoosa; if Celestial Being is doing good work like that, then does it really matter who they are? What if your lead means they aren't able to eliminate war any more?"
"It's a reporter's job to get to the truth, no matter how unpleasant that truth is, no matter how much mud you have to wade through to get there, no matter how dangerous it is to find," Thunderlane replied angrily. "That's what Mom always believed, and I believe it too. If these Celestial Being types are going to pass themselves off as heroes to the world then the world deserves to know who they really are."
Rumble frowned, his head bowing. When he spoke, his voice was quiet. "Be carefuly, big bro. Remember what happened to Mom, in the end."
Thunderlane got up, walking into the kitchen to put one hand on Rumble's shoulder. "I know. I won't pretend that my work isn't dangerous, but I honestly think this lead is one of the safest I've ever investigated. Otherwise I wouldn't be asking you to help me."
"What?"
Thunderlane exclaimed about Apple Crumble, the maverick scientist who had disappeared from the public eye after working with Celestia on the solar power generation system.
"The only one of her descendants who isn't shrouded in mystery is your schoolfriend Apple Bloom," Thunderlane finished. "I think she might know something."
"Apple Bloom, know something about Celestial Being?" Rumble said. "You know, she's kind of an idiot."
"All the same, I want you to get close to her and find out what she knows," Thunderlane said firmly.
"You want what?" Rumble exclaimed. "I can't do that!"
"Why not?"
"Because my girlfriend hates her! I Diamond sees my cosying up to Apple Bloom and Sweetie Belle, she'll break up with me!"
Thunderlane smirked. "Really? That's an unexpected bonus."
"Hey!"
"Oh, come on, you really think you're relationship is going to last. A rich girl like her isn't going to settle down with someone like you and, honestly, you'd be better off with someone who wasn't so demanding. Someone like Apple Bloom, maybe?"
"I'm not breaking up with my girlfriend just to help you out with your job!" Rumble yelled.
"I need your help," Thunderlane said. "I can't chase this up because everyone else thinks it's too implausible, but I know there has to be a connection between the Apple Family and Celestial Being, it's the only explanation for Apple Crumble's retirement that makes any sense. But I can't investigate, and if I confront Apple Bloom she'll deny everything. I need to get info from her indirectly, info that she doesn't know she's giving away. You're the only person I can trust to get that for me." Thunderlane's eyes widened, until he was more a puppy than a big brother.
Rumble sighed. "Uh, okay, I'll do it. I just hope Diamond doesn't notice or get too upset."