14
She’d known that this moment would come someday.
And she’d done absolutely nothing to prepare for it.
No papers. No obscene amount of caps. Not even a decent place to hide out and let them pass by.
No, she’d literally walked right into their hooves. Even with the vast expanse of open, flat ground that was the wasteland of the prairie, the moment she saw them on the horizon she knew that she’d screwed up, possibly for the last time.
She had to purposefully draw blood from her own tongue to keep from uttering a foul curse at herself, and the slight taste of copper did nothing but remind her of the unspoken horrors ahead. “….K-Kite….I think we’re in trouble….”
Her answer from the increasingly unstable mare was merely a quiet whimper, and she even went so far as to brush up against her, as if hoping the contact would chase away the shakes in her body.
Her eyes kept watch on the stationary squad of Union troopers through her binoculars—so far, they didn’t seem to be in any hurry to leave their position, but they did know they were there, as the squad leader was staring right back at her through his own binoculars. He even offered a tiny, friendly wave of his forehoof. Not wanting to arouse any suspicions just yet, she returned the gesture and quickly put the binocs away.
Shit, he probably thinks Kite and I are snuggling right now….
“…..Kite, straighten up, the squad leader can see us plain as day,” she said gently, rolling her shoulder a bit to encourage the mare to stop occupying her personal space. “Don’t let them see you scared or they might ask for those damned papers. That means you too, BJ.”
“I-I know the drill,” the colt stammered slightly, his voice a tad shaken but otherwise in a far calmer state than his mother. “And don’t get your hopes up, they get promotion points based on how many slaves they catch without papers.”
This time her mouth moved without thought, silently spewing that foul curse, and her gut began to twist and turn with bone-stiffening terror. She didn’t think she could talk her way past this patrol. For damn sure she didn’t have the caps to bribe them to look the other way. And she was not about to offer herself as a….”payment”….to encourage them to let them pass without asking questions. They would likely strip her of her weapons beforehand, and after the deed was done there was no guarantee they would even hold to such a bargain and simply capture them all wholesale without a shot being fired.
A gunfight was the only option she could think of....and that was suicide. One against eight, she wouldn’t get more than two or three of them before the rest cut her to pieces….
Kite’s body reluctantly moved away from her, though her walk seemed to become a bit unsteady as they began to move forward once more. “….dammit, should’ve done it when I had the chance….”
…done what?
Instead, however, she sought to spur some creative thinking in Kite’s mind. “We still have a couple of minutes to think of something.”
“Fat lot of good that does us,” Kite spat back out of spite. “They’ll find what they’re looking for, take me and BJ in chains and probably you two along with us for suspicion of helping runaway slaves. And trying to beat them in a stand-up gunfight is going to get us killed, they’re occupying the only cover I can see.”
“….t-they can’t all be for this…slavery, can they?” Light Tail dared to suggest, her voice giving the impression that she knew it was a very far-fetched idea to start with.
“Focus more on how we’re gonna get by them,” Sling insisted strongly, her attention now focusing on the immediate environment around the Union patrol. She could see what looked like yet another wrecked sky wagon along the edge of the road on the left, and something much larger some distance beyond the patrol….
“…we can’t,” Kite moaned in despair. “They set up checkpoints now and then on the highways, even the lesser traveled routes, making sure nobody’s sneaking runaways around. They crushed the underground and they want it kept crushed….guess they finally cleaned up that radroach problem around their farms, this is the first one I’ve seen since we met….”
….okay, then…no way to get by them, or around, she surmised to herself, her eyes continuing to observe the looming checkpoint. If we turned around and went back up the road they’d probably run us down….
….so how the hell am I going to kill them without getting into a huge firefight….
A recap of her arms and munitions did not reveal any insights—one shotgun, with a freshly installed extended magazine tube for a total of eight rounds, though she only had six loaded, and she didn’t want to top off the magazine even from this far away from the patrol for fear of tipping them off to her intentions. One N-series 10mm, six 12-round magazines…one 5.56mm pistol with a five-shot cylinder, and a six-shot .44 Mag with enough kick to it to make a fast repeat shot very difficult. With the 10mm she could probably drop two…maybe three, before the rest of them opened up on her—
“Something’s wrong,” Light Tail’s voice spoke quietly. “Something besides them being there.”
That deep, motherly instinct that stirred her to keep the filly in line and out of trouble spurred her to speak in return, though when she did it was not the words she’d expected. “….what do you see?”
She thought she heard El-Tee’s voice catch itself in her throat, seemingly surprised that her mother’s first response wasn’t to tell her to be quiet. “….remember the last time we ran into a patrol, they were all spread out and covering each other, and really not in the mood to be playing? These guys aren’t doing that.”
Sling took another two seconds to observe the patrol—really observe them, rather than just pick out their weapons and armor—
Sonovabitch she’s right, she spat derisively at herself, taking in the eight Union ponies and their complete lack of spacing. They were all clustered together at the overturned sky wagon, a couple of them even whispering to each other rather than watching her like she’d have expected. It almost seemed as though they were trying to not look intimidating.
The child was right, as usual. Something was very wrong.
“….leave the talking to me,” she said sternly. “Look ‘em over, take note of what they’re doing and where their focus is at, but be subtle about it. A couple of minutes should tell us if these guys are legit or not—”
Even as that thought passed through her mind, the squad leader’s foreleg came up, beckoning her to approach the checkpoint as the other seven in the squad took in the approaching mares and children, and now she was without the option to ask for help in taking these bastards on. She wasn’t sure if any of these troopers were lip-readers, and she didn’t want to take the risk.
….shit, shit, shit…..
She could feel her heartbeat getting stronger, like it was using her ribcage as a drum set. Her lungs kept threatening to lock up and stop taking in air, and now and then she could hear Kite whine a little. For better or worse, BJ was deathly quietly, except for a short moment when he told El-Tee to keep her attention on the pups and keep them corralled. Likely to give her a cover to use to eye the troopers over without being caught at it.
A minute later, and she had her eight targets analyzed and ID’ed as they came within speaking distance—five unicorns, two male and three female. Three earth ponies, one mare and two stallions. The three earth ponies looked like they had some heavily modified R-series 5.56 rifles mounted onto their battle saddles. The unicorns seemed to sport mostly 9mm pistols for sidearms—judging by the grip she guessed them to be the 13-round M&A model, though the one carried by the squad leader could have been a .45 Auto pistol. She also saw two service rifles among the unicorns, one with its forearm held together by copious amounts of duct tape….one pump-action shotgun….and what looked like two 5mm assault carbines…which, appropriately enough, was the long arm carried by the squad leader….
….Luna rape me, I am seriously outgunned here….
“What brings you down this way?” the squad leader asked immediately, though he kept his tone polite and non-confrontational….for the moment….
“The hope that the next town has bounties worth looking for,” Sling heard herself answering without hesitation….and without any of the fear and terror she felt welling up within her….
She thought she heard one of the stallions laugh at that reply, and the bluish-shaded squad leader allowed a slight snort of amusement to escape his nose. “Well, it’s a risky business. Ya never know. Don’t usually see bounty hunters travelling with kids, though…or with a working Pip-Buck. Were you contracted for a highway escort?”
A soft breeze began to float across the wastes, howling lightly as it passed by them. “….no. She’s….well, she’s handy with a med kit. Not much good in a fight, but she’s saved my life afterward. Worth keeping around for that.”
One of the unicorn mares had quietly snaked her way around her squad leader as she spoke, and called out to her superior the news that she’d been hoping would go unnoticed. “Hey Sarge, she’s marked. Life Tap’s guild. The colt too. No sign that she’s been traded out of that line of work.”
Sarge’s mouth grew a slightly lopsided grin. “…well, worth keeping around for that too, I guess. Papers?”
How Sling managed to not utter a series of uncomplimentary F-bombs concerning Luna or Celestia’s parentage, she would never know. All she could subconsciously conjure up was the need to keep up with her lie long enough to figure a way out of this increasingly deep hole that was cracking open beneath her. If these guys were imposters, they were putting on a very good show so far. “Lost ‘em a couple of weeks back, about the same time that I got this lovely shiner here,” answered, her left forehoof briefly brushing at the scars running down the left side of her face. “Some bounty I was chasing down got the drop on me, had more help than I was led to believe. He nearly wasted me. Wouldn’t have made it if my little girl hadn’t shown up when she did. As it was, I still lost some of my gear. Papers too, probably.”
“Where at?” Sarge pressed gently, his voice still not betraying any sign of his inner thoughts.
“Some scrapyard, maybe twenty miles north of Syrup Mound. Lost track of the bounty after that fight, and nobody in Mound or Stonewall had seen or heard any sign of him. Thought I’d try my luck down this way, see if anybody had some jobs that would lead me to him. Lousy SOB might even have my papers…”
“You didn’t try and get replacement papers through one of the courier offices in Maize?” he asked next, sending a shock through her heart that nearly reached her bladder.
She hoped he didn’t catch that. “….shit, no. Didn’t even think about it, was so ticked off over getting my butt kicked I just wanted to track him down and slice him open….”
“So, you were bounty hunting, tracked your target down and got ambushed at a scrapyard…with a functioning Pip-Buck on your leg?”
“It only functions if you turn it on,” she pointed out lightly. “Another one of the many mistakes I made that afternoon. Most folk in this line of work don’t get to walk away from a day like that. Counting myself lucky that I’m alive to get grilled over missing papers.”
“Right. When you bought these two, was it a private transaction, or a purchase at the guild’s selling block in Laura?”
“Private,” she answered almost immediately, a cold feeling growing in her gut. He’d been awfully specific about the town…. “….very private, just outside Lome.”
“….right,” he said again, mostly to himself. “Say, a couple weeks back there was a pretty big firefight in Maize. Five dead, all from this local gang giving us fits and problems, and we’re pretty sure at least two griffons were involved in it to boot, maybe three. Probably about the same time you messed up your bounty, woulda been only three hours walk from that…scrapyard, you said?”
“Willing to bet it wasn’t there before the megaspells, but yes, I’d call it a scrapyard.”
“Yeah, ain’t gravity a bitch?! Why don’t you walk with me a bit? Answer some questions about it? You might be able to help us put some things together.”
“Why not here?” she challenged back. That coldness in her gut started icing over….
“…think your daughter’d rather not have to listen to us talk about that day,” he replied with a soft, somber tone. “Probably traumatized enough by it, let’s not add to it.”
Something in her chest dropped hard enough that she felt it atop her stomach. Shit, he’s not buying it.
“….fine….you guys wait here, I’ll be back—”
Light Tail, bless her tortured heart, chose that moment to break her silence and act like the ten-year-old filly she probably felt like just then. “M-mom, wait—”
She found herself trying to nuzzle the filly back into a calmer mood in the next instant, and never remembering the decision to do so. “I’ll be fine, honey,” she cooed into her ear quietly. “Just wait here, keep the pups in line. I’ll be back.”
A tiny, almost inaudible gasp from her throat was the only sign El-Tee gave that she didn’t quite believe it, but surrounded as they were and unwilling to do anything that might make the Union troopers turn aggressive, she stopped protesting and let her leave in peace.
Or as much of it as she felt right then.
He’s not buying it, Sling thought fearfully, her eyes quickly drawn to an overturned storage trailer sprawled across the left half of the highway. The roll-up door was surprisingly intact, secured by a rusty, thick chain and a flimsy-looking padlock, and the topside of the trailer looked to be riddled with holes of varying sizes that suggested that age and erosion had been slowly eating away at this ancient husk of metal. But she couldn’t spot any sign of the wasteland beyond in any of the holes, which suggested that the interior of the trailer and its underside had escaped any serious damage….
….and that it offered complete visual privacy from the others once he’d led her behind it….
…oh shit, he’s really not buying my story…
Thankfully, she managed not to let that fear and terror sink its way into her legs. Not until he’d led her around the back end of the trailer and stopped about eight feet, completely hidden behind it….
“…..I think we drop the bullshit now,” he said bluntly.
She felt a tremble in one of her hind legs, and decided to take a seat on her hindquarters and see this through. Hidden from sight, and far enough away that their voices wouldn’t carry over to the others. “….Life Tap’s guild doesn’t sell slaves in Laura, does it?”
“Laura won’t let them,” Sarge confirmed without any fanfare or gloating. “Only town in our territory that’s gotten away with telling any of the five guilds what to go do with themselves, even after we crushed their part of that damned underground into a thin red paste. You didn’t react in the slightest to that bit of misinformation, jumped right on the “private” option. A legit buyer would’ve known better.”
“….well, crap.”
Moon be damned, he still had this oddly friendly gaze to his face that made it hard to guess at what he was actually thinking or feeling, and he seemed to know too much about Union procedure to be faking it at this point. “Don’t feel bad. Heard worse lies, a lot of what you said matches up with some things we’d been hearing about the last couple of weeks. I’m willing to bet you know a lot more about what went down in Maize than just whether or not people got shot at. As it is, even not counting that discrepancy about Laura, your Pip-Buck’s labeled “115”. Only seen one of those, five years ago, and that mare was not giving it up for anything. Shot her way past my checkpoint on the main highway connecting Syrup Mound to Trotpeka, then took off like the wind. I was a private then.”
….h-holy shit, the last Overmare….
“….you…you saw her?”
“Saw her….bedded her, later, when I caught up with her outside Trotpeka. Gave me this sob story about having to find out what happened to the Equestria Core, so I told her to try her luck across the valley. Wound up sleeping with her and let her go. Biggest mistake I ever made, damn near got mustered out…”
Oh crap, I’m on his screw-over list…
“As it is, I just made Sergeant six months ago. I doubt I’ll ever get higher than that, but that’s the hole I dug when I plowed her, so that’s what I’m stuck with. As for the hole that you’ve dug….”
She was glad she’d sat down. She didn’t think she could’ve kept standing for much longer, not with the turn things were starting to take….
“Your girlfriend and her kid are going back to Stifla,” he continued, and he finally began to take a slow, careful walk around her….and she could almost feel his eyes pouring over every inch of her. “They’re runaways, and at worst you’ve been helping them along the way for who knows how long, which is a question we’ll get answered once they’re back in the pens and we get a look at the transaction records to track down her last master. You’re in very deep shit here.”
Now her heart was starting to skip beats. Her breath came in sharp, quick takes, sometimes coming out as a gasp as she tried to fight off her growing terror….
“My CO’s a hard-ass, especially after what happened to one of our patrols last week on the eastern highway towards Syrup Mound, and she’s going to want to make an example out of anybody she catches trying to sneak runaways past her, kids or not. Worst case scenario, you and the filly get thrown in chains with them. There’s enough of a market for little kids her age that she’ll probably get snatched up, and that’ll be the last you see her.”
Silence.
She stopped hearing the wind. Stopped hearing her own heart trying to murder her. Stopped hearing her breathing through her ears.
She stopped feeling or thinking anything resembling the horror she’d been stricken with.
She felt rage. The kind that usually came before she started killing people.
“Don’t have to come to that, though,” he deigned to whisper in her ear, even letting one of his forehooves take a quick poke at her side. “I know it can be….disorienting, coming out of a stable into a whole different world. We can work something out.”
Even in her greatly building rage, she still managed to maintain enough sense of self and her conscience that she was starting to see a way to turn this to her advantage. “….let me guess. A “donation” of sorts?”
“Nah,” he huffed back, his hoof beginning to trace along her side and down towards her hindquarters, and she had to force herself to stay still with actual physical effort. “I ain’t that hard to please, actually. Twenty minutes in the hay oughta do it. Not often that I run across a mare like you. The way you tried to bluff past an ownership inspection, with half-true lies that would actually match up if anybody got to thinking to try to put it together….girl, you are dynamite—”
Her eyes briefly widened to the size of a dinner plate. She hadn’t meant for her non-violent approach to get her into this deep a mess….
“Love those hind legs too, and I bet your flanks are just as smooth. Gonna be hard to keep quiet, but I’ll try. You do this….and I’ll send you on your way with your kid, with a letter for my CO down the road in Galesville to pay you a thousand-cap reward for turning in a couple of runaways.”
She had to blink twice to make sure she wasn’t imagining this, and that she really was in the middle of a devastated wasteland, behind an overturned cargo trailer on a broken highway, being more or less blackmailed into submissive rape by a desperate male….
….and that she was even partially considering it.
“….just like that?” her dry throat managed to croak.
“Just like that,” he cooed softly. His touch was starting to get a little more….personal. Reaching for the base of her tail. “Won’t sugarcoat it, your kid will probably scream bloody murder when you leave without them. But you gotta think of what’s best for her here. Those slaves are going back. Whether you two join them depends on you. And we both know what’ll happen if you go that route. Stable ponies don’t last long in the pens.”
….thousand caps….enough to get them through the valley, the way she was going through them…
….no more worrying about whether she’d get caught on the road with them…not having to worry about Light Tail getting taken away like that….they could probably hop over the valley, no issues at all….
….and all she had to do, was let this stallion have his way with her for twenty minutes….
…..turn her back on a mare and colt she’d only known for a few weeks…..
….and break Light Tail’s heart. To save her.
“C’mon,” he whispered again, his insistence growing stronger…and still frustratingly polite despite the subject being discussed. “I can tell it’s been a long time for you. Just relax, let yourself enjoy it….”
He circled her once more, passing in front of her with his face pressed closely towards hers, and as he allowed his neck to brush past her she caught a slight hint of crimson soaking the back of the collar of his barding, still slightly wet….
….and, strangely, a small spatter of crimson further back along the barding itself…and no discernable wounds anywhere on his neck or head that would explain the presence of the blood.
Unless he’d gotten the armor off a dead trooper.
This time, when the rage built up...she let it stay.
With an indignant huff, she hurriedly unsnapped her travelling saddle and let it slide off onto the ground, and turned around, trotted a bit further down along the trailer—
—“Sarge” wasted absolutely no time in following her, ridding himself of his armored barding and weapons in an excited rush, and even tried to prod at her hindquarters as he caught up to her—
—she stopped, let her tail flick about in annoyance as she crouched slightly—
—wait till he’s closer—
—she heard his forehooves lift up off the ground—
—she sprang into a violence of action far faster than she’d thought she could ever achieve. Her hind legs lashed out, bucking him squarely in the throat and turning his breath of anticipation into a choked, garbled-up gasp that barely escaped his crushed larynx—
—she spun about, wrapping his head tightly with a thick telekinesis spell to cradle his fall, and at some point she felt the need apply a sharp, sudden twist—
—her magic obeyed her commands instantly, a sharp crack! signaling the breaking of his neck as it bent sharply to the side, and his body promptly grew limp and listless. The spasms would start any second….
She lowered his dying carcass onto the broken asphalt, resisting the urge to empty her bladder onto his body in a final insult as she retrieved her saddle and strapped it back onto her person, the remainder of her plan coming together in the time it took her to draw her prey into dropping his guard.
They had one shot at this. One.
She popped the retaining strap on her holstered 10mm open, but left the gun where it lay as she quickly trotted out from behind the trailer, back onto the road, and began to gallop back towards the others—
—Sarge’s “subordinates” were disciplined enough to have kept their distance, though one of the mares had apparently tried to play nice with Light Tail and was actually talking to her a little when they all perked their heads up at the charging mare—
“Something’s wrong with your squad sergeant, he just collapsed and started convulsing!!” she cried out, allowing a little terror into her voice as she began to slow down to a halt—
—her act was just good enough to spring a couple of the troopers into action. The mare that had been talking with her daughter—a pink-coated unicorn with a dark blue mane and tail—promptly bolted upright and took off towards the trailer—
—and an earth pony, a denim-colored stallion with a cropped brown mane, followed after her at an equally brisk pace—
“M-mom, what happened?!” Light Tail shrieked quietly, inadvertently causing her mother’s heart to twinge with guilt at the concern she showed for that….thing, she’d just killed…
….dear Celestia I’m sorry, honey….
“Convulsing?” Kite prodded next, her gaze fixating on Sling’s face.
“I don’t know,” she forced herself to answer, flicking her eyes onto Light Tail—
—saw BJ sitting right behind her daughter, and just off to her side, and briefly traced her eyes over to the lightweight revolver resting inside its holster on her daughter’s right side before meeting his eyes—
—she saw something in him change. She couldn’t quite place it, or describe, but somehow, staring at him for even that brief moment, she just knew that he’d gotten her silent message—
“—don’t know,” she repeated, her eyes tracing off to her left, zeroed on Kite’s knife for the briefest of instances, and then cocked her head about to see what the remaining five troopers were doing—
—all their eyes were tracking their galloping squad mates as they rushed to their sergeant’s aid, though she saw one of the mares quickly regaining her composure…
“…what about you guys?” she gasped between breaths, her horn coming to life as she silently cast out her hearing protection spell. “You all good here?”
Even through her now-muffled hearing, as she tracked her eyes towards that two-striped mare to her left and the unicorn stallion right next to her, BJ’s calm, measured reply managed to come through with the clarity of the damned.
“Good to go.”
