Chapter 27. Blow Up
The vibrations that were shaking the entire lab continued rise in frequency, and were now entering the audio range.
"Blow out the front door, then shoot anything you see. Hurry! We've only got a few seconds, before we're all dead!" Stormie yelled over the increasing din.
"Hurry," Brainstorm added. "Shoot to kill."
Something hit the glass of the showroom doors, and they shattered. Presumably Stormie had just shot them.
"We'll shield you from the blast," Stormie yelled. I could feel the vibrations all the way to my core. They were very distracting, taxing my power to think. Then, at the moment, obeying was more important than thinking.
Bracing myself, I lifted my right foreleg, and wished the pistol into existence. The urgency suggested that messing around with complex gun designs would not be wise. As soon as it had finished forming, I mentally slammed the spell into its virtual magazine and squeezed off a couple of shots. I don't know what the second one hit, because the first one totally blew away the doors, and the metal plates welded to them, their twisted remains bouncing out into the old shopping mall with a resounding clatter. Broken glass, pieces of blue satin and other shrapnel filled the air, but none of it made it to where I was standing, instead, hitting a thin glowing wall before dropping to the floor. I recognized it as a variation of Brainstorm's shooting gallery shield spell.
Folding the gun around my hoof, I ran forward, through the smoke, through the doorway, struggling to see what was beyond, in the unlit mall. It was hard to pinpoint the target by listening, because I was being assaulted from all directions by echoes off the bare walls of the mall.
"Shoot to kill. Stop that weapon firing no matter what the cost!" Brainstorm yelled. "If it fires, everypony will die, them included." In other words, they are dead either way. I understood. I can't say that pleased me any, though.
"What am I looking for?" I yelled as I cleared the smoke, and desperately looked around the blackness for the source of the vibrations. Overhead a couple of lights flickered into action, triggered by my presence.
"Fucking huge gun," Stormie clarified. Wonderfully descriptive. Just how big was 'fucking huge'?
Bullets started whizzing past me, an error on the part of our attackers, because that gave me a general direction. Far off, perhaps quarter of a mile away, right down the other end of the mall, where it had narrowed into a large corridor, there were a number of ponies. Behind them, filling most of the corridor, extending from floor to ceiling, was a substantial dark mass. It was big enough to be blocking off most of the light from the ceiling lights behind it. What I assumed was the barrel of the weapon extended forward, over the heads of the ponies that were firing at me. The vibrations had reached a screaming pitch, my body twitching and quivering in response, making it hard to even breathe, yet the frequency continued to climb.
I slid to a standstill, raising and unfolding my boot pistol, still armed with the disintegration spell. I rapidly squeezed off several shots, all aimed at the dark mass. In response, the sound warbled, its climb halting, as the area disappeared in an orange flare of multiple explosions and thick black smoke. I felt the resultant blast from where I was standing. Even aiming at the machine as I had been, I knew that those explosions had killed the operators and those guarding it. I had crossed the line. I had done the last thing I ever wanted to do. I was now a killer, justified or not.
Stormie slid to a stop beside me. With her that close, I could just hear her saddle mounted weapons spitting a stream of bullets into the clouds of smoke. "Keep firing until the noise falls off," she instructed me.
Taking my best aim, I squeezed off another half a dozen shots, and again was buffeted by the resultant blasts. The noise and vibrations suddenly increased in volume and intensity, sounding very ragged, as if metal was rubbing against metal. Suddenly the frequency began to plummet, then following a deafening screech, the area exploded with the sound of ripping and tearing metal, as something huge hurtled about on a rampage of its own. What in Luna's name had I just set free?
"Cover!" Brainstorm yelled, and we scattered, seeking shelter in whatever alcove was the nearest, as the shock wave carrying tons of pieces of shredded walls and smashed machinery blasted towards us.
The silence was deafening... or had I actually gone deaf? I tapped my hoof on the floor. "Thunk." I heard that, so it really was quiet. I wondered if I had blacked out, or had just been too stunned to notice what was going on. It seemed the power had blacked out too.
