Fallout: Equestria - Just Like Clockwork

by Starlight_Tinker


Chapter 15 - A Slave to Time (Part 6)

Chapter 15 – A Slave to Time (Part 6)
He's my big brother best friend... Forever...


A long time ago, in the magical land of Equestria, a Time Lord was travelling...

I couldn't breathe.

The time rotor slid up and down confidently within its enclosure, as it had done reliably for so many centuries. Its constrained, space-time manipulating transit was unyielding and repetitive; constant in its regularity. I found myself envying it as my skin began to moisten with sweat and my hearts shuddered arrhythmically inside my chest. I was panicking, I realised. Me! Panicking! The Master was minutes away, waiting on me to stop his diabolical plans (whatever they were), and I was bloody panicking!

Maybe it was the fact that, for the first time in several years, I was about to face a major challenge on my own. Had I really become that dependant on my companions? I concluded quickly that that simply couldn't be the case, oh no. Having just deposited my two most recent charges in their respective eras, I had effectively rid myself both of distractions and liabilities, I told myself. The Master wouldn't be unable to hold anypony I cared for as a hostage, and I wouldn't have to waste time explaining myself every few minutes to a pair of alien simpletons—

I winced at the very thought of calling either Applebloom or Ditzy a simpleton, truncating my internal monologue with a inward-facing grimace. I couldn't honestly say anything bad about them - there was one reason, and one reason alone, that I had left them behind, and it was one that, in truth, I had known about all along.

I was afraid.

Not of them specifically, you understand, (even though either one could be as intimidating as an advancing Darlok if they tried) but of... of facing them in the event that I failed. I'd have to go rescue them, you see, and look into their big, round eyes as I ushered them on board the TARDIS in the midst of fiery rains and solar gales. They would know in that instant what an absolute coward I'd have to have been; that I'd turned tail and fled my friend-turned-nemesis without foiling his plans, and reserved just enough time to save two mares out of several billion. I'd have to tell them that their world had been lost to the Master's insanity, and that everypony they'd ever known had just been turned to ash and scattered across their solar system.

I held my head in my hooves in an attempt to calm my unnerved psyche, but was only half way through telling myself that everything would be fine when a shudder reverberated throughout the control room. As the floor stabilised, a drone hissed out of the console and quickly lowered in pitch as the time rotor ceased to move. The TARDIS had landed.

Taking a bracing breath, I dried my eyes and crawled out from my hiding place under the console. Flexing my limbs, I made sure that I was standing tall, and began to trot with as much confidence as I could muster towards the door.


I stepped out onto a paved surface, and surveyed my surroundings with a determined scowl. The TARDIS had come to rest on an ornate viewing platform lined with stone columns in the style of one of Equestria's earliest civilisations, situated atop a large hill. The platform's only entryway had been blocked by a construction made up of several unwieldy planks of wood, as if it had been cordoned off and boarded up several years previously. The barrier itself was painted with blue and white stripes (although the design was by now faded and chipped), and bore the words 'DANGER: POISON JOKE INFESTATION' in luminous, emboldened letters on both sides. I glanced about for a moment before realising that I was alone (there were neither ponies nor any discernible infestations nearby), and so trotted over to the periphery of the structure to see where it was I had ended up.

The view from the edge of the platform was spectacular. I found myself overlooking Canterlot in all its twilight majesty, the spires of the royal castle reaching for the heavens as the sun set in a sea of reds and oranges in the distance. The platform was set into the West-facing side of one of the larger ridges that bordered the ancient settlement, creating a vantage point over Equestria's first city like no other.

A gentle breeze was working its way over the artificial plateau as I drank in the view of the metropolis below. It wasn't the biggest city I'd ever seen, of course. Nor was it the most advanced, or the most populated. But despite these shortcomings, it always managed to hold a special place in my hearts, a fact that caused me to both reminisce warmly, and grimace in trepidation.

"Oh! You're here!" a monstrously familiar voice said suddenly, startling me. I swivelled around on the spot to face my addresser, quickly finding myself almost muzzle-to-muzzle with the Master (who had just materialised behind me). In surprise, I stumbled backwards, pressing my flank painfully into a safety rail surrounding the platform. The metal, which was rusted and old, promptly gave way, and I was moments away from rolling bloodied and mangled into Canterlot when my former schoolmate, in a feat of truly impressive athleticism, reached out and grabbed my hoof, pulling me back to safety.

"Oh! Careful now!" he said scoldingly, a cheerful grin plastered over his face. "We wouldn't want you regenerating right when I save this world now, would we? You'd miss my moment in the sun!"

"Master..." I hissed, as I composed myself and tried to process what had just happened. "Whatever it is you're planning, you don't need to go through with it! We can... we can talk this out. You don't have to take Equestria with you!"

"Take it with me...?" my old friend replied, a confused frown marring his previously happy expression. "Take it with me where? What are you—?"

He stopped talking mid-sentence, his eyes darting back and forth as his mind quickly dissected my words.

"Wait," he said slowly, as the corner of his mouthed arched upwards in amusement. "You think I'm going to do something catastrophic to your precious little planet, don't you? As in: I'm so damaged that I'm going to destroy an entire civilisation in some sort of psychotic hyper-tantrum? Is that it?"

"Please Master, you don't need to do it..." I whispered, as my eyes simultaneously begged him to stop, and promised the direst of consequences should he fail to acquiesce. "You're so much more than—!"

"Oh, for Rassilon's sake!" the Master moaned, as he rolled his eyes and slackened his jaw in frustration. "You really do think the worst of me! You're worse than those pissants back at the Academy! For the love of the vortex Doctor, I am not the stereotypically insane 'baddie' you make me out to be!"

