The first thing I noticed after the twisted-inside-out shock of the teleport was damp grass under my paws. We’d appeared in an empty park. It buzzed with crickets and stunk of freshly-cut grass. There was a burnt tang in the air, like somepony had been barbecuing bell peppers an hour or two earlier.
The second thing I noticed was the cold. The sun had gone down but even at midnight it wasn’t normally this chilly. A stiff breeze made my crest fluff up. Wherever the princess had taken me, it wasn’t Farriershire.
“Where are we?” I asked.
“We’re just north of Manehattan,” said Princess Twilight. “Specifically we’re in Puddinghead’s Park, in Golden Stirrup.”
“Golden—You mean the Golden Stirrup?”
“Oh, you know the place?”
“I know its rep.” Golden Stirrup was the richest ‘village’ in all of Equestria. Every yuppie in Manehattan wanted a summer home here. You needed three years membership in an invitation-only air-yacht club to even get a look-see at an apartment around here.
The princess smiled at me, again. “Well, that makes things a little simpler. Down that street—” she raised a hoof and pointed towards a well-lit road, “—is a bar called Hydrogen. Go to the bar and order a greyhound with a lemon twist. That’s the code-word, your contact in the team will then approach you. He’ll fill you in on the details.”
“Go to Hydrogen, order a greyhound with lemon twist. Gotcha.”
She pulled a satchel out from under her wing, and then I twigged that the money chest hadn’t teleported along with us. Neither had my gym bag and null tube. “I had a friend of mine pack this bag for you,” she said, “it’s got a bow tie, a blazer, designer spectacles, feather highlights, and a pocket mirror. Hydrogen is a pretty high-class bar, you’ll want to look the part as well.”
“Hey, what did you do with—”
“Your bag? I sent it to the team base along with the money chest, you can pick it up when you get there. It’d be very conspicuous in Hydrogen. Speaking of blending in, there’s some bits in the pockets of your blazer, you’ll stand out less if you spend it freely; it’s that kind of bar. Oh, shoot, it’s past moonrise already! I’m sorry, I’ve got to go right now.”
“But—”
“Don’t worry, your contact will explain everything. Hydrogen, greyhound!”
Before I could get so much as ‘what does my contact look like’ or ‘but my cracking tools are in that bag’ or ‘when are you even paying me for this crap?’ out, she winked out of existence, and I was alone in a chilly park.
“Freakin’ ponies,” I muttered.
It took twenty minutes to get to Hydrogen: five minutes walking, one minute getting the blazer on, fourteen minutes messing with the bow-tie in the dark. I didn’t bother with the makeup. I’d only look like a clown and besides, red lipstick clashes with my beak. I slipped the doormare a hundred-bit note. ‘Some bits’ was a joke, there was ten large tucked away in the inside pocket of the blazer. I could get used to working for an org with this kind of budget.
Hydrogen was yuppie as they come, the walls were all a tasteful latte-mocha-whatever-cream lit by soft lights, the tables were black granite, and the drinkers were stupid-drunk. You could tell by their fetlocks—the smart ones kept the vomit away from their five-hundred-bit silk shirts, but it always splashed onto their hooves.
I sat down at the bar next to a loud-mouthed lawyer and toyed a hundred-bit note between my talons until the barmare made eye contact.
She smiled widely and rocked on her hooves, more sober than her customers but only by a few drinks. “What can I get for you tonight, hon?”
I slid the note across the black granite bar. “Greyhound with a lemon twist. Keep the change.”
The mare winked at me, turned around, and turned back with two bottles, a fist-sized cube of ice, a glass, and an ice-pick all nestled in her fores. She perched the ice on top of the glass and started whittling it away with the pick, until a sphere of ice dropped from the cube and rattled into the bottom of the cup. She twirled both bottles in her hooves and poured them in at the same time, managing a perfect two-to-one ratio of grapefruit to gin. A stainless-steel stirrer appeared from thin air with a lemon rind twisted around it, and when she finished stirring the drink, the rind was wrapped around the ice ball. She passed me the drink and left to serve another customer. I took a sip.
Not bad for an earth pony.
“You have rather good taste in drinks.” Canterlot. Didn’t recognise the voice but the accent was Canterlot, Old-Money Canterlot with capital letters for ‘Old’ and ‘Money,’ private education, booming laughter and quiet little fencing scars. I don’t know who this guy was impersonating, but he had him down to a tee.
“Y’know, I’m more of a jello shot girl if I’m honest, but this ain’t that kind of bar...” I took a look at him. Unicorn, golden coat, royal-blue mane. Red rose for a cutie mark. Wrong about the fencing scar, he could have been a model. He stunk of hair dye and cloaking magic. I guess the other ponies were too damn drunk to notice.