Her 10mm whipped out in front of her, an extension of her magically-powered will, settled the orange-lit sights on the two-striped mare’s head and squeezed—
—a near simultaneous boom behind her accompanied her shot, and the bright muzzle flash erupted from her gun blinded her to the grisly effects of her headshot, thought she could help but noticed a strange, circular-shaped object darting away as she snapped her sight picture onto the stallion—
—she felt something wet splash across the right side of her face, startling her aim and causing her to jerk her shot downward just as she’d squeezed the trigger on the stallion, who by then had spun towards the sound of the gunshot to bring his saddle-mounted rifle to bear on her. Her shot tore through his throat, and the effects were worth throwing up over if she’d had the time—he collapsed onto the ground, his forehooves grasping at his grisly wound as he began to choke on his own blood —
—she turned around, barely catching note of the stallion next to Kite stumbling over onto his side from a viciously-slashed throat, and felt her blood run a little colder at the sight of BJ sighting the lightweight revolver onto the lone remaining trooper that had been watching her squad mates running down…and that mare barely had time to register her friend’s body falling down beside her before the sharp bark of a .38 Special turned her look of shock into her final moment of life. The bullet penetrated the right side of her head, and oddly enough she managed to stumble forward a second or two before her legs gave out and folded beneath her, sending her to the ground on her side…
…and she never got up.
Five kills…..
….in about two seconds. Three, at most.
Still two more left to kill.
She hurriedly lifted the dead up and away from the sky wagon, tossing them aside in a flash of magic as the others rushed to join her behind their new cover in the coming firefight—
“H-holy….o-oh Luna Mom what—”
“You were right, honey,” Sling confirmed solemnly for her shocked daughter, her breath slightly haggard from the effort it took to shove five dead bodies away from them in such a quick fashion. “They’re not Union.”
“Union or not, there’s still three of them left and they got full automatics,” BJ huffed in a heavy breath, the cylinder of Light Tail’s revolver clicking open, presumably to replace the fired casings with fresh rounds.
“Two,” she corrected. With a flick of her magic her 10mm’s safety switched back on, and she holstered the weapon in exchange for her shotgun. “Took care of the “sergeant” already. Get behind the engine, it’s the only part of this sky wagon that might stop their AP rounds—”
A sharp rip of automatic fire signified the seriousness of her warning as bullets began to shred their way through the sky wagon’s chassis, and within a moment’s time she found herself being squeezed in from all sides by two kids, two growing husky puppies, and another mare—
“H-hey wait, lemme out first—”
—several rounds began impacting against the rusted remains of the engine, their impacts coming out as duller thuds instead of the sharper clanging that had been tearing up the chassis, and now she felt the pressure against her body almost doubling—
—she finally managed to squeeze her way out of the pile of terrified ponies and dogs seeking shelter by pulling herself out backwards, her mane briefly trapped under Kite’s belly before it popped free.
Just below her vision, one of the red hash marks on her EFS began to shift towards her left, slowly—
—two slug rounds slid into her shotgun’s magazine tube almost thoughtlessly, but with those rifle rounds tearing through the sky wagon like paper she couldn’t get a shot off—
Shit—
—a bright electric blue glow lit up around Light Tail’s body as the little filly popped out from underneath Kite’s forelegs and floated her 9mm up and over the engine housing, and then began firing off rounds as quickly as she could fight the gun back down and pointing in the general direction of the overturned cargo trailer. But at sixty plus yards and counting, she held no hope that the rounds would have the effect intended—
—at least, she’d had no hope, until Kite’s magic enveloped her rifle and joined in on the return fire, using the engine as a rest for the rifle to steady her aim. Within a couple of seconds, the automatic fire streaming in their direction ceased entirely—
—take the shot—
“Don’t stop!” she urged in a light shriek of her voice. “Keep shooting, keep their heads down—”
—her shotgun came to a rest on the back end of the sky wagon after racking the first slug round into the chamber, leveled at what she hoped was her target’s chest area as the red hash mark edged closer to the edge of the trailer—
—the light brown stallion’s head poked out from around the edge of the trailer, and Sling adjusted her aim slightly to the right and down—
—he ducked back behind the trailer just as she squeezed the trigger, and the shotgun bucked back slightly within her spell’s grasp. Still, she swore she could actually see the slug sailing across the street for a split second before it ripped through the trailer’s side, and hopefully came out the other side close enough to her target to make him leery of coming out again. To help further that desire, she went ahead and fired the second slug at nearly the same spot, and a second hole appeared in the trailer not far from the first one.
Now came the hard part.
Sling vaulted herself over the sky wagon, breaking into a hard run once her hooves touched down upon the asphalt. Kite and El-Tee’s gunfire began to shift position as she closed in on the cargo trailer, barking at her hindquarters and fading in volume—
—the earth pony stallion risked a look around the corner, poking his head out for a quick look—
—she snapped the shotgun up, squeezed the trigger back the instant the bead sight came down on him, but he ducked back just as the shot discharged. At a distance of over forty yards, the buckshot had next to no chance of landing anything resembling a lethal hit, and she couldn’t tell if any of the pellets had hit the trailer.
Instead of chambering the next shell, she just stuffed the shotgun back in its scabbard and drew her 5.56mm pistol. Even with just standard 55-grain FMJ rounds it stood a better chance of penetrating armor than anything else she had on her—
—a burst of gunfire tore through the trailer in front of her, bullets ripping through the walls and zipping by her, and she responded by emptying all five rounds in the gun into the trailer herself, centering her aim just to the right of the holes that had just been created in hopes of getting somewhat close to the stallion—
—the shots ceased after the fourth round, and the empty casings jettisoned out of her pistol as she hit the cylinder release and popped in a fresh set of rounds from a speed loader—
—she rounded the corner just as she closed the cylinder shut, found the stallion clutching at a facial wound with a left foreleg as he swung about to bear his saddle-mounted rifle on her—
—she’d barely centered the front sight on his head when she fired two quick shots. One tore into the foreleg pressing down on his wound, but the other punched through his head just above his nose, an instant-kill shot that sent him tumbling to the ground much like a puppet with cut strings—
—she barely got her sights turned on the last surviving “trooper” when the spat of gunfire from Kite and El-Tee picked up in intensity, and the pink-coated unicorn shot back behind her cover, completely ignoring the fresh, bleeding gunshot wound in her left cheek as she brought her rifle around towards the fresh threat at her flank—
—Sling emptied the last three rounds in the cylinder on her target, hearing a distinctive metallic ping as one of her shots hit the pink mare’s weapon. The impact, though minor, was seemingly enough to startle her hold on the weapon, as it clattered to the ground in the flash of a cancelled spell field—
—the last two rounds punched through her right eye and forehead, and her legs immediately folded up and bent beneath her as her body crashed to the ground—
“Guys, stop, it’s over!!!” she shouted out, using a brief amplification spell to power her voice across the street—
—the shooting died almost instantly, though one last round did manage to power through the cargo trailer and sail harmlessly into the distant wastes.
Sling covered the remaining distance to her final kill in roughly three seconds, her magic stripping the dead mare of her remaining weapons and armor as quickly as possible. She did take a couple of moments to fish through the armored barding’s storage pouches for any manner of healing potions, but to her dismay she only found one—
—Kite’s body popped into her view from around the corner without warning, startling her into a slight jump which the scarred mare pretended not to notice—
“….oh, good, I was afraid you’d spared one,” Kite sighed with great relief, taking only a cursory glance at the dead “sergeant” before settling her attention back to her. “….lemme guess. The ‘let-me-rape-you’ deal where you and Elly get to leave and BJ and I were screwed?”
Sling’s mood began to darken considerably. “…something tells me this is a more common practice than I want to believe.”
“….y’know what, let’s leave it at that.”
Knew it. “….are the kids okay?” she asked next instead, shifting her attention to Kite for the moment. Mostly because it was suddenly becoming very difficult to look at any of the dead bodies around her without feeling that guilt welling up in her. Raiders were one thing….but ponies that had acted like decent folk, even if they were only pretending to be….
“They’re fine,” Kite replied, still unwilling to take her eyes off of her. “Mutts too. Think we scared Elly half to death though, she doesn’t want to stay here much longer. I kinda have to agree with her, we can’t be found here….”
Sling began to feel a wave of exhaustion as her adrenaline high finally began to wear off, and she simply plopped down onto the asphalt beneath her for a short break. “She was right about one thing, these guys weren’t the real squad. Take a look inside the trailer here, see if there’s any bodies stuffed inside. They might have used a suppression spell to hide the stench…”
Kite’s face scrunched up into a vision of disgust as she fished a hammer out of her saddlebags and began to trot towards the back end of the trailer. “Oh, there’s a lovely thought….”
That’s not the thought you should be worried about….
…but no need to tell her until she was absolutely sure that step was necessary. She’d thought it over earlier in the day, discounted it, and figured that was the end of it, until now….
…now, it was starting to seem like the only way to get through Trotpeka without the Union giving them trouble. And pulling it off would require some favor…which she hoped would come from reporting this mess to wherever she could find a sizable garrison of troopers with a ranking officer. That “sergeant” mentioned a CO in the next town down the road, and while she wasn’t entirely convinced of his truthfulness he’d put up a good enough act that she was willing to surmise that he was doing the same thing she’d done—string together a story with enough of the truth in it that it would hold up under any cursory scrutiny….
….wait a minute….
In a sudden fit of desperation she tore at his discarded gear in a flurry of magic, her brain working strings of information together into a coherent theory faster than she could process it. He’d put up a good act—a great act, even. He’d known about the shootout in Maize, but news floated about pretty quick through the trade caravans, so that was nothing. But he quizzed her pretty hard about herself, going off of her answers rather than on a pre-determined checklist and picking her story apart with little tidbits here and there—
—she stopped toying around in his saddlebags once she’d felt her magic latch onto a thick, lightweight object that…felt rectangular in shape, the way the feedback loop into her horn was tingling. A boo—
—no, not a book. A well-worn…diary? Journal? A portion of its spine along the top was torn off and scratches, nicks, and some gouging adorned the front cover, but it was still intact and serviceable. And surprisingly enough, the writing on the pages was clear and legible, a sign of a decent education somewhere….
Right…so he’s taking my story apart in his brain, grilling me like he’d gone through things like that every day….or used to….good possibility he actually used to be a trooper on checkpoint duty before he went brigand—
—her magic settled itself around the journal, carefully flipping through the pages and quickly taking note of the entries themselves. They seemed to be dated on a year and calendar system other than standard Equestrian—one page, for instance, was dated 15.5.184, the last letter she assumed to be the year….and Kite had told her once that the day the spells dropped was called “The Last Day” up here on the surface…
…so the wasteland literally sees that day as the end of the old world? They date their years in accordance with that belief…that they believe that times like those are gone forever?
Pretty fatalistic. No wonder they were surrounded by thievery, rape, and murder…they had no hope of things ever getting better, so they just lived with what they’d become.
They’d given up. And with no hope, there was nothing holding back all the evil that sucked all that hope away to start with.
Vicious circle.
She shook herself out of her daze and continued to pour through the departed stallion’s journal, a string of guilt beginning to well up as she flashed through the pages—
“—ster’s birthday is in a week, still haven’t found that fourth book in the DD series she wants—”
“—ic training was hell, and these guys aren’t even military, they just go off some old army handbooks they dug up out of Fort Wiley—”
“—et Celestia that mare was so good, sh—”
Sling purposefully shifted past that particular entry, and began skipping several pages whenever her eyes discerned that the entry was a rather graphic account of one of his conquests…and he seemed to have taken quite a number of females of various species. She swore she even saw mention of a couple of zebras and griffons in a couple of entries….
…guess that explains his cutie mark, though. A special talent for….breeding, I guess?
Thank the gods she hadn’t let him go through with it. But the bit about zebras intrigued her greatly. She wouldn’t have thought there’d be any in the prairie, even during the war….
She slowed down her pace as the year date on the entries began to grow closer to the current date—17.7.199 was one of the last five entries, which was last week, and she stopped skipping about and began to read through it fully even as Kite finally managed to beat the padlock on the trailer open and slid inside just long enough to see the contents—
“17.7.199
Got a break at last. Crew and I were layin’ over in Maize, a day after the Union lifted their lockdown on the place. This sultry zebra and her unicorn partner slinked up to my table in the bar, asked about “special services”. At first I thought they were whores, until the unicorn mare bluntly shot me down and said that she was already taken in bed and wasn’t about to touch a stallion anytime soon. So, with a chance for a threesome with a zebra and a unicorn now officially out of reach for the moment, the topic went back to that “special services” subject.
That’s when I recognized the zebra. Julaya. Bane of the Union’s existence ever since the war with the Runners. Runners and the Union might have called it off, but Julaya didn’t share that opinion. When I was still in the trooper corps she’d made a living out of robbing the main trade guilds, usually by hitting their caravans on the highways. Had a small side business in shooting up slaver gangs on sight, guilded or otherwise. Love Tap’s guild was especially hard hit by that bitch, there’s a bigger bounty on her head than there was on any Runner during the war.
Turns out she’s got bigger ambitions now. She wants to take the hurt to the Union in a bigger way, and that means taking out enough caravans at once to starve out a garrison. She’s got a trial plan going on for Galesville to test her theory, wanted me and my crew for a job on the northern highway out of that town. She must have done her own scouting on me to single me out for the job, considering it was that slut of a CO there that mustered me out of the Union altogether for banging that stable mare. Like the thought hadn’t crossed her mind the first time she saw that “115” on that lovely thing’s Pip-Buck….
I didn’t really need convincing after that. Julaya wants to kill all trade going in and out of that town, to starve the garrison of food and water and make them send out enough of their weakened troops that she can ambush them along the road and take them out. She wants to hurt that CO…and quite frankly, so do I.
Plan is simple. Take out the checkpoint some twelve, thirteen miles north of Galesville, assume their uniforms and positions, wait for the first caravan to come through and take it out, and slink off. We’ll have to do it after the scheduled two-day status check, and we’ll have at best thirty to forty hours before the next scout comes up the road to repeat the process. Won’t be a very big window, and the whole thing will ride on us catching them unaware. Even a short fight will make it hard to pull off the act. But once that’s done, if we’re lucky, a caravan will come through, and we get to keep half the goods and caps from whatever comes our way. The chance for a high payoff is there, and it’s worth the risk, but if we only get a mom-and-pop operation then the risk definitely outweighs the junk we’ll bring in. We can’t let anybody get through after seeing us regardless, so we’ll have to take out the first group or two that rolls by and hightail it out with the goods before the next runner from Galesville shows up to check on his comrades. Either way, Julaya gets her vengeance on the Union, and we get a score without anypony knowing it was us.
She did offer an up-front payment of one-third of the contract payout as a good faith gesture….and managed to turn it into a night with her in her room. The hell with the caps, a romp with a zebra doesn’t come along every day, and she was sub-lime. Got a little creepy with her unicorn lover watching and glaring from the corner, but whatever. Shame she didn’t join in.
Crew’s been given the heads-up, we’ll get together in a couple of days, and I’ll run them through the procedures that goes along with manning a checkpoint to make sure the caravans can’t make us out as fakes until it’s too late. Never got a chance to run one in my trooper days, should be interesting to play the part of the squad sergeant.
-L.S.
….yes, his special talent was most definitely breeding, Sling noted dryly, a slight shudder running through her spine. But this page alone was like stumbling into a mine stuffed full of arcane gems. All of it, right there in black ink, this was exactly the ticket to get the Union off their backs.
….as soon as Kite was done barfing over what she’d found in the trailer. She only caught a glimpse of the heaving mare before she turned away, lest her own stomach decide to join in the event.
“…shit, that was gross,” the purple-coated mare moaned as her magic slammed the trailer shut. “If not for the smell suppression runes plastered all over the trailer I’d have hurled the moment that door opened….”
“How many?” Sling heard herself ask gently, slapping the journal shut and stuffing it inside her saddlebags.
“….eight,” Kite huffed as she splashed her mouth with water. “Cut throats on all but one of them. Must have been killed in their sleep, last one was shot in the back of the head, close range. Let’s get the hell outta here, back up the road. We can keep going west for a bit—“
“We need to get down to Galesville, tell the garrison CO there what happened,” she interrupted, keeping her eyes focused on the road ahead as she finally began to stand up. “Found a journal on the “sergeant”, pretty much lays out what happened and why. Says these fakers were doing a job for a zebra named Julaya—“
“Oh, shit,” Kite blurted sharply, the contents of her canteen sloshing about violently as she bolted over to her. “Sling, take your stuff off and lie down—“
The tinge of fear in the mare’s voice stopped her movements cold, her legs buckling as her mind forced her to relive some very brief, very intense memories of flaring, red hot pain in her side and a filly’s terrified screams. “….I-I….s-shot?”
An invisible, cold force, much like a solid wall, pressed down on her back, directly in tune with a flash of magic from Kite’s horn, and Sling found herself pushed back down and flipped over onto her right side as her gear was stripped from her body—
“Oooo thank the stars, no,” Kite’s voice heaved in great relief, and Sling felt her own body grow lighter in gratitude. “The wounds in your side, they opened up. Saw some blood dribbling down your belly, thought it was a gut shot that you didn’t feel. We’ll just shove that potion you pilfered down your throat. It won’t heal the scars, but it’ll close the wounds back up.”
Sling gulped down half of the potion without another word, ignoring the slight fiery sting in her side as Kite dragged her travelling saddle back over to them and lifted a strip of cloth out of a small storage pouch, lacing it with an antibiotic cream to cleanse the wounds. “…crap, maybe we shoulda stayed in town another week. You only took the stitches out…what, three days ago?”
“They stayed a bit longer than they should have,” Kite answered, her attention focused more towards cleaning the streaks of blood off before El-Tee could see it and freak out. “I knew once we got back on the road that you’d end up running and slamming yourself around in a fight, wanted to be sure the wounds fused together tight enough to not rip back open and spill your guts out. Guess it worked, they’re just torn open a bit, and that potion’s already closed them back up. But it would’ve been a lot easier snipping them out if I’d done it sooner than I had. Never knew a grown mare could squeal and cry like that.”
A rush of blood flooded her face as she focused her magic back onto her stuff and dragged it back over. “…maybe I should be looking at body armor instead of bullets next time we get stuff to sell….”
“Now that’s the brightest idea you’ve had with our salvage since we met,” Kite snarked back with a laugh. “Yes, it’s nice to have ammo to shoot with, but med supplies are a lot harder to come across. Stopping the bullet before it enters your body is the best way to stretch them out, if you’re going to insist on shooting your way through half our problems.”
“….maybe if I had El-Tee’s knack for getting ponies to do the right thing, I wouldn’t have to….”
“…no, it’s not you,” Kite sighed softly, the rag no longer swabbing and poking at her belly. “World’s a shithole. Rape, murder, thievery, slavery, mutant wildlife that’ll eat you alive or rip unborn foals out of a pregnant mare….it’s…it’s life out here, and it’s hard to stay sane or soft in it. Every time we do shit like this….I worry that Elly’s gonna lose the thing that makes her so special to this hellhole.”
….oh, buck me, Sling cried inside. Make this harder, why don’t you…
“…speaking of hellholes, I wasn’t kidding about earlier. We really need to get to the next town and tell the Union what happened here—”
“Sling, you take me or BJ anywhere near the Union and we’re gonna get sucked right back into that….that shitty mess of a life we thought we had it good in,” Kite hissed back, a touch of fear creeping into her voice. “The hell with the Union and their spat with some sideways-thinking zebra—”
“Kite,” her mouth spat forcefully, despite her sheer inability to even look her in the eye. “We are never going to get past them at Trotpeka, not like this. That “sergeant” remembered enough of the real deal to make that much clear to me. We are not taking our chances going blind through the valley of mutant cannibal ponies. We don’t have the luxury of looking for an alternate route with Saurus out there looking for us. We don’t have the firepower or the numbers to fight our way through the valley. What other choice is there?”
Kite’s forehooves shot out, grabbed at her head and twisted it around until she found herself forced to stare back into Kite’s eyes—
—her bubbling, slightly quivering eyes—
“Y-you take us anywhere near there, and we’re done, they’ll take us and send us ba—”
A shrill, filly-sized scream of pain pierced through the skies, accompanied almost immediately by a rapid spat of gunshots, and her plans for squeezing past a Union checkpoint unmolested were tossed aside in favor of finding whatever—or whoever—had just hurt her little girl and tear it apart for even daring to crawl near her.
--------------------------------------
That Elly was screaming and shooting at all meant that whatever had just attacked her hadn’t outright mortally wounded her, and was probably some manner of wildlife that had been nesting or hunting in the general vicinity because she didn’t think the little filly had it in her to shoot anypony.
For better or worse, her mother was the exact opposite—in fact, in the split second that she was still able to keep hold of Sling’s scarred face, she could see a flash of unmitigated rage and terror hit her eyes before the stable pony broke away from her grasp and galloped around the trailer in a mad dash to reach this threat and rip it to pieces with her magic.
Kite’s thoughts were no less dire, but were far less violent. The medical pony in her was already sorting through her mental checklist of med supplies in anticipation of the next few minutes of Elly’s life as she took off in Sling’s wake (and tried not to stare at the stable pony’s backside). Bandages and gauze wrap, anti-biotic cream to prevent infection, possibly a suture kit for stitches, a coagulant agent to clot up cuts or tears and stop the bleeding. More severe injuries like bone fractures, deep cuts or stab wounds, or large bite wounds would probably see the use of a healing potion to save time…provided she didn’t share her mother’s resistance to them.
The mother in her briefly freaked out and overrode every rational thought the second she saw what it was that Elly was willing to shoot at.
