//------------------------------// // 8 - A Deeper Meaning // Story: Lateral Movement // by Alzrius //------------------------------// “Lex!” called Sonata as she followed him. “Slow down!” She had expected him to ignore her and continue barreling down the train tracks. Thus she was rather surprised when he seemed to heed her call, slowing his frenzied dash to a moderate jog, allowing her to catch up with him. Smiling at him in thanks, the two kept up their pace for an hour before exhaustion forced them to come to a stop. “Don’t you, like, have some sort of spell or something that’ll let us get there faster?” panted Sonata. Lex shook his head. “I have a spell that will increase our speed, but it only lasts for a minute or so,” he said, also breathing hard. “And my magical travel spell is short-range, covering a little under a thousand feet at most.” “Well we can’t keep this pace up.” Sonata sank to the ground, giving her aching legs a rest before motioning to Lex. “Gimme your pack.” “Why?” Despite trying to catch his breath, Lex managed to shoot her a disapproving look, clearly intending to rush forward again once he’d gotten his wind back. “It’s lunchtime.” Lex blew up. “‘It’s lunchtime’?! Are you joking?! We need to-” He ended his rant abruptly, before he could work himself into an even greater tirade. Closing his eyes, he forced himself to calm down. He had always considered himself an intellectual, and intellectually he knew she was right. Ignoring food and rest in favor of pushing themselves to their physical limits wouldn’t get them to Tall Tale any faster, since the resulting exhaustion would require a commensurately greater recovery period. Worse, if whatever was destroying the tracks caught them when they were incapacitated, they’d be in little position to fight it off. Taking a deep breath, Lex held it for several seconds before letting it out. Silently, he took off his haversack and tossed it lightly to Sonata. Catching it, she favored him with another smile before walking to the grass surrounding the train tracks and pulling out a blanket. Lex joined her as she set it out, and the two settled down to eat. It took only a few minutes to finish the cold hayburgers that Sonata had procured from the dining car of the now-departed train, but neither moved to get up after finishing, knowing that exerting themselves immediately after eating would only make them sick. Instead, they sat in silence, each pondering what they should do next. Sonata spoke first. “What did you mean back there, about the dragon…or whatever it is,” she added that last part in a slightly morose voice, clearly disappointed that their foe might not be the legendary beast she’d been hoping for, “trying to isolate Tall Tale?” “The fact that it had limited itself to the tracks was suspicious from the beginning,” replied Lex without hesitation. “There was no immediate reason for doing so, which meant that whatever did that had some greater goal in mind. At first I thought that it might have simply been trying to cause an accident, but that didn’t fit the data.” “It didn’t?” Sonata tilted her head, not following. Lex shook his head. “Remember what that engineer said? They deliberately went slower at night so that they wouldn’t arrive until morning. That’s why they were able to stop before they hit the wreckage, which meant that a wreck was unlikely from the beginning.” Sonata paused for a moment, apparently doing some hard thinking, before nodded. “He did say that, but what if this dr-, this thing was thinking that the train would come along during the day, when it’d be going a lot faster?” “That still wouldn’t have resulted in a wreck. Even if the train had been going full-speed, the daylight meant that they would have seen the wreck in advance, and so had enough time to throw on the brakes.” Lex stared into space as he spoke, focused on the swirl of information going through his mind. Sonata frowned, still not entirely sure that she got it. “But maybe this thing didn’t know that? I mean, dragon or not it’s still a big scary monster, right? I don’t think they let those into train school.” She paused long enough to giggle at the image that conjured up for her, imagining a dragon in a conductor’s uniform, before continuing. “So, like, maybe it thought that would cause a wreck anyway.” “I considered that,” admitted Lex. “But if that was the case, it wouldn’t have destroyed a second section of track. No matter which way a train was going, having a single break in the line would have been enough to derail it, making a second instance completely superfluous, and since this thing is intelligent enough to plan to that degree, it likely would have realized that.” “Completely super-what now?” asked Sonata, making Lex close his eyes in a silent sigh. “In other words, two broken pieces of track wouldn’t mean two train wrecks, so there must be another reason why it did that again.” “Ohhh,” Sonata nodded. “I get it. Why didn’t you just say that from the beginning?” Ignoring that last comment, Lex moved on. “So that leads us to another question: if it wasn’t trying to derail the train, what was it trying to do?” “I understand that part, but how did you come up with ‘keep everypony out of Tall Tale’?” “Keep everypony out, or everypony that’s already there in,” corrected Lex. “By my estimation, we covered about fifteen miles between when we left the first wreck and when we came to the second one. What does that tell you?” Sonata was sure there was a particular answer that Lex had in mind, but for the life of her she couldn’t imagine what it was, silently signaling that she had no idea. Lex was still staring at nothing, but he picked up on her motion in his periphery and continued. “Fixing a ruined stretch of track isn’t an easy task. It will be difficult to cut away the twisted metal and fill in the ballast. After that, they’ll need to carefully measure the replacement rail lines and have them welded into place. That’s why that engineer said it would take a couple of weeks to repair.” “He did? I don’t remember that.” “You hadn’t arrived by that