"Ow! That hurt!" I complained, looking at my foreleg. It wasn't where it was meant to be. In fact, it was lying on the floor a good pace from where I was standing, balanced on the three legs that remained. Between me and it, there was a moderate amount of blood splattered about. That had all come from when the leg was initially severed. The blood flow had stopped almost immediately, a much improved response than had been typical of a standard HELaTS. A pony no longer had to hold the wound shut for around ten seconds to stop the bleeding.
"I just cut your leg off. Of course it hurt," Brainstorm said, as he wiped the blood from the leg-blade he had formed using his HELaTS abilities. "But you did say you wanted to practice using the new HELaTS system."
"Yes, I did, but perhaps I should have given this more thought," I said, lifting the stump of my right foreleg so I could examine it. Oh, so that's what the bone looked like. It had a decidedly metallic sheen. This was surreal. I felt quite detached from what was happening – even unconcerned. I looked at the floor again. I guessed the Storms didn't mind having to clean blood off the floor of their lab.
"Practicing now, when you are not in mortal danger, is for the best," Brainstorm said. "That way you can concentrate on the problem at hoof, rather than having to divert your attention to the attacker. Or, if you wish to up the level of stress, perhaps we could advance the test by cutting off your head, too, and see how you handle two problems at once."
He had to be joking. He had to. "Would that even work?" I asked, tentatively.
"I honestly don't know, and for the time being, I recommend you avoid trying," Brainstorm said with a chuckle.
"Well, yeah," I said. "Anyway, my leg, or at least, what remains of it, is still hurting, so shall we get on with practicing?"
"Sure," Brainstorm said. "Go ahead. Pull yourself together."
I could've hit him...
"Aneki, did you notice the intensity of your pain is far below what such a wound would usually impart? You should be able to tell that," Stormie asked.
"Actually, I still can't recall much of my previous case of limb loss, or the pain involved. I have, however noticed that I am capable of holding a conversation, without any cussing, while standing here with a crippling injury," I said. "Now, shall we move it on? Run me through this process again. Actually, I could have phrased that better. Don't run me through. One wound is enough for the moment. How do I reattach my leg?"
"Don't move from where you are. Mentally reach out for it. Use your mind to visualize reaching out from your stump. If need be, you could form your weapon from the stump, and reach out with that, but you should not need to."
"Okay...," I said.
Mentally I tried to visualize reaching out to the severed limb with my mind, but my expectations kept interfering with my thoughts. Why could I not see... what was it I was supposed to see? I contemplated forming an extended barrel with my internal weapon, and reaching with that, but I felt that would be cheating. I wanted to do it right. Staring at my stump, I tried again, and failed.
What was I meant to see?
For that matter, why did I need to see anything at all?
I closed my eyes. Okay, what was simple to visualize? Perhaps some sort of tendril would do. What I needed to do was form a thin piece of flesh or blood, held together by the new HELaTS modifiers, and reach out with that. Yes, that was the idea. Oh, that felt wet, but it felt like it belonged to me – ah, it was some of my spilled blood. If I absorbed that, and reached about with more tendrils, I could recover more of my lost blood. Good, that seemed to be working. Huh, what was that? My limb? I'd reached that far already?
I could not help but open my eyes to see what was happening. Sure enough, there were shiny, gloopy strings of black and red stretching forth from the stump of my leg to the severed portion of the limb, as well as spread out across the floor, much like veins, gathering the spilt fluids.
"So far, so good," Brainstorm said. He showed no surprise.
"What about contaminants?" I asked.
"Girl, you are made out of materials absorbed from your surroundings, one way or another. The modifiers won't pick up anything they can't use, and will probably harvest anything they can."
"Oh, yeah. I'm made out of sublevel twenty-one girders, aren't I?"
"And Luna knows what else."
I closed my eyes again, mentally exploring the tendrils. I wasn't finding any more spilt blood, so I gathered those tendrils, and extended them along the line the others had taken, eventually reuniting with the severed leg. I felt them merge. With one last effort, I retracted them, pulling my leg back together. That was it – all I needed to do.
"Well done, Aneki," Stormie said. "How does it feel?"
I mentally explored the limb, before putting some weight on it. It still felt wrong, as if it was made of something foreign. Poking it with my other forehoof, I found a lack of sensation.
"It's quite numb," I said. "Didn't I have to spend a day in a coma to let the nerves regrow the first time I had serious nerve damage?"
"You did," Stormie affirmed. "but the second time, when you lost both forelegs, you were up and walking around shortly after, due to the improved modifiers we used at the time, and those were primitive when compared with what you now have. These new ones should only take moments."
"Do you know that, or are you just theorizing?" I asked.
"I know," Stormie said. "from personal experience. This time we tested it on ourselves before testing it on you."
My eyebrows went up in surprise. All too often I had been their test subject, usually unwillingly.
"See," Brainstorm said. "We do learn!"
"Presumably you waited until after Stormie had given birth to little Wuz," I said. They regretted experimenting on me when I was pregnant. I didn't see them doing it to themselves in that situation.