"I'm not saying that you are!" I replied, stepping forward as he moved away from the edge of the viewing platform. "I'm trying to say the opposite, in fact! I know that you're more than just the aggregate of all those crimes! You're my friend! And if the ponies of this planet have taught me anything, it's that friendship is mag—!"

"You just don't sodding understand, do you!?" the Master suddenly snarled at me, a fleck of spittle flying free from his lips. "I've never been appreciated for my works! Not like you! Not like the brilliant bloody Doctor in his brilliant bloody TARDIS! Which you stole in the first place, by the way! All I get are dark legends and intergalactic arrest warrants, while you always seem to end up with the adoration of the entire damned cosmos! How many religions are based on you now, by the way!? My last count was six, but do feel free to correct me if that's changed since we last met!"

"Y-you call those travesties works!?" I shouted, shedding my air of concern as my patience expired. "You've killed tens of thousands during your lives! Do you expect me to believe that they were all just accidents!? That you didn't know what you were doing every single time!?"

"Of course not!" he bellowed back, his eyes wide and enraged. "I expect you to appreciate my solutions as a fellow Time Lord. For Rassilon's sake, Doctor, I've brought order, safety and prosperity to billions! A few thousand sacrifices are the price that those civilisations had to pay for their improvement! And besides, it's different this time! This time, I'm doing things your way, so you don't get to play the hero! Today, it's my turn to be the get it all right!"

"I-I can't believe I'm hearing this!" I stammered, shocked at the extent to which the Master had lost his mind. "BLOWING UP A STAR IS NOT GOING TO MAKE YOU A HERO!"

"Blowing up a star!?" he replied, recoiling as if he were taken aback by my accusation. "I'm not going to do anything with their sun, Doctor! I told you, it'll be different this time!"

"Then why do you have the Hoof of Ponega!?" I asked, pointing angrily at the shiny, new gauntlet that was now covering his left forehoof. "What else could you possibly want with the most powerful solar manipulator in the universe!? I'm not a fool, you know! Now, give me the Hoof, and we can stop all of this before it goes too far!"

"Doctor..." the Master said, his tone suddenly quiet; almost apologetic. "I won't need their sun to use the Hoof. A thousand balefire explosions will do just as well..."

"A thousand..." I whimpered, slack-jawed and shocked. "Then the devastation in the future was... Wh-what have you done...!?"

"Why do you always assume that it's something I've done?" the evil creature before me said calmly, as he raised his hoof and began to enter commands into the solar manipulator's console. "As I've said twice now, I'm doing things your way this time."

"MASTER!" I suddenly screamed, surprising even myself as my words echoed amongst the stone columns. "YOU UNDO WHATEVER IT IS YOU'VE DONE, OR SO HELP ME I'LL... I'LL KILL YOU!"

My words had the desired effect, as the Master stopped in his tracks, dropped his foreleg back to the ground, and turned to face me. The faux mirth was gone from his expression, his face now occupied only by an pencil-thin frown of contempt.

"You'll... kill me, you say...?" he said slowly. "You. The Doctor. Will kill me. And there was me thinking that you would never end a life... even if it meant losing your own."

"I suppose some things are worth killing for..." I replied quietly, making sure that the weight of my meaning was adequately conveyed. "Make no mistake, Master. You may be my oldest friend, you may be the only other Time Lord in the universe, but if you continue to threaten this planet, I will end you...!"

He stared at me for a moment, blinking only twice as he regarded me evenly. After taking a few seconds to consider my ultimatum, the Master took in a breath and began to speak.

"You've clearly learned nothing in Equestria, Doctor," he said simply, before once again raising his foreleg to his face. "You call us old friends, but you refuse to give me a chance to change. I'm trying to turn a disaster into salvation. I'm trying to be..." He paused for a moment, looking to the ground as he bit his lip in resignation, as if he was having to force words out of his mouth. "I'm trying to be... 'good'..."

"Put. The Hoof. Down," I said through gritted teeth, as I pulled my Sonic Screwdriver into my mouth. "I won't ask again."

The Master stared me down for another few seconds as I bored into him with my eyes. My warning glare did nothing to his flawed resolve though, as he simply shook his head at me in disgust and continued to input data into the Hoof of Ponega. With a white hot rage, and a conviction as hard as marble, I gripped the controls of the Screwdriver in my teeth. The control panel of the Hoof burst into shards as a plume of blue and white sparks flared out of the gauntlet. A shriek escaped the Master's mouth as he fought to drop the device before it singed his foreleg to a cinder. The struggle only lasted a moment, and ended with my demented former friend cradling his burnt limb as he stared up at me, raging in his defeat as I stood over him.

"There," I said, a look of barely contained disgust spreading across my face. "Now you can't harness any energy. Stop the bombs, and I'll promise to put in a good word with the Princesses. Maybe they'll only banish you to their moon for a century as opposed to a millennium."

"You damn fool...!" he hissed, the purest, most concentrated expression of hateful contempt marring his features. "There's no stopping this! It's a nexus of fixed points! There are a million reasons that this world is going to burn, and now its only hope for survival has been destroyed! Well fucking done, Doctor! You've just destroyed Equestria!"

I felt my eyes widen slightly as a series of thoughts occurred to me. A nexus of many fixed points in time could indeed appear as one large invariance, as I'd previously detected. And the Hoof wasn't just meant for controlling nuclear reactions inside stars - any reaction would do, a fact that, worryingly, also backed up the Master's claims. In my fear and my anger, could it have been that I had misjudged him? Was it possible that he was telling the truth, and that I had... ended Equestria...?

