//------------------------------//
// Chapter 36. Repair Mission 
// Story: H'ven Sent 
// by otherunicorn 
//------------------------------//

The hospital had been a busy place since we settled in Habitat Ten. The first major task had been setting up the two gender conversion tanks. That had kept us busy for a couple of weeks. The biggest challenge was finding material from which to build them, as there was nothing directly suitable. Unlike Brainstorms' tank, they didn't need to keep anypony alive for twelve hundred years. Once those were operating, ponies were required to attend to them, both to keep them operating correctly, and to keep the occupants company.

There were the usual minor injuries to treat, both of the intersex and fertile as well as a birth to tend to. The facility was, after all, far better than anything else down in Hell. It wasn't long before the former medical facilities were nothing more than first-aid stations, with anything more than a scratch being brought to us for treatment. Some of those visiting decided to join us, moving into Habitat Ten permanently.

With the two gender conversion tanks operating at around one conversion per week, per tank, so far only a few ponies had been converted, and once they were out, they promptly got themselves pregnant, much to the delight of Crimson and Brainstorm. Even Stormie was expecting. The general consensus was most of the ponies that were converted would wait a year or two before getting pregnant, so as to avoid a population explosion. Four to five hundred new foals at two per week would severely stress our resources! A dozen or so we could manage. For a lot of the intersex, just being a real mare, having the ability to have a foal some time in the future, was enough for the moment.

Brainstorm and Stormie were also conducting medical classes for any that would attend, passing on skills and knowledge that had not survived the hardships of Hell. That way, we would have a larger medical staff to deal with the expected sudden increase in demand, as well as the convenience of having ponies with the right skills to hoof when needed, on a day to day basis.

Bittersweet had been the first converted to a mare, and now, as often as not she would hang around with Cacha and myself, socializing, or as she was now, just sitting quietly in the office Cacha and I shared with our staff, observing proceedings. Having lived so long, she had the ability to just sit perfectly still and watch, to the point that one could easily forget she was even there.

Mostly, Cacha and I were kept busy organizing the various repair sorties out in the expanse of Hell, although busy wasn't really the right word to describe the infrequent tasks we received. Usually there were only five or six of problems per week, mostly minor. We'd dispatch a team of ponies picked for their suitability to the task. If that task required a unicorn, one would be assigned. That left most ponies in Habitat Ten free to help with repairs to Habitat Ten, itself, or just to do as they pleased.

Often the jobs that were further out were taken by Cacha and myself, as an excuse to get out and have a good, long run. Sometimes we would be gone for a few days. During that time, Carrot Top, Bittersweet, or one or two of the other intersex would look after the office.

A pony knocked on the office door post, so we looked up, seeing Bright Star standing in the doorway.

"Dad!" Cacha said. "Come in! You don't need to knock."

"You two were deep in conversation. I thought it would be best," he answered.

"So, are you here to visit, or is there a problem?" Cacha asked, rising, starting towards the visitor.

"Both, I guess. Something has failed up in the life support chamber, and it's in a hellite-only area, so somepony is going to have to go up there. Aneki, I thought you might be interested in coming over to our habitat and seeing the monitoring station in person. You may be able to make more sense of the report than we can, as you are from up there," Bright Star said. "Oh, and one of our own repair teams has found Aquamarine's body down in the sump."

"She was dead, then?" Cacha asked.

"Very dead, as we expected," Bright Star confirmed. "There was no sign of Fire Starter in the area, though. If she made it as far as the sump, she could have floated anywhere by now."

"Are they looking for her?" I asked.

"No, although they did bring Aquamarine's body up to our recycler as it seemed to be the right thing to do. Her friends and family are holding a funeral service for her tomorrow. I do not expect anypony from this habitat will wish to attend."

"Too damn right," Cacha muttered. "I doubt even the fertile that have moved over here would be interested. Feel free to invite them, or leave a message on the notice board if you wish, but I expect to do so would be a waste of time, if not an invitation for outright hostility."

Bright Star shook his head. "I will leave it to those directly involved to come across and personally invite any pony they feel should be there. She wasn't from my herd, so I won't be attending either."

"She never had an intersex foal of her own, did she?" I asked.

"No. Somehow she beat the odds and had three fillies." Bright Star said. "One of them is in my herd, and even she isn't that keen on attending the service, although I expect she will attend in the name of family harmony. I guess she got to see more of the real Aquamarine than a lot of ponies did."

Reaching Bright Star, Cacha reached up and gave him a firm hug around his neck. "So good to see you, Dad."