“You’re right, it isn’t. My name is Goldenrose, by the way,” he said, holding out a hoof.
I put a fist out to bump it. “Cool. I’m—”
“Gilda, yes? Of course. We have a mutual friend. We also have a job to do.”
I nodded, slowly. “Uh-huh. Wanna talk about it somewhere quiet?”
“Here will do just fine. We’re swaddled in a distraction charm, anypony who can hear us will be listening to other, more interesting things. My years at the School for Gifted Unicorns weren’t entirely in vain, it seems.”
“Sly. So what’s the job?”
Goldenrose smirked and sipped at his drink. “There’s a mare five seats to your left. She’s a unicorn with two doves for a cutie mark, a fashionably cerulean coat and a bespoke Coco Pommel saddlebag. She’s also delightfully drunk. You see her?”
I glanced out of the corner of my eye. “Hard to miss.”
“I need you to start a fight with her.”
“There’s four bouncers and one of me. It’ll be a short fight.”
He sighed. “It shan’t get that serious, and besides, this isn’t that sort of bar.”
“The baseball bat hidden under the wine rack says otherwise.”
“Those are mere precautions. You don’t have to harm her, just get her hackles up. Ruffle her feathers.”
“She’s a unicorn.”
“A figure of speech, my dear. ‘Get all up in her face,’ as those in the Lower Districts say. As soon as it kicks off, I’m going to separate you.”
I looked back at the mare. Tipsy. Loud. Arguing something something contract law something with her friends. “So what are you gonna—oh.” Goldenrose had disappeared. Freakin’ ponies.
I sighed and prepared myself. Stretched my neck. Shook the tiredness from my shoulders. Downed my drink, and let the dregs pour down my chin. I stood up, glass still in claw, and let myself sway a little. Then I walked over to my target.
I fell into her shoulders-first and let my glass clatter to the ground. I shoved her into the bar with an open claw before she could open her mouth.
“Whaddya think you’re doin’, dork? You spilled my drink!” I slurred.
Her jaw dropped and she gawked at me, red in the cheeks. Before any of her friends could start yapping or step in, she snapped, “You pushed me!”
“Yeah, ‘cause you spilled my drink!” I snapped. “You think you can mess with me just ‘cause you push papers for some podunk crew of ambulance-chasers?”
“‘Ambulance-chasers?’ Do you even know who I am?” She was practically screaming. Good. “I am a junior partner at Wellbright, Bookend and Sunchaser. You’re wearing a made-to-measure blazer in Hydrogen. I earn in a day what you make in a month, you know that?”
I moved back just enough to let her step towards me, and grinned. “Wellbright, Bookend and Sunchaser, huh? I didn’t know they were hiring jennies these days, long-ears.”
All her friends went deathly silent. The bartenders froze. I could hear her pupils shrink. “You racist bitch.”
She lunged. I’ll give her credit, if her first punch hadn’t glanced off the side of my head, it’d have given me a shiny new black eye. I grabbed her and wrestled, shifting us both from side to side, mostly keeping her friends on the backs of their hooves and stopping them jumping in.
I felt somepony practically leap between us, and tear me away from her. Goldenrose, making good on his promise.
“—a thousand apologies for my friend’s behaviour, she’s had a trifle much to drink and she’s yet to adjust to the more civilised norms in Equestria—”
“—your ‘friend’ should know that this is not that kind of bar—”
“—could sue you for—”
“—again and I’ll have security escort you both off premises—”
“I feel sick, take me to the bathroom,” I droned, half-draped over Goldenrose. I’ll give him credit, he works out at least.
“—just plain out of line, I work pro-bono for the Donkey Anti-Defamation League and those kind of remarks—”
“—I must apologize once more and also bartender could you please take this thousand-bit note and buy several rounds of drinks for this mare and her friends and if you’ll excuse me I just have to drag my foreign friend to the doubleh-vey say before she spills something unpleasant over the delightful decor, ta-ta!”
I groaned and dry-heaved until he ‘carried’ me into the bathroom and locked the door behind us.
I dusted myself off and said, “Not that I don’t like fighting in bars or nothing, but why’d you just have me go nuts on a random lawyer?”
“To distract her while I relieved her of these,” said Goldenrose, as he magically dangled a set of keys in the air.
* * *
We slipped out the back of Hydrogen and headed over to the offices of Wellbright, Bookend and Sunchaser. I leaned against a tree on the other side of the street to scope the place out. Two floors, stone building, terracotta roof and ivy climbing the walls, all keeping in line with the ‘rustic aesthetic’ of Golden Stirrup. Ground floor lights on. One guard visible, sitting down in the reception area.