Thoughts continued to flood my mind until a bright flash of light appeared far off in the distance, blinding me for a moment before it receded. As my eyes readjusted to the fading pulse, I was able to discern a new shape on the horizon. My mind ceased to function rationally as I realised I was staring at a mushroom shaped plume of green fire: a balefire explosion. I blinked in disbelief, my jaw hanging slack as tears began to stream freely down my face.

"N... No..." I whispered, as my world disappeared before my eyes. "It... It can't be..."

"It is," the Master said as he righted himself slowly, his previous rage having turned once again to an apologetic mewl. "And it'll only continue now. You need to go get those mares you were travelling with to safe—"

"YOU!" I screeched, an inequine howl leaving me hoarse as I launched myself at the wounded killer. "YOU DID THIS! YOU KILLED THEM ALL!"

My head collided with his chest with as much force as I could bring to bear, and we tumbled backwards twice, head-over-hoof, before coming to rest at the rear edge the viewing platform. I had landed atop my opponent, and began to bury my hooves into his ribs and face with all the strength and rage of the cosmos, as if the now dying world around me were doing the punching. The Master immediately tried to wrest himself from my onslaught, jerking from side to side to try and shake me off. In the distance, another flash pierced my eyes, then another and another. Every single one was followed by the rapid growth of a sickly green mushroom cloud, and the promise of another few hundred thousand lost souls. The struggle continued regardless, and we soon found ourselves tumbling down from the far side of the platform. We came to rest next to a wooded area which was entirely bounded by blue flowers.

"It...! Wasn't...! Me...! Please...!" the Master shouted between blows, his forelegs waggling impotently in defence of his torso. My hooves reddened rapidly as I continued my enraged, stationary gallop across the the world killer's body. Wounds wept crimson and bones cracked under my fury, a raw, primal anger fuelling my need to attack. I had once said that I 'never would', as if to say that I was above the act of killing; that I was beyond the barbarism like that erupting all around me; that, regardless of circumstance, there was always a better way.

But, clearly, I was wrong.

I continued my onslaught until I began to lose the feeling in my hooves. With a final burst of brutishness, I turned around and bucked the Master several metres straight into a nearby tree, leaving him to fall prone into the blue flowers below. His face was by this point black, blue and red with lesions and blunt force trauma. His chest, now a sea of mottled black patches, heaved as he struggled to draw breath.

I looked down to my hooves as the sounds of ragged breathing and distant explosions seeped into my ears. What had I done!? What had he done!? How was Equestria ever going to recover from all this!?

The weight of the truth hit me like an asteroid impact as I collapsed onto the ground. It was me. It was my fault. And it always had been.

Equestria had always been doomed. The Master could have helped. His plan might have worked. And I had stopped him from trying. All because I didn't believe that he could change. All because I didn't believe that he could be good.

I cast a glance toward my oldest friend, as he struggled to breath amongst the blue flowers, and began to reflexively scramble away. I had always run from my problems; why change that now?

I crawled back up to the platform, sweating and sore, to regard the land I had once considered calling home. A warm wind had reached the plateau, stinging my eyes and making my flesh tingle as it washed me in a thousand rads of balefire fallout. I grimaced as blood began to spontaneously seep from my tear ducts and gums, my mouth filling with the taste of coppery death as a thousand needles danced across my hide.

I wept as I ran back to TARDIS, turning my back on Equestria as it burned.

<<<<< O >>>>>

Meanwhile, in the Equestrian Wasteland...

As I had intended, the halls of the Emporium were clear of slavers, my plan to send them all running for their lives having worked like a charm. My friends and I (accompanied by our little cadre of captives) continued to move away from the bar area, towards the large lift that had originally brought us down to the lower levels. Once inside, Saltira slammed her hoof into the panel, and sent us trundling towards the slave cells.

"Right you lot!" I said loudly, addressing the slavers we had in tow. "I want all of the slaves in this place out of their collars, and out of their cells. How do I do it!?"

"Go fuck yourself!" snarled one of the better-fed ponies in our group of captives. "The moment you or any of our slaves even so much as poke your heads out of here, you'll be shot on sight! You think you're so fucking clever, that you're doing some great fucking service to the these worthless shits, but this life, right here, is the best they're ever going to—! MMMPHH!"

The slaver's angry little monologue was cut short as Galinda, much to the collective satisfaction of me and my friends, suddenly wrapped her claws around his muzzle. Her grip tightened as she stared straight into his eyes, her rage made evident by the blood she had begun to draw from the despot's fresh facial wounds, despite her artificially blunted claws.

"I think that's enough of that train of thought, don't you?" she said through gritted teeth, turning to address the other captives as another few trickles of blood (and a good few tears) dribbled down the slaver's face. There was a rapid flurry of nodding naught but a microsecond later, and at least one audible gulp from the group.

"Good," Galinda said, as she released her talons, allowing the slaver in her grasp - who was now in a far less argumentative mood - to drop to the floor. "Now somepony answer his question, or I swear to Celestial I'll tear the answer out of you one by one!"

"Uh..." began the guard who had praised me earlier. "You could... I mean I think it would be a good idea if you, uh... reconfigured the Fence."

"The Fence?" I replied, intrigued. "What fence? What are you talking about?"

"Well, you see," he started to say, in the same oddly enthusiastic manner one might expect from a tour guide, "there's this transmitter in the upper levels that makes a sort of 'radio dome' around the Emporium that we call 'the Fence'. If a slave's collar doesn't receive a signal from it every ten minutes, the explosives get set off and, well, you know what happens after that."

"Right, I get that," I replied, as I raised my forehoof to massage one of my temples. "I knew there was something like that in here already. But the controller for it was in Tower's desk terminal, and now we can't get to it. I need an alternative!"