"You too, you too," he responded. "Oh, are you pregnant yet? When can I expect a granddaughter?"

"Not pregnant yet. Next year, maybe. I want to look after Aneki at the moment. Anyway, maybe I will surprise you and have a son!"

"So my intersex daughter who can suddenly have foals is going to give birth to a male? Interesting. Interesting indeed." Bright Star smirked a knowing smirk.

"Are we that obvious?" Cacha asked.

"No, but rumors of amazing possibilities have begun to circulate. Unicorns with spells. Hints of new modifiers. Strange tanks being assembled in the hospital. Daughters that change genders. Things do add up," Bright Star said. "Anyway, when do you think you and Aneki can come across to our habitat and check out the report on the monitoring station? We thought you might be interested in seeing the monitoring system yourselves."

"Right now would be fine," I answered. "It isn't as if we are tied to these desks."

"And if we are with you, Dad, it isn't like we even need any pony at them, with you being the representative from over there, after all," Cacha said, grinning.





I was kind of expecting the monitoring station to be like the magic screens I had seen at the top of Habitat Ten, and down beside the engines in the core, but it wasn't. Its screens were large, and effectively formed the walls of the room. Shallow control panels were angled out, below each screen, giving rudimentary controls for navigating through various on-screen menus. Bright Star had explained that after a period of time without input from a pony, the screens would go into an automatic mode, cycling through various reports, diagrams and maps, highlighting any problems that were detected within Habitat Eleven. That was not the case at the moment, as a mare was standing here, tapping on two of the buttons with a finger extended from her hoof, moving back and forth between two pages of information.

I stared at the equipment for several seconds. It was way too convenient for such an extensive setup to have been put down here by the original builders, considering that Hell was never really meant to have any permanent inhabitants. That it would be conveniently situated near the pipe the Hellites would use to heat their habitat was simply more than I could accept.

"This station wasn't always here, was it?" I asked.

The mare turned from the screen and stared at me. "I am told it was moved here from sublevel eighty of the life support chamber around the time of the great extermination. Apparently it was quite an undertaking too, considering the wiring required."

"It wasn't much use to us up there, was it?" Bright Star said. "I'm not sure if the ponies who brought it down here did so in the hope of gaining some sort of leverage over those in the life support dome, or merely so they could survive."

"Whether we like it or not, if we don't keep the systems down here running, we die," the mare said. "Hi, I'm Discernment. It's my job to work out what's going wrong."

"Hello, Discernment. I'm Aneki," I introduced myself. "With all of these screens, aren't you able to bring up things like fuel used, and other historical data?"

The pony shook her head, sending her golden mane bouncing. Like others who lived in this habitat, her facial armor was deployed, hiding the color of her coat. "This system is dedicated entirely to damage control."

"How have you been using the magically accessed pages?" I asked.

"The what?" Bright Star and Discernment chorused.

"These," I answered, reaching out with my magic and activating the appropriate button. Immediately an extra dimension was added to the display, hovering just in front of it, offering more detail than was presented on the screen itself.

"What? It doesn't look any different to me," Discernment said.

"Well, it sure looks different to me," I said. "There is a whole extra layer of information. Hang on a moment, I wonder if it's possible to..." Calling up the magical menus, I searched through the configuration pages until I found the option I was hoping to find: Enable extended menu system for non-magical beings. The moment I selected it, the enhanced magical display flattened out, becoming part of the information displayed on the screen itself."

"Okay, that's different," Discernment said.

"How bloody long has it been since you guys have had a unicorn down here?" I asked, wondering how the option could have been hidden for this long. For that matter, how hadn't these ponies known about the functionality both here, and on the engine monitoring screens if they had known about unicorns themselves.

"We haven't had one with magical ability as far back as our memories go. They were nothing more than legendary creatures before you showed up with that thing on your head," Discernment said. "I'm not sure any surviving Hellite has seen one, perhaps apart from the old one, and she's totally nuts. Good luck getting anything out of her."

"What about ponies with dud horns?"

"Huh?"

"Bony lumps on their forehead?"

Discernment lifted her locks, to reveal an ugly nub, just peeking through her facial armor. "Something like this, you mean? There's just me."

"Go show that to Brainstorm," I said.

"Why?"

"Because, before I met Brainstorm, my horn looked exactly like that."

"You're kidding me?"

I shook my head. "He really did fix it. Ask him. Anyway, what is the problem you wanted to show me?"