I nudged Goldenrose and whispered, “You new to this, dude?”
“Excuse me?”
“Like, are you new to this whole business? Some kind of hobbyist, amateur, or something? Not really used to ‘security’ work?”
He snorted. “And why in Celestia’s mane would you say that?”
“One, you’re dodging the freaking question and two, you needed my help to filch keys off a drunk pencil-pusher in a crowded bar. From her bag. That’s cub’s play, dweeb. So I’ll ask again: you new to this, dude?”
He sighed and smirked at me and I wanted to slap that smirk off his face with sharpened claws. “Yes, it would have been no challenge to simply pick the keys from her pocket and walk away,” he said, “but my task was somewhat more complex than that. I took her office keys, and only her office keys from her key-ring, and replaced them with blank keys of an identical brand. She won’t know that her keys are missing when she gets home tonight, and hence she won’t call the office and warn them that her keys might have been stolen. By the time she finds out her office keys are all blanks, it will be far too late.”
“If you’d given me the blanks I’d have done that alone, and I’d have a new set of drinking buddies.”
“And you might have gotten yourself caught, thrown unceremoniously into a cell, and asked some rather sticky questions by the Manehattan Night Watch for the rest of the evening. Speaking of night watch, we have three minutes before the security guard starts her rounds. The stairs are past the door on the left side of the lobby, and two doors on the right upstairs is the target room.”
“A’ight. What’s the plan?”
“You’ll have a better chance of remaining undetected if you sneak in alone. Go to the room—2E on the door—and find all the legal documents relating to financial companies. We need those documents. You can get out through the office window, which would be your way in if not for the alarms. Here, take these.”
He passed me a set of keys, and a black metal tube. I hefted the tube in my claw and grunted. “Keys and a flashlight? Hearth Warmings’ come early, huh?”
“I’m sure you’ll do fine. Good luck.”
I walked across the street as the security guard got out of her chair and started her rounds. I waited thirty seconds in case she turned back to grab another donut out of her conveniently-placed snacking box. When she was gone, I unlocked the front door and slipped inside, locking it behind me.
I didn’t run for the stairs, not yet. If they were smart enough to have alarms on the windows, they’d be smart enough to have motion alarms inside all the locked offices. I didn’t want to deal with those on a case-by-case basis, so I slipped behind the guard’s desk and took a glance around. The central alarm system was built into the wall behind the desk. A Jet-Set Technical brand, mid-range model, around six years old. Pretty new for a legal office. Ancient for a thief.
Alarm systems are made by the same ponies that make card banks, analytical engines, and smoke alarms: they might talk big about idiot-proof systems and redundant backup measures, but nobody wants to hear 130-decibel screeching for the week it takes a technician to arrive because some idiot forgot the key-code. All but the most paranoid of models have a tiny little hole hidden somewhere on the back with a ‘reset’ button deep inside. A good model will start a count-down when you open the panel and give you about ten seconds to find that tiny little hole (or enter the code) before it starts wailing. If you’re in this business for long you’ll carry around a list of model series and bypass locations, and if you’re in this business and you’re smart you’ll carry that list around in your head. The police or watch or whoever call notepads full of that stuff ‘exhibit B1 for the jury.’
I knew exactly where the reset hole for a JS-Tech LC-OK300 pattern security suite was, so I grabbed a paperclip off the guard’s desk and I made it putty in my claws before the countdown reached ‘8.’
I made off for the stairs with a spring in my step. I’d have to be real unlucky for a tired night guard to get to her desk, double check the alarm system, notice it had been reset, and figure it was an intruder and not a glitch, but real unlucky is something that happens to ‘security professionals’ who don’t move quick enough, and that’s without my brand-new partner screwing something up for me while I worked. Finding office 2E in the dark was no problem—ponies and unicorns have crap night vision, griffons don’t—and neither was getting inside. Finding the right documents was going to be tricky.
It was the right room, there was a picture of the mare from the bar hugging a significant other, but it was a mess. The desk was covered in documents, the drawers were filled with documents, and there were five filing cabinets along the walls of the office filled with more documents. I ain’t gonna lie—most of my experience with legal documents comes from smacking ponies under the tail with a rubber hose until they sign one. These were all in heavy legalese and talked about companies I barely knew and ponies I’d never heard of.
This was going to be difficult. It’d take an hour to whittle out the right documents and I’d have to be damn quiet too. Griffons see better than anypony, even pegasi, but ponies hear better than we do. If I was stomping around in this room and the guard was stomping past it, she’d hear me before I heard her. The window was a problem, too. Any nosy pony could see a flashlight in a dark room, and Zephyr-knows that freakin’ ponies have a deep need to tell the nearest authority if they spot something like that.