"Well..." the guard droned for a moment. "You could always reconfigure it manually. The controller was in Mr. Tower's office, yeah, but the transmitter itself is on level fourteen. I mean the signals are all encrypted, yeah, and it's all enclosed in a bomb-proof, magically reinforced, anti-tamper case, but I... guess it'd be doable."

"Is it held together with screws?" I asked, a single eyebrow pointing upwards as Saltira pressed the control for the indicated floor.

"Uh, yeah... I think so..." he replied, a squint of confusion on his face.

"Excellent!" I whinnied, clapping my forehooves together. "That's our plan then! We reprogramme this transmitter of theirs, blow the reactor and get everypony to safety! Although... maybe not in that particular order. Now, Mr. surprisingly-helpful-slaver, how do we get there?"

"Go down the corridor on your left out of the lift, take your second right, and it's the door at the end of the hallway," he said, beaming at my approval of his cooperative nature.

"Whit aboot the encryption?" Saltira asked as the lift came to a halt. "Doesn't that mean all the data an' such'll be in code?"

"Basically, yeah," I said, trotting past her into the corridor. "But it shouldn't pose a problem."

"Shouldnae pose a problem!?" Saltira repeated loudly, her brow furrowed in anger as she moved to block my path. "Shouldnae!? These are oor lives yer talkin' aboot here! How can ye be so cavalier aboot this!?"

"I'm just stating a fact," I said, staring as reassuringly as I could into her eyes. "Codes aren't exactly difficult for me, Saltira. I'm great with mathematics, there hasn't been a security software update in over two centuries, and I've got a time-travelling alien's personal toolkit fused to my head. This 'Fence' thing won't be a problem. Trust me."

Saltira stared me down angrily for several seconds, searching my face for uncertainty. Her expression softened when my confident veneer failed to crack, and with a exasperated sigh, she stood aside.

"Ah really hope ye know whit ye'r doin'..." she said warningly, as I turned to face the group.

"I do," I replied softly. "Don't worry, everything will be fine soon enough, Saltira. Now, everypony listen up! Here's what we're doing. Atom, Bulkhead, Galinda, I need you to take our captives to the surface, releasing the slaves as you go. Whatever you do though, don't go outside yet, otherwise you're liable to get shot by all the Emporium evacuees. Just get the slaves out, get them armed if possible, and wait for the collars to shut down. You lot good with that?"

"Er... hang on," Atom said, squinting at me in confusion. "Why aren't we going to the reactor to start that overload you talked about? Surely that would be the best use of our talents right now, right?"

"Yeah," said Bulkhead, "we'd be a heck of a lot more useful there than carrying these weird pipe-weapon things. We don't even know how to use them!"

"I don't want you to risk your lives with the reactor, no matter how competent you are," I replied. "Besides, the reactor is the last thing that we'll be attending to - freeing everypony in here is our top priority, followed closely by stopping the Darlok."

"He's right," Galinda added, as she adjusted the shoulder strap of her weapon. "Blowing this place up with everyone still inside it isn't what I'd call a winning move. Freedom first, then explosions."

Dutifully, Bulkhead and Atom looked to Galinda, and the trio nodded in agreement.

"Good," I said. "Whilst you do that, Saltira, Sage and I will shut down the Fence, and only then start looking into triggering some sort of overload to take care of the Darlok. Everypony understand?"

A series of nods and monosyllabic affirmations were returned. The answer was 'yes'.

"Excellent," I continued. "Any more questions before we set off?"

Silence this time: a resounding 'no'.

"Alright," I said to my friends, trying desperately to conceal the nervous gulp making its way down my throat, "let's do this!"

With that, our party split into two. One band of liberators with imprisoned despots in tow, and another of insurgents, with a populace to free and a monster to fell. We turned our backs to one another, and began to gallop.


The pressure door hissed gently as it slid into the ceiling, and Sage, Saltira, and I trotted quickly into the stuffy little room behind it. The air inside was cool, but smelt strongly of dust and oil, as if the same roomful of gas were being cooled over and over again without being swapped out or replenished. The walls were lined with a number of short bookcases filled with nondescript binders, and several small tables, their tops covered with various magical components and dismantled slave collars. They were of little interest though - or goal rested in the room's centre.

The Fence's control system was cylindrical, about two metres tall, and was utterly featureless save for a cluster of status lights and a small keypad. The exterior panels were adorned at their edges by several dozen shiny circles, each with a curious arrangement of grooves on top. I surmised quickly that they were some sort of security screws with proprietary heads, designed such that only the correct driver could be used to remove them, and set flush with the casing so they couldn't by gripped and unscrewed manually (a faint buzzing in my horn told me that they were also enchanted in some fashion).

With a smirk at the little fasteners' misplaced self-assuredness, I flipped open my horn and started counting. Seven seconds later, the last screw had tinkled to the floor, and the cylinder's coverings were able to fall away, splaying outwards like the petals of an ugly, metal flower coming into bloom. So much for 'reinforced and tamper-proof', I thought to myself.

"Okay..." I mused out loud, as I studied the Fence's now-exposed innards. "Access port, access port, where's the access— Ah! Here we are."

I pulled an interface cable out of my PipBuck and plugged it into the cylinder, then ran a series of short commands to establish a connection. Sage and Saltira stood by silently as line after line of status messages scrolled over the screen fused to my foreleg. A moment later the connection was accepted, as I knew it would be, and I started looking toward circumventing the Fence's security. I had read fourteen separate books on the subject of cryptography in my time in Stable 52, and thanks to a combination of easy-to-use programming tools on the part of StableTec, and near perfect recall on mine, I managed to start a jack-of-all-trades decryption algorithm running in less than two minutes.