I pushed the twisted metal remains of a wall panel off myself, reabsorbed my pistol, and slowly stood. After a visual inspection of my body, I tried each of my limbs, pleased to find that everything was still attached and worked. There were a few impact marks on my black bio-robotic body, although only one or two showed any sign of bleeding: scratches, nothing more, fortunately. Extending my fingers, I reached up to check my face, only to find it felt totally alien. Oh, the head armor had deployed. I decided to leave it in place until this mess was sorted out.
"Oh, there you are, Aneki," a slightly husky voice stated. I could hear the relief they felt.
"Cacha? You are out of your tank?" I asked, pointlessly, as she clearly was. Turning I found her a couple of paces from me. Like me, her armor had deployed and her eyes glowed orange-red. Her mane was still wet, plastered down on her black skin. I missed seeing her pretty pink face.
"Yeah, I'm out," she stated. "When I heard the first explosion, I thought it would be better to be out and about as quick as I could be in case we needed to run.
"Stormie and Brainstorm?" I asked.
"Brainstorm is over there, taking a nap too. We haven't found Stormie yet," Cacha replied. She indicated where Crimson was assisting the fallen stallion.
"Stormie was near me, when the machine exploded," I said, glancing around for anywhere she could be hidden.
We heard a groan from under another collection of shrapnel and debris.
"Stormie," Cacha and I voiced together.
"I think I'm hurt," came Stormie's response. "It feels like I have a massive cut along my flank."
Immediately Cacha and I started lifting the debris from Stormie and throwing it aside. If we could get pressure onto her wound, we could stop it bleeding. Hang on... hadn't a fair amount of time already passed? My level of panic dropped. If Stormie was going to bleed out, it would have already happened. Within moments Cacha and I had cleared the debris and could see Stormie relatively clearly, both Cacha's and my eyes providing light. She was lying on her left side, leaving her injured right side clear for us to see. The rent in her hide started at her shoulder and ran right down the length of her body to just shy of her tail. Below was dark, and reflective. Unfurling my fingers, I felt the edge of the tear, finding it felt as dry as it looked. There was no blood. Cacha reached past me and shoved her fingers straight into the wound.
"Cacha!" I gasped.
"You're fine, Stormie," Cacha stated, "assuming you don't have any wounds I can't see."
"What about that cut?" Stormie asked, turning her head so she could see it herself. Her eyes were also glowing. "Good grief! That's serious!" she exclaimed.
"You are armored, you silly mare," Cacha said tapping the black of Stormie's face. "This," she said as she grabbed the torn skin and pulled hard, "is just your old coat."
A great chunk of Stormie's coat ripped free, revealing the fully developed bio-robotic body below.
"What?" Stormie gasped as her old coat parted company with her body.
"You're a Hellite now, girl. Your conversion is almost complete. Your old skin would have come away of its own accord within the next few days. This has just sped that up a little. It's my own conversion I'm worried about now," Cacha added.
"You'll be fine, Cacha," Stormie said as she looked past us. "Crimson! How's Brainstorm doing?" she called.
"Same as you, by the sound of it," Crimson responded. "He's coming around now. Head armor has deployed, and his old coat is torn around his neck."
"Oh good, we are still alive," another voice interjected: Brainstorm.
"Welcome to the land of the living," Crimson responded.
"You succeeded in stopping them from firing the weapon, Aneki," Brainstorm said.
"Did I?" I asked. "This area is totally trashed."
"You did," Brainstorm asserted. "That energy had to go somewhere. If that thing had reached full power and fired, it would have vaporized the lab, and the main structure behind it, not to mention the floors and ceilings for a few levels above and below this one. Every pony within a mile would have died, and chances are a section of the city above would have collapsed." Whoa! That would have been a major disaster! Not that it would have been my problem any more.
Brainstorm stood, and went through a similar routine to what I had when I first got up. Satisfied all of his body parts were still where they belonged, he turned back to us.
"All parts present and accounted for, except for my saddle guns," he said. Now that I thought of it, Stormie's were no longer on her either. After hunting around for a few moments, he levitated his missing weapon from where it had been thrown and settled it on his back. "Hmm. Lights are out, but I can see. Interesting," he added, before heading towards us. Crimson, the only one of us who still looked like a regular pony, followed.
"What the fuck was that thing?" I asked, not caring that my choice of words fell outside my comfort zone.