There was a paper flip-board in the corner of the room. I took a roll of sticky-tape from her desk, ripped sheets from the back of the flip-board and started to make a jury-rigged set of blackout blinds, and then there was a noise from the window that sounded like ‘tunk’.
Then another ‘tunk.’
And a third ‘tunk’.
I crept over to the window and saw a weird shape tapping against the glass. The end of a piece of rope, floating up from the ground. On the ground below, Goldenrose.
I opened the window and grabbed the rope with both claws. Goldenrose bounded up the side of the building with speed and grace I didn’t think a unicorn could manage, and then I saw that the rope had shrank to a metre long. It had been enchanted to haul the lazy dork up the side. Unicorns. Figures.
“What are you doing here?” I whispered.
“Finding the right documents, I was simply waiting until you’d removed the alarms,” he said, way too loud.
“Keep your damn voice down,” I hissed.
“Sorry! Sorry, I mean. Anyway, I forgot to tell you where the documents were.”
I look around the paper-strewn room and glare at him. “Freakin’ everywhere, right?”
“The ones we need. Look,” he said, and pulled the chair out from under the desk. He pressed his hoof against the carpet below, scraping and rubbing until he found something. A square of carpet peeled up from the floor under his magic. The shiny face of a floor safe shone up at us.
“The keys, please,” he said. I fumbled for a second and passed him the keyring.
He opened up the safe and pulled out a few kilograms of documents, which he stuffed into a bag. “Now for the cover up,” he said. “Take the paper out of the cabinets and spread it over the desks and floors.”
While I did that he locked the safe shut, broke the key off in the lock, and then ripped the smoke alarm off the ceiling. When we were done, I saw his horn spark up. The sparks danced on the strewn papers.
I slapped him right in the horn. He squealed like a foal, and I clamped a claw over his mouth just so he wouldn’t give us away. “What are you doing?”
He whimpered and stumbled away, looking hurt. “I-I’m setting fire to the office, you fool! If I burn everything h-here, the office will be sealed off until it’s been investigated. She won’t be able to find which documents were stolen and which burned in the fire, and she won’t be able to open the safe to check inside!”
“Yeah that’s cool except you’re using your horn, you freakin’ dumbass,” I spat. “Every lick of flame that first spark makes will have your magical signature inside it, and the more the flames grow the stronger that mark will be. The Manehattan Watch has an arson squad, and they’ve got forensic mages and diamond dog trackers and by the time this little fire burns out they’ll see your magic from their freakin’ bedrooms. They’ll catch up with you before you’re one town over, and thems will be some sticky freakin’ questions that you’ll be answering, you get me?”
He stepped back. His ears were plastered to his skull, and he looked downright miserable. “S-sorry. I made a mistake. I am, um, I’m not r-really used to arson, I must admit...”
“You don’t say.” I sighed. “Look, I get it. You’re a con-pony, and that’s a tricky skill-set. Not everyone in this business has every skill, that’s cool. Just—just freakin' warn me when you’re gonna do something like that, okay? I can handle that. Speaking of, you want me to start the fire?”
Goldenrose swallowed, and nodded. “Yes, please.”
Starting a fire would be easier if I’d had more than a flashlight and a blazer full of money. I searched through the desk. No cigarettes, no cigars, no lighters. Bottom drawer had a make-up kit and a pint bottle of hoof-varnish remover. I looked above the window. There was an air-con unit bolted onto the wall. Score.
“Goldie, you got a spell to muffle sound?”
He nodded. “Where do you need it?”
“On the air-con unit, I’m taking it off the wall.”
A white glow covered the metal box. When I grabbed it, I felt the weird sensation of thin metal folding and nails tearing from brick with no noise coming out. I opened it up and tore out the compression matrices. Wires sparked and crackled, and the coolant array turned into a makeshift space heater. I opened the hoof-varnish remover, poured it on the papers around the unit, and then directly into the glowing, sparking insides. It went up in flames with a ‘fwop’.
I said “Time to go?” to Goldenrose but he was already propping the window open and trailing his rope down the building. We were outta there before you could even see the blaze from the window.
“Well, that could have gone worse,” he said, a few hundred paces down the street.
“We got what we came for?”
“All here,” he said, tapping his saddlebag and smiling. For the first time that night it was an actual smile and not an insufferable smirk. Arson brings out the best in ponies.
“So what’s the plan now, then?”
“It’s been a long night,” he said. “Time to go back to base, I think. It’s about time you met the team.”