"Right," I said to my companions, as I leant back onto my hindquarters. "I'll have access in a few minutes - I just have to wait on my PipBuck doing its thing."

Sage nodded, taking a moment to glance at the screen before moving to explore one of the room's many bookcases. Saltira on the other hoof remained still, standing just a few paces away from me. She was staring off into space, her chest heaving even though she had barely exerted herself. I looked to Sage, but he had already buried his head in one of the many binders and likely wouldn't come up for breath until interrupted.

"Hey..." I said softly, after turning back to face Saltira. Her head snapped to face me, her eyes wide and focused.

"Whit!? Whit is it!? Whit's wrang!?" she said quickly, startled.

"Whoa, relax!" I said, taken aback. "I just wanted to talk to you - I can't help but notice that you're a little on-edge..."

"Aye, on-edge is right," she replied, as she began to pace restlessly back and forth around the cylinder. "Ah mean, wouldn't you be? Ah've been here fer mah entire adult life, and a good bit o' mah childhood too. Just the idea of gettin' out is... oh, Celestia it's amazing! But every time Ah get tae thinkin' aboot leavin', Ah start tae worry that they might catch us again. That they'll catch me, and Ah'll be back in a cage, stuck under the ground, in... back in their beds...!"

All of a sudden, Saltira clutched her chest and began to stumble over her own hooves, the telltale signs of a panic attack manifesting as she started to hyperventilate. I tried to get up to grab her, but was stopped by the interface cable shackling me to the cylinder. My inaction was of no consequence though. A neat flurry of motion emanated from the corner of the room, and Saltira found herself being propped up by Sage, who had clearly been keeping one ear open for trouble.

"It's alright," he cooed softly, as he gently guided her onto the floor. "You'll be fine, we'll all be fine, and the Emporium will never hurt anypony ever again. Do you understand? You're safe with us. Safe."

Sage held Saltira in an embrace for the best past of a minute before her breathing settled back to a normal rhythm. Tears streamed from her eyes, and her hooves shook slightly as she gently returned the hug, turning around so as to bury her face in Sage's chest.

"There, there..." Sage said, as he stroked her mane. "Nopony will hurt you as long as we're around. You have my word on that."

"B-but..." Saltira said in between sobs. "The slavers... they're so powerful! They're everywhere! Whit if they do catch us!? Whit then!? Oh, we'll all be in so much trouble! They'll punish us! Punish me! Ah don't wanna go back to the cages! Ah want tae see the Sun! Ah've got tae get oot o' here! Ah've got tae—!"

"Saltira," I said calmly, derailing the traumatised mare's breathless spiral back into panic and despair. Both she and Sage looked towards me, for some reason suddenly enraptured by my voice. "You're already free. The slaver's just haven't realised it yet."

Saltira didn't resume her crying. Instead, she stared back at me, her face almost totally expressionless as she absorbed what I'd said. A moment later, she took in a single, long breath, letting out a trembling sigh as she exhaled, and pushed herself carefully back onto all fours.

"Aye..." she said quietly, smiling gently as she looked at both me and Sage.

"Alright then," I said, smiling back as an oh-so-welcome warmth spread through my chest. "How about we try to take our minds off what we're doing, eh? I mean, we all have to wait for my PipBuck to finish running this program anyway, so how about we take a few minutes to recharge?"

"I don't see any harm in that," Sage said. "Just keep your weapons to hoof, and leave an ear open."

"Okay," I replied, "how about we, uh... Oh! How about we sing a song?"

"How aboot naw?" Saltira said, chuckling cautiously at my suggestion. "Ye might be goin' fer optimism, Compass, but Ah know fer a fact that now's no the time fer singing."

"I suppose not..." I said, smiling involuntarily at Saltira's joviality, slight though it was. "Well then, how about you, um... Actually, would you mind answering a question?"

"Aboot whit?" she replied.

"Well," I said slowly, just in case I hit a hidden nerve, "do you know a stallion named Buckshot?"

To my relief, Saltira didn't suddenly burst into tears or suffer some form of breakdown as I'd feared she might. She just nodded slowly, her eyes unfocused and distant again.

"Aye..." she whispered. "Ah didnae expect tae ever see him again. In fact, Ah thought he wis deed."

"How do you know him?" I asked, now even more curious than before. "I heard that he stopped in his tracks when he saw you earlier."

"He's mah brother," she replied simply.

It took me a moment to process what Saltira had said - after all, I had only just recently been informed as to the structure of a 'traditional' equine family unit. But when I had finally parsed her words into meaning, I couldn't help but be flabbergasted.

"Buckshot has a sibster!?" I blurted a moment later, almost entirely without thinking. "When was I going to hear about this!?"

"Sister," Sage said, having now left his binders for the second time.

"What?" I asked incredulously.

"Sister," Sage reiterated. "You're getting the words sister and sibling mixed up. Sibling is the general term, sister is the feminine gendered version."

"Oh, you know what I mean!" I replied, exasperated. "Regardless, he never told me!"

"And why the fuck would it matter tae you!?" Saltira said, no doubt confused at my indignation.

"Because I just so happen to be his coltfriend!" I practically shouted back.

"H-his whit!?" she blurted, her jaw hanging open.

"His coltfriend," I repeated calmly. "Why? Do you have a problem with two stallions being together?"

Saltira's eyes narrowed as one corner of her mouth arced upwards.

"Heh," she said to herself, smirking. "Mah wee brother's gone and got himself' a coltfriend." She looked me in the eye. "Naw, Compass, I dinnae have a problem wi' it. In fact Ah think it's brilliant! It'd drive our parents bloody mental, and the less we end up like them the better!"