She was stumbling away from her attacker sideways, her pistol wobbling in her magical grasp as the glow surrounding her horn began to flicker and dissipate, one of her forehooves continually pushing the pups along with her. Her assailant, to Kite’s horror, was not a baby ant that had wandered too far from its parent nest or a parasprite that saw a vulnerable prey, but a small (by wasteland standards), sand-colored radscorpion, not much bigger than Max or Mona, thrashing against the ground as Sling’s magic tried to physically squash it flat. And for all of two seconds, she dared to think that Elly might have gotten off easy and only been cut up by those sharp pincer claws.
And then the poor thing stumbled one last time, tripped on her own hooves, and fell to the ground with a dulled moan of agony and a splotch of blood in her left side, just in front of the saddlebag.
“Oh shit,” she whispered, her voice hoarse and unable to work itself up to a full speaking tone just yet. The world around her seemingly vanished, her attention almost wholly focused on this single injured child that wasn’t even hers. “E-Elly, don’t get up—”
Elly wasn’t quite ready to give up trying to walk just yet, even as the first signs of the venom poisoning began to show. “…w-which way’s…up…”
Fu…it’s already setting in… “….better if you don’t try,” she warned softly, her magic pulling at the travelling saddle and lifting it off of her. “Stay still, don’t move, that thing stung you.”
Elly tried one more time to get herself upright, rolling up onto her legs in heavy, heated breaths that suggested she was struggling to simply accomplish moving. “….it did, didn’t it…”
Her mind briefly wondered why she hadn’t heard Sling murdering the radscorpion yet, and risked a look at the soon-to-be-deceased mutant arachnid—
No, she is killing it, Kite realized with a slight horror, watching as an indigo colored magic field enveloped the radscorpion and continuously squeezed inward, shrinking little by little with every moment and crushing the bug with sheer fury. She’s just taking her time with it…
“Sling, hurry up and kill that damn thing, then cut the tail off,” she barked at the stable pony’s back. Odd that she hadn’t outright shot it or stabbed it, she mus—
—the field shrank to half its size instantly, accompanied by a disgusting series of wet crunches that finally put the creature’s thrashing to a sudden, violent end, and Sling’s knife sliced through the air and severed the stinger off of the tail in one swipe—
….thank Luna it wasn’t a pony that did this, Kite shuddered mentally. No telling what she would’ve done…
“The hell is this thing?!” Sling hissed angrily, her voice strangely torn between hatred and crying. “What did it do to her?!”
“….it’s a bark radscorpion,” she answered freely, just as Mona’s nose poked its way past one of her forelegs and started sniffing at Elly. “…that one’s a juvenile, not much bigger than a cat…seen much bigger ones than that, but that’s not the problem. The barks carry a nasty venom in their stingers, seen it kill healthy adults in a matter of hours—”
Dumb ASS, she smacked herself mentally when she realized what she’d just uttered. Now all Sling could think about was the poison running through Elly’s blood veins. “…w-what? K-Kite can you—”
“No,” she cried. By now Elly had grown tired of trying to make sense of her world and slumped back to the ground, moaning her newfound misery out to the world, and Mona began to realize that something was very seriously wrong with her favorite pony. The pup started to nudge and bat at her face with her snout and paws, whining and howling softly to try and rouse the filly up. “…she needs anti-venom. We don’t have the equipment to make it, even with the poison gland you cut off. Her saving grace here is that she was only stung by a juvenile, or she wouldn’t make it to the next town. As it is, we need to get her to a working clinic. Somebody with known access to the anti-venom or the means to make it from the gland, before she starts suffering permanent damage….”
…somebody….like a garrison of Union troopers, she realized belatedly, her heart growing heavier at the thought. Get Elly the help she needed….at the cost of getting tossed back into the slave trade….
The decision was made easily. It sorta helped that Elly was starting to realize just how badly she was hurt, and by a mere venomous sting to boot. “….legs, getting numb….K-Kite….somebody…help…..”
BJ, silent little bugger that he was, finally crept up into view out of the corner of her right eye, and what little she saw of his face gave her the impression that he was actually a little worried about her. “….oh shit, that looks bad…”
Kite’s eyes swept the immediate area, for something to use to carry the filly with them and to keep anypony from seeing the tears forming under her eyes at the thought of losing her one chance to get away from the hell she’d lived with half her life. “….S-Sling, check through the bodies…see if you can find any kind of an IV kit. If I can get a drip started with a healing potion, it might counteract the venom damage long enough to get her some help. Beige….see if there’s a wagon or something we can use—”
Both souls darted away from her without another word—Sling opted to go back behind the cargo trailer to start her search there, and BJ was never more than three steps behind her.
The pups stayed put, their efforts to rouse their master from her stupor doing little more than frustrating Kite as she tried to get a feel for the filly’s pulse and breathing. “D-dammit, Max stoppit—”
Elly’s low, painful voice put her attention back where it belonged in terrifying ways. “Kiiiite…head hurts, ‘s doin’….doin’ sumthin to ma….”
….oh, Luna…it’s attacking her brain….
“….S-Sling, I need that IV now!!!”
--------------------------------------
Much as she enjoyed the perks of a desk job, there were days when the realities of it reminded her of the smaller things in life that she missed.
She missed the smell of the air in the late afternoon. She missed crossing through the rare, chest-high patches of tallgrass and feeling the stalks scratch against her legs and armor. She missed the weight of her gear bag on her back and the feel of her bedroll strapped across her loin. She missed the occasional romp with the randomly picked stallion or mare (or the rare zebra or griffon) in her patrol unit when they’d sneak off just out of the sergeant’s hearing for a quickie. She missed the light thump of her rifle as she slung round after round of lead at a raider or a highway gang. She missed the feel and scent of moisture of approaching storms as her squad roamed about the Union’s trade routes. She missed the simple pleasure of only having to do as she was told and not think about it too hard.
Now she had nothing but the stale, stirred air of a dusty office inside a former hotel-turned-garrison barracks with a barely-working spark generator. She no longer had to carry eighty pounds worth of gear on her back because she spent most of her time just keeping her troopers in line, properly supplied and equipped, and out of trouble. She could no longer enjoy a round or three of casual mating with some random stranger, but had the company of a couple of somewhat dedicated lovers and two foals that were turning five next month. She could still shoot, but only on her own time and she wasn’t expected to get out into the field anymore in the first place. And now when storms hit the prairie, she learned to curse and swear at the mess it made of the roads and how it delayed critical shipments of ammunition, water, food, and other necessities of life.
And when somepony out in the wastes got the funny idea to start screwing with her and her troops, she couldn’t be ordered to go out and mess them up over it anymore, or even take a few squads with her and do it on her own initiative. She had to send squads out to do it and wait for them to come back. Squads that, unlike her old unit, she didn’t trust to get the job done right. Four-Two Pony, 3rd Platoon, Fair Stride’s Trading Co., out of a little town to the southeast called Hayfield. Best time of her life.
Getting older wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, after all. Particularly when it brought her days like today. She’d thought she’d seen the last of that damn breeder of a stallion….
But instead of spitting on the journal in her telekinesis spell field out of spite, she settled for the slightly more important business item of making sure that her field clinic’s latest patient wasn’t in worse shape than she looked. Pretty little filly, really, sleeping away her pain and misery in such a way that she almost took after those two damn mutt pups of hers, even after taking into account the four or five plastic tubes plugged into her body at various points. Light teal blue coat, indigo-colored mane and tail, the latter of which had this really striking streak of electric blue in it….
“She gonna be okay, doc?”
The light pink unicorn mare beside the cot barely took notice of her, her violet eyes and magic more focused on making sure the dangling set of IV bags, healing potions, and anti-venom packs were properly adjusted and set. “Might be a couple of days before the venom’s flushed out for sure,” she replied flatly. “But there shouldn’t be any permanent damage. The slave mare actually did a pretty good job of counter-acting the venom, using a couple of healing potions and drippling it through her system with an IV system made out of a healing potion bottle, some plastic tubing, and a rubber gasket cap. It’s an old stable-taught field trick for keeping a poisoned victim stable until they can get them to a dedicated medical site. Wouldn’t surprise me if we find records of her once being in the possession of a doctor’s clinic out of Stifla. I’m just making sure the kid’s comfortable and out of it, let her sleep through the worst of it. She’ll feel like shit when she comes to, but she’ll be fine.”
One of the husky pups stirred slightly, but settled back down almost as quickly and continued sleeping against the filly’s back. Its littermate was likewise curled up at the foot of the cot, snoozing away the evening hours in the company of its wounded, poisoned master. “And why are these damn flea bags taking up space in here?”
“Because the little bastards bite the shit out of you if you try and take them away from the girl, and I’d rather not deal with the kid’s mother if I got rid of them like you asked,” the medical pony sneered back, one of her forelegs rubbing at a rather painful set of teeth marks on the other. “Long as we leave the pups alone they ought to behave. Consider letting the mom or the slave mare hang around here, help out with them a little.”
“The stable pony’s going to have other problems on her hooves in a few minutes,” she assured her field nurse curtly. “As for the slave and her boy, their fates are pretty much sealed. When the next slave caravan comes through they’re getting shipped back to Stifla. Make sure they’re in good straits and fit for a two-week journey on hoof, then get the morgue set up for tomorrow. You’re going to have sixteen bodies on your tables.”
“Shit,” the medical pony curse immediately, her magic poking at the IV equipment one last time to make sure it was working properly before she began to adjust the blanket draped over the filly’s slumbering body. “Call in a couple of medics from the squads, I’ll need the extra help.”
“I can’t do that,” she sighed back sadly. “Today marks the second squad we’ve lost this week to that damn zebra. The troops are on edge as it is and I’m not about to pull their medics just to sort through folk that don’t need the help anymore. Do the best you can.”
“The help isn’t for me, it’s for the kid. I got a urinary catheter running so she doesn’t piss the cot from the IV bag fluids going through her. I want somepony watching her at all times if I can’t be here to do it myself, in case she stays out longer than expected. If not the medics, then maybe the slave mare that got her this far. She seems knowledgeable enough. Might keep the mutts in line too.”
Her spine quivered at the thought of a thin tube being used to help pass urine out of her body, and she quickly relented on the doc’s request. “….the slave mare, then. I’ll send word to the brig to let her out, under guard. I need the squads ready for a fight at a moment’s notice if my plan to kill that zebra whore fails.”
“Age has really mellowed you out,” Mayflower grumbled. “A decade ago you’d have been begging for a chance to strike out on patrol and cut her head off personally.”
Don’t remind me. “Pop a coupla foals out and see how much your priorities change.”
That shut Mayflower up just long enough to let her leave the field clinic in peace. The tent flap had barely slipped off of her coat before her thoughts had already shifted to the next item of business on her evening agenda.
The filly’s mother.
A short walk across town took her back to the garrison, the two griffon troopers at the front door letting her through without a word or a nod (or any sign at all that she existed, even). The lobby itself, usually staffed by a corporal unlucky enough to draw desk duty for the month, was devoid of life save for herself, and so she saw herself past the reception desk and up the stairs to the second floor, and then further on down a hallway to the left. At the T-section, she turned right, heading straight for a door down at the end of the hall with a pair of troopers standing guard outside, one griffon with a 12-gauge shotgun and a light orange earth pony stallion with a 9mm pistol in a mouth-bit grip.
“She cause any trouble yet?” she asked as she approached the door.
“None yet, Major,” the griffon replied briskly, her talons rapping along the shotgun’s forearm. “Just begging for a soul to talk to, askin’ about her girl.”
“I can fix that. You’re both done here, report back to your sergeant. I can handle one Stable runaway.”
“Finally,” the stallion sighed in great relief as the pair immediately separated themselves from the door and walked down the hallway she’d just come in from. “Thought I was gonna have to piss on the wall.”
“Told you not to drink that Sparkle-Cola,” his partner shot back. “You know that crap goes right through you."
“I know it does, but that pressured bladder kept me from trying anything funny when we were supposed to be working.”
A small smile began to creep into her lips as stopped just short of twisting the door knob open. “Y’know, now that I think about it, I do recall Gaven saying he’d gotten a commode in one of the rooms on the other side of the floor running,” she called out, her tone one of feigned innocence and nonchalant intent. “B35, I think. Nice, quiet spot for a little….action, for a couple of stressed friends looking for a release…”
The stallion froze in place, visibly stunned by her poor acting—she couldn’t really blame him, he’d only been with the garrison for a month, and didn’t really know how she ran her troop. She didn’t care if every trooper in the garrison was sleeping with each other every other day, as long as they didn’t let it interfere with their duties or end up with a herd of newborn foals as a result. Like a certain stallion had done years ago….
“….d-did…did she just give us permission to sc—“
“Hey, when the Major gives you a free opportunity for some fun, you don’t say no,” his griffon partner cut him off, now physically dragging him along with her as she turned the corner at the intersection. “She said report back to the sergeant, she didn’t say when, so shut yer trap, hit the head, and then you and me are gonna plow.”
“H-hey, wait a sec I—“
Ahh, to be twenty again, the Major sighed wistfully, finally releasing a telekinesis spell on the door knob and pushing herself through. And childless. And free of any resemblance of responsibility aside from myself….
….still, at least the kids weren’t too terrible to deal with. And when they were, that’s what their father was around for….
She’d barely shut the door behind her when the indigo-maned stable pony perked up slightly from the lounge sofa that sat before her desk, her darker teal blue coat appearing frazzled and in need of a decent brushing. “Is my daughter okay?” her hoarse, tired voice begged.
Begged, she noted.
“….my field doctor says she’ll be fine,” she answered, trotting around the lounge sofa to take a seat on the hardened cushion behind her desk that she’d stolen off a couch downstairs. “Your runaway’s been well-trained. Her healing potion IV trick kept the venom from doing any permanent damage. And by the looks of you, her skills have even saved your life at least once. Surgical scars are not hard to ID once you’ve spent a few years looking at the aftermath of gun battles in a field clinic.”
The stable pony’s face, scarred by what looked like a griffon’s attempt to tear her face off with his talons, collapsed onto the sofa in a heaved breath of relief even as she fought off lingering memories of how she’d lost half her right ear years ago, when she was still a grunt. “….when can I see her?”
Grant her that much, at the least, whatever else happens. “When we’re done here. We didn’t get a proper introduction when you popped up at the northern guard post screaming for some help. My name is Major Berry Colada. I run the garrison and the troops stationed here, and we’re responsible for highway security in a twenty-five mile radius all the way out to Stonewall and Maize to the east. I know by your Pip-Buck that you’re a one-one-five stable pony, so don’t bother trying to hide that.”
The stable pony put up surprisingly little resistance, unlike the last one-one-fiver that had slipped through the garrison five years back. “….Sling Shot.”
Guess that explains all the pistols you had on you. “And the two runaways you had with you?”
“Kite….the colt’s name, I don’t know. Neither of them are willing to give it. We just call him BJ.”
No lies so far. Decent sign, I guess. “I happen to know what it is, but I can live with just BJ. Do you realize the kind of trouble you’re in at the moment?”
“….pretty screwed from my point of view,” Sling Shot mumbled, her voice coming across as oddly low and deep, and not at all like the screaming, frantic mare that she’d been earlier. “You got all my guns and ammo, you got my daughter, my….my friend and her son…..”
She’s too tired to put up a fight. Good, this shouldn’t be too hard to get through. “Let me spell it out a bit more clearly. You, with runaways belonging to a salvage hunter in the outskirts of Lome that was found shot dead roughly….five months ago, I think? Or was it six…”
“That wasn’t me.”
“Sorting out who shot which slave owner for their property is not my job.”
She’d misjudged Sling Shot’s state of mind. She might have been physically tired, yes, but she still had plenty of fight left in her mind. “So what is your job, then? To cast a net and catch anypony trying to get away from the bastards so you can throw them back like lambs?”
….the hell’s a lamb? “This isn’t a meet and greet, stable pony,” Colada replied evenly. “The guilds aren’t that forgiving of those they catch trying to ferry runaways across the valley. The last time folk tried to organize an underground in the war, the slavers massacred every soul they caught doing it, along with their families. If they don’t kill you outright they’ll likely toss you into the pens with your runaways, your daughter included.”
Sling’s eyes grew hard and angry, glaring back at her with an accusing tint in her voice and losing much of her visible fatigue. Rage could be a hell of an anesthetic. “You’ll lose a lot of your precious troopers trying, bitch.”
Getting out of control, Colada mused silently, her right foreleg slowly rising up beneath her desk, towards a .32-caliber pistol she kept in a holster bolted to the underside. Put this stable pony back in her place before that naïve idealism gets her killed. “I don’t know how long you’ve been topside, stable pony, but things don’t work like they did back home.”
“If you work anything like my bastard of an ex-security chief, you’ll stop reaching for that pistol you’ve got tucked under your desk,” Sling roared, her body beginning to rise up into a sitting position as her horn became alight with an indigo glow of her unicorn magic, batting her braided ponytail of a mane about with a brief release of arcane energy.
Colada’s hoof stopped just short of the hoof-shaped sling cuff that hung out from the .32 pistol’s earth-pony friendly grip. It was a rare unicorn that was gifted in any degree of magic beyond simple levitation and telekinesis, and for the moment she wasn’t willing to find out the extent of Sling Shot’s expertise the hard way. “….sharp eyes. Most souls can’t tell my muscles are moving under my coat. Stopped wearing clothes because the fabric would fold and give it away, even.”
“Then you’re a little smarter than the chief. You wanna talk, talk. You don’t need the gun, you already have everything I want.”
“What I don’t have that you want, is yourself and your companions free and roaming about the wastes. I’m not inclined to just give that to you, not as long as you insist on the runaways accompanying you. I’m trying to save you and your daughter from joining their fate.”
“Save, how?” Sling seethed back. “By scaring me into just giving them up? They’re not going back to that life.”
“Yes they are,” Colada warned darkly, setting both forelegs back out onto her desk. No use in trying for the gun now, now that the stable pony was watching for it. She was just going to have to bludgeon the idea into her with harsh words. “And you need to decide how you’re going to avoid joining them. The next caravan from the guilds is due in any day and they have enough guns to make it through raider territory if they want, so you don’t have long. The way I see it, you have two options. You can pay the fine to me, directly, for “unknowingly” escorting runaways, and you won’t end up in the pens. And nobody in the guilds is going to give me any shit over it, not when I can shoot them for trying. Or you can do me a favor and avoid the fine altogether. Might even be a little reward in it for you.”
“Unless that reward is Kite and BJ coming with me when it’s done, you can do it yourself,” Sling grumbled angrily.
By the Sisters she’s not giving up on that. And if she’s that insistent on it….
“Didn’t say the reward was from me,” she countered calmly. Sling probably wouldn’t believe it completely, but if there was even a slim hope of achieving what she wanted, the stable pony would probably take it. And at the moment, she had no other way of accomplishing her own goal of sending Julaya into the afterlife without putting the town at risk—understaffed garrisons had a nasty habit of getting hit with alarming frequency. “Caravan master may have enough rank in his guild to at least listen to what you want. No guarantee he’ll do anything but laugh in your face and take them anyway.”
“And what kind of “favor” would even get me this personal audience with slaver scum to begin with?”
“A fair question, actually. The journal you brought with you from my decimated checkpoint, I assume you’ve nosed through it a little?”
Sling’s angry face briefly contorted into a shot of disgust at the subject. “Enough to know the stallion probably had STDs usually found only in barn animals.”
Colada’s guts turned slightly cold at the thought, and her haunches began to quiver in horror at the contemplation that there might be more truth to that little insult than she was comfortable with. “….that stallion’s name was Lucky Strike. He used to be a trooper up until about five years ago. Before that, he had a reputation as a very….effective breeder. Within a year of his arrival to my garrison mares starting bearing foals left and right, when I was still a captain. Had like, nine births within a 13-month period. All of them claimed Strike was the father, and he felt no shame in admitting he’d rutted them all. Kept doing it right up until I mustered him out for putting all but two my squads understrength through sheer pregnancy and birth rate alone. Last straw was a Stable runaway, one-one-fiver, five years back, that he plowed and just let go without so much as a question about whether the one-one-five was still intact. By then his father had died and left his caravan company to his far more capable and controlled daughter, and I didn’t have to worry about some rich trade baron giving me shit for kicking his sex addict of a son out of the corps..”
Sling’s rage abated slightly, a tinge of shock creeping into her slightly agape mouth. “…wh…how…he…”
That’s about the reaction I got out of most of his conquests… “I’m not totally confident about the grand total, he’s spent some time in other parts of the wastes as well. But based on the sheer birth rate jump I had here I’m pretty sure he’s got at least a dozen more foals out there, in addition to the seventeen he made here.”
Sling’s jaw dropped free from her skull, her veil of fatigue replaced by a look of pure shock. “….holy shit….”
“No kidding,” Colada sighed. “Part of my job at the moment is tracking them all down, going off of his unit’s patrol routes and mission areas. It’s been hell, managed to find nine. Maybe ten if my latest trace turns something up. Since Strike was a trooper the mares are entitled to some form of living assistance to help with raising the foals, and I’m having to fight them to verify the kids’ age so I know for sure that she was impregnated while he was still a trooper. He’s infamous enough for his breeding that I had a couple of girls try to claim him as the father of their colts, only they were three and a half years old, not four. Don’t doubt that he is, but his sleeping around after his time in the corps is not our problem.”
Sling’s jaw tried to work itself back into place, and eventually the stable pony had to physically push it back with a forehoof. “….so…so what does his raging sex addiction have to do with this favor of yours?”