Discernment flicked through a few different pages before zooming in on a cross-sectional display of the underlevels of the life support chamber. A couple more button pushes brought up an overlay showing power feeds. Beginning in the center of the display and extending upwards was a dead zone. It wasn't far from where the main gun had exploded.

"This," Discernment said. "It went dark late yesterday. It's a distribution node with Hellite-only access. I can't tell if the computer has gone bad, or if there is a real fault. We need somepony to go up there and investigate, and if needed, retrieve a new computer and install it. Any thoughts?"

"It could be a delayed result of us trashing the area last time we were up there," I said. "That appears to be about one sublevel up from where the main gun exploded. Maybe some damaged conduits and pipes have exposed some wiring to water or effluent, causing corrosion or short circuits."

"You can handle that sort of thing?"

"I'll need to take an electrician up with me," I answered.





Rather than take the usual shaft, then elevator, up into the life support chamber, we had decided to take a less direct approach to the area. Apparently there were ladders through the water jacket, and their associated airlocks, at the base of every main support, and that meant there were literally dozens of ways for us to climb up into the life support chamber.

There were also several large lifting platforms, although putting one of them into operation, merely to transport a few ponies up there, was not practical in the slightest. Apparently they were suspended from cables, the winches up in the water jacket of the life support chamber itself, all hidden by massive airlock doors. Once the platform had passed through the airlock, hydraulic arms took over, and pushed the platform up to sublevel eighty from below, a section of the floor folding out of the way. Their design thus hid any evidence of a way down from within the life support chamber itself.

We had chosen to use a ladder several miles from the one we had previously used, as it was the nearest to another of the very few elevators the Hellites had commandeered for their own use. Nonetheless, once we had passed through the airlock into the service shaft around the main support beams, we had opted to quietly climb the ladders instead. I didn't want to risk giving away my position as I had on the way down here. Those vibration sensors at Central were just too sensitive!

Conversely, despite our stealth, I was trying to contact a member of Central directly. There was some risk to it, but I didn't think 4J2 would turn against me. I tried my communicator again, but like all other times I had tried, there was no response. There were definitely repeaters as far down as this sublevel of the life support chamber. 4J2 really must have permanently disabled the connection from his end.

"Well, it looks like I'm not going to be able to ask 4J2 about winged pegasi any time soon," I quietly said to Cacha and Maisie. Maisie was our wiring and computer expert, so she was accompanying us on this mission.

"It will be a trip up to the surface during the marathon, then?" Cacha asked.

"It looks that way."

"Cool! I really want to see where you grew up."

"It would be too risky to actually go to my old home, or to where I lived as a youngster. If I get recognized, it would be a problem."

"I just meant the city itself," Cacha said. "We'll need to get ourselves well disguised anyway, so it may not be as dangerous as you think."

"I still need to be recognizable, or we may not be able to make contact with 4J2."

"It sounds like a fool's errand, doesn't it? We have such a miniscule chance of success."

"Doubly so. First, we find 4J2. Yeah, right. And then we ask him where he has an example of a long since extinct type of pony stashed away," I said.

"When you say it like that, it makes me wonder why you will even try," Maisie said.

"It's a shot in the dark, a last resort, if we can't work out things ourselves before then. Maybe we will find things out for ourselves when we are up there. Maybe we break into one of Central's facilities during the celebration and hunt around for the information ourselves. It's not like locks are a problem any more. Cameras may be an issue, but we can deal with anypony who comes to investigate."

"Take out their feeds, then. Deny them of electricity," Maisie suggested.

"And that would deny us access to any computers," Cacha said.

"And those are probably so secure, we couldn't crack them anyway," I said. "Getting a member of Central to talk would be so much easier, and in my experience, that is also almost impossible."

"4J2 talked."

"And everypony else I spoke to in there was prepared to die, rather than simply give me directions on how to leave the facility. So we are back to needing to find 4J2 again."

"Anyway, I think it's time we went full stealth," I said. We had already transformed our usual hooves into soft pads, so our footfalls were inaudible. All that remained was for us to reduce the volume of our voices to a whisper, and avoid talk when possible. The other two nodded.

We were only a mile or so away from the area in which the main gun had exploded, but one floor higher, as that was where the access door to the power distribution node was. As usual, the automated lighting system was making being totally stealthy impossible, three lamps lighting the section of corridor in which we were: one ahead, one above, and one behind. If anypony was waiting for us, they would see the lights. In theory, we may be able to see lights above them too, unless they were lying in wait, motionless.