"Really?" I asked, turning my head in confusion. "That's weird that you should say that. When Buckshot told me about how your village was destroyed he seemed to miss your parents greatly."

"He wis young," she replied, shaking her head. "He didnae know them like Ah did." She looked me in the eye gain, her expression even and her voice quiet. "How much did he tell ye?"

"Only that you lived in a small walled village, your father was a medic of some sort and your mother was a security mare. One day, raiders attacked and he wandered out into the Wasteland with nothing but a shotgun and a coating of blood thinking that everypony except him had just been killed."

Saltira didn't respond. Instead, she looked to the ground as if to halfheartedly examine the texture of the floor tiles.

"Is that... not what happened?" I asked carefully.

"Naw, that's... that's how it happened," Saltira said, perhaps a little to quickly, whilst nodding perhaps a little too enthusiastically. "The, uh... raiders captured me and a couple o' the other fillies and colts after they ransacked the place. Then they sold us tae the Emporium. Simple as that..."

I shared a momentary look with Sage, and it seemed that we had both had the same thought regarding our companion's testimony.

'Did she just lie to us...?' our expressions said.

Before we could press the issue any further though, my PipBuck started to beep, indicating that the program had succeeded in finding a weakness in the Fence's internal security.

Without another word, I turned to regard my foreleg, filing my exchange with Saltira away for future review. Pouring over the data returned by my cryptographic analysis, I surmised that the Fence had been secured using a variant of the StableTech 'LUNA-6' cypher which used an all-too-predictable pseudorandom number generator to perform its encoding passes. A matter of seconds later, I had programmed my PipBuck to imitate the security scheme and generated a valid passcode. In short: I was in.

"See?" I said to Saltira, trying to keep 'I told you so!' out of my tone. "No problem at all!"

She didn't respond. Maybe she had picked up on the scepticism Sage and I had felt regarding her story of her past. I'd definitely have to dig up some answers at some point.

Though that particular conversations would have to wait, I decided - there was a much more pressing problem at hoof. As I scrolled through the now bare workings of the Fence's control system, it became worryingly clear that it was lacking a certain highly useful feature: namely, that of a 'release' function.

"Shit..." I whispered under my breath as dread crept into my stomach. "Oh no, no, no... Don't fucking tell me...!"

"What's wrong?" said Sage, his brow furrowed in concern.

"There's no way to unlock the collars from here!" I replied, forcing (and failing) my voice to maintain a normal register.

"Wh-Whit!?" Saltira said loudly, her voice having suddenly returned. "Whit happened tae 'There'll be nae problem'!?"

"There shouldn't be one!" I said, gesticulating wildly as I scrolled back through the options on the interface. "The only function that this bloody Fence thing has is to send out a radio pulse of random numbers every six-hundred seconds. It doesn't do anything else!"

"So it's like a dead-stallion switch," Sage said, his voice reassuringly low and evenly paced. "This thing stops sending numbers and the collars explode, right?"

"That's what I'm thinking," I replied, taken aback slightly by how quickly Sage had figured out the situation. "I just don't get why there aren't any release functions!"

"Wait, you were expectin' there tae be a great big ol' button with 'Release the Slaves' written on it!?" Saltira gawked. "You fuckin' arsehole! Why would they include that!? If it ever went aff by accident they'd have a full-blown revolt on their hooves! I thought ye were gonnae hack the thing and do some sort o' technical magic on it! Not wander up and expect there tae be a 'fix all problems' option then throw your hooves up in the fuckin' air when the solution didnae waltz out and smack ye in the snout!"

I couldn't respond. Shame and self-hatred welled in my stomach and forced their way into my head, forcing me into a teary, hot blush. How could I have been so stupid!? Of course they wouldn't be a 'release all' command! Saltira was right - they'd have to be the biggest idiots in Equestria to include one!

"I..." I began to stammer. "I thought..."

"Compass it's alright," Sage said as he sat down beside me with one of the binders, his manner one of competent urgency rather than panic. "Just look through the documentation with me and we'll find a solution."

The binder he presented was filled from cover to cover with cracked and stained sheets of neatly text regarding the Emporium's security system. In a fascinating, yet somehow predictable, twist, it turned out that the system had originally been intended as a prototype prison security system for detaining Zebrican spies and preventing them from using their espionage skills to escape. As one might expect, the tamper-proofing on the collars themselves was truly impressive. Proprietary screw threading, dummy panels and components, a life signs monitoring system, and a dense network of sensors designed to detect attempts to open the casing.

As I read on, a feeling of panic crept further and further up my throat - these collars were perfect! The room was silent for several minutes as Sage and I scanned page after page of manuals regarding the collars, getting nowhere all the while.

I was on the verge of crying out in frustration when Saltira's voice suddenly cleaved my absorption in the binder in two.

"Hey," she said. "Whit aboot a power cut?"

"A power cut?" replied Sage. "As in, to the Fence?"

"Aye," Saltira responded. "Whit happens if this thing cannae send oot those numbers? Ah remember gettin' stuck in the cages fer close to two days a few years back without lights or fresh air, not tae mention food and water! Ah'm pretty sure it wis because the main power wis aff, since the lifts and doors seemed tae be affected as well."

"You're right!" I exclaimed, my eyes shooting back and forth excitedly. "They'd have to plan for a power cut! Otherwise, they'd lose all their products within ten minutes! Oh... uh, no offence..."

"None taken," Saltira said, her teeth gritted in a distinctly hostile manner. (I surmised that this was Wastelander body language for 'You're lucky I need you alive'.)

"Sage," I said, avoiding eye contact with Saltira, "have you ever seen anything about power interruption in the—?"

