The Exterminator

by HackamoreHalter

Bugged Conversations

“Children, gather round! No, no, don’t cry. The soldiers will keep us safe. Don’t listen to the noises out there, just listen to my voice, okay? Would you all like to hear a story about the princesses? Princess Celestia was a beautiful pony, with wings like a pegasus and a horn like a unicorn! Every day, she would raise the sun up in the sky. What’s that? What is the sun? Well...” -Matron Goodheart, acting Headmistress of the New Fillydelphia Orphanage

*****

“Halt!” A female voice called out from the darkness, unsteady and on edge. “Do not move, hooves on the ground! Anything glows and I shoot!”

“Calm down, Lemma.” The stallion shook his head-gently, so as to avoid having a bullet put through it- and let his hood fall back, the beaten old scarf slipping down from his muzzle to around his neck. A light flared into existence, its brilliant light such a shock from the clouded twilight that it almost burned. The light angled down upon him, illuminating a poor excuse for a pony. Features that would never have been considered handsome under the best of circumstances were gaunt and weary. Bloodshot orange eyes with dark bags underneath were narrowed to mere slits at the harsh glare. Half of his left ear was missing entirely. His russet-colored coat was matted against his hide from mud and sweat, scarred and patchy in places from injuries both old and new. His straw-blonde mane was kept short, hacked away inelegantly with a combat knife, and a week’s worth of stubble the same color decorated his muzzle. It was a face only a mother could love, though mothers were a rarity these days. The rest of him remained hidden beneath a hooded parka and durable pair of pants, once considered a fashion faux pas and now a necessity against the frigid winds.

“...Reese?” The guard asked from somewhere above him. “You’re still alive?”

“Unless you’re planning on letting me freeze to death out here.” The winds were already jabbing needles into his exposed ears. “You mind getting that light off me while I still have eyes?”

“You know the drill, Sergeant,” came a new voice on his level, this one much older and sure of herself. Hoofsteps crunched in the snow just outside the circle of light, but blinded as he was there was no way of knowing just what was out there. “Everypony gets checked.”

Reese flinched but held absolutely still underneath the glaring light. A snuffling sound reached his ears before the second voice called out at last, “Squads, back on patrol. He’s clear.”

The light overhead died and Reese shook his head, blinking away the stars that had burned their way beneath his eyelids. Before him stood a ruin, the remains of which still managed to stretch up into the sky. It was a multi-leveled fortress of stone and crystal, reminiscent of a treehouse of titanic proportions. A veritable castle nestled within its branches, though large sections of the castle had been torn away and scattered across the nearby hills. The tree itself was in decent condition and now proudly, if quietly, housed the baker’s dozen of soldiers that surrounded him, the vast majority of them trotting with purpose away from the base.

“Ryder's never wrong about these things.” A war-torn, elderly pegasus mare in heavy armor emblazoned with draconic designs marched over to him in a precise, clipped gait, with an equally old hound following faithfully at her heels. She reached out with a wing turned grey from too much stress and too many years and she patted him on the neck like a doting grandmother. “You're late. Welcome home, Reese.” Her momentary warmth faltered as she glanced over his shoulder with an unspoken question. The look in her eyes hardened even before Reese answered.

“Marigold and Tough Cookie didn’t make it, Colonel Jiffy.” Reese spoke hollowly, too drained to summon up anger or sorrow. The words came easily, a familiar rote that he recited mechanically. “We were returning from the mission when we were ambushed by an unmapped Scorp nest at the mountain’s base. The Specialists were KIA.”

The mare aged another year before Reese’s very eyes, her head sagging from the weight of her studded plate helm. “Another two of the old Guard gone.” Jiffy drew herself back up to standing attention, the position so far ingrained into her very nature that no amount of time could dull it. “Did they complete their mission?”

Reese rifled through his pockets and produced a dog-eared tome, pages covered in incomprehensible scribbles peeking out from behind the blood-splattered cover. “Everything we learned,” he mumbled through the mouthful.