"It was an ancient weapon that was discovered sealed up in a hidden store room. All sorts of other ancient tech was found at the same time, and spirited off to be used up above. That just left that damn monster," Brainstorm explained, without fully answering my question.
"So how do you know about it? I thought you were locked up for twelve hundred years," I said.
"It was found before they locked us up, and with us being Advanced Weapons Development Laboratories and all, they employed us as consultants to help them work it out," Stormie said. "And as you can gather, we succeeded..."
"...which was rather unfortunate," Brainstorm continued. "Had we realized the enormous power of the thing, we would have told them it was scrap, or sabotaged it or something. Fortunately we were able to abort the test firing before it was too late. That was how I recognized what was happening when the vibrations started."
"So what exactly is... was it?" I tried again. "It was clearly too powerful for use within the H'ven dome. Was it repurposed from something else? If not, and it really was built as a weapon in the first place, it must have been intended for firing at things outside Habitat Eleven."
"You're on the right track, Aneki. It was a main ship's gun," Cacha said quietly.
"Which leads to the obvious question, what the Hell is a weapon that powerful doing in the life support chamber, and what exactly is a main ship?" Crimson interjected.
"I think she means it's the main gun of a ship, Crimson," Brainstorm said. "It does not, however, give us any idea as to what one was doing in H'ven, or if it actually belonged here, in what context?"
"From what I have seen," Cacha said, "and as Aneki suggested, it is meant for firing outside the habitat. There are several positioned around the outer walls, facing out towards the nothing. I have seen them. None of them have been used in living memory. I don't think they even work anymore."
"Have you seen the nothing?" I asked.
"No. There is no way to see what is outside the habitat that I know of," Cacha replied. "The guns are built into massive armored installations that themselves are sealed off from the rest of the Habitat. There are inspection ports that allow us to see them, and sealed hatches that would allow access, but they are locked, even to us."
"So what you have just told us suggests that H'ven is... a ship?" Stormie asked.
"It looks that way," Cacha agreed, "although with the total loss of documentation during the extermination, the how and why of it is unknown, even to us."
"What is a ship, then?" Crimson asked. Thank you, Crimson.
"It is a large, self propelled vessel, or container, designed to move things from one location to another," Cacha said.
"Cacha, I thought you weren't going to tell me anything about Habitat Eleven," I said, reminding her of her earlier comments. "You wanted me to work things out for myself so you could double check my thoughts against Hellite conclusions."
"Oh, I did, didn't I? Well... that much would have soon been obvious to you anyway," Cacha said. "I wasn't allowing for us to come face to face with heavy weaponry in the life preservation chamber, though. How much had you figured out, anyway?"
"Do enlighten us," Brainstorm agreed.
"I figured it was to help preserve a single type of creature, ponies, no matter what other types of creatures may or may not have existed. It was to do so by isolating and protecting us until such a time as whatever was outside had changed sufficiently for us to return out there. As for guessing it was a ship, please consider that to us, from up in the dome, ships are only vague concepts mentioned in old breezie tales, and as the base word for 'shipping', as in moving cargo about. It's another word that has lost its true meaning, along with our knowledge of anything else that may exist outside Habitat Eleven's walls," I stated, feeling a little put out.
"Won't worry, young'n. You are doing okay. Stormie and I are twelve hundred years closer to whatever was the truth about this place, and Cacha has seen things none of us could imagine," Brainstorm reassured me. "But for now, our safe haven has been blown open, and we have just alerted half of the pony population with an explosion they would have needed to be asleep to miss. I suggest we survey what is left of the gun, and the damage it has done, then get the hell out of here. Or perhaps more to the point, we should all hurry up and go to Hell."
The absence of light was a blessing. In the low light from our glowing irises, we were only able to see in monochrome. That insulated us from the true horror of what we were walking through. The pieces of shattered electronics, trailing color coded wires, just became textured debris trailing grey 'hair'. Blood just became grey smudges, while the pony entrails that were scattered about were not that different to the hoses and pipes of both the destroyed weapon, and those torn from H'ven itself.
Water was leaking from pipes that had been built into the gap between the smashed false ceiling and the floor above, raining down on us, splattering on the floor, forming little streams with the blood and oil in the debris, flowing downwards, before pooling or vanishing through the cracks of the bowed and cracked floor.