"Page three-hundred-and-ninety-four," the elder buck said as he planted another thick, heavy binder down in front of me. Sure enough, on the page he had opened it ot, there was a short passage entitled 'IN CASE OF MAIN POWER INTERRUPTION'.

"H-how did you—?" I began.

"Fast reader," Sage replied, shrugging. "Remember I told you read every volume of the PipBuck manual? Well, I did that over a weekend back in Trotfell. I just... really like books!"

"I wish I had your patience," I said back, shaking my head. "I swear, I was the slowest learner in Stable 52. There were times when I though I'd never finish my studies—"

"Uh... hello!?" Saltira said, interrupting me, a look of absolute disbelief plastered across her face. "Fates hangin' in the balance here! Are ye gonnae shut the place down or not!?"

"Right!" I said, chiding myself into a blush. "Sorry, sorry, sorry! Let's see what we've got here..."

I leant forward and started to read the passage Sage had selected for me.


In the event of an interruption to the secure packet transmitter's main power supply, the device will switch to a reserve battery which, depending on wear, may allow continued operation for up to a further thirty-five minutes. Should the device remain unpowered at the end of this period, the secure packet transmitter will, unless configured otherwise, transmit a final secure packet before going offline. This packet will instruct all detention devices within range to switch to their "TRANSIT" mode, wherein the requirement that a verifiable secure data packet be received every 600 seconds is suspended. This is to prevent the detention devices from prematurely entering "TERMINATION" mode and hence, shall avoid the undesired dispatch of any detainees (for further information on this process, see Section 5.34 "Explosive Decapitation: Don't Lose Your Head!").

"Ah ha!" I shouted, slamming my hoof into the page. "This is perfect! This thing puts all the collars in range into some sort of roaming mode within half an hour of it losing power!"

"So... we can leave...!?" Salitira said, her jaw slack and her eyes wide. "We can finally get out of this Tartarus-hole!?"

"Yes," I said, resolute and proud once again. All we have to do is figure out how to turn this thing off..."

A short search revealed that the Fence's power came from a single multi-core cable set into a thick groove in the floor to prevent tripping. I flipped open my horn and focussed on the coupling. The familiar, now almost comforting buzz shook my teeth as the plug magically worked itself free of its socket, flopping to the floor like a severed tentacle a moment later.

With a whine, the Fence ceased to function, its lights dimming into oblivion as its last few Fausts of magical energy were exhausted by its processors. We enjoyed less than two seconds of silence before the inverse of the whine we'd just heard met our ears. The internal lights flickered back to life, the whirring of internal lodestone drives filling the room with the chatter of a thousand digital insects as programs were reloaded and protocols accessed.

'PRIMARY POWER INTERRUPTED', declared a notification on my PipBuck, which was still plugged into the device's heart. 'RESERVE POWER MODE ENABLED; ESTIMATED SHUTDOWN IN 00:28:00. BE ADVISED THAT DETAINMENT DEVICES WILL BE SWITCHED TO TRANSIT MODE IN 00:27:00.'

"Excellent!" I said gleefully, turning to Saltira and Sage. "The batteries haven't worn as much as I may have liked, but at least we can get out of here now. Only twenty-seven minutes until all of the slaves in this facility can leave forever!"

Saltira, once again, was left with little to say. Her eyes were unfocussed and vacant, as if she had momentarily unplugged herself from reality much in the same way as I had just disconnected the Fence. But, despite her apparent absence from the world, I was sure that she had heard me. After a moment, the corners of her mouth began to curl upwards into a smile, and, one by one, her teeth were bared in an ever-widening grin.

"Actually," I said, as an idea came to me, a certain heft in my barding pocket triggering a wave of realisation, "I think I can do you one better..."

I reached into my pocket with my hoof, and pulled out the collar remote that Bulkhead had put together for Buckshot's part in our deception. A thought had come to me as I had considered the function, and the capabilities, of the Fence.

It had occurred to me that the collars, fool-proof though they may have been, were all still centrally controlled. The right stream of radio pulses stopped them from exploding, and another set of pulses would do the opposite. I already knew that the collar remotes could both unlock and detonate the collars, but I had never, up until that moment, considered how. Frowning, I extended my foreleg, and pointed the remote at Saltira.

"Saltira..." I said, lost in thought. "Hold still..."

The smile that had only just taken residence on her face dropped away instantly as her ears flattened against her head, her eyes contracting to minuscule dots.

"NO! WAIT!" she screeched as I depressed the button on the remote, her hooves shooting up to reflexively shield her face from the ensuing blast.

But the explosion she was expecting never came. Instead, her collar fell to the floor with a loud clunk, leaving the poor mare wide-eyed and in a state of shock.

Looking down at my Pipbuck, I scrolled through several menus before arriving at the seldom-examined radio logs, and noted, with considerable glee, that a new, unidentified, heavily encrypted narrowband signal had been detected only a few seconds previously.

"I knew it!" I exclaimed, as I whipped around and began to feverishly dismantle the remote.

"Compass, what are you doing?" Sage asked, as he rushed to Saltira (who was still standing as still and rigid as a statue, her eyes widened to the extreme in shock).

"Just a little extra flourish," I answered, my head now buried deep inside the Fence's innards.

What I had suspected before about the collars had just been proven true: that they had a single, unified unlock code. The fact that I was able to use a scavenged remote to release a totally separate collar was proof enough of that. It was also clear at that point why it wasn't possible for collars to be singled out by the Fence for unlocking - every collar gets the same transmission, hence the use of portable, short range remotes for removal or detonation.