“Then they didn’t die in vain,” she said as she took the journal almost reverently with her outstretched wing, turning back to the oversized fortress door to rap sharply on it with an armored hoof. The cumbersome door slid open with the sound of rock grating against rock, barely wide enough for a single pony to pass through, and the warm glow of small campfires spilled out over the snowy wastes. The colonel squeezed through with a surprising grace, with Reese and her hound following swiftly after.

The ground floor of the crystal tree was packed with ponies, though it could hardly have been said to be bustling with activity. Only the gravelly rumble of the door sealing shut at his back, and the muffled grunts of the guards straining against halters hitched to the gate’s rusted handles, broke the subdued silence. The ponies here were refugees, freed prisoners, or volunteers, bringing with them only their families and the clothes on their backs. All showed the scars of constant suffering, and their weariness made them look older than their years. Few were older than twenty, and the small hoof-full that could claim to have seen a time without war were the ones with the most haunted eyes. They huddled around carefully maintained fires, staring into the flames with a distant gaze.

“We’ll have the brains study your findings. I’m sure Cantare will want to debrief you soon.” Colonel Jiffy made her way through the herd to a guarded set of stairs leading higher into the castle proper before turning to address Reese again. “For now... get some rest, Sergeant. You’ve earned it.”

Reese saluted as his superior officer disappeared deeper into the fortress before moving away to claim his own secluded corner of the former castle that was well on its way to becoming a condensed slums. He picked out a spot with a modest pile of refuse that didn’t offend his nostrils too badly, or at least didn’t curl his nose hairs, and also managed to block some of the brightness from the sputtering trashfires. The one nearest to him let off more smoke than flames, which suited his twilight-adapted eyes just fine. The temperature was still frigid, as whatever stone or crystal the castle was built of had absorbed the eternal winter’s chill and sapped the heat straight out of a pony’s hooves, but the air was still warmer than the unforgiving winds outside. Reese wiggled his way out of his heavy thermal parka and the matching fur-lined snowpants, brushing away broken bits of glass and splinters of wood that had dug their way into the sturdy fabric. Beneath the defense against the ravages of weather, he wore defense of a more practical kind; a worn, full-body vest woven with metal plates that stretched down the length of his back, wrapping around to cover his barrel but hanging off the sides of his legs to keep his movement unrestricted. What color the vest might have been originally was a mystery, as it had been permanently stained the color of muddy water speckled with deeper reds of dried blood. As uncomfortable as the vest appeared, Reese made no move to shed it as he had the coat, wearing his armor as if it were a second skin. He did eventually resign himself to emptying its many pockets, carefully setting out the remaining home-made bombs with care. The last item he held with even more tenderness than the explosives.

It was a photograph, the colors faded and the edges yellow with age, of a young mare gazing into the frame with mournful, baby blue eyes. Her coat was the tawny gold of a proud lioness. A cloth headband struggled in vain to hold back the wild strands of her hazel mane. She didn’t smile- if anything, she looked a little sad. Even so, she held herself up with such strength, such solemn intensity, that Reese couldn’t look away.

“The legendary warrior returns,” came a taunting but friendly call from behind him, breaking the spell. “Hey, cute broad.”

Reese slipped the photo back into his vest, turning back to his explosive maintenance with rushed but precise movements, all but ignoring the stallion at his back. “You need something, Duskin?”

“Hey, no need to get defensive.” A midnight blue pegasus slid up beside him, forehooves held up in surrender. He was similarly armored and battleworn, with a gaunt frame and stumpy wings that barely looked capable of holding aloft a songbird, much less a pony. Duskin’s words were every bit as blunt. “I’m not dumb enough to go after any mare of yours. You hear the rumors going around the patrols yet?”

“They say he took out a dozen frost queens with a single grenade,” said a unicorn mare with a voice that had no right to be that airy and sweet as she drew up on his right, effectively boxing him in. Even in the comparably warmer clime, she was bundled in so many layers that she was nearly as wide as she was tall, with only the tip of her cream-colored muzzle and horn peeking out from her hood.

"It was one hunter drone, Lemma, and I had remotes."