I really didn't know what we were expecting to find. There was no doubt that this was the main ship's gun that Brainstorm and Stormie had encountered before. The charred markings matched what they could recall. I knew what I had hoped to find though, and it was a stupid hope. I hoped to find survivors, and not for the sake of my conscience, but for the ponies themselves. I had to admit I didn't expect there to be any though. My initial barrage probably killed them all. Brainstorm and Stormie, between them, rained enough bullets on them to finish any I may have missed. The gun blowing itself apart would have torn apart anything that was left.
To my left was the opening the armature of the rotary converter and flywheel based energy storage system had made when it left its mountings. Walls had been ripped from their mounts, torn, and dragged along with the spinning mass as it flung itself away from the remains of the gun. The result was rather like a funnel, feeding off in the direction it had taken. That mess would take engineers a long time to repair. Fortunately I could not see anything that was going to cause significant problems for the ponies up in the H'ven dome. Major structural damage had been averted.
As I stood, staring at the devastation, I noticed a pony leg sticking out from below some debris, a mapper-communicator on it. I carefully wound my way through the jagged and twisted metal until I reached it. There was no movement. Bracing myself against the inevitable, I reached down, extended my fingers to feel for a pulse, but even as I did, I knew it was way too late for whatever pony this leg had once belonged to.
"... 3V3, please report. Anypony. Please report. What is going on down there?" a desperate voice barked into my mind. That was weird. With the leg being severed from its owner, the comms unit was connecting to me.
"Are you the comms pony, or the pony in charge of this debacle?" I asked.
"Ah. I'm the comms pony. I'll put the commander on for you," the voice answered.
After a few moments of silence, a different voice spoke into my mind. "Commander 1R2 speaking. Report."
"What the fuck were you morons thinking?" I subvocalized back. "Firing that weapon down here was a death sentence for everypony around here!"
"Wha... what? I will not tolerate language like that. Hang on... you are not 3V3, are you? Identify yourself. What team are you with?" the voice barked back.
"Oh, I'm the structural engineer," I responded, "I'm standing on a bent floor, half way up the trail of destruction the weapon made when it misfired. And you are lucky it did misfire, because if it hadn't, you would likely have collapsed part of the city."
"Put me on to 3V3 immediately," the voice demanded. Not a great one for listening, this fellow.
"Ah, you are so busy barking out commands that your head is shoved so far up your own ass that you don't listen to a word anypony says, eh?" I yelled at him, making the others near me jump, and stare at me. After all, until this point, the conversation had been silent.
"You are going to be in so much trouble when you get back here!" the voice at the other end raged. "Put 3V3 on!"
"Put him on what? A fucking plate, perhaps?" I asked, deliberately meaning to infuriate the prick at the other end a little more. "In case you haven't caught on yet, 3V3 isn't here to put on. All I have of him is his foreleg. I think a bit of him is smeared on the far wall, and I'm guessing that streamer might be his long intestine."
Before now, I hadn't been aware that it was possible to transmit the process of emptying one's stomach via the mental link. Fortunately I was able to hold my composure, and the remains of my last meal, while the commander went about losing his.
"So, who are you?" the voice tried again, this time expressing somewhat conflicting signals.
"Oh, as I said earlier, I'm a structural engineer. I suggest you look at the employment record of the pony you are hunting. What was her job again? Oh, that's right, Aneki was a structural engineer," I said slowly, and clearly. "That is right, in case you haven't woken up to it yet, RU12 or whatever the fuck you call yourself, I am the fucking target, and unlike every other damn pony down here, I'm actually alive!"
"The only one alive?" the voice managed.
"Yes, that is right. I have been unable to find any pony alive. In fact, I have been unable to find an entire pony. It really is horrific down here. No lights, water and effluent leaking all over the place, the possibility of modifiers leaking from the sealed up lab the blast cracked open. If you guys have even the tiniest bit of intelligence, you will seal off everything below about sublevel thirty and give the Hellspawn the chance to do their job and clean up this fucking mess," I stated. "Or, you could just be bloody minded fools and come down after me again, and die."
"You are threatening to kill..." the voice began. What an idiot. What a closed mind.