point.” “Oh, okay then. But what does that have to do with how far apart the two wrecks were?” “The tracks make a few turns between there and here. Even though they’re small ones, the distance involved and the surrounding forest makes the train operators have moderate tunnel-vision. I’d be surprised if they could see more than a mile or two ahead.” “So?” Sonata couldn’t help but wonder if he was deliberately dragging things out before he got to the point. She didn’t mind too much – it was pretty cool how he could put all the puzzle pieces together – but she was getting impatient to catch up. Her question was enough to shake Lex more fully from his reverie, and he looked at her. “So, that means that they won’t even discover the second wrecked area until after they fix the first. That means that they’ll have to start over again, and the entire thing will take twice as long. In other words, Tall Tale is certain to be isolated for quite a while…giving that thing plenty of time to do whatever it’s going to do.” That thought was sobering enough that both sat in silence again for a few minutes, before Sonata piped up hopefully. “Maybe some pegasus pony will fly by and report that there are two wrecks?” “I doubt it.” It never occurred to Lex that Sonata was simply trying to be positive, and he responded as though her idea had been literal. “We’re almost a hundred miles from Tall Tale, and quite a distance from whatever the last town was-” “Ooh! I remember this one! It was Pineville!” Sonata grinned, pleased to have been able to contribute something. She could be smart too! “Right, Pineville. Which means that any flying passerby noticing the wreckage is unlikely.” He paused, as something else occurred to him. Is it doing this so far from either town to try and increase the repair times even more? He turned the thought over only for a moment before rejecting the idea. No, if it’s this intelligent, it would know that the repair workers can just take the train directly to the affected area and back in no time at all. That means… “It doesn’t want the ponies in Tall Tale to know what it’s doing.” Silence greeted his latest revelation, and he glanced over at Sonata, wondering why she hadn’t asked any follow-ups. For her part, she simply raised her eyebrows and gave him a pointed look, twirling a hoof in a “hurry up” gesture. Huffing slightly, Lex explained. “It went a hundred miles from Tall Tale to do this. Why so far away? Because it doesn’t want the ponies there to know what’s happened. The train was on its way there, which likely means that Tall Tale doesn’t have a train of its own that they can use to go looking for help when they realize that nopony can reach them.” “That’s good, right?” Sonata asked as she stood up, stretching slightly. Lex did the same, stepping off the blanket as she gathered it up again. “Most likely. If it’s trying to perpetrate a deception, then that means it’s not acting openly. So the ponies in Tall Tale are safe, at least for the moment. But whatever this thing is doing, it’s definitely no good.” “Totes,” nodded Sonata seriously. Finishing packing up the blanket and passing the haversack back to Lex, the two of them headed back to the train tracks and started forward again, walking this time. The sun was low in the sky by the time they discovered the third stretch of wrecked track. This time, Lex looked at it for barely a minute before concluding that it was the same as the others and moving on. Privately, he also suspected that it was the last one, since by that point they had no longer become unexpected, and so even the most dense of ponies would start checking ahead so that repairs could be coordinated simultaneously. That, and they were getting closer to Tall Tale now too. They’d covered quite a lot of ground already, and in Lex’s estimation they’d be there in another two days. That only gives me the two days after that to figure out what this thing is, what it wants, and how to deal with it. After that it’s the equinox, and I’ll have to commit to a course of action… He was pulled from his musings as Sonata nudged against him. “Hey, the sun’s setting. Think it’s time we settled in for the night?” Realizing that he’d lost track of the time, Lex fought down a mild blush and nodded. “I’ll get everything ready,” he said, digging his muzzle into one of his haversack’s pockets to retrieve the rope he’d used last night in preparation for creating another extradimensional space. “Should I gather up some more leaves, too?” teased Sonata gently. “That won’t be necessary, I’ve thought of a solution for that particular problem. All I need to do is adjust the phase of this bag’s folded space so that the resonance shift doesn’t overlap with that from the rope trick spell, and it should be fine.” Lex stated this matter-of-factly, as though he were discussing the weather. “It won’t be a permanent alteration, of course, but it should last the night easily. That way we can take the bag into the conjured space without either of them being adversely affected.” He gave a rueful shake of his head. “I can’t believe I didn’t think of that last night.” “…yeah. That’s like, super embarrassing of you,” replied Sonata, her voice a mixture of sarcasm and incredulity as she moved off the tracks and towards the woods. Lex, not picking up on her tone of voice, frowned and opened his mouth to rebut her assertion, but suddenly froze. “Sonata!” he hissed, his voice tense. Picking up on her boyfriend’s alarm, she quickly turned back to him. “What is it?” “Look over there.” Lex was looking towards where the sun was setting, staring further down the track. Squinting against the dying light, Sonata didn’t see anything at first, and was about to say so when she noticed that one of the shrubs didn’t look quite right. It was slightly too far out from the tree-line. For that matter its silhouette was too smooth, like it wasn’t a bush at all. In fact…it wasn’t a bush at all! Near-totally hidden due to the trees around it and the setting sun behind it, staring at Lex and Sonata from almost a thousand feet away, was a pony.