"What, those piddly little pipe bombs for a Scorp?" Just enough of the mare's lavender eyes were visible to see her eyebrows rise. "You'd need a bunker buster to crack that shell. Might as well have swatted it with a rolled-up paper."

"I dropped a building on it." At Lemma's smirk, Reese reluctantly added, "I was out of paper."

“That's it?" Duskin sighed like a pre-war child who'd just unwrapped socks for his Hearth's Warming present. "And here I heard it was an entire swarm you slew, mister fearless leader, with nothing but a firecracker and a frown.”

"Wouldn't surprise me with a scowl like his." Lemma squeezed the increasingly exasperated sergeant's cheeks with her front hooves as if she were kneading dough to the encouraging snickers of her pegasi comrade-in-arms. "If our dear, sweet Reese's Pieces ever smiled, I'd know to shoot him for being a bug."

"And that," Reese grunted as he extricated himself from the grasp of a mare with no concept of personal space, primarily with a shove that left her sprawling to get back on her hooves like an upside-down turtle with a quilted camouflage shell, "would worry me if I didn't know you could shoot at the ground and still miss the snow."

"Ouch, cruel." Duskin winced at Lemma's predicament, though he chose to stand back and watch her flailing rather than lend a hoof. "You don't have to go for blood just because you aren't fond of the nickname, boss. I think it's kinda fitting, myself."

"Yeah!" Lemma chimed in after finally managing to roll over. "How's a colt get a cutie mark shaped like an explosion, anyhow?"

"Oh, you know how it is," Reese said as he nonchalantly waved the question away, "kids running down a shelter hall, not looking where they're going, and they run right into each other. Next thing you know, it's 'hey, you got your ammonia and moth balls in my peanut butter!' And the other says, 'hey, you got your peanut butter in my ammonia and moth balls!' And one little boom later, you're waiting for your eyebrows to grow back."

"Somehow, I'm guessing you were the one with the ammonia," Lemma deadpanned before brightening. "Ooh, but that reminds me..." With a shimmering aura the color of honey, the many coats entombing the mare shift and loosen, peeling away like the rings of an onion to orbit nearby in her magical grip. For a moment, her emaciated, malnourished frame of little more than skin and bones was left shivering with only a single inner thermal jacket, the formerly inaccessible pockets of which she pilfered to extract a collection of bags before armoring herself against the cold once more. "I stumbled into the motherlode on my last patrol; a pre-war shop that still had nuts in it!" Duskin watched the floating bags with a raised eyebrow and an unspoken question, one which Lemma answered with a pout. "Yeah, yeah, nuts gone bad taste like rocks soaked in ass sweat, but these are different! Look, see? I baked them into cookies."

"I don't know what I find scarier... Lemma being generous with food, or Lemma trying to bake." Duskin opened his mouth for another snarky comment, only to be silenced by a force-fed object somewhat resembling a biscuit.

"Shut up and chew, test subject! Got to figure out if any of these are fit for pony consumption." A maniacal grin came over her face as her first victim fell choking to the ground, and the flickering campfire light ominously shaded her face as she turned towards Reese. "Your turn, Sarge."

"Survived the Scorp only to fall here..." Reese sighed heavily, his head sagging and listless. "Is this the end for me?"

"Aww, don't be sad. Here, I'll let you pick your poison." Lemma squinted at the individual bags. Various baked goods of questionable quality came floating out for an impromptu sales pitch. "We got... Buckeyes, they don't look so bad. Um, let's see, got some pecan balls here. I'm real proud of how almost ball-shaped those are. These are... brownies? I think? Well, they're brownish, at least. Ooh! And macaroons! Your choice, Reese, which'll it be? Reese? ...Sarge?"

"C'mon, Lemma, let's go try your treats out on Ryder." A recovered Duskin had quietly risen from the floor to cut in and guide the unicorn away with a stunted wing, his voice cheerful despite a deeply furrowed brow. "That old hound's got an iron stomach."

Lemma tried to cast a glance back over her shoulder, but the dozens of coats barely allowed her to move her neck. Her voice trailed off as she was led away. "Is he allergic or something? I get the feeling he didn't much like the..."