"Oh, I don't need to kill you fools. You are doing a pretty good job of that yourselves. I only hope you don't take all the ponies in H'ven with you," I said. "Now listen and listen well. As I have already stated, I am a structural engineer. From my casual inspection, I would say the damage down here is extensive, but superficial, structurally speaking. The safest option would be for you to stay out of the area until either the Hellspawn repair it, or you can work out a way to properly decontaminate it. I also realize that whatever I say to you will probably be ignored and you fools will shortly be down here looking to kill me again, in which case, all I can say is, it will be your death, and not mine. Now if you will excuse me, I'm rather tired of holding onto what's left of poor old 3V3, so I am going to put him down. Goodbye." With that, I released the severed limb, and turned to face the ponies that were staring at me.
"What?" I asked.
"Why didn't you lie about who you were?" Brainstorm asked. We were back at the lab now, and the place was a mess. Fortunately pretty much everything we had wanted to salvage had already been moved into the access shaft alongside the main structural member, and would have been spared from the shock wave.
"Because their records would soon prove that there was no structural engineer, or any other pony, for that matter, that was down in the area. It isn't like the public can just waltz down here any time they like. At least now they might think Crimson and Cacha are dead, and that you two died centuries ago, assuming they worked out you were even here in the first place," I explained my reasoning. "And now that the largest weapon they had at their disposal has blown up in their faces, what else could they throw at me? Using that gun was stupid, over the top and a clear case of sheer desperation."
"All the same," Stormie said, "I still can't think of a good reason for this monstrous weapon would have been within the life support chamber."
"I can," I said.
"Really? Please share your thoughts," Brainstorm requested.
"Cacha said all of the other guns are mounted in the walls of the ship, out where you need to be a Hellite to survive. Even then, they are sealed up, and built into the structure. How is a pony meant to get any hoofs-on experience with maintaining the things? I'm betting that one unit was put up here in the life support chamber so that ponies could be trained to maintain it, even without having to become a Hellite first. If you failed, you were sent back to your civilian life, or trained to do something else, and you were none the worse off because of it," I theorized.
"Valid points," Brainstorm agreed. "Then, with the extermination, knowledge of it was lost, and one day, centuries later, some ponies poking around down in the underlevels accidentally discovered the hidden warehouse, and pulled it out again, taking us to it to try to work out how to operate it."
"And after sitting around for another twelve hundred years, it was dragged out by a herd of clueless idiots from Central in their desperation to exterminate me," I said. "All the same, I find that a bit too extreme."
"Perhaps enough information survived on us for them to know the lab was where a couple of criminals used to make modifiers. They probably imagined you as a rogue Hellspawn with access to equipment that could destroy or convert the rest of them to Hellspawn as well, for revenge. Something like that," Brainstorm suggested.
"And in their desperation, they correctly concluded that the weapon would eliminate both you and the lab, and destroy any modifiers in the process," Stormie concluded.
"And that thing just happened to be conveniently sitting nearby?" Crimson asked.
"Nah. Last we saw, it had been locked up again, miles away and a couple levels up. It must have taken them at least a week to get it down here," Brainstorm said.
"What I'm really not looking forward to is tonight," Cacha interjected, quietly.
"Why? We should be well away from here by then, and even if they caught up, we could take them down without much trouble," Stormie said.
"I'm talking about the stress that will hit us as soon as we settle down for a nice, quiet sleep. I expect I will be screaming, and I was sheltered from the worst of the blast!" Cacha stated. "Anyway, let's get out of here. Hopefully my conversion is complete, because staying here any longer would be stupid.
"Hold still, girl," Stormie instructed, moving around behind Cacha. She rested her horn against Cacha's spine, near the tail, a glow forming around both as she did. After holding her horn there just long enough to both bore and annoy us all, she let the spell dissipate. "Congratulations, Miss Cacha, you are now a fully functional mare. And for good measure, I just applied the corrective and protective spell to your ovaries. All you need to do now is pick a stallion. And while I'm at it, Aneki, please present your butt so I can apply the same spell to you and your little one."
I obliged. The spell felt kind of weird while it was being cast, but not... perverted. I endured it in silence, as Cacha had.
"All done," Stormie stated. "And now I am stuffed. Brainstorm can help you with the spell, Crimson."