“Nothing, directly,” she replied. “But the zebra that put him and his crew up to the job of killing my troopers and ambushing caravans passing through the checkpoints, she’s not stupid. She’s been a pain in my ass for years, even more so now that I’m a major and not a private chasing down raiders and bandits. She’s hit slavers, merchants, traders, anything attached to Union business or logistics has been her personal bitch ever since the war with the Runners. I’ve lost one other squad in exactly the same circumstances as the one you came across, and two of my resupply convoys and a merchant caravan went missing around the same time. I’m down to four squads until the rest of my company comes back from training maneuvers at Fort Wiley and they’re needed here in town. I’m taking a big risk as it is just sending one out to collect the corpses up north. That’s where you come in.”
“….me?”
And now I lay the bait… “Yes, you. My favor is simple, and you had enough guns on you that I figure you know your way through a firefight, so you’re my freelancer. Run her down, put her out of my misery and bring back proof of the deed. She’s wasted enough slaver caravans and collection parties that the caravan master with the incoming caravan will give you a somewhat fair chance at airing your wishes to him. He may tell you to piss off, he might kill you anyway, or he might even offer to let you buy your runaways right there through the caravan without having to go through the main office in Stifla. I have enough pull with guilds that he won’t bother you over how they came to be in your company in the first place. Not if he values his balls as much as I think he does.”
As she’d thought, Sling Shot saw her “offer” for what it was almost immediately. “….that’s a hell of a risk for me to take for something that’s more likely to get me killed than to get me what I want. Particularly when it serves your needs first before I even get to see to mine.”
“Your other choice is to sit here and wait for the slavers to arrive, at which point they’ll either kill you or take you and your kid to the pens with your friend and her colt,” Colada pointed out. “And we both know you aren’t going to do that.”
The scarred stable pony sat there and glared death back at her, as if trying to murder her through sheer vision of hate alone….and she didn’t doubt that she would have if she could’ve pulled it off. “….you have no idea what I want to do right now.”
“I’ll take that as a ‘yes’,” she said, taking a slight risk in taking her eyes off this mare just long enough to fetch a map from her left desk drawer and rolling it out across the desktop. “Fortunately for you, I’ve dealt with Julaya enough to know how she runs her crews. If she’s not knocking over a caravan herself, she’ll have some hired guns do it for her and have them bring their haul to a pre-arranged rendezvous point that’s usually within a day’s walk. My eastern checkpoint was taken out three days ago, resupply caravan never made it through and there was evidence that a merchant and his wares got waylaid too. And now that I know my north checkpoint is gone too, I can surmise that her fallback point is somewhere to the northeast…”
Even as she’d spoken her eyes began to trace upward from the center of the map, quickly locking onto a small pair of waffle-pattern lines that indicated the road system for a small town or granary silo site, and her right forehoof slipped up and tapped onto the leftmost set of lines—
“This town here, to the northeast of us, used to be a farming community in the old world. There’s a granary a few miles away from it as well. These are the only two defensible locations within a day’s walk of either of my checkpoints, rest of the area there’s pretty flat and barren, just a few hills to the west of the town for cover. If she’s not there, there’s a good chance some of the trade commodities and supplies she’s stolen will still be stashed there. Before today, I’d thought her either to my southeast or the northeast, and with the squad I lost last week to a raider ambush I wasn’t risking the town’s safety to do a concentrated search in both areas. With the information you’ve brought me, I know where to look now.”
“….how do you know it was raiders that killed some of your troopers last week?”
“The way they left the bodies, and those of the second resupply caravan that went missing,” Colada shivered, an unbidden memory flashing back small bits of the aftermath to her—severed limbs, flesh and meat torn off of bones and skeletons, and mares….no, no need to go back over what had been done to the mares. “Bandits and thieves don’t do what raiders do to their victims. Their ambushes are pretty crude, but if a squad is particularly green it’s usually enough to get the drop on them. Wasn’t expecting raiders being near a road leading directly to Trotpeka, it was supposed to be a quick check on the caravan to make sure it wasn’t having problems with its wagons or brahmin.”
The stable pony’s brain briefly latched onto a theory she’d long ago discarded, but it was easy to understand why she’d leap to the conclusion. “You don’t think this Julaya is coordinating with them, do you?”
“Not on purpose. They’ll rape you to death just for walking by them, and that’s if they’re not hungry. Any sign that they’re coordinating their attacks on my supply routes is pure accident. I just have the bad luck of having to deal with both of them at once at a time when half my standing force is off the reservation.”
Sling Shot finally fell silent and lumbered off of the lounge sofa, reaching the desk in a few tired steps and slapping her PipBuck-adorned leg onto the desk as her magic began to play with the various dials and buttons mounted on the ancient Stable-Tec hardware. Her eyes would flash back and forth between the map and the Pip-Buck’s display every few seconds, and when Colada deigned to take a look at the display she saw what looked like a digitized map being scrolled and panned about and which was very similar to the map now proudly on display on her desk….
“….I want my gear back if I’m going anywhere,” Sling Shot finally muttered, moments after she’d finished fiddling with her Pip-Buck. “All of it.”
She wanted to feel a sense of accomplishment at finding a solution to her current problems, but all she could muster was a somewhat unpalatable aftertaste of shame at using a hurt mother’s desperation for her own ends. “…we can debate whether the rifles are really yours afterward, if you come back. But I’ve no objections as to the rest of it. You need to set out at first light tomorrow morning if you want to catch her before she gets word that Lucky’s crew is dead. Once she finds out she’ll vanish into the wastes and you won’t find her again. You get one shot at this. Make it count.”
--------------------------------------
It was pretty telling of the trouble she’d been in, that she could understand she was not waking up the way she usually did.
Usually, she’d wake slowly but surely. First her eyes would open, get stung by an increased light level (despite the fact that the wasteland was eternally blocked from the sun by an endless cloud cover), and shut themselves and try to forget that she’d just woken up. But it would never work, and her brain would start firing up, usually by teasing her with bits and snippets of whatever dream she’d been having. She’d get to sorting through it, trying to remember, and the mental effort would start waking up the rest of her. Legs, body, tail, eventually the rest of her realized it was time to start a new day and assault her senses with the tension and aches of having been completely still for several hours. Unless the pups hadn’t decided to lick her awake and drown her in dog slobber. And then she was usually up and awake and screaming for some help with dealing with the sudden assault to her coat and mane.
So step two, then, was stretching herself and relieving those aches. Felt really good most of the time, though more than once Mom had given her a good verbal thrashing for letting her tail flick about all over the place while she stretched out the back half of her body. Apparently she wasn’t supposed to let her tail hike up or curl around her hindquarters while she was stretching herself, especially in a boy’s presence. She supposed that made a little sense.
Step three, after her morning stretches were done, was to find somewhere to relieve herself in peace and quiet, and maybe clean herself up some with a little water and a dab of that coat conditioner/shampoo packet of which she had dozens of stuffed into a little bag in her travelling saddle labeled “HYGIENE KIT MKII”. It wasn’t much, but it was still better than letting the dirt and grime build up to a point where she got smelly.
Then came breakfast. Most of the time it was food scrounged up from the town market the day before—the Stable rations were too good-tasting to be using them all the time, and were saved for occasions when no suitable food could be found elsewhere. Between herself and Mom, they still had roughly five months’ worth of Stable-made rations left, and they were worth saving. The military MREs, however, were just as bad as those old journals from the library said they were (the hardtack crackers and biscuits notwithstanding)—even Max and Mona refused to eat the things most of the time, and just ignored their helpings or even tossing them out a window if they were displeased enough with their food offerings. And they created…problems, later on, when the military MRE meals had run their course through her digestive system. Meal Refusing to Exit was an eerily accurate insult.
So the military food was usually used either as a trade commodity, or as a last resort meal when no one could bring themselves to use up a Stable MRE that was best used on the road where they couldn’t guarantee they would get to a town with a food market within the day. She was surprised that the military MREs could fetch a decent count of caps, but then she hadn’t lived up here long enough to not get picky with what food came her way.
This time, when she first opened her eyes, she did so slowly, and realized within a few seconds that this wasn’t going to be a normal morning.
For starters, she had plastic tubes stuck into her left foreleg—when she tried to move it, she could feel something inside her leg pulling on the tubes, and she stopped moving almost immediately. Her body—her whole body—was in varying degrees of pain, like the nerves themselves had been attacked by some invisible and evil force. She had a mild headache that stretched all across her brain. And for the two seconds that she kept her eyes open, the light that assaulted her tried to make her headache worse, and she didn’t want any light shining onto her, ever again. She hoped noise didn’t make it worse too.
That mild, fleeting hope was destroyed when something behind her beeped, once, and cause her headache to pulse sharply for a brief moment.
“….som…somepony turn tha’ off,” her mouth slurred softly, barely moving or obeying her mental instructions to work in a proper and dignified manner.
She should have kept her mouth shut. Her weak cry for help inadvertently brought more noise into her world, in the form of a very exhausted and yet relieved pony that was only a few feet away—
“—lly, was that you?” Kite’s voice mumbled in shock—
Her hooves clomped on what sounded like soft ground, which was fine, but her voice wasn’t fine at all. It made her headache angry and want to start beating up her brain. “Ghhh…not s’ loud….head hurs…light too…”
She felt a slight tingling sensation in her ears, and suddenly the world was a lot…quieter. Not that it was making that much noise to start with, but she’d take what she could get. Thank the stars Mom had finally gotten around to teaching the rest of them that hearing spell of hers last week….
“—at better?” Kite’s muffled voice whispered, barely audible…but her headache was not displeased with this level of noise, and gradually backed off of its attack on her brain.
“….a lil’,” she sighed, when her mouth had a brief fit trying to say “better” without it coming out like “butter” or “buther”. She kept her eyes closed, in blissful darkness, afraid that adding more light would only enrage her headache again.
“….do you feel as bad as you look?”
“…how doai look….”
“Like you got beat up by a yaoi gai and forgot to thank it for going easy on you.”
Her brain found that funny for some reason, but even just snorting her laughter out her nose hurt (and probably launched a bit of snot out to boot), and she just burrowed her head deeper into the stiff pillows beneath her head. Even as hard as they were, they were better than the hardwood floors or the stiff bedsprings she’d been resting on these last few weeks. “….nuu laughin’….hurs…”
“…sorry…jus…just trying to make sure you really are okay….do you remember what happened yesterday? With the bug that stung you?”
The mere mention of that hideous, terrifying thing brought the events in question back to the front of her mind, when moments ago she’d not even been aware that she remembered. Odd how memories worked. But now that Kite had said something about it, she could remember it well enough. The cat-sized bug, with its huge pincers and freakishly scary, pointy tail, the way Max and Mona had stirred it out of its hiding place underneath one of those broken sky wagons and kept trying to pick a fight with it, that gut-churning feeling that told her this was not something the pups were supposed to be messing with and having to shield the suckers from the bug’s wrath when it got tired of being harassed and lashed out with its tail….
…and the cold, numbing sensations that had hit her limbs almost immediately, even as she pulled one of her guns out to try and shoot it….
“….wha was tha’ thang…stung me, good…”
“It was a radscorpion,” Kite’s voice replied softly, much to the pleasure of her headache which chose to continue calming down instead of lashing out at her brain again…or maybe it was this soft, cooling sensation that was flooding through her head at that moment. “They’re what the old world scorpions changed into, after the megaspell event. Nopony’s sure how it happened, they just got a lot bigger and meaner. Folk think it has something do with the megaspells, or whatever the zebras used in their balefire bombs. Doesn’t change the fact that they’re nasty things to deal with. You were stung by one of the smaller varieties, a bark. It was just a juvenile, not full grown, or….or things would be a lot worse right now.”
A lot worse….like….
…dead worse?
Thankfully, Kite kept on talking, pulling her away from the brief thought that she’d barely escaped death, and her horn brushed against her skull for a brief moment, enough for her to tell that this nice, refreshing sensation pulsing through her head was coming from Kite’s horn and not some small breeze passing by. A light healing spell, maybe? “…anyways, when we got a look at what stung you….we had to make a hard choice. Sling and I were arguing about where to go, after that mess with the bandits posing as troopers. She wanted to tell them about it, I didn’t wanna go anywhere near a Union garrison because…well, runaways getting caught never turns out well. But you getting hurt….that kinda changed things. Only help we could find you in time was the garrison….so here we are….”
Even as whacked-out and slow-thinking as she was, El-tee didn’t need any further information to figure out what Kite was alluding to. Runaways from the Union’s slave system, going straight into a Union garrison…well, that kinda defeated the purpose of being a runaway, didn’t it?
That didn’t change the fact that it hurt her on the inside, in ways that oddly enough seemed like it was worse than the bug’s venom. “….whas gonna happen t’ya?” she cried meekly. “Can’t they jus…leya go….”
“…it….it doesn’t work like that,” Kite sighed sadly, and for some strange reason one of her forehooves started poking at her face…or at least, it was strange until she realized the mare was just wiping away tears she couldn’t feel just yet, even as she pulled her horn back and the cool, invisible waves washing through her head began to settle into a stable, persistent feeling throughout her brain that kept it at ease and refreshed. “Telling them what happened to their troopers only got you and your mother out of trouble. Otherwise we’d all be going to the pens. Sling struck out this morning on some…some stupid hope that taking care of their problem will get her a chance to convince them otherwise….”
“…mo…momma’s not ‘ere?”
“….no. She wanted to wait until you woke up, but she wasn’t sure when that would be, and she wanted to be back before nightfall….I’m sorry, she really wanted to be here….”
Something stirred behind her, pressed against her spine, and shortly afterward that something began to shuffle and stretch its stubby claws against her as it slowly woke up, a soft bark escaping its maw as it yawned….
“Max and Mona stayed with you the whole time,” Kite murmured soothingly. “Even bit the crap out of anypony that tried to separate you from them. Did a surprising amount of damage to a couple of ponies…”
She almost spat “Bad Maxie”—Max was the one with a tendency to bite things or ponies he didn’t like—until she felt a muzzle brush against her neck and start nuzzling her cheek, and decided she could let that go, this time.
“….they gonna take ‘em?”
“They should be okay. They only bit people that tried to move them. Folks figured out that if they left the pups alone they’d behave, mostly. The worst they did after those short biting episodes was get under hoof of the nurse setting up these IV drips and….”
“…an’ what?” she moaned, trying to coax more information out of Kite as she began to stretch out her back legs….
….until she felt something inside her….in a place where she really didn’t want that something to be….
“…..K-Kite….thers sumthin’ up ma butt….”
“It’s a catheter,” Kite explained simply and calmly. “And it’s not stuck up your butt…exactly. It’s…well, it helps pass urine out of unconscious patients if they’re expected to be out for a while. Don’t pull on it or mess with it.”
Her body went cold still, suddenly far more sharply aware of this…this foreign object that was somewhere it wasn’t supposed to be. She supposed that made sense, in a way. She’d always wondered how injured or sick ponies…took care of business, if they were out cold for longer than usual. But that didn’t change the fact that she did not like this thing being where it was, and she wanted it out! Now!
“….get it out,” she croaked, struggling to move and get up in some fashion that wouldn’t disturb the thing in the place she didn’t like it being. Nothing worked so far—now that she knew it was there, it was like everything she did only made her even more aware of it, and it was starting to scare her when she felt a sharp, prickling sensation begin to creep up her spine from that spot where the thing was. “Get it out.”
“…Elly, stay still, it’s okay—“
“Get it out!” she shrieked back. She didn’t care that it might probably get shoved back in if she fell unconscious again and didn’t wake up for a while. She was awake right now, and she didn’t like it being there! It felt really weird and super-embarrassing and disgusting! She wasn’t some little baby foal with no diapers, she was a semi-grown up pony and she wanted some measure of dignity in her life! That included not having little sharp needles and tubes being shoved in places they had no business being in! “Get it out!!”
…okay, maybe she was acting a bit babyish right then, but oddly enough the fleeting anger and embarrassment kinda worked to wake her up a bit, energized her nerves and muscles to a point where she start to tell that she had a rather fuzzy and itchy blanket over her body, that she was apparently sleeping on a tough folding camp cot with some tough fabric that wasn’t canvas or cloth, maybe that super-tough nylon stuff—
And her growing insistence on getting that thing out of that place she didn’t want it in was already working. Instead of trying to argue with her over or telling her to pipe down and take it, Kite decided to just go ahead and give in, and before she knew it she found herself being pinned down by the mare’s magic as she pulled the blanket off of her to accede to her demands—
“—ght , all right I’ll get out it just…sit still—“
El-Tee promptly went limp, lest she damage….certain parts of herself by thrashing against that uncomfortable feeling back there. It was embarrassing enough to have to have somepony else’s eyes there, she didn’t want them being there any longer than they had to be. “….jus’ get it over with….”
“Stay still,” Kite warned, even going so far as to press a foreleg down on her hindquarters to keep her still. “This is going to feel weird.”
More weird than having it there to start with!? she shrieked silently, nonetheless willing herself to remain as still as a statue. Mostly. Her left ear twitched a bit, and she was pretty sure her tail wanted to start trembling and shaking out of a terrifying sense of anticipation o—
“—ooooaawoaaaaa—“
No, weird wasn’t the word for the sensation striking her nethers right then, it was actually downright painful! She had no idea something so small could even fit where this thing was right now!! It wa—
As quickly as the sensation began, it was over, and suddenly she felt a great sense of relief and….and space? Like that thing was taking up room and now that it was gone, she felt lighter? It couldn’t have been that heavy….maybe her brain just didn’t like it and enjoyed feeling the sensation of having no foreign objects in places they didn’t belong….
“There, it’s out,” Kite’s voice grumbled with a slightly heavy sigh. “Don’t see any blood following the catheter out either, so you’re good there. Might want to wait and see if you pass blood the next time you have to go before we know for sure that everything there’s working.”
That’s…a gross way to find that out….
…still, that was one less thing to have to explain to whoever was supposed to be watching her, if it wasn’t Kite. And her short panic attack did manage to wake her up enough that she could actually speak complete, coherent sentences and not sound like she was on some stupid drugs or something. Got her brain working a little more clearly too. Kite’s healing spell was helping too, she guessed.
“….medical ponies can be really gross….”
Kite’s snickering lasted only a couple of moments, but it was enough to uplift her spirits. A little. “…yes, medicine is not always about healing broken bones and cuts. Lots of little things here and there, none of it glamorous or even exciting. Sometimes, it can just be really disgusting. Like that catheter.”
Annnd this is a good point to say ‘stoppit’. “….I don wanna know how the other thing gets taken care of. Let’s jus’ leave it a mystery. Embarrassed enough…”
“…yeah, sure,” the mare agreed hastily. “…do…do you need to—”
“No,” El-Tee answered swiftly, even though she still felt a tingle of pain there that made her want to. “…not right now, anyway. And you can quit brushing my face, Maxie.”
A short, disappointed whine rumbled through her face, but the husky pup nonetheless finally stopped rubbing against her neck and awkwardly hopped off the cot, much to the surprise of Mona who yelped quietly at the sudden appearance of her brother atop her tail….she guessed, anyway…
A sharp rip of vacuum-sealed plastic caused her ears to perk up, and she finally found a reason to try and open her eyes—
“Most of our stuff got locked up when the troopers found out BJ and I were runaways,” Kite’s voice said, just as the sound of an MRE tray’s cooking enchantment flared to life and began preparing the food underneath the tray cover. “But your mom dropped off a couple of these before she left. Figured you could use a decent breakfast if you woke up in time. Breakfast…Menu number…five? Some kind of apple and cinnamon-flavored oatmeal, biscuits, and…hash brown casserole? The hell’s a casserole?”
El-Tee’s stomach inadvertently growled at the promise of a decent meal, for once. “Hash brown casserole…much better than just plain shredded hash brown, it’s got like…onions, and cheese, and stuff….”
Kite’s stomach grumbled a little too, at that. “Oooo, that does sound good.”
At first things looked really, really blurry when her eyes finally peeled open. All she could see was this…this dark purple mass, which she guessed was Kite, and a drab blurry mass all around her. As she forced her forward half to at least shift upright and give her a normal view of the world a smaller, silvery blur popped up to her right, with a couple of tan blobs being held above it and dumping smaller blurred objects onto the silver thing….
“….oh, wow, my eyes are messed up,” she moaned, rubbing at said eyes with a foreleg out of habit, even though it did nothing to clear her vision up. “All I see are blurs. And this big purple blob with an ugly red hat.”
“So I didn’t brush my mane this morning, so what?” Kite laughed back, and the top of the purple blob shook a little, spreading the red mass atop it all around. “Your eyes might be a little messed up for a bit. Side effect of the sedative the main nurse here hit you with to keep you under. I’ve stopped the drip feed, you shouldn’t have gotten the dose that you did. You might still feel a little drowsy today. Say you eat breakfast, take care of anything that needs doing, and just nod off again, sleep off the rest of this venom poisoning? Sound good to you?”
What a silly question! Medical orders to sleep all day and do nothing? Who wouldn’t like the sound of that once in a while? “I’d sleep for two days if I could…..and what happened to that…radscorpion?”
“Dead,” Kite answered flatly. “Think Sling was so mad at it she just crushed it to death without thinking about it, but thankfully she limited her spell to the body. Tail was left intact.”