Even if we managed to get to the facility without Central noticing us, the moment we opened the door, they would know we were there. Maybe they would let us do our job. Maybe not. Whichever the case, doing it as quickly as possible would be in our best interests.

"You're unusually jumpy," Cacha whispered to me.

"I've got a bad feeling about this whole mission," I responded. "I keep on expecting to see a death squad jump out and start shooting."

"You worry too much, Aneki," Cacha said.

"You were exactly the same after we returned to the habitat used by the intersex," I reminded her.

"Humph. Besides, we are here, and nothing has happened yet," she said, pointing to a ripple in the floor plating.

Sure enough, we were in the area above where the main gun had exploded. As we moved forward, the ripples increased to buckling. There were gaps between wall and floor plates where the distortion pushed them apart. Nonetheless, it all felt quite rigid, unlike the corroded floors that had sent me plunging into this adventure in the first place. I could see how this level of damage, while not really compromising the overall structural integrity of the place, could easily stress wiring or pipe work, leading to eventual failure.

The visible damage lessened as we turned one last corner, and after we had walked down the short length of corridor to the door to the distribution node, the visible ripples in the floor had ceased. The distribution node was nowhere near as big as the effluent processing plant I had visited on my way down. Like the other facility, this one had a passage passing all the way around it. Unlike the last one, there was no ladder to allow a quick way to move between levels, as it simply wasn't needed. It also seemed to be integrated with the structure, rather than a separate entity cradled within it, suggesting that vibration was not an issue. That would have worked against it, transferring the shock wave from the explosion directly to any equipment within.

Maisie raised her hoof to the scanner, and the door began to cycle. There was no announcement about us being qualified or anything.

"That's odd," Maisie said, no longer whispering, as there was no longer any point to doing so.

"Maybe it is a symptom of the fault," Cacha suggested.

"Could be," she agreed, as the door lifted clear, allowing us access. A small patch of brighter light spilled out into the corridor, inviting us in.

For something so old, this distribution node was in pretty good shape, especially if I compared it to the corroded and perished condition of the abandoned celestial body simulator emergency control room that was only one level down and a few dozen paces from here. I wondered if some sort of spell such as Brainstorms' stasis field had been used to preserve the general condition of the equipment, or it if merely reflected the hard work of Hellites over the years.

While cream paint was prevalent in here, there were also racks of equipment exhibiting an aqua-grey color. All I could see, as I walked in, were in good physical condition, with no sign of distortion or being knocked from place by the explosion. Could it be possible that the damage was outside the facility? I guessed interrogating the computer would soon answer that.

I glanced around looking for it as I took a few more steps in. Ultimately, it would be Maisie who needed to access it though. Ah, there it was...

"Uh-oh," Maisie said, pointing at something with a hoof.

I dodged around a rack to see where she was indicating, only to see a bit of a scrambled mess. A few panels had been removed from a freestanding piece of equipment, its guts ripped out and scattered about the floor, trailing wires. Uh-oh, indeed. That was the computer! I glanced up at the ceiling. Nope, no manipulators were up there. Nothing else nearby seemed capable of dismantling a computer either.

"What the hell happened here?" Maisie asked, staring at the mess. "This looks deliberate."

"Security has been breached," I said, recalling the lack of specific recognition by the hoof scanner when it had allowed us access.

"Has somepony from up here been tampering with this?" Cacha asked. "How did they even get in here?"

"Let's get out of here," I said.

As I turned, I saw the door descend, and as much as I tried, I was unable to reach it before it sealed itself shut. Jamming my hoof on the door release achieved nothing.

"Trapped," I muttered.

"Are you sure? What about if we reconnect the computer?" Maisie asked.

"Perhaps, but I vote for cutting a hole in the wall, but even then, I suspect that won't be quick enough."

"What do you mean? How long does it take for ponies to get down here from Central?" Cacha asked.

"Maybe an hour. But that isn't the problem. I think they are nearby, waiting for us."

A metallic screech drew our eyes past the racks of equipment to the opposite wall, or more correctly, to where the opposite wall had been a few moments ago. A dozen ponies, dressed head to tail in environment suits burst in, each armed with a saddle mounted rifle. As each cleared the equipment, they took position aiming their weapons at us.

"Do not even flinch, if you wish to live!" a voice barked.

Considering that my weapon was not currently deployed, and that so many guns were aimed directly at me, I complied. This was a situation with which I was not familiar, so taking action would be too risky, and so far, they had not opened fire.