"Of course, love. We only tested these latest modifiers two days ago."
"Ah!" I said, and not because of Brainstorm's comment. "The feeling in my leg is back!"
To prove the point, I lifted the leg, retracted my hoof walls and extended my three black fingers, wiggling them.
"You may not have noticed yet, but these new modifiers heal so cleanly, there will be no scarring," Stormie said.
"Wow!"
A quick glance at my leg suggested she was right. No girl wanted scars and I already had too many.
"It gets better. You know how you can form blades, replace your hooves with pads and so on?"
"Yes?"
"If you use that same mental imaging on your old scars, you can get rid of them, too."
"Really?"
Ducking my head between my legs, I looked at the network of lines left by my vivisection. The natural lines that were part of the HELaTS body sort of disguised them, but I knew they were there. Mentally, I pictured erasing one of them. The real scar vanished. I dropped my mental image, and the scar did not return. Cool! I'd have to engage Cacha in a game of spot and erase the scars, later.
"Impressive!" I said. "I don't suppose using these modifiers would let me form a pair of wings too?"
"Mock wings, yes, you could probably manage something that looked like closed wings. You may even be able to open them a little," Brainstorm said, "but that would just be part of your standard HELaTS abilities anyway. If you wanted something that would let you fly, you would need cybernetic enhancement or DNA modification while in the tank. The latter is how we did Snow."
"Do you want wings?" Stormie asked. "Perhaps you wish to be an alicorn queen?"
"Maybe, some time in the future," I said. "That way I could keep up with Allie. All the same, it's a big change, and I'm not so keen on an extended soak at the moment."
"Cacha didn't want them, either."
"You offered them to her? I mean, you obviously..."
"Yes, at the same time we offered her the horn."
"Did you offer her the other pokey bit, too?"
"You mean, did we offer to turn her into a male? No, not after asking you. We decided to let her raise the subject, should she think of it," Stormie said.
"However, after the treatment was over, we did share our discussion on the matter with her. That led to the little joke we played on you."
"Yeah, thanks. You got me good," I muttered, thinking back to Cacha hiding under the blankets, claiming she was embarrassed about gaining a pokey bit. "Anyway, it's time I headed back up into the life support chamber. I have training to attend."
"How much longer will you be doing that?" Brainstorm asked.
"Unless something invades first, and forces our hooves, we will keep training until we are good enough, and that could take months."
"The patch I welded over the break-in point has held, so far," Brainstorm said, "and even if they do get into the hangar, they won't get through the rotary corridor lock. Presumably, all other points of ingress are just as difficult to overcome."
"Has the captive clockwork spider head revealed anything, yet?" I asked, thinking back to the bodyless head of the machine that had broken into the habitat.
Brainstorm shook his head. "It is either too clever for me to crack, or too stupid to be worth cracking. Either way, I can't get anything out of it, short of... literally cracking it open."
"Well, good luck. Anything you can find out will only help us when we do go outside the habitat."
There was a lot of puffing and panting around us, but we three HELaTS appeared as fresh as when we started. Today's training session had been particularly intense, but even so, hadn't been particularly challenging, and that had more to do with the current level of our skills than anything else. The other ponies that were training with us today were pretty ordinary specimens – the members of the former death squad.
Commander 1R2 had decided Habitat Eleven needed skilled defenders instead of death squads. Admittedly, the death squads had not fulfilled that specific role since I had come to power, but they had been retained as a specialized police force of sorts. Their special skills had not been called on often in the last three years, so as time passed, they had atrophied. To bring them up to standard, they had been training with us regularly for the last three months.
The training completed for the day, we assembled near the edge of the training ground, as was routine. Leaving his vantage point, 3G1 approached.
"All right, soldiers, that will be all for today, but by no means will it be all. By the time I finish training you, I expect you all to be as skilled in teamwork as the three Hellite mares."
There was a collective, and very undisciplined, groan. All present knew that was impossible without converting the squad to the very type of beasts they had originally been trained to hunt – HELaTS, more specifically, converting them into HELaTS unicorns. Nonetheless, that 3G1 was using us as a benchmark showed he clearly understood the threat we were facing. Ponies could be converted to HELaTS unicorns in a week or so, if needed. Training, on the other hoof, would take months, so, if conversion was needed, the more prepared they were before so, the better.
"The three Hellites are to remain. Everypony else is dismissed," 3G1 said.
With many expressions of relief, the other ponies bid a hasty retreat, despite their exhaustion, lest 3G1 should change his mind and call them back. Once they were far enough away not to overhear him, 3G1 turned to us.
"Your majesty, you and your two team members have improved to the point where I am unable to teach you anything significant. You have passed my expectations, and hopefully your own as well."
"Thank you, 3G1," I said. "I believe we have. While we have only seen a single example of what may be outside, now, we are at least able to defend ourselves, and fight back."
"I wish you well with your mission. Please drop by when you return. You may not be a Changeling queen, but you are still my queen."
3G1 turned before we could answer, and walked purposefully away.
"Cacha, Snow, I suggest we go out for a quiet, celebratory drink," I said.