“…why would that matter?” she pondered aloud, inwardly feeling a little guilty even though it was a hideous bug that had nearly killed her. The thing had only attacked her because the pups had been bothering it….
“Anti-venom is actually made from the venom itself,” the mare explained, her blob-like form shuffling a little as the MREs neared the end of their cooking cycle. “There’s a clinic in Stifla the Union runs that keeps a bit of stock of all the venomous species they can find, and they’ve got methods of getting the venom from the animals without killing them. But it’s a very slow process and there’s usually not enough to send out to all the garrisons. I had Sling cut the stinger end of the tail off, where the poison gland is, so that the medical personnel here could make the anti-venom you needed. The thing wouldn’t have survived without its stinger regardless, she did it a favor killing it first.”
Even if she did it only ‘cause she was really mad at it….
“…so what about you?” she asked next, not just to change the subject (even if it was just as uncomfortable) but because she starting to get this ugly, itchy feeling that Kite wouldn’t say anything about it unless she made her. “What are they gonna with you and Beige?”
Her answer came not from Kite, but from a new and completely alien visitor that was just now creeping up into range of her blurry vision. Dark bluish, about Kite’s size, and—
“They’ll be escorted back to the slave pens in Stifla with the next guild caravan that comes through,” the new blob answered stiffly, coming to a stop next to Kite, who seemed to physically recoil slightly at the new blob’s presence. “My hooves are tied on that matter, the best I can do is make sure you and your mother don’t get thrown in with them.”
“…and where is my mom right now?” she asked of this new alien blob, though by now her vision was starting to clear up and show that this blob was indeed another mare, with a dark blue coat, littered with several scars across her body, and she was even missing half of her right ear….
“Your mother’s out running an errand for me,” the half-eared mare replied, coming to a stop next to the wheeled cart where the MREs were sitting. “I’m the commander of the garrison here. Major Berry Colada. You’re Light Tail, I assume? Would fit with that tail of yours.”
The joke that everypony gets, El-Tee grumbled quietly to herself, her tail flicking once out of annoyance. Sure, it was a neat way to get a name, but couldn’t have Mom been a little more…original? Like, Mom’s name was Sling Shot, and that didn’t seem to match up with anything about her except that she could shoot a pistol better than anypony else in the Stable. “….if you need help to figure out somethin’ that obvious maybe you shouldn’t be a major.”
Major Colada’s eyes were starting to become clearer and clearer to see—which was probably a bad thing, because she looked a little less than amused by her smart-mouth comment. “…sassy little thing, aren’t you?”
“You want sassy and little? Maxie down here’s got that covered,” she quipped, briefly poking her head over the edge of the cot to make sure the mutts were still there. To her great relief, they’d remained stationary, contenting themselves with just sitting there and staring at all the ponies gathering around them, though they were starting to take a little more interest in Colada….
“Mona’s the quiet one, but only for a while. Think she’s a bit smarter than her littermate too, sh—”
“Yeah, you look like you’ll be fine after all,” Colada groaned loudly, her head already bowing in defeat and exasperation. “Even getting a decent breakfast in bed, lucky filly.”
Got her flustered and annoyed with me already, good. Shouldn’t be too hard to get some answers out of her, if she wants me to shut up…
“Speaking of which, ya got any meat or somethin’ the pups can snarf on? Kite only brought breakfast for two and these guys hate military rations, they actually toss them out windows or in trash cans. Kinda funny, really.”
For a military-type pony, Colada gave in to her request more quickly than she’d have expected. “….shouldn’t be too hard to scrounge something up,” the major said hesitantly. “Provided, of course, you can do something for me in return.”
It was both funny and eerily terrifying how quickly Max and Mona came to the conclusion that the major wasn’t being entirely friendly with her request. Within a moment she heard a quiet, soft growling beneath her and looked down to see both pups standing up on all fours, slowly baring the front of their jaws to the strange pony that was seemingly threatening their master—
“Hey, stop that!” she shrieked down at the mutts, lest they do something awful, like bite the major (even if she did something to deserve it later). “Stop that or you don’t get breakfast!”
Max’s ears twitched slightly, and he eventually backed off, a little. He wasn’t growling anymore, and only showed the tips of his front teeth, but he didn’t sit back down. Mona, surprisingly, was a little harder to corral—she eventually had to swat her on the nose with a light bump of her right forehoof before she got the message, but even then she refused to take her eyes off the major, and her ears never came back up, but stay flat against her head.
The message was clear, in any case: “We do not like you!”. And given what had happened to her yesterday, she couldn’t be completely mad at them. They might have even sensed something less than honorable about what she’d just said…
“…whatever you want, make it quick,” El-Tee warned when she was certain neither of them were going to suddenly lunge forward and bite the major on the leg. “And it’d better not prove these jokers right.”
“….I was just going to ask you about your stable,” the major said cautiously, inadvertently putting a slight shock into the filly’s heart that grew cold inside her. “Whether anypony else might be wandering out, or if it could be contacted.”
Suddenly Mom’s story makes so much more sense, she realized with a sickening horror. If everybody up here thinks they’re all dead, they won’t try to find a way inside and find out otherwise…
“…they’re…they’re all gone,” she spoke in a hushed, cracking tone. She was faking it, but only a little. All she really had to do to make it seem real was think back to days when all she worried about was homework and getting back at Sun Star, or Aunt C’s crazy antics, or Grape Jam and Emmy and all the lazy afternoons they spent together, and then the tears would come whether she wanted them to or not. “….the power, it went out, this huge swarm of radroaches swarmed in and…and Mom barely got us out before the big door slammed shut….”
“I think that’s enough to answer your questions,” Kite chipped in next, her voice carrying a dark, sinister undertone with her words. “Or has the Union dropped down to raider levels by robbing mass graves?”
Figuratively cornered into a bad spot and surrounded by increasingly unfriendly faces (and a couple of sharp sets of dog teeth), the major’s body language began to display some subtle signs of distress as she hurriedly excused herself from the big tent and left them alone once more.
So much for getting answers about Mom….
“….great,” she sputtered in defeat, her head plopping down onto the cot’s pillows as her mood began to shift into a cloud of disappointment. “Thanks for scaring her off….”
There was a soft flash from the MREs as the cooking enchantments finished their work, and soon the scent of fresh hash brown casserole and biscuits began to penetrate the air and seep into her nose. “….wait, you weren’t trying to get rid of her? T-then….then why did you—”
“If people thought that my Stable was still intact, they’d try everything to get in,” she answered before the question could be finished. She honestly thought Kite would’ve seen that already. “As long as folk think the power’s dead and the door can’t be opened, they won’t be too anxious to spend any time and effort to check it out for themselves. It’d take a lot of work to get that door open and it’d be hard to justify it if all their information tells them that there’s nopony left in there. They can get guns and bullets anywhere, and for a lot less trouble than if they were to try to crack open a stable that’s out of power and full of dead bodies.”
“….but you don’t believe any of that, do you? You think there’s still a chance that they’re alive?”
“They have to be,” she said instantly, stirring from her brief respite to pull at the cart with a foreleg, wincing slightly when she used the wrong one and ended up tugging on the tubes still stuck into her left leg. And the stupid cart was too far away to start with, now that she looked at it. “Aunt C wouldn’t let everypony down like that, she’d find a way. Some back-up power battery, maybe even getting the main generator back up, something….”
“….you had an aunt? Sling never mentioned having any brothers or sisters…”
“Have,” she insisted in a sharp, strong voice. “…and…and she’s not really my aunt. She’s just…she was the only friend mom ever had in the stable. She was always around as far back as I can remember. Birthdays, holidays, just plain hanging out and stuff…it was almost like she was family from the start, even though she was a pegasus and we were unicorns, I just called her Aunt C. I don’t ever remember callin’ her anything else. Even after she tried to take me flying in the gym room and found out I don’t like heights and almost barfed on her back.”
Kite’s magic carefully floated one of the trays off of the cart, then pushed the cart closer to the cot for El-Tee to awkwardly poke at it with her own magic, which she quickly found to be a little difficult to use without making her headache worse. She could use it in short spurts, but anything longer than five seconds was out of the question. “….so Aunt C was short for….”
“Cloud Wind,” she said, a touch of wistfulness creeping into her memories as she spoke. “Never seems to take anything seriously, ‘less she has to. Even kept buggin’ Mom now and then like she wanted ‘em to be like coltfriend and marefriend! Even if it was weird it never stopped gettin’ under Mom’s skin and freaking her out!”
“And yet you think this prankster surrogate aunt of yours could save your stable? Was she security too?”
“Yup! One of the best! Even made her the stable safety officer, she can make decisions ‘bout things and folks’ safety that not even the security chief can give her grief over. She was always talkin’ about the chief being a hard-headed pony when it came to postin’ security ponies in jobs or positions they weren’t really prepared for, they never did get along too well. But the Overmare always had her back, mostly. Kinda rare that she makes a decision that the Overmare doesn’t agree with….”
Her first bite of breakfast was that hash brown casserole, and after what felt like years of not having a taste of the stuff, it was almost like a heavenly dessert melting into her taste buds. The flavor was mixed up just right, no one ingredient was overwhelming any of the others. Cheese, onion, sliced fried potato, and whatever else was mixed in…all of it, combined into a singular indiscernible taste that felt distinct and zesty all at once. She even forgot that she was lying in a cot, inside a really big tent, getting antidote for a poison sucked into her body through a tube in her left leg. For a moment, anyway.
And these were just rations. How she wished she could get the ingredients to make a fresh batch of it with her own magic and two hooves….
“….holy gods, this stuff is good,” Kite’s voice moaned pleasurably, and when El-Tee looked back to see what Kite had bit into, she was surprised to see the mare’s eyes turn glassy and dazed, as if she’d never tasted anything like a hash brown casserole before…
…and it occurred her, ever so sadly and briefly, that she probably hadn’t….
“….hey, could you mix up the fruit flavor drink packets?” she asked gently, nosing her packet on the wheeled cart closer to the edge to point it out to the mare. “It kinda hurts to use magic for long, I don’t wanna make this headache worse by shaking a canteen….”
Kite’s magic—an oddly light purplish field of ambient mana—enveloped the packet and pulled it off the cart without protest, even pouring some water from one of her canteens into a sealable drinking bottle and mixing the packet into the water. Within a few moments Kite had two such bottles in her grasp, violently shaking them up and turning the clear, cold water into a bluish shaded fluid that made her taste buds water with anticipation.
“Don’t think I ever got a ration with this….blue berry rush?” Kite said with a slight grunt as she churned the bottles over and over to get every last powdery bit dissolved and mixed into the water. “What is it, exactly? Blueberry?”
“I don’t really know, it’s weird tasting. Good, just…weird. Guess it’s kind of an acquired taste.”
“…well, whatever it is, you need the electrolytes in the stuff regardless. Now that you’re sort of up and awake the IV drip will have to come out. Instructions I were given were to just go with the anti-venom if I judged it safe to do so, so you’ll have to keep yourself hydrated. They don’t have a lot in the way of medical supplies.”
“….then I guess it’s a good thing I hoarded a coupla packets here and there….”
“I’ll see if I can fetch them from your bags later,” Kite said, just as she’d finished tormenting the water bottles. She floated one out onto the cot, slightly loosening the cap for her, and kept the other one for herself.
El-Tee almost didn’t ask what she wanted to, at first. The conversation was going so nicely, Kite seemed to have forgotten that she was slated to be a slave again—or she’d just resigned herself to it and was trying not to do anything to upset her. Either way, it was a rather quiet and peaceful moment they were having, one that she was loathe to destroy….
….but she just had to know. It was her mom, she just had to.
“…what you were saying earlier, about mom? About where she was going?”
Kite’s mouth stopped short of biting off a chunk of her biscuit, her face visibly disappointed with the question she’d just been given out of nowhere. But whatever she thought of the timing, she didn’t try to talk her out of pestering her over it. “….she….she went bounty hunting. The zebra that major wants dead….she thinks taking her out will give her a chance to convince the slavers to…to do whatever she wants them to do with us, I guess. The only thing they might agree to is to just…sell me and BJ to her directly, without having to go through the guild hall in Stifla….but that’s a long shot at best. Worst they may do is kill her outright for asking…”
She felt that cold thing in her heart again, this time in her stomach, and it stopped her lungs momentarily. “…she wouldn’t do that….would she?”
“She might, if she thinks it’s the best chance she has. It’s not like she can take them head-on.”
“I bet she could, if she thought it about it enough,” she mumbled back softly, content now to simply nibble away at her breakfast and try not to ruin any more of this conversation. “She’s probably got like, a dozen combat spells she can bust out if she gets desperate enough.”
--------------------------------------
I really, really wish I had bothered to learn some combat spells.
True to Colada’s words, she’d found her target at the small farm town half a day’s walk northeast of Galesville, occupying the largest building in the center of town. She could barely make out the structure of the granary and its silos several miles further down the wastes, but potential reinforcements were the least of her concerns.
In addition to the zebra she’d been sent to kill, she counted no less than a dozen armed souls of one sort or another—unicorns, earth ponies…four griffons, one of which seemed to be armed with a rather heavy-looking machine gun, complete with a backpack and a belt feed to the weapon itself. Even if it only had thirty seconds’ worth of ammunition, it was more than enough to tear her apart limb from limb. And most of the others were armed with one sort of rifle or another—M-series service rifles and marksman carbines, 5mm assault carbines, two R-series 5.56 rifles, and even a couple of bolt-actions (one in the hooves of an earth pony stallion, amazingly enough).
And all she had to face them down with was three pistols and a shotgun.
She swore at her enemies. She swore at the wasteland in general for making her life one large obstacle after another against murderous odds. But mostly she swore at herself for being too damn lazy to bother to read up on the majority of the combat spells in her book after nearly getting killed by a crazy nympho of a griffon. All she’d managed to learn in the two weeks she’d spent lounging around that debilitated hotel room in Stonewall was a direct mana burst spell that was easily manipulated and would do quite a bit of concussive damage with little thought, but required a great deal more energy and effort to turn it into a life-killing instrument of destruction. The most efficient form appeared to be a sphere, flung at the target at any speed she desired—the largest mana orb she’d fired off was roughly half her size and probably hit hard enough to plow a pony over, but she’d never actually used it against another living soul. Just fired it off at the air and watched it zip off for about thirty yards before it fell apart and disintegrated itself.
A rifle would have given her a tremendous advantage right off, perched just on top of this small hill and with just enough cover to shield her from their initial return fire….except that she had never been any good with a rifle. It wasn’t like shooting a pistol—with those, bullet trajectories were easily compensated for by simply adjusting her point of aim slightly in response to changing distances and the drop in bullet velocity as a result of that distance, and the ranges were short enough—twenty-five yards, max—that it was never that much of a shift, and there were almost no outside variables to contend with. And they were small enough for her to simply wrap a spell field around the grip, tight as death, and she could pop targets from bad-breath distance to twenty-five yards for as long as she wished. Rifles were a lot larger and longer to grapple with, and even with expert practice at manipulating multiple telekinesis spells on a singular object, she had never been able to qualify with any of the stable’s rifles when it came time for the yearly proficiency tests—one reason why she’d never managed to be more than the quartermaster and a back-up, unarmed security pony, except for the last week that she’d lived there in which the Overmare had overtly ordered everypony in security to go armed. She didn’t think it was the guns, either—all the others had done just fine with them, even the earth ponies, and the rifles shot to the sights when she slapped them into machine rests for yearly accuracy tests. She could never figure it out.
And now it was biting her in the ass, hard. Pistols and shotguns were fine, up close, but the vast open spaces of the wasteland was making it increasingly clear to her that she was going to end up on the losing side of a gunfight again if she lived out here long enough. Anypony with sense had a rifle of some sort, and most of the time lately her targets were shooting back at her at ranges she couldn’t engage them at. Hell, this might be that gunfight that finally got her killed outright….
….and without that zebra’s head, or some sort of proof that she was dead, she was never going to get a chance to get Kite and BJ out of the slavers’ dirty hooves. She wasn’t about to attack a slaver caravan and hope for the best, not until she could get a better idea of their numbers and armament. She wasn’t sure how long she could sit here on this hill and observe the town without at least one of these mercs coming out this way. And if she waited until nightfall to make her move, it would be too dark to even see ten feet ahead of her. Dusk was the best time, that period of the day when the darkness started to come….but by then she would only have a short amount of time to make her move. Thirty minutes, at most. That would mean spending the night in a town full of dead bodies, attracting all sorts of predators out looking for an easy meal.
The sensible, logical decision would have been to leave, to try and make it back to Galesville by nightfall, and tell Colada that the task was suicide…and she couldn’t bring herself to do it. To do so would have meant having to tell Light Tail that Kite and BJ wouldn’t be coming with them anymore, that they were going back into the slavery system and that there was nothing more she could do for them. And she knew how that would turn out. Ugly.
But more than that…Kite had saved her life. Not just by pulling three bullets out of her insides after she got her ass kicked and nearly killed, but by being there to guide them through the prairie and through what passed for civilization in the wastes. She wouldn’t have known which way to go to get away from the Union without her, how the slavers and the union worked, what threats lurked out there besides raiders and highway gangs. And somewhere along the way, she’d stopped being a book to the wastes and turned into…a friend. Perhaps the only one she’d make, given how much she tended to keep souls at bay. For all the things that Kite had done for them that hadn’t been asked for….
…for all of that, it was worth the risk to at least try to keep them out of that life. She wouldn’t be able to live with herself (or Light Tail, for that matter) if she turned around and gave up. Even if trying cost her her life, and took her away from her little girl.
So since that had been decided….
…how in the nine levels of Tartarus and hell was she going to take out a dozen mercenaries and their zebra patron without getting too shot up to live to tell about it? The griffon with the machine gun would have to die quickly, and the three souls with the 5mm carbines could put out a lot of lead themselves. There were about two dozen houses and buildings—it looked like the town had once held over two hundred, but most of them had fallen apart down to their very foundations. Only the town center, two streets worth of businesses, and a few houses nearby that could have doubled as lawyer’s offices were still intact enough to offer shelter. Her saving grace is that for the moment, all the mercs seemed to just be milling about, killing time, as though they were waiting for something or someone to come along and give them a reason to be more active. Two in particular seemed to be getting ideas for how they could better pass the time—a unicorn stallion seemed especially interested in one of the mares next to him, and she’d gone from dazed to upright and lively in about the time it took for the guy to start whispering things into her ear. She had a pretty clear idea what got her roused up so quickly….
Then again, it probably helped explain how ponykind had managed to survive this long after the megaspells. Always mating, always breeding, always foaling, no matter what.
She hoped Lucky Strike was not a sign that this innate breeding drive was starting to get out of control….
Just thinking about that stallion gave her the chills. Seventeen kids, at the least? Maybe more? Holy Celestia that’s….wow, he really couldn’t keep to himself….that’s gotta be giving Colada early gray hairs in her mane….
Unfortunately for the two would-be lovers (but perhaps better for her), the time for lazing about and doing nothing was quickly coming to an end. One of the griffons at the edge of the gathering was waving one of his forelimbs up, presumably rousing his fellow hired guns upright as he looked out at the end of the road. She shifted her binoculars upward, following the griffon’s gaze to try and find out what had his attention an—
—she felt her rear legs freeze up almost on cue, her tail trembling slightly as her body threatened to embarrass her harshly in the next couple of minutes….
Saurus.
Motherbucking Saurus, strolling down the battered, partially-buried streets with one bandaged wing and that perpetually pissed-off look that looked like he had enough rage to use it as a physical weapon. His dark, almost black feathered head and neck actually went very well with his dark tan furred body and was impossible to mistake for any other griffon given his size. Probably bigger than Ada, even.
She tried, and tried very hard, not to wet herself at the sight of him, and counted every second that passed as a victory as she tried to make sense of his presence here. Was he working with Julaya to find her? Was he just looking to make some extra caps on the side while he searched the wastes himself? Did he know these mercs and get word of Julaya’s location through a chance meeting somewh—
His beak moved, briefly, and then Saurus turned towards the large, central building a couple of blocks down the road to the south of the gathered mercs….
…and without much in the way of fuss or procrastination, they all gathered their gear and quickly fell in behind him.
Her body’s urge to involuntarily piss itself out of fear quickly faded as she tried to make sense of what had just happened. Moments ago she was trying to figure out to kill thirteen souls…and now she was watching a terrifying nemesis lead the group as they made their way to her main target and obliging her wishes to get herself in town without being spotted and shot at….
…and she couldn’t fathom why. What little she knew about him suggested he was anything but the “work-well-with-others” type. Hell, he’d killed one of the mercs he’d hired to help kill her at that scrapyard when he started voicing his doubts about what he’d been hired for. Why would he show up here, seemingly buddy-buddy with over a dozen of them, and have that dozen follow him with only a few spoken words?
Was he here to kill Julaya himself?
….whatever he’s doing, he’s just given me the chance to get close enough to start fighting on even terms, she relented, furiously stuffing her binoculars into her saddlebags, and then unzipping them from her saddle to slim down her profile some. She kept a few miscellaneous items out of the bags, just in case—her last two healing potions, one box of spare 10mm ammunition, forty loose rounds of 5.56mm ball ammo, and roughly twenty spare 00 buck shells. Out of habit and a deeply-ingrained paranoia she kept her entire supply of .44 Magnum and Specials on her, and at the moment had Grayhawk loaded with a full cylinder of .44 Specials. She kept the speed loaders loaded with Magnums, just in case she needed the extra power—she’d be feeding the .44 Specials in one at a time.