It was incredible to consider that freedom had been so close for the Emporium's captives all this time; if only they had known about the other button on the remote controls. I found it astonishing to consider just how powerful a weapon fear could be when wielded correctly. The slaves were each literally inches away from freedom, and all it would have taken was the slight of hoof to pickpocket a guard, or the bravery to subdue one. But they had never even tried.

I tried to shake the depressing thoughts out of my skull as I worked, instead trying to enjoy the tactile, satisfying feeling of plugging connectors into the appropriate receptacles. A few seconds passed, punctuated only by the soft hum of the Fence's internals, and the gentle clicking of my ministrations. Once complete, I stepped back, ran a basic diagnostic on my PipBuck to make sure everything was still working, and pulled the cable out of the Fence, turning to Sage and Saltira with an enormous, involuntary grin plastered across my face.

"There!" I said. "I've hooked up the remote's cryptographic talisman to the spare port on the Fence's secure packet generator! Now, when the timer runs out, and the final signal is sent, the collars won't just be able to leave the range of the Fence, they'll also deactivate and unlock! All at once! How about that for sabotage!?"

Sage let out a single, impressed scoff, his lips upturned at one end as he held Saltira.

"Not bad..." he said, smiling. "Not bad at all, Compass."

I looked to Saltira, as did Sage, honestly hoping for a compliment (it was important she knew just how brilliant I was being). It seemed, however, that she hadn't been paying attention. In the time that I had taken to modify the Fence, Saltira had descended to the floor, her gaze characteristically distant, and her hooves held gently around her neck. Her mouth was open, and her breathing a curious combination of calm and panicked, as if she was on the verge of another attack, but was just managing to hold it together. I stepped over towards her gently, trying my hardest to not make any noise, lest I startle her, and lowered my self to meet her eyeline.

"Saltira...?" I said softly, looking up into her sharp, blue eyes. "Are you al—"

"Six thousand... five hundred... eighty-one..." she whispered, in a voice that seemed infinitely more thoughtful and delicate than her previous manner.

I looked to Sage, who frowned and shrugged. Clearly, it had meant nothing to him either.

"I don't understand," I said quietly, as I lowered my flank onto the floor in front of the red-maned mare. "What does that mean, Saltira?"

"It's..." she began, only to gulp nervously. "It was... the number of days Ah've been made to wear that collar..."

I looked to Sage again, and saw his jaw slacken slightly as his eyes began to glisten. He turned away, leaving me to return my gaze to Saltira, the weight of what she had just said bearing down on my mind like an oppressive, solid cloud. We had both just done the calculation in our heads, and both knew exactly what it meant.

Eighteen years. Two months. And six days.

That's how long Saltira had been a slave. That's how long she had been forced to serve the worst dregs of ponykind, as everything from a waitress to a prostitute, how long she had had her equinity taken and locked away, how long she had been degraded and abused with nothing to comfort her; not even the promise of death.

I sank back onto my haunches and exhaled slowly, running my tongue around the inside of my mouth. The cloud was raining down upon me, moistening my eyes and making my lip tremble in the cold.

"Ah... Ah counted..." Saltira continued, her line of sight still fixed on some infinitely distant point beyond the realm of the living. "At first... It was tae tell masel' that it wouldnae be much longer till I wis out, till Ah wis free again. But then... as the years started tae pass... Ah lost hope of leavin'. Ah just... kept countin'. Because that's what good slaves do... They keep on going... Or they die..."

Saltira's head suddenly began to move, her eyes focussing themselves on me as her vision returned to reality. Her hooves, which up until that point had cradled her neck where the collar had sat, now extended outwards, trembling and slow.

"And now..." she said, as her forelegs were wrapped around my neck, and I was brought into an embrace unlike any I had ever encountered. "Now... Ah don't have tae count anymore..."

A shivering breath escaped my mouth as Saltira closed here eyes and laid her head upon my shoulder. Tears were freely making their way down Sage's face as he beamed at me, and I felt a wetness on my shoulder that could only have come from Saltira's tear ducts.

I closed my eyes as I too began to weep, and returned the hug, a wave of unprecedented emotion smashing into my consciousness as the cloud in my head ruptured, forcing a hurricane's worth of fear, sadness, and anger out of my mind, leaving behind only the rays of joy from the Sun above.

The hug tightened, and the tears only flowed more strongly as time went on. I wanted that bliss to last forever - for the knowledge that I had just made an actual difference in somepony's life to stay in my head, current and raw and wonderful, for the rest of time.

Stone Tower, however, had other plans.

The room shook suddenly, as an explosion rocked the entire superstructure from base to tip, streams of concrete dust falling from the ceiling as we scrambled to our hooves.

"Is that the thing you said wis chasin' ye?" Saltira said, as she dried her eyes and picked up her gun. The flair with which she rose to her hooves distinguished her completely from the mare that had only moments previously had an explosive locked around her neck. Her eyes were bright and so brilliantly alive, her mane seemed to be fuller, her coat more colourful, her cutie mark practically glowing with joy!

"Yeah, that'll be it," I said, still smiling at the change I had just had the privilege of being a part of. "Let's get to the reactor room and blow this place. We just have to keep him busy for another twenty-one minutes before the collars are released, and we can all get out of here."

"Then we have plan," Sage said, as he approached the door control. "Lead on Compass!"

"Allons-y!" I whinnied gladly, as we galloped from the room.

To be continued...


Footnote: LEVEL UP!

New perk added: Liberator
You are a child of liberty, and no friend to slavers. You can now release single slave collars at close range using any remote. Science +5; Lockpick +5.

New perk added: Epiphany
You have guided a recently new companion through a life changing event. Your ability to relate to other Wastelanders is developing nicely. Speech +10.