"Up!" Snow said.
Cacha just grinned.
We were standing outside Storm labs. Well, I was. Stormie was in the doorway, holding me there with threads of conversation, unwilling to let me go, like a mother saying farewell to her child on the first day of school.
"Have you got everything?" Stormie asked. Again.
"You sound like my mother," I said. She did!
"I am a mother now, so I guess I have an excuse."
"So am I, and my foal is older than yours. Not to mention that one of my companions is even older than you, so perhaps she should be mothering you."
Stormie threw up her hooves. "You win. I only ask because I care... Do you have food?" She couldn't help herself! To think, only a few years before, she had been a stallion without a conscience.
"We have our food generators," I said. Surely we had been over all of this before. It wasn't like we were a few kids that were running away from home without any forethought. We'd been planning this for the better part of a year.
"But will they work outside the habitat? Will the magic field reach far enough to power them?" Stormie asked.
"That is a good point," I admitted. "Snow assures us they work in the hangar, and that is outside the main hull, so we can generate the food we need, there. That should be sufficient for our first foray outside. Once we know more of what is out there, we can plan accordingly."
"Make sure you prime them with a decent set of trace minerals then - the sort of things your body retains."
"Yes?"
"Your body hangs onto some of the elements in food. You lose others through sweat. Salts, and such," Stormy said. "They won't be recycled by the portable food generator, so the longer you rely on them, the poorer your food will get..."
"Unless we prepack them with those elements, instead of just the easily recycled stuff," I said, understanding what Stormie was saying. She did have a valid point. The habitat systems reclaimed those minerals from the dead, from air filtration and general refuse recycling. Portable food generators were limited to what was manually placed in them, and as what we usually placed in them was our own waste, the resources would dwindle.
In reality, it would only start to be a problem if we were somehow prevented from returning to the habitat. Ponies regularly did week long trips through the bowels of the habitat when on repair duty. Oh, that was an unfortunate choice of words.
"You may as well come back in, and I'll organize something for you," Stormie said.
I shrugged.
"Okay, thanks, but don't take too long. The others are waiting for me."
"I'm surprised that Cacha isn't grafted to you at the moment."
''She thought I would only be away for a minute," I said, dryly.
Such delays were part of life. It wasn't as if we were in a panic. After all, we hadn't been out to check on the condition of the hangar for nearly a year since the initial invasion.
Brainstorm had patched the forced-entry point to the hangar, and while that patch would not stop further ingress, it would alert us to its penetration. If a clockwork spider decided to enter in a different location, local tell-tales Brainstorm had placed might alert us, but the hangar was vast, and the area monitored, small.
Snow had wanted to check on the condition of her ships – after all, she had spent centuries working on each, but we felt the risk was too great, and had prevented her from going to the hangar on her own.
Snow was not a pony I would have even thought about adding to my team before I had met her. She had just been some unknown, insane but harmless relic from ages gone by. The truth could not be further from that. She was highly intelligent, dexterous, and skilled. She also had personal experience with over two thousand years of our history. She remembered Equestria, even though her time, prior to boarding Habitat Eleven, was short.
"Aneki? Where are you?" Cacha called, her head appearing through the doorway.
"Careful, girl," I warned. "If you come in here, Mother Stormie might find more excuses not to let us go."
"Come on. We are leaving now," Cacha insisted, walking around me, and herding me towards the open door. "Bye, Stormie. Wish us luck!"
"But..."
"Keep walking, girl," Cacha said.
"Stormie is getting some trace elements and minerals for out food generators!"
"Silly Aneki!" Cacha said. "I've lived down here all my life. I have already packed them!"
"Bye, Stormie!" I called towards the doorway. "Apparently we already have everything we need!"
By the time Stormie made it back to the door, we were already a good number of paces away.
"Come back, safe!" she called after us.
For the second time, we found ourselves winding through the maze of walls, wires and machinery, to Snow's portal to the hangar. This time, we didn't have an enthusiastic Allie showing off her light casting spell, so the total darkness was interrupted only by the low level of light our HELaTS eyes generated themselves. The effect of having three points of illumination (six, if you counted eyes instead of heads) was somewhat different than when illumination was provided by my eyes alone. Things I may have missed would be picked out by another's gaze, or the wandering eyes of the others would increase my effective peripheral vision.
It also showed quite clearly when Cacha was gazing at my butt.
We eventually arrived at the entrance to the passage, glad to see its high-security door was still firmly shut. Admittedly, we knew it would be, but nerves and self-induced semi-panic were to be expected in this situation. After all, we had returned from our last visit here as a zombie, a critically injured mare and a corpse.
There was that little plaque that read OUTER HULL and HANGAR ACCESS. It was foreboding, marking what could literally be the point of no return.
Snow raised her hoof to the scanner, and unlike last time, the door opened without complaint.
"Once more into the breach, my friends," I said, which, in retrospect, was rather fitting, considering the revolver-like construction of the passage through the hull.
Without another word, we filed into the first chamber, the door closing behind us.
So, this was it.