And if she used up most of her ammo, she hoped there’d be plenty of spare guns lying about by then for her to use.
It felt like an eternity to wait for them to congregate at the door to the central building, and then file inside one after the other. When the last soul passed through the door and closed it behind her, she slowly crept out around the side of the hill and made her way down the gentle slope to the remains of the town below. She didn’t exactly race down—she was afraid someone inside might catch sudden, rapid movement through a window more easily than a casual walk, and while her EFS compass was flooded with red hash marks, none of them appeared to be moving very quickly or urgently as the majority of them gathered around a pair of fairly stationary marks. It took her roughly three minutes to reach the edge of the outermost intact house—or as intact as a three-walled, partially collapsed structure could be, and with more available cover to work with she began to speed up her approach a little. She had her shotgun out and loaded to full capacity by the time she reached the central building a minute later—
—a brief flurry of voices leaked through a broken window on the building’s west side as she sneaked up beneath it, one of them almost instantly familiar to her with its harsh, cold roar—
“—ot terribly pleased with your efforts so far,” Saurus’s rough voice bellowed harshly. “I seem to recall a very specific conversation about you not holding up to our deal.”
The female that answered him did so in somewhat irregular Equestrian (but still quite clear and understandable), as if it wasn’t her first language…and was probably Julaya, given how…foreign, her voice sounded to her ears. “A deal I am not that anxious to see to quickly. Your reputation as a raping scoundrel does not give me confidence you will hold to it.”
Saurus’s growl briefly brought back the urge to urinate where she stood, but she quelled that irrational, unbidden fear lest she ruin the best shot she’d probably get at killing him. Think about El-Tee, think about your little girl, think about what he threatened to do to her—
“—sed me off enough to make me not care about getting some on the side. Maybe that little shit of a filly instead—“
“Yeah, well, I was out there this morning while you were messing around with your lover,” he snarled. “Found that slut of a stallion dead and disrobed, broken neck, no sign of a struggle, likely unicorn’s magic.”
“Impossible. I know of no unicorn with magic of that strength.”
“I do,” Saurus assured his still-unidentified counter-part. “The one I asked you to look for. Bitch flung a barrel at me like it was nothing—“
Sling felt her heart seize up inside her chest. Oh, fu--…he knows where I’m at—
“This same ‘bitch’ you claim to have ruined your wing?” the foreign female voice countered, oddly calm and undaunted by the raging predator before her. “To have survived your ambush—an outcome you engineered to begin with? To have slipped through your claws the next day when you used her as bait to draw out your pursuers? She seems more like the kind of mare I would welcome to my bed—“
A brief flare of frustration zipped through her thoughts. Why does every mare I run into up here want to sleep with me?!
“So if you did get around to finding her, you were just going to try to screw her?” Saurus added sharply, his voice beginning to grow a hard edge to it. “We had an agreement, remember?”
“I remember that you came to seek my assistance in finding her two weeks ago,” the foreign voice claimed. “You have yet to give me a compelling reason why I should do so. I might ask instead what you could offer me for the trouble.”
A brief moment of quiet only made his reply even more sinister. “…y’know what, screw it. I know where she is now, it’s not like I need your help anymore.”
“….then what—”
“You’ve built up quite a fortune the last few years,” he went on, as several of the red hash marks on her EFS slowly began to spread out across the compass overlay…perhaps surrounding this Julaya and whoever it was that had chosen to remain near her. “Some of it from the war, when you funneled over a hundred zebras out west through the southern pass in the valley. The rest from your years of robbing every Union-affiliated caravan you could hit. Nobody’s ever seen you spend that much of it whenever you crawl out of the wastes. So you’ve got plenty left for these guys to take when they flush that whore out of the garrison and pull her guts out.”
Her threatened intestines quivered with fright inside her belly, and a palpable sense of urgency and violence began to seep into the environment. Almost like she could taste it.
“….I knew you could not be trusted in the end,” the female uttered darkly. “I should have refused our deal from the start.”
“Yeah, you should have if you weren’t going to hold to it,” Saurus said, contempt coloring his words. “Been at this too long, Julaya. You got stupid. That stable bitch probably told Colada about everything she found at that checkpoint for some favors in getting her runaways out of trouble. If she hasn’t send squads this way yet, she will shortly. But all they’ll find is your dead ass cut to pieces and your lover strung up from the ceiling by her ribcage—”
Her body’s desire to embarrass her returned, and she found it a little harder to suppress it this time. She had to actually bite herself to give her nerves something to truly complain about.
“—J-Julie, what are w—”
“Hush, love,” the foreign female voice shushed the terrified mare gently. “We are not dead yet—”
“Don’t take too long with your fun,” Saurus’s voice interrupted. “Colada’s company won’t be understrength forever and we still gotta draw out two more squads before we can take the town. I’m gonna take stock of her haul over the last week, get her lockboxes cracked open. Gather up at the old grocer when you’re done.”
A flood of thoughts, plans, and emotions swarmed over her, teasing her sanity with several differing pleas and decisions. To leave this Julaya and her unseen lover to their grisly fates, and take enough “evidence” from the corpse to convince Colada she’d done the deed. To flee this increasingly horrific scene before the screams and cries could start and burn into her memory and haunt her. To do whatever it took to make sure she didn’t get found and included in the “fun” herself….
…and the moment a singular hash mark began to slide away from the group, the singular emotion that she came to rely on the most reminded her of the last words she’d heard from this murderous, sick-hearted griffon, and of the violence he’d threatened to put her little girl through….
…and she found herself suddenly clear-headed. No more confusion, or jittery thoughts. No overwhelming, piss-inducing fear.
Her good friend—rage—had reminded her that above all else, she simply wanted this evil griffon dead so that his filthy claws would never defile her daughter.
Her shotgun, chambered and ready to fire, rose up to the window along with her, the barrel barely an inch away from the cracked glass as she spotted Saurus’s backside trotting towards a door, inside what looked to be a large dining room that held over a dozen lust-crazed mercenaries surrounding their “prey” at the edge of her vision—
—she’d barely applied her hearing spell over her ears when the weapon blared out, smashing the window and filling the room with a brief yellow flash—
—she saw Saurus’s body fall, but couldn’t tell if it was a lethal hit, but with the second most-dangerous target out of the way, she shifted her aim to the group, swung the front bead sight over a griffon’s wide-eyed face just as he turned around to see what had just blown up behind him—
—a second blast splattered this griffon’s brain matter out through the hoof-sized exit wound the tight pack of .33-caliber pellets created as they bored through the skull, and Sling had just enough conscious thought to realize she had already racked the third shell into the chamber when the bead settled on her third victim—a pastel pink earth pony mare with an automatic rifle mounted to her battle saddle, her body twisting around to bring it into firing position—
—a single squish of roughly six and a half pounds of pressure put a third charge of buckshot into the mare’s front chest area, completely blowing through her battle saddle’s meager barding and causing her to stumble to the floor, slowly choking to death on whatever was left of her organs inside her chest.
Three shots. Three hits.
Just in time for the remaining ten mercenaries to get their bearings and start shooting back.
Sling bolted from the window, back into the town’s streets, as the room lit up with automatic fire and sent bullets into virtually every part of the environment around her immediate vicinity. She thought she heard a scream rise up out of the room as she fled, but she put little thought into it and focused more on escaping the veil of lead chasing her across the street. The central building in town had few houses facing its west side, and she was well on her way towards one now—the side of the build had a bit of its advertising still intact, which read “—TING SERVI—” above its front door and could have meant anything—
—a portion of the central building’s west wall seemingly exploded outward, sending planks of ancient wood scattering across the street, and the sight she saw in the hole when she looked back made her screech like a six-year old filly.
That machine gun-armed griffon had apparently plowed clean through the wall, was now standing upright, and was perhaps two seconds from getting a good enough bead on her and turning her into a thin, red paste.
She had just enough time to duck through the doorless front entrance before hell followed in after.
Even with her hearing spell muffling her ears, the harsh, grunt-like muzzle blasts of the machine gun were unmistakable. For certain the gun was making pulp out of the building’s walls—she swore she could hear part of the front facing of the building already coming apart as the endless stream of lead slugs ripped through the aged plaster and plywood, and as many of those bullets were continuing on full-steam to penetrate further into the building, she belatedly realized that she had no real cover in here, only concealment. And at the rate that damned gun was shredding the place up, it wouldn’t take very long for a bullet to find its way into her body—
—a chunk of hardened plaster and plywood sliced at her face as she scurried into a hallway, just around a broken receptionist desk, and she screamed again as she zipped down the hall, hooked a right through a half-smashed door that appeared to have a grime-crusted sign above it with a stencil image of a shower head—
—the porcelain tiled floor that crunched up beneath her panicked hooves told her that she had apparently just entered a communal bathing room, complete with a set of solid bath tubs th—
—that were apparently strong enough to withstand a 7.62mm slug that had expended part of its momentum, as several stray shots from the machine gun across the street clanged against the outside of one tub without seriously damaging it.
The strain of the thing upon her magic, tremendous as it was, was barely noticed in her panic-aided efforts to flip the tub over and put it between her precious flesh and the murderous hail of lead for at least the next seven seconds, tucking herself behind as it slammed back down onto the floor—
—a couple of bullets managed to cut through a couple of seconds later, and she feared she’d misjudged the value of her improvised cover—
…and the flurry of lead came to a merciful stop, the silence that followed seemingly more deafening than the gunshots themselves—
“—u two, circle around back, cover the exit!!” Saurus’s voice screamed, his tone one of absolute, seething rage and confirming that she had missed killing her target at a very poor moment. “Geralt, anything pops up, cut its head off with the pig!! If she’s still alive, leave her intact so I can take my payment out of her before I cut her head off!”
Sling’s guts, cold with fear, began having trouble wanting to retain their contents, though she managed to hold herself together through sheer force of will. Celestia rape me, I done pissed him all the way off…
A spat of gunfire, muffled by both her hearing protection spell and several walls between herself and the source, broke out somewhere in the town’s depths—
“—ck me, Julaya’s still alive!!” a stallion’s gravelly voice bellowed outside. “Sh—”
The voice suddenly fell silent, with no explanation for roughly three seconds until a singular, lone gunshot, from somewhere in the wastes behind her, finally managed to roll through the air at her location, and then that cold, icy terror in her warmed greatly with relief and gratitude.
She’d only met one soul that dared to take six hundred yard shots.
“—k it, Geralt put some lead on that hill, NOW—”
That monstrous machine gun opened up again, and when she didn’t hear any bullets tearing apart the walls around her she found herself with perhaps just enough breathing room to get out of this mess, though for the life of her she couldn’t see how he could hope to score any meaningful hits on a target that far off with area fire.
She could see, however, an opportunity to take it out while its attention wasn’t directed at her.
She leapt over the tub, shotgun and 5.56mm pistol out and ready to fire, and charged out of the communal bath and into an open doorway on the opposite side of the hall directly in front of her—
—she found herself in what looked like a small office, of all things, with a desk sitting on three broken legs and a pair of dented, heavily pitted file cabinets turned over onto their side near the far corner. The window behind the desk had been shattered, either by time or the hail of gunfire that had been directed at her, and through she saw the machine gun griffon with his weapon leveled upward at the hills, towards the southwest, and firing off short bursts of six to ten rounds in an effort to keep the rounds somewhat grouped together at his target—
—she started with the 5.56mm pistol, putting the entire cylinder into his lightly armored chest in just under a second and a half at a distance of thirty-two yards, and when his body staggered and dropped to all fours she started putting shotgun shells downrange in his general direction as quickly as she could work the forearm—
—she saw his body sag into the ground, thought it had been one of her three shells until she heard that singular shot again about three seconds later—
—but put the machine gun griffon’s fate out of her mind as Saurus’s raging scream bore through the hallway, spinning around and firing off her last two shells in the magazine tube through the wall, in what she hoped was in his general direction—
—the wasteland proved yet again that it was content to shift fortunes exceptionally quick, and within a minute of each change in luck. A half second after the second shell ripped a hoof-sized hole in the right wall, Saurus’s body seemingly teleported into the room, and his talons were picking her up and carrying her into the wall—
—said wall gave out under the force of his hateful charge, and though she escaped any major injury, she was still in the hateful, lust-crazed grasp of a crazed griffon with every intention of ripping her apart limb from limb if she didn’t do something right now—
—one talon managed the near-impossible feat of closing around her throat, while the other one began raining blows on her face that felt like she was being hit by an errant baseball—
“Shoulda stayed in yer damned hole in the ground!!” he roared furiously, a speck of saliva splattering her face as he screamed out his rage. “Think shit’s bad now?! Wait ‘till I get my claws on that loin spawn of yours!! I’ll have the little slut begging me for it in a month—”
Her eyes snapped open, all of her sensations seemingly dying in the instant it took for his implied threats against her precious filly to filter through her ears—
—her 10mm was almost touching his armored torso when she began emptying the magazine into him at point-blank range, ignoring the sharp ache between her withers and shoulder blades and focused on getting this insane creature off of her—
—after the fifth shot she found herself being flung off of him as he rolled over, his hind legs kicking her in the belly and between her haunches in the process, and she thought she felt a trickle of blood began to seep down the inside of her left hind leg—
—she righted herself, somewhat, rolling up onto her chest and shifting her aim back on his torso, started squeezing the trigger as quickly as she could get the orange-illuminated sights on him—
—his own pistol was leveled towards her, its open-top slide exposing much of its barrel and giving her a rather menacing glare as its muzzle erupted in a flash of bright whitish-yellow flame—
—she managed two hits on his torso, just below his head where she’d been aiming, and the impacts to his armor seemed to disrupt his breathing momentarily, because he stopped shooting and stumbled slightly—
—her pistol finally suffered its first malfunction since she’d left the stable. Her third shot went wide, missing his head entirely…and the slide failed to finish its cycle completely, hanging up as it slung forward. She felt the hang-up through her spell field almost immediately, and she instinctively racked on the slide to repeat the cycle, only for it to get stuck in the same position.
In roughly two glances she could tell that it wasn’t an empty casing caught between the ejection port and the barrel hood, and that Saurus was well aware of her malfunction and fighting through his pain to try and put a bullet between her eyes before she could fix it.
Her rapidly-growing rage spurred her into tossing the gun at him as hard as she could, hopefully buy her a second to get Grayhawk out and firing—
—his reaction was quick and predictable, but in the process his gun came off of her body as he slapped the flying pistol away from him with his free talon—
—she charged straight at him, crashing into his body and actually managing to bring him to the ground even as a familiar chorus of rapidly-strung booms began filling the air somewhere to her left—
—one hoof slammed down on his right talon, and she swore she could feel bone and that strange bird flesh crunching up and tearing up underneath as his hold on his pistol promptly fell slack. Her other forehoof starting swinging and kicking at his face, her blinding anger and hatred beginning to grow into an overpowering drive and flooding her with adrenaline and a singular desire to obliterate this foul creature before it could harm her daughter with its perverse plans—
—in the chaos and flurry of forelimbs, hooves, and an unbroken talon, she’d lost track of her environment, and of her own movements and that of Saurus’s, until a stray blow to her nose brought her just enough focus to see that she was now standing before a battered, injured griffon, who was backed up near the hole in the bath house’s wall he’d created with her body moments earlier, clutching his pistol in his uninjured hand and trying to get a bead on her—
—she promptly charged forward again and tackled him through the hole, carrying him back through the office and into the hallway, where she summoned a surge of magic to toss him through the doorway into the communal bathing chambers, and then ran in after him.
The entire time, her only overriding command was a familiar, ghostly command that had hounded her ever since she’d run into this sick bastard.
KILL HIM NOW!!!
That desire, that searing rage, had such control of her that she didn’t even flinch when that overturned bathtub began to slide across the broken tiles of the floor, kicked out towards by her eternal foe in a mad bid to crush her legs. She merely leapt over it as she ran onward, her eyes taking slight note of a rusted water pipe barely attached to the wall on her left and ripping it off in a flash of indigo light—
—Saurus’s pistol squeezed off two rounds, not waiting for a solid hit and instead firing the moment he sensed the barrel coming close to her general direction. The result was two rounds that grazed her shoulder and right cheek as she came down upon him with her meter-long length of pipe and drove its new sharp end into his chest—
—even through her muffled, spell-protected ears, his eagle-like screech of pain was unmistakable, and the pain drove him to fire one last shot at her, swinging the pistol around to her side and jerking the trigger—
—Sling felt a fiery sting in her right shoulder, just above the leg, and though the leg itself was not injured, it suddenly became quite painful to attempt to move it—
—the barrel came up again, ostensibly to put a bullet in the side of her head, and that was as far as he got with his plan. Without warning or forethought a ball of swirling bluish-purple energy snapped free from her horn and sailed into his face, startling him with both its sudden appearance and the force it delivered on impact. His trigger claw inadvertently squeezed the trigger on his pistol, putting a bullet in the ceiling instead of her head.
His last attempt to inflict grievous harm upon her nearly succeeded. His hind legs were able to coil up beneath her and lash out, kicking her away from him a second time and sending her back out of the bathing chambers, and in the process banging her injured shoulder against the doorway on her way out. A flare of pain shot through her nerves and left her reeling on the floor for only a couple of moments before she fired back—
—another ball of crackling mana fired off towards Saurus’s general direction, smashing the doorway apart and pulling up sections of bathroom tile in its wake. It hit the overturned bathtub and promptly dissipated, but sent the tub spinning over towards Saurus in a shower of glowing blue and purple spots.
She didn’t wait to see if the tub hit him. She just let another mana orb loose, larger and even stronger than the last one, barely able to tolerate the sudden, unbidden image of this monster gleefully violating her daughter as Kite screamed and howled in despair—
“Heartless bastard—”
—the doorway shattered, leaving dome-shaped cuts in the surrounding wall as the orb hurled towards its violent destiny with her hated target—
“Let’s see how you like this up your ass—”
—her third orb was unbalanced and failed to take into account a shielding component—the force that she fired it off with wound up tossing her back into that savagely abused office, and before she knew it she was tripping herself over the hole and tumbling into the ground outside. She had no idea if either her second or third orbs had actually hit him, or even if the third one made inside the bathing chambers…
…but when she heard part of the building begin to collapse upon itself, she suddenly found herself fixated on completing the task. To bury this sadistic, evil creature of the hells under a ton of plaster, wood, and whatever the hell else had been used to build this structure, and ensure that he could never come close to he or her only child ever again.
Her fourth and final orb took several seconds to build up, and by the time she’d finished constructing it she couldn’t even see the building in front of her for its size and swirling tendrils of mana energy peeling loose from it. All she could see was this red-hinged vision of this building coming down on top of this bastard, who had threatened harm to her family, and her scream of fury seemingly triggered the massive orb of energy to carry out her wishes.
It blasted away from her, ripping through the outer wall like paper and tossing chunks of torn wood out from the impact. Flashes of bright light began erupting within the building amidst a cloud of dust kicked up from within, and very shortly afterward an exceptionally strange sounding explosion, almost like a bomb going off underwater, reverberated through the air—
—the building before her, which she had by then come to believe was the town’s public bath house, rapidly fell apart in an uncontrolled implosion. Within seconds, what had once been a barely-standing structure had become a massive pile of broken frame supports, roofing, wood, and interior plaster. A thick cloud of dust billowed outward and curled up, forcing her to turn away and close her eyes lest she find herself blinded by unseen debris and dirt.
And only then did her massive exertions begin to catch up to her.
Her limbs slackened, losing their rage-induced strength and rigidity, and she struggled to move forward on weakened legs. Her eyes slowly parted open, but the cloud of dust that now enveloped her forced her to squint her way through and take her stroll at a leisurely pace.
She could see occasional flashes of gunfire even through the dust, and with each burst a red hash mark on her EFS blinked out, never to return. Her right shoulder, now fully aware that there was a bullet lodged in it, made every effort to put weight on her right leg or otherwise move was met with a torrent of pain, forcing her to awkwardly creep forward on three legs and hope that whoever was winning beyond the dust was not looking to kill her.
Unable to feel out any of her other weapons strewn across the ground through her magic, she settled for the one gun she had left on her, though when she deigned to raise up Grayhawk for a look down the sights, she found that the red crystal insert on the front sight was not as bright as the green-colored sights on El-Tee’s revolver amidst this dust. She resolved to try and find a green crystal sight replacement if she got out of this—
—two quick shots popped off somewhere beyond the cloud, accompanied by a partial star-like muzzle flash slightly to the right, though it looked like the weapon was firing at something ahead of her. Perhaps that last red tag that had just disappeared—
—she began to emerge from the edge of the dust cloud, where things were much more clearly seen, and she felt her heart drop at the carnage that had been wrought while she’d been busy with Saurus. The machine-gun griffon had bled out and was no longer moving, and spread out across the streets and curbs were at least six other bodies, all motionless and with several bloody holes in their sides and heads. A seventh victim of the Runners’ deadly, precise fire was just now sliding to the ground, the earth pony’s legs slowly folding and crumpling up, his face mangled and bloodied by what looked like two headshots, one of which had managed to make his eyeballs bulge inside the sockets….
….she hurled when she saw that. She wasn’t sure why, but seeing that, she thought back to that “trooper” she’d shot in the side of the head yesterday, not much further than a foreleg’s length away from her, and she began to wonder if she’d blown an eyeball clean out of that skull with that shot….