"I don't get done by a beautiful mare? Unfair!" Crimson joked as Brainstorm obliged by casting the spell.
Stormie looked around the lab again. To me it didn't look like there was much worth worrying about. A few flasks of unwanted concoctions were lying on shelves or on the floor. The shabby blanket I had been sleeping on was still there, and so was the hose I had been using to booby trap my defenses. Brainstorm's unicorn guns were still on the bench, despite the shaking. I worked my way through the mess and grabbed my saddle bags, putting them on and securing them. Apart from the green food converter, which I grabbed and stashed, I couldn't see anything else of mine about. I picked up Cacha's bags and tossed them to her, then began making my way back towards the showroom door, where the others were still standing.
"Aneki, be a dear, and pass me the new unicorn guns, please," Brainstorm requested. I looked at him as if he had three heads.
"Last time I picked up one of those, you know full well what happened," I said, darkly.
"Oh, for crying out loud, Aneki, I told you these are totally harmless to you," Brainstorm chastised me as he squeezed past Crimson and Cacha. "I'll just get them myse...eaaahhhhg!"
As soon as he touched them, one of the two guns immediately began changing shape, grasping at his hooves and legs, pulling itself to him. The little panels stuck out on the stalks moved in and out, clicking and clacking, the cables behind them writhing, before emerging, and plunging straight into his legs, piercing directly through both the remains of his old jade-green coat, and the tough black hellite skin below.
"Aaaaah!" he cried. "I didn't see... that coming. I thought we fixed... the... pain... problem..." I watched with mixed emotions as little pieces of machinery forced their way into his body, all of those little panels on stalks rippling to their strange choreography as they worked their way nearer to his skin, before cutting their own access points into his body.
"Well, well," Stormie said. "That really is just desserts, isn't it? It seems I forgot to mention to him that I added concoction ninety two, version ten to the last mineral booster mix I injected us with. Since it appears we need to wait for his conversion to complete itself, I may as well take my medicine now, too. Consider this a sincere apology, Aneki." With that she squeezed past Cacha and Crimson, and grasped the second of the of the unicorn guns. The process, complete with cries of pain, started for the second time.
"Well, this is just hilarious, isn't it?" I said dryly. "Come on Cacha, Crimson, help me grab a bit of scrap to weld over the opening into the mall."
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4666197 Stephen King's Under the Dome?
Hehe.
Ew?
Ahh. Sweet payback.
4751440 Thanks.
4750150
No. I didn't watch that.
4752138 well, i figured the premise was similar, what with the whole 'magical dome covering city/civilization' bit
4752145 I will admit a dome isn't an original idea. Even the Simpson's movie had them trapped in a dome.
4752212 yeah...
this is definitely an intruiging story.
Small question... how does she get mental link if she's holding the dead guy's comm in her hoof, though?
4760587 Just physical contact of the comms unit with her body. It's not much different to actually wearing it. Don't forget she was able to use her own by simply lying on it when 4J2 hid it under her.
This story has got to be the most entertaining OC story I've ever read on fimfiction. I keep reading, reading, reading, and finally, each time I reach an "end", I panic a little before realizing there's more than just the page I've been reading. Had this been in a good old book format, I would probably be reading this as I read the second Hunger Games book: 8 hours non-stop - that's no food, no pause, not even visiting the bathroom.
I haven't quite reached the "end" of it yet, but I would like to thank you for writing this awesome story. I'm actually too tired to be doing anything, yet here I have been reading almost until I fell asleep on my desk.
Thank you for writing this, and I can hardly wait until I have the time to read more of this!
"are you twelve". Subtle, that one
Present your butt!
Central has a BFG...
Hot mare with saddle cannons, interesting combination.
What the hell was even making the noise?
Those poor seismic detectors must be getting rocked.
Central must be crazy then, authorizing something like that to kill 5 ponies.
In a handbasket no less.
Heh, I imagine her giving a little shrug as well.
The Brainstorms are... strange.
5618990
Haha, I am the same way. Fell asleep on my laptop last night while reading.
Hnggggg. I just love EVERYTHING about this story so much! It's also VERY different from what I thought, but it's AMAZING! Everything about it is great, including how there's always more to read <3
This... Is a very well written story!!