….and when she saw Ada’s tan-mottled armor and boonie hat, and the pair of small scars on her left hind leg, she finally allowed herself to stop thinking of finding somepony to kill, and dropped to the ground after making sure she’d put at least ten yards between herself and the mess she’d barfed up onto the ground.
Ada wasted absolutely no time in deciding what to do next. A single glance backward was all that she seemed to need, and her left forelimb was jerking towards the large building that Julaya had been ambushed in as she slung her black rifle over her back—
—and in the next instant the griffon was flying towards her, dropping back down right in front of her and rolling her onto her left side for a better look at her gunshot wound—
“Holy hellfire that was awesome and scary at the same time,” the griffon jested nervously, her talons gently poking at the wound and making the pony wince with every slight tug. “Hold still, I think it lodged into the bone. Tell me if this hurts—”
A claw began to dig about into the wound, and Sling’s brief scream of pain convinced the griffon to stop messing around with it—at least for the moment—and start pulling what looked like…tweezers? A scalpel…and then what looked like a serrated combat knife….
“….is…is he really dead?” Sling groaned through her exhaustion. Her limbs started to go hollow on her….
“I’m not digging his sick ass out of that rubble just to be sure,” Ada answered, placing one talon firmly on Sling’s barrel, just behind her right foreleg. “But you need to be as still as possible. Solid lead slug, no copper jacket, and it might have broken up. Think I can pull it out, it’s not that deep. This may take a few minutes, and it’s going to hurt.”
“….normal day in the wasteland, then.”
Ada actually laughed for a couple of seconds. “Looks like you’ve adapted to the wastes, all right. Talk to me, tell me what the hell brought you out here alone. Leon and I were watching you the last few minutes, didn’t see any of the others with you. Don’t tell me you actually went to Galesville.”
She could feel the talon on her body pressing down a little more, and out of the corner of her vision she could see the other talon start to come closer to the wound in her shoulder, and it suddenly dawned on her that perhaps Ada was trying to make small talk in order to give her something to focus on besides what was about to happen to her….
…and she gladly took the bait. “…El-Tee got hurt,” she blurted with a slight choke. “Some…some damn bark scorpion or something…big-ass bug the size of a cat…”
Ada’s voice grew quiet and remorseful. “…oh fu….the only help you’d find is the garrison in Galesville…she gonna be okay?”
Sling though she felt the flesh of her wound being stretched slightly, but it didn’t hurt as much as she’d thought it might.
Perhaps not at first, anyway. “…she should be, now. Kite wasn’t thrilled with our choices. But the venom hit El-Tee almost immediately….scared the shit out of Kite more than it did me, but then she knew what it was doing to her. She…she came up with a slow drip IV with a healing potion, a soda bottle and some plastic tubing….kept the venom from doing any permanent damage until we got to town….”
“So you’re out here on some job to pay back the cost of the anti-venom, or something?”
“Not…quite. The garrison commander, name of Berry Colada—”
“I know the name,” Ada quipped quickly. “I also know she’s not stupid. She wouldn’t let somebody with two known runaway slaves loose unless there was something in it for her.”
Okay, no, it didn’t hurt at first, but she could gradually feel the wound being pulled further open, in ways it didn’t want to be messed with, and the sensation was exceptionally sharp and painful. Her hind legs shot out, dug into the ground, and she struggled to keep from screaming into the dirt beneath her face, muffling it in her throat and mouth—
—the foreign sensation in her shoulder subsided somewhat, at least enough for her to stop squirming and relax a little—
“…well, frag me, it broke up all right,” Ada cursed, absently tossing a piece of the smashed-up 9mm slug aside. “Looks like two other pieces to dig out…”
Hoofsteps began creeping into her hearing range, drawing closer with every passing moment—
—she turned her eyes up and forward, and her sideways-titled view of the world was filled with the sight of a genuine, honest-to-Luna zebra trotting up to her, with what looked like a curved, thin sword coated in fresh blood strapped across her back, her ice blue eyes staring down towards her—
”You missed,” the zebra spoke…or rather, Julaya….she hoped. “Hit his armor, not his head. But squashing him like a bug beneath a building is a much more fitting end. It would seem he was not mistaken as to your magical prowess.”
Ada surprised her by seemingly being undisturbed or even aware that this zebra had just essentially waltzed up to them with nary a care in the world, and she quickly came to understand why as the griffon spontaneously decided to shift position, quickly lying down on top of her and essentially holding her in place with her own body weight. “Hey Julie, help me hold her still. Still gotta pull a couple more bits out, I may need to get a little rough.”
“For this one I would dance provocatively before strangers for their amusement and caps,” Julaya’s voice purred in reply, her forelegs already moving to do as the griffon wished and pinning her forelegs and neck down firmly, but without undue force. “Is she single?”
“Single, and straight,” she spat back at the zebra’s chest as Julaya lay down in front of her.
With her vision now a swirl of white and black stripes, she decided she was better off just shutting them completely and allowing her mind to focus on the voices instead. “….damn.”
“Hey, be nice, stable pony,” Ada insisted somewhat strongly. “Maybe you had choices where you came from, but the rest of us gotta take what we can get in the wastes. And Julie’s actually kinda nice when she’s not busy robbing caravans and getting the Union hot and bothered at us. You really gotta stop that crap, girl.”
“I will rob and kill as many of those enslaving bastards as I can find until their savage system collapses on itself!” Julaya’s voice hissed back angrily, inadvertently putting more pressure on her legs and head than she was perhaps aware of.
“No, you really need to stop,” Sling squeaked painfully, just as she felt Ada’s claws began to poke at her wound once more, and she hoped the conversation would make the impending flood of pain easier to take. “Colada wants me to kill you.”
Ada’s claws stopped short of the wound. “….so should I stop trying to help you, stable pony?”
Julaya, on the other hand, seemed less than threatened by her admission. “She is hardly the first mare to try to do that to me,” the zebra laughed. “And Colada has dangled a…carrot, before you to encourage you to try.”
A hell of a carrot. “….my daughter, she needed help. Help only the Union could give…and I had two runaways with me when we went to them…”
Julaya’s hold on her softened, and her voice no longer dripped with cheer or subtle infatuation. “….and the price for not being tossed to the pens with them…is my life?”
“….it’s more complicated than that. I was acu—”
Sling’s words died in her throat as Ada’s claws began to forcefully part the wound open, and suddenly the only thing that matter was riding out the pain, trying not to struggle too much against the restraining efforts of the zebra and the griffon lying on to top of her, and trying not to scream everybody around her deaf. By Luna’s mane she was even starting to cry a little from the intensity of it!
In what felt like an eternity, but was actually only about four seconds, the pain in her shoulder subsided into a less intense ache, and her “field surgeon” unceremoniously tossed another piece of the bullet off into the dirt beside them. “One more,” Ada huffed. “One more and then you get a healing potion to swallow like water.”
—pain, like fire and ice all at once, along with the exceptionally intense aches and the abstract, horrific feeling of a foreign object digging around past her ribcage—
Her body tensed up, frozen in fear of an event she didn’t remember suddenly beginning to come back to her in fragments—
Ada recognized it almost immediately, and stopped being delicate and picky in favor of finishing the job as quickly as possible. “Shit Julie get ready for a fight—”
The zebra’s forelegs tightened their hold on her as a pair of sharp claws began pulling the wound apart, and this time she swore she could feel a pair of cold, metal tingling sensations brushing against the edge of bare, bleeding flesh—
—a cool, gentle wave of what felt like another unicorn’s magic briefly intruded into the wound, and an instant later she felt a warm piece of metal tickle her nerves as it was pulled out—
“Or you could ask the damn unicorn standing in front of you to pluck it out painlessly,” a new feminine voice finished for her, right next to Julaya by the sound of it—
“Oh, hello love,” Julaya’s voice greeted back casually as her forelegs loosened their grip on her. “This crazy pony is not into mares, so she will not be joining our little harem.”
The other female voice could only groan in slight disgust as a healing potion was set down in front of Sling’s agape snout, and without hesitation she clenched her teeth around the open top and tossed her head back to empty the flask as quickly as she could. “Julie, you narcissist nympho, we almost died back there, could you show a little restraint for once?!”
Julaya didn’t seem to share her partner’s concern…at least, not openly. “….then how will we convince this pony to not kill me? She values her friends and family far more than a zebra she has just met, it will not be easy to convince her I am worth something if I cannot seduce her.”
“K….k-wait, what?! She came here to kill us?!”
“…well, I did not hear you mentioned, so perhaps not you. But I seem to have pissed Colada off enough for her to send bounty hunters out to find me—”
“She’s not gonna kill you,” Ada’s voice assured them all with a dark, threatening edge as she clambered off of the stable pony. “Are you, stable pony?”
Instead of answering, she simply drained the healing potion flask of every drop of its contents, then tossed it aside and laid herself out across the ground as the potion went to work mending her wounds. The hole in her shoulder was rapidly closing up, and a lingering flash of fire below her belly quickly cooled off and vanished. The aches and sores assaulting her head were likewise being soothed and eliminated. “....if anybody’s got better ideas for how I’m going to get my daughter and my friends back, spill it…”
“It’d help if you’d tell us what the hell Colada told you that made you think a hired hit would work in the first place.”
“A slaver caravan’s coming through any time now,” Sling groaned to the air, relief beginning to ebb and flow into her face and brain as her head injuries wilted before the power of the strawberry-flavored healing potion. Good stuff. “And if what I hear is correct, miss Julaya here is the bane of every slaver and Union guild’s existence, so killing her may be worth a favor to the right soul….or at least that’s the lie Colada told me….”
“You are not wrong,” Julaya confirmed somberly. “The slaver guilds do not give or take favors. Only caps.”
“And I’m not about to risk touching off another war by helping you wipe the slavers out when they hit the road,” Ada added quietly. “….even if I’d like to…”
Her brief fit of good feelings were short lived. Deep down, she’d suspected as much that what she was doing wouldn’t work out. Colada herself never actually promised that it would, only that there was a chance the slavers would at least hear out her request. It was still a chance worth exploring. Now that she had an outside, somewhat less biased opinion on the matter, though….
….she was starting to feel sick. She’d wasted two, maybe three souls, crushed another under a building out of sheer anger….
…for nothing?
“….so that’s it, then?” she croaked, feeling a tear roll down the left side of her face. “All this…death, and suffering…twelve people just got killed and my friends are still doomed?”
The silence that answered her was almost palatable. She could practically taste their uncomfortableness in the air, and it was demoralizing. She could only remember one other time in her life when she’d felt so….alone. And helpless.
“….exactly how were you to prove my demise?” Julaya pondered tenderly, finally breaking through the veil of soul-crushing quiet in some attempt at making peace, or perhaps just preferring talk to this deathly silence. “If not by my body, then some souvenir?”
“…she didn’t say how,” she sobbed in a mild, quiet voice. “Just said bring back proof, for all the good that’ll do now…”
The other mare, the one she had yet to open her eyes and actually see, seemed capable of reading minds, or just Julaya’s. “….Julie, no, we need that money—”
“We need to leave,” the zebra replied curtly, cutting off her lover mid-sentence. “We acquired our vast and not-so-secret fortune in the event that we would need to. But it appears that enough word is spreading of its existence that we would be safer if we were to….vanish. Saurus knew of our fortune, and our location, likely from one of the mercs now lying dead around us. Ada and Leon know me well enough to know I do not like spending caps and are in enough trouble with some locals that they require some monetary assistance….”
A nervous, half-hearted laugh out of Ada’s beak was as much a confirmation as anything she could have said. “…that damn obvious, is it?”
“Even in the war you could not keep out of trouble, old playmate,” Julaya’s voice laughed back. “Always coming to me for a hoof or three, or some caps to square away some troubles you caused. Ah, to be kids again….”
“You’re no older than I am.”
“Julie, we need those caps!” the unseen mare begged of her partner, and Sling finally felt compelled to open her eyes and put a face to this voice—
—a light pink unicorn, with a blueberry-shaded mane and tail, and apparently truly missing her right eye as she sported a black eye-patch that covered it up, along with what looked like most of a facial scar around the eye socket itself—
“I heard you the first time, love—”
“Then you’ll hear it again, because we don’t owe this bounty hunter anything!!” she screamed back. “We need those caps!! How the hell else are we gonna pay our way across the valley?! I am not going back to whoring myself out for table scraps and I’m getting tired of your grudge against the slavers!! It almost got us killed today!!”
Julaya’s face fell a little, though Sling could see a spark of that deep-seated hatred still alive and thriving behind those…pretty….eyes….
….oh gods, did she just call that zebra’s eyes pretty? Was Kite’s constant subtle infatuation starting to rub off o—
It struck her right there, so suddenly and sharply that she felt the world go still as it slapped her silly with its overt obviousness. This unicorn wanted to keep the caps…Julaya….
….wanted to give them to her? Instead of using it to escape this hellhole?
….an escape she can still make, if everypony thinks she’s dead….
…could…could this idea work, maybe? Dare she even try?
“….that sword important to you?” her voice creaked softly, taking a moment to eye the zebra over and finally taking notice of several splotches of blood that coated her body….
“It’s….my preferred way of dealing with slavers,” Julaya replied hesitantly. “Cut their heads off, or whatever part of them I reach first….why?”
Sling could feel the disconnected parts of her next crazy plan coming together in her battered head before she could finish speaking. “And these…caps of yours? Are you seriously considering just….giving them to me, just like that? No strings attached?”
“Not exactly, no,” the zebra corrected gently, casting an off-hoof glare at the unicorn beside her. “My love is correct in that we need them to fund our escape from Union territory, if there are folk hunting us down for them. But if we had another means of leaving, one that would convince the wasteland at large that we are no longer worth looking for, we would not need them so badly then.”
“…then get a map and a pencil, or something to write with, and listen very carefully because you can only use these once.”
--------------------------------------
She wondered if this was how Sling felt when she found herself in tight, dark spaces, chased by carnivorous, mutant bugs hell-bent on slaughtering her wholesale. Trapped. Helpless. Terrified beyond measure, to the point where one’s bodily functions would start failing them. Imagining that the walls themselves were out to get you, or some such, because she swore that they bent a little whenever she wasn’t looking at them.
She’d been dreading this moment for weeks, prayed every night that she would not find herself back in the grips of the “system” to be abused and tossed aside like a used rag. Prayed that things would somehow work themselves and she could be on the other side of the valley, where a soul was at least treated as a living thing instead of a piece of furniture or a toy. Prayed that maybe, just maybe, Sling might have a change of heart and decide to experiment a little, but that last one was just wishful thinking spurred on by the company of the first mare that gave enough of a shit to try and get her across the wastes despite the dangers of helping runaways.
Like every prayer she’d ever bothered to whisper to departed, uncaring alicorn princesses, they all crashed, burned, and withered into ash, and it all started with one damn mutant bark radscorpion. That bug got off easy. It wasn’t left shivering and trembling in fear of the future, disheartened to the point that thoughts of suicide were starting to make a little sense.
Even BJ was less than his usual thrilled self, having been stuck in a separate cell and separated from everypony until this morning. He just lay down where he’d landed after being tossed into her cell, and had yet to bother to get up. His face seemed even more downcast and sullen than usual.
She dared to think that he might have looked disappointed.
And when he finally spoke, she found that she wasn’t far off from the truth. “….damn those stupid stable ponies,” he grumbled quietly. “Had to be all hopeful and shit…..”
Her heart began to ache, no longer certain she could deal with the re-emergence of the son she’d been trying to raise right ever since he was born. The colt that was coming out of that shell before her, the one that played mind games with a filly (and their mothers) and tormented them all with a smart-ass mouth, was so much more lively and….normal. She didn’t want the shell of a colt she’d been stuck with, she wanted the son that had been cracking his way through that façade he called a wall between himself and the wastes.
“…would you rather that Elly had died out there instead?”
She expected a conflicted, tormented answer, hoping her son was still in there, trying to get out, and his answer gave her a slim hope to hold onto. “….s-she’s gonna be okay, right?”
“….she’ll be fine,” she answered softly.
“They…they won’t take her too…will they?”
A flitter of terror ran through her spine, and she opened her mouth to speak—
—the main door to the corridor of jail cells screeched open, the ancient metal hinges almost screaming in agony, and several sets of hooves quickly began trotting down the hallway towards them—
—the solid black armor of the slavers was almost impossible to mistake for any other group in the wastes. Appropriated from old highway police barracks and reserve military armories decades ago, most of it was still in serviceable condition and more than capable of taking hits from most weapons that a denizen of the wastes could get ahold of. Many souls had tried to take on a slaver caravan, only to find that their pistols and shotguns didn’t hit hard enough to make it through the armor. Those few wastelanders that could get a rifle without having to be part of the Union’s trooper corps or a mercenary gang learned never to part with it.
Sling would never be able to kill her way past these guys….and now three of them were standing outside her cell door, one of them carrying a fresh pair of control collars in a spell field….
The slaver in the middle, a large, broad-shouldered blue-gray stallion with a matching mane and tail color, had absolutely no sympathy or concern for the two of them as ponies. “Get up,” he commanded sternly. “Heads forward and out.”
….s-so that’s it, then, she cried inside, her hollow, soulless legs already learning to follow commands once more as she found herself holding her neck out in preparation for the collar’s cold, explosive-laden touch. No last minute change of heart, no guns-blazing shit…
…just collected, like stray animals that had gotten out of an enclosure, and thrown back in….
For a moment, it looked like BJ would be the one to screw up first. For whatever reason, right then, he decided to speak up. Probably thought that since Elly had a way of getting adult ponies to see things her way, that maybe these slavers could be reasoned with in a similar way. “….y-you don’t need the collars, we won’t be any trou—”
The towering stallion snapped his hard eyes onto her son, his right foreleg curling up and over his torso for what looked like a functioning cattle prod he kept attached to his armor around his withers, and while she remained motionless and still on the outside, inside she was screaming and threatening foul, unkind actions upon this slaver for possessing the one “compliance tool” that turned her son into a quivering mess of a colt. “Did I say you could speak, boy?”
The psychological reaction was immediate and disheartening. He went from bland and emotionless to cowering, terrified, and almost apologetic as he seemingly shrank into the ground and assumed a submissive position, his head held out and facing the floor. “N-n-no…”
“No, what?” the stallion’s voice threatened ominously, his hoof half an inch away from the sling cuff of the cattle prod.
“…n-no, sir…”
“Better,” the sadistic stallion said, with a slight tone of approval. “Still not great. Gonna have to get you re-trained. Consider this the first step in re-education. Step two will remind you what happens to those who get the idea they can help themselves to runaways they meet in the wastes…”
Kite’s heart stopped cold, and she felt herself close to breaking down completely. BJ, amazingly enough, had managed to not piss all over the floor in the presence of the cattle prod, but she feared now that he would be rendered little more than a recalcitrant foal—
A fourth pony’s presence made herself known very loudly and very angrily as she stomped into the corridor outside the cell. “What the hell are you doing in my holding cells?” Major Colada’s voice demanded furiously, her body drawing closer to the slavers by the second.
“Retrieving our goods,” the cattle-prod armed stallion answered back, seemingly unfazed by Colada’s outburst. “Have the kid in the clinic brought to the caravan, and when her mother comes back you bring her in too.”
Colada’s reply was so explosively violent and sudden that Kite could barely process that it was even happening until she felt a splash of liquid splatter her face amidst the sudden burst of gunshots and the gut-wrenching, horrified screams that assaulted her ears. When she dared to wipe it off of her face her hoof came away drenched in fresh crimson….
…and she looked up from the floor, and saw two dead, twitching slavers in the glow of the overhead kerosene lamp, blood splattering their wounds and the floor as their muscle spasms began to make them slide across the floor, and the cattle-prod stallion lying prostrate with two bullet wounds in his left foreleg, stuck between the bodies of his comrades as Colada put away her smoking black rifle and pressed the muzzle end of a .45 Auto against his forehead and jerked the hammer back—
“Don’t you ever give me orders!!” Colada’s voice snarled…or, at least, a hint of her. Her voice was so harsh, so angry, so….so different, that if she had not been looking at her right then, she would not have believed it to be Colada at all. “This is my garrison, my command, my domain, my rules!! You do not barge in and make demands of even a private in my garrison, you wait patiently until I tell you you can proceed with your business under escort, and you do not suck up sick, wounded children under my care or their stressed-out mothers trying to pay me back for the medicine that saved her child’s life!!”
The lone living, wounded stallion, eyes open, almost got himself killed by thinking this armed, angry mare above him was bluffing. “….bitch, you just got yourself a whole heap of trouble,” he grunted painfully, trying to force himself up on three good legs. “Seem to have forgotten the agreement the trade guilds made with us—“
Colada’s .45 moved to his right leg and put two rounds in the lower calf…and to Kite’s surprise, the deafening gunshots that should have left her ears ringing and her senses briefly overwhelmed by such loud noises in a tight, confined space never came, and she finally realized that she had inadvertently and unconsciously cast Sling’s hearing spell over her ears, and BJ’s without ever realizing it. She couldn’t recall exactly when she had done this, but surmised it to be before Colada starting shooting up the slavers judging by the lack of ringing in her ears….
“The Union and the slaver guilds have an agreement to stay out of each other’s business,” Colada seethed to his ears. “Which you done fucked up by coming into my holding cells unescorted, unannounced, and then proceeding to bark at me like one of your quivering whores you rut when nopony’s looking. I already have all the reason I need to kill you and wipe out your caravan in the streets, so don’t make that decision easier to make. Take your “charges”, and if you idiots want to wait for that mare to come back and talk to her, then wait. But if any of you send so much as a germ to that filly in my field clinic I will have your entire outfit gutted alive and chopped up for radhog feed, and all your “masters” will be able to do about it is to thank the stars they weren’t there to share your fate for daring to challenge my authority here.”
By the time Colada had finished verbally undressing this stallion of his confidence and dignity, a flurry of bodies had flooded into the corridor, some bearing black armor, and others bearing the tan-mottled camouflaged armor of the trooper corps…
…and she noted with quiet alarm that the troopers had the slavers under their guns the entire time….
She felt BJ’s body brushing against her forelegs as he stumbled past to hide beneath her (though he would have had to crouch down to do it), now more afraid of Colada than he was the stallion she had just taken apart. Which was fine.
She was scared to death of her too. All that authority, all that rage….if the Union really wanted to, they could wipe out the slavers in a matter of weeks. Find some other way to keep food going. As much as she hated them for letting the slavers run amok and with some degree of sanction….they were also the only good thing to come out of the prairie since the megaspells, for what little it was worth. Some stability and defense against the seemingly innumerable hordes of raiders and carnivorous wildlife infesting the wastes, some manner of trade and commerce flow between the surviving towns and settlements….
…and the only thing holding it back from being better, was its association with the slavers, which these troopers apparently barely tolerated to begin with.
She hoped this was a more widespread attitude than it was ten years ago.
The stallion cowering at Colada’s hooves and pistol had to be helped to his rear hooves by the assistance of two other slavers, and when he gave commands it was no longer to Colada, or in a manner that would draw her final wrath. “…get the runaways, march them out,” he heaved to his fellow slaver scum. “….and bring the bodies too—“
“Their dead asses belong to me now,” Colada cut him off sharply. “Consider it the first step in your re-education of how the agreement works.”
The stallion’s voice grew silent, and none of the other slavers dared to “correct” the major, but simply waited until one of the troopers unlatched the cell door and pull it aside before carrying out their newly amended instructions. A black-clad mare with what looked like a lime-green coat cautiously motioned with a foreleg for the two of them to follow, and the pair found themselves soullessly falling in behind the slavers as they saw themselves out of the holding cells (and away from all the guns being pointed at them). To her great relief, she no longer felt or saw BJ’s body trembling and quivering—it seemed as though seeing the stallion reduced to a wounded, helpless child by a mare whose anger rivaled that of Sling’s was enough to calm his nerves a little.
For the moment.
Even with the cloud cover in the skies, stepping out of the dark, dank holding cells and into the open street briefly overwhelmed her eyes with the sting of the limited daytime lighting. She couldn’t tell what time of day it was other than the fact that it was past sunrise—between then and dusk, the omnipresent gray skies always looked the same unless a storm was coming in.
A separate kind of storm threatened to break out all around her when the slavers grew close to the pack of six brahmin-hauled wagons lined out in the middle of the street. A gray-feathered griffon, uniquely the only slaver among the group not wearing armor, was coming to a stop beside the caravan and grew from calm to almost liquidly livid in the time it took for him to see the cattle prod stallion’s wounds…
“….you idiot,” the griffon seethed sharply, his eyes furrowing into a frustrated glare. “I told you to wait until I said it was okay! I told you!”
“….they’re runaways,” the wounded stallion gasped back, his blood loss and pain beginning to manifest into shock, though he was able to speak somewhat clearly. “Runaways, the mare that brought them in with her is—“
“Is under Union guard and out of our control!!” the griffon bellowed back angrily. “I told you, you do nothing in a garrison without their say!! NOTHING! And you definitely do not bother children in Colada’s garrison or she’ll cut your balls off and play ping-pong with them! When I told you she had pull on me I meant that she will wipe us out if we so much as fart around her— ”
She didn’t know why, but she wanted to laugh when all the slavers that had been within a few of Colada suddenly found themselves needed elsewhere and got as far away from her as they could manage, quickly clustering together and pulling her and BJ along with them as they headed for the third wagon in the caravan—
“She does not bluff!!” the griffon continued to rail against the stallion. “I got this job after she killed the last guy who had it when he made the mistake of assuming otherwise! Every trooper stationed here will die in her place, down to the last pony and griffon if that’s what it takes to see her to safety, that is how much pull she has with the Union brass!! You do not give Colada any reason to kill you, because she will!! I’m amazed that I’m alive to scream at you over this!!”
She barely heard BJ’s little satisfied snort at the verbal thrashing the stallion was getting today so far, first from a mare and now apparently his boss, and she silently thanked the both of them for their short tempers.
“….get the runaways squared off, we’re getting out of here before anybody else screws up,” the griffon snapped sharply. “You can thank Brick for ruining your booty call today.”
She sensed almost every set of slaver eyes in the caravan suddenly regarding their wounded “co-worker” as a target for future reprisals as she felt the cold, disturbing touch of a control collar being slipped around her neck, ready to blow her head clean off at the touch of a button or an errant wire. At least Elly wasn’t here to see this….
….at least, she shouldn’t have been.
Her voice was like a beacon in a black sky—somewhat lively, content, and even playful, and her nerves grew cold and heavy as Elly’s voice grew closer—
“—ll of this?! That quick?!”
The voice that answered her caused her heart to stop altogether, and she was pretty certain her lungs were starting to fail too. “That quick,” Sling replied from what sounded like….
….like fifty yards away, when she dared to turn her head to her left, and spotted Sling’s teal-blue coated body walking down the road towards them, with what looked like a pair of….
….of brahmin? Each one hitched up to a wagon, one of which was stuffed full of small footlockers and leatherhide bags? The other one…loaded with guns, armor, and other stuff…as usual…
“….nuh uh,” Light Tail squealed playfully, sprawled across her mother’s back and resting her head against the back of Sling’s neck. In their wake, Sling appeared to be pulling an IV drip feed for an anti-venom and healing potion pack, which was still plugged into the filly’s foreleg, and the pair of husky pups were dutifully following along behind them with nary a sound or threatening growl at all the strangers around them. “You had help. You had to.”
“…okay, so Ada and Leon happened to be in the area at the same time—”
“I knew it!”
Confusing, conflicting emotions began to play against each other in her head. Part of her believed that Sling had given up, had gone back to caring only for herself and her filly, and was merely there to see them carried off to the slave pens and simultaneously taunting her with the salvage haul she’d been able to bring in. Part of her was torn up at how hard this would hit Elly when the slavers ignored them and carried on….
….and then that part of her grew confused, and apprehensive, when Sling crouched down onto the ground and bid the filly on her back to roll off with a roll of her withers. “Hop off a minute, honey, I got work to do.”
Elly’s hooves gingerly slipped off and cushioned her descent onto the ground, and the pups quickly took up space beside her as the mare rose to her full height and continued on her path towards the slavers. “I have a business proposal for your boss,” Sling called out calmly….though Kite noticed that every holster on her travelling saddle was unlatched and allowing her near-instant access to her guns if she decided she needed them. “Where is he?”
The screaming, frustrated griffon barely even looked her way as he counted off the last of his crew passing by him, and silently cursing at the minus two he was coming up until Colada’s hard glare convinced him that his current count was correct. “Name’s Gus, I run this caravan,” he answered, turning to fall in behind his crew. “And none of my product is for sale today.”
Sling’s horn lit up, tossing a long, red-and-black curved scabbard of some kind out of one of her wagons and towards Colada’s hooves as she passed the Major’s position. “There’s twenty thousand caps in my forward wagon that say otherwise.”
All the tension and anger that had been floating about the air the last two minutes evaporated into a shared sense of disbelief, and even denial. No one, no one, in all of the wastes, had that kind of cash on them, no one outside the trade and slaver guilds. She was bluffing, lying, had to be—
“Holy shit, you actually got her,” Colada’s voice breathed in a stunned stupor, her forelegs cradling the scabbard as she poured over it. “You got her….”
Gus turned back towards Colada, briefly curious as to what it was that had the Major not cursing and swearing at his crew, and suddenly stopped cold in his tracks himself. “….no shit,” he murmured. “Bane of my bloody existence and you got her damned sword right there….”
“We can talk about Julaya another time if you want,” Sling countered. “I have a business proposal for you, with the caps I found at her hideaway. If you don’t want them, somebody else will. Somebody you might not want getting this kind of wealth.”
“And I am very innately curious as to why the hell you’re so willing to part with any of it so quickly,” Gus said back. Though he was no longer ignoring Sling, that wasn’t necessarily a good thing. Not where slavers were concerned. “Way I hear it, you came to town with the two runaways I’m loading up right now. I’m inclined to believe you knew.”
“You can believe whatever you want,” Sling said dismissively. “I still have twenty thousand caps and a desire to use them, provided you hear me out. I seriously doubt the major is going to let you shoot me and take them by force.”
Kite wouldn’t have made that gamble yesterday, but after what she just saw two minutes ago…. “….what do you want, then?”
Sling’s left foreleg came up, pointing towards her and BJ. “Them.”
Gus’s beak snorted into a strange, confused laugh. “You serious? Twenty thou for two runaways?”
“I don’t want to buy them,” the stable pony answered sternly. “I want to buy their freedom.”
…….wh…wha…
“….excuse me?”
“I didn’t stutter,” Sling shot back. “I said I want to buy their freedom. Twenty thousand. I’ll make it a simple mathematics issue if that’s all that registers to you. The colt alone is worth five considering he can work brahmin fields and train dogs. His mother would be worth fifteen thousand for the fact that she has the medical skill to save your life with field surgery using no painkillers or anesthesia, only what she can find in a first aid kit. I can attest to that personally.”
She was wrong. She’d thought the place had gone deathly quiet at the casually-dropped statement of “Hey, I’m rich as hell now!”. That was nothing. The silence now was so complete, so absolute, that she could have heard a bug crawling across the ground and pinpointed its location within twenty yards. Everypony around them—slavers, slaves, troopers, townsfolk stopping their daily business to watch the unfolding drama…all rendered speechless, staring at this crazy stable pony who had a vast fortune all to herself….
…and was practically giving it away to save a couple of runaways from being put back in the system, as if the concept of money was lost on her completely.
And still, she couldn’t bring herself to even contemplate that this was real. That she wasn’t hearing things or dreaming or…or dead, and in the afterlife….
“…twenty thousand, you say?”
“That’s what my Pip-Buck counted this morning before I set out,” Sling replied immediately.
“….Rainer, get up there, get a count with your fancy piece of Stable-Tec,” Gus’s voice commanded after a brief moment of thought, and one of the slavers practically jumped his way through the caravan and into Sling’s foremost wagon, with a Pip-Buck of his own on his right leg held out over the footlockers and bags as he turned about inside the wagon bed….
“….shit, she ain’t bluffin’,” he breathed in awe. “….twenty thousand, on the dot. Julaya’s stash was real….”
“It’s real, it’s mine now, and I’m offering it to you, in exchange for the freedom of my friend and her son,” Sling said again, her voice growing more insistent on the matter. “Hell, take the wagon and the damn brahmin with it for all I care. I got no use for the beast now. I get my friend and her kid back and free, and you get more caps than most folk could make in a few years. Does the why of it really matter to you in the end?”
Gus’s body shifted slightly in place, his head going back and forth between the crazy stable pony and herself and her boy, huddled together and freshly clapped with exploding control collars beside a wagon that smelled like it held a dozen other unfortunate souls within its tarp covering….
…and then gave them one last, final gaze, and then cocked his head off to the side, towards the pair of slavers fitting the collars to them. “Cut ‘em loose.”
The collars, impossibly, were pulled off at the command of an increasingly insane slave master. They were quickly nudged away from the caravan, back towards that…
…tha…
….oh, my gods, this is really happening isn’t it—
“Understand that what you ask isn’t an instant and quick affair,” Gus’s voice said, following her and BJ as they stumbled blindly towards that crazy, indigo-maned stable pony. “In fact, you’re the first soul in memory to actually do it. It’s going to take a few weeks of work and gods-awful Union-mandated paperwork to sort the whole shit-mess out, and put the word to all the guilds to add her and the kid to their no-catch-or-kill list. The Union gets a set of papers detailing the whole thing to put in their records, the guilds get a copy, and then somebody comes out and turns the marks on their necks into freedom marks. Until then, you all need to stay in town. Stray out before the marks are changed, and the deal is off. Even Colada won’t be able to save you from that.”
“They’ll stay,” Colada promised with a hard voice. “I’ll see to it personally.”
“Then we’re done here,” Gus said, his voice carrying an air of finality as he deftly hopped up onto the lead wagon. “Rainer, drive the money wagon. You heard the crazy pony, she’s got no use for the beast now.”
Kite’s watched, impossibly and with increasingly blurry vision, as the caravan of slavers slowly pulled away….
…without her, or BJ….
….leaving her and BJ here, instead of taking them….
…leaving them….
….leaving them….free….
She could not process what had just happened. In fact, she ceased processing anything altogether. She simply shut down and became little more than a stupefied zombie of a pony who only responded to the occasional poke with a slow blink of her eyes. She only saw bits and pieces of the next few moments, or minutes, or hours. She saw what looked like a bloodied, scarred teal-blue face coming within a breath’s distance of her, a hoof slowly waving itself back and forth in front of her.
She thought she could feel the air around her changing, from warmish to slightly cooler and darker, with less natural light. She thought she could feel old, hard wood beneath her hooves, tickling the frog with its imperfections and bends in the boards. She thought she could hear a voice, a nice, soft…
…..feminine voice, concerned….
…calling her name….over, and over…..
….and when she finally blinked, hard, her vision cleared up….
….and there she was. Crazy stable pony Sling Shot, a.k.a. Bookcase, standing in front of her, the pair of them now in what looked like the two-hundred year old ruins of yet another hotel room, the sounds of a running water and actual bathtub somewhere behind a closed door….
….she was there, and the stable pony was there…and she and BJ were not on that caravan, being sucked back into the miserable lives of being somepony else’s toy.
They were free. For the first time in her adult life, she was truly free.
“….Kite?” Sling’s voice croaked fearfully, her hooves continually shifting between waving themselves before her stunned, misty eyes, and shaking her gently for some manner of response other than mere shock. “….Kite, say something, you’re starting to scare me…”
Speak. Say something, the crazy stable pony desired. Kite’s lips moved to speak, to satisfy this one’s request….
....no.
She couldn’t speak. Words were not enough. Nothing would ever be enough, not for…
…not for this. What she’d done just now….how could she speak and still be worthy of it….
“…..I’m sorry,” her mouth finally uttered as a sudden, stiff calm began to take hold of her, her brain fixating on a course of action both familiar and alien, terrifying and yet the only source of comfort she could find right then….
“….s-sorry? For what?”
“For this.”
Her forelegs had trapped her prey before she could react to her “attack”, a deep, tearful kiss that came out of…somewhere, inside her, desperate to do or show something that would mean more than words and a quarter-hour of bawling her eyes out could express. She could hear Sling’s shocked, surprised cries muffled back into her mouth, but it never swayed her from stopping. Sling’s body quickly froze up in her grasp, even her tail stopped moving. At the end of what felt like eternity, she had in her forelegs a frozen, life-like statue of the pony that had just given her her freedom back, along with her son’s….
And then she stopped. Because she had to breathe.
She pulled back, away from the statue that used to a pony…ten seconds ago? Fifteen? She couldn’t tell. Didn’t want to.
She was free. Her son was free. They had friends, friends who would literally give up a fortune for them…and already had….
…..she finally found something to say.
“….for somepony that’s not into mares, you are making it incredibly difficult for me to not want to make mad love to you right now,” she sobbed happily, pulling herself away from the statue of Sling Shot before she could start to act on those aired desires. “I….I really shouldn’t be in the same room with you for a while….I…”
She put words into action when she saw a door in the side of the room, leading to another hotel room beside this one, with what looked like her shocked, wide-eyed colt of a son waiting beyond the door, sauntered off to escape to this other room before she could make things worse even though she was secretly so overwhelmingly happy that she was literally about to explode into tears and laughter…
…and before she crossed the doorway and shut the door behind her, she had to look back over her withers, at this shocked, stone-still, wide-eyed and wide-mouthed mare frozen in a singular moment of time, and bite her own tongue to keep from rushing back over and doing what she wanted to.
“….l-like I said…I’m sorry….I had…I just had to do that, I can’t explain why, I just had to…I…I’m sorry….t-thank you….”
She finally shut the door, making sure to lock it on Sling’s side instead of her own, and crashed down into the nearest, centuries-old bed and mattress where she finally came apart and started laughing and crying, and squealing like a little girl.
No more beatings. No more rapes, no more pain…or at least, no more pain at the hooves of another soul who saw them as little more than playthings.
They were free.
--------------------------------------
When her brain finally found the energy to restart itself following a body-wide crash that rendered her practically unconscious, it took her a full three minutes to fully recover her first sense—taste.
“Strawberry” was the first word to articulate the lingering taste in a word that could best describe what had just tangled itself with her tongue and assaulted her mouth for….
….she didn’t know how long. She only knew that her brain registered it as a pleasing, sweet, soft….strawberry. Which did not compute with what she knew had really been messing around in there just now.
The next sense to return to functional capability was hearing, and what she heard was among the strangest, most conflicting sounds of joy and…deliriousness she had ever heard in her life. She could hear Kite in the adjoining hotel room that Colada had quartered them in for the duration of their stay in Galesville, crying, laughing, squealing like a ten year old filly who’d just had her first pretend-kiss from that colt she kinda sorta had a little bitty crush on and stuff like that. She could hear BJ’s voice trying to talk some sense into his emotionally crashed mother, but he might as well have been talking to a raging tornado gleefully ripping across the plains in thoughtless destruction. It was a strangely exquisite feeling, to know that she had finally done something worthwhile to elicit such a….strong response….
The third sense to return was touch. And this sense was more truthful and…
…and…
….wistful? Kite’s body and forelegs had been…warm. Entrapping. She was definitely trapped by her, to be sure. But it had been a very long time since another soul had held onto her like that….in that way…..
….and she found that she missed it far more than she’d thought possible, now that she knew what it felt like again. She didn’t want to linger on that one for long.
The fourth sense to come back to her, sight, came gradually. The millions and millions of stars that flooded her vision slowly faded, bringing her back to the lamp-lit hotel room with the town’s only working bathroom and shower/bathtub, and the pile of guns and travelling saddles nestled in the corner to her right. Her sight offered no explanation as to why it had suddenly decided to spontaneously explode into a blinding shower of strange looking dots and stars, nor could it explain why it was continuously flashing images of Kite’s face directly against hers when she could not even actively recall such a thing happening.
The fifth and final sense, smell, curiously reported only a lingering whiff of….
….fresh linen…and....lilac?
….fresh linen, and lilac?
No explanation came. And none was wanted.
Her brain began to autonomously direct her to the working bathroom, where she recalled having put Light Tail a few minutes prior and setting up a warm bath for her to relax and soothe her muscles in. She was slightly relieved to see that this part of her recent memory was still true and intact, as she found Light Tail inside in the tub, her head just above the water line, lying atop what looked like….a seat, built into the right side end of the tub? For a pony to sit or lie in, as her daughter was doing just now? It even had a headrest for a pony to lie their head on, and which Light Tail chose to make use of a few moments later, and splay herself out across the seat as though she were trying to sleep in the heated water.
At least, she was until she opened her eyes, saw her mother, and promptly started laughing at her, for some reason. She didn’t even hear herself asking what she was laughing at until the little filly gleefully told her.
“You, silly pony!” Light Tail laughed. “You look like you just got struck by lightning, or somethin’! Yer eyes are like, really big, and your mouth keeps hangin’ open wide enough to catch a baseball!! You look like yer lost even!”
One of her forehooves sought to correct one of these deficiencies and close her mouth, only to have slack open after each attempt. After the fourth try she finally succeeded in her task and turned her attention to the sink—
—dropping a small pouch onto the edge of the sink labeled “HYGIENE KIT MKI” and pulling out a mouthwash bottle, a toothbrush and a tube of paste, that she didn’t even remember actively searching for, and beginning to assault the inside of her mouth with a combination of wash and paste in an effort to remove the lingering taste of another mare’s tongue from her own, and she would do this until all she could taste was mint and fluoride. She even went as far as to violently shake her own head while she had a mouthful of mint wash, and in the act of spitting it out managed to splash a bit of it onto the mirror above the sink and get another laugh out of the lounging filly that had two days ago been poisoned almost to death by a mutant scorpion….
“Yer funny today, mom!” Light Tail squealed. “I mean, it was awesome how you found a way to get Kite and BJ away from those slavers, for good, and everybody in town was like “bwah”?! Like they couldn’t believe it! But then when you went to try and snap Kite out of it I heard you scream for a second, like she surprised you or something! What was it? What’d she surprise you with to get you to scream like that?”
Her brain came to a complete and utter halt trying to process how to explain that to a ten-year-old filly that still had no clue how the process of reproduction worked….and she quickly found comfort in the age-old, parent-dodging-the-question answer as she spat out a second mouthful of wash and started rinsing her strawberry-tainted mouth with water in preparation for a third shot of wash. “I’ll tell you when you’re older.”