17: Undetermined
Light Despondent Remixed
chapter 17: “Undetermined”
“We will be alone. We will not have backup. There's just us. And we get one chance to get it right.”
Captain Gabriel Lorca, Star Trek: Discovery - “The Butcher’s Knife Cares Not For The Lamb’s Cry.”
“Make the incision above the coracoid bone,” said Doctor Richter.
The last time Kraber had been cutting a pony open had been when they’d captured some of Shieldwall’s PER. They’d been tough, but Kraber had made them talk. They’d revealed the locations of a few holdouts that escaped from the “Newfoalsland” camps, before they could disappear any more rural little middle-of-nowhere towns in Canada.
And then, here he was.
Kraber drew the scalpel along the pegasus pony’s shoulderblade. Blood welled up around the cut, exposing hollow Pegasus bone. Kraber knew, for… reasons… that it was actually comparable to aerogel in terms of how impossibly strong it was.
Thank God I’m not using a kitchen knife for this again, Kraber thought. It hadn’t even been a good kitchen knife that last time.
And now, here he was.
“Twelve-gauge needle?” Kraber asked.
A unicorn pony by the name of Doctor Fetlock passed the specially-made needle over to him, clutched in their telekinesis. Kraber wasn’t entirely sure they weren’t about to jab it into his eyes, b-
No, his friend might never fly again if we don’t do this, Kraber thought. He wouldn’t be that petty, right? Ri-
“Focus, you bloodthirsty idiot,” Fetlock said.
Kraber grumbled, before pushing the needle into the pegasus’ coracoid bone, perforating it with tiny little holes.
“Wire?” Kraber asked.
The unicorn passed him an 18-gauge steel wire. Slowly but surely, Kraber wound it through the holes, circling the fractured coracoid. Bit by bit, it regained shape.
“We’re going to need the wing cast,” Richter said, walking over to the 3D printer. It was something Kraber had been extremely happy to see in an operating room. After years of seeing uncomfortable, cumbersome casts and utterly hating how unhealthy it was to keep a limb so enclosed, apparently Ex Astris Victoria had jumped on the 3D-printed cast bandwagon. Instead of a massive white plaster lump around the limb, it was a hard, reinforced plastic scaffold.
He reached in, then carried it over to Fetlock.
Fetlock levitated it above the anesthetized unicorn’s wing, and slid it over the feathered appendage. His horn glowed, slightly more intensely, and the cast sealed itself closed.
“Now, immobilize it,” Richter said.
Kraber nodded. He and Fetlock each grabbed a strap from the cart next to the operating table, attaching it to the cast and winding it around the barrel.
“I’m going to, ah… go over there,” Kraber said, jerking one thumb towards a corner of the room.
“You’re sure?” Richter asked.
“I’m sure,” Kraber said. “You think she wants me to be the first thing she sees when the anesthetic wears off?”
“No,” Fetlock said, bluntly.
As Kraber headed off into the corner, he heard the patient stirring. He couldn’t quite tell what they said. It was something like “mlurmrmrmrrm?”
“It’s alright,” Fetlock said, “You’re going to be fine, Alpen Glow.”
“I…” Alpen Glow said. “Oh, thank you, thank you so much, I wouldn’t have been able to fly without you!”
Fetlock stammered off a series of unintelligible syllables. Kraber slowly walked towards one of the exits, where he could deposit the already bloodstained scrubs and gloves.
This was fine.
“I literally owe you my life,” Alpen Glow says. “You and Richter!”
Better that he gets credit for it, Kraber thought.
“Well,” Fetlock said, “I don’t mean to brush off my part, but-”
His voice trailed off.
“It was…” Fetlock said. He sighed. “It was Viktor Kraber that actually did most of the legwork. He was responsible for the wire around your wing, and he’ll probably be the one that removes it.”
“There’s a what in my what?!” Alpen Glow yelled.
“The falling pipe really fokked up your coracoid bone,” Kraber said, turning back, almost involuntarily. God, I missed this. “The wire is to hold it in shape until your bone is healed. I’m keeping it immobilized so you don’t strain anything. After a short recovery period, you should be cleared for some physical therapy to see what condition you’re in.”
“So,” Fetlock said, “like I said, Kraber actually did most of the work.”
“...Oh,” Alpen Glow said. She looked at him, confused. “Well, then, ah… uh… I… well... Thanks?”
“Just doing my job,” Kraber said with an ironic salute.
“Sure…” Alpen Glow said, her voice trailing off. It sounded like she’d rather be saying anything else or be anywhere else.
“I’ll help you out,” Fetlock said.
“Sure,” Alpen Glow said, very pointedly not looking at Kraber, the fur near her mouth taking on a strangely reddish tint, “You uh, you do that…”
Fetlock and Richter helped the pegasus off the table, helping her towards the door millimeter by millimeter on legs still unsteady from the anesthetic.
Kraber headed over to the room. Alpen Glow looked at him, her eyes wide with…
With…
What was that? Sadness? Fear? Disgust? Whatever it was, it didn’t quite feel thankful.
As Kraber opened his locker, he felt Richter’s gaze raking over him.
“You did good work,” Dr Richter said quietly. “But you got unfocused.”
“Hard to stay focused when every fokker is giving you death glares,” Kraber retorted.
“That’s just how the job is,” Richter said. “Don’t tell me you’ve never operated in a combat zone. You need to put your personal feelings aside.”
“Have you heard of me before?” Kraber joked weakly.
“Yes, and that is precisely why I am saying, ‘put your personal feelings aside’,” Richter said sharply.
“My personal feelings aren’t as much of an issue,” Kraber said. “Getting insulted in the middle of a theatre is. Alpen Glow tripping over herself to hope I didn’t do anything is.”
“Put that aside too then,” Richter said. “When you are in a theatre, Dr Kraber, you focus on your patient, not on whatever guilt thing you’ve got going on, whatever nasty thoughts are going on in whatever passes for a psyche up there.” He raised one finger. “You want to get unfocused? Ask for another post. You want to do surgery? Don’t lose your focus again on my watch.” He raised another finger. “And don’t act like being called ‘you bloodthirsty idiot’ is some great injustice. Frankly, it’s the politest description I could have picked.”
“It’s… look, I’m trying,” Kraber said weakly.
“Yes, which is why you’re still here,” Richter said. “But you’ll forgive the rest of us for not being immediately thrilled about that.” His expression softened slightly. “Give it time, Dr Kraber. And don’t worry about Fetlock. He’s always tetchy with new people. Especially Carter-side people, and especially those with your kind of rep.”
“Not that we’ve had anyone quite as bad as you,” Fetlock added.
“Yes, fokkin’ thank you, I get it,” Kraber said angrily, turning towards Fetlock. “I’m horrible, you’ll never accept me, I’ll never be welcome here, I fokkin’ get it -”
“I don’t think you do,” Richter growled, stepping between Kraber and Fetlock with a sharpness Kraber hadn’t expected from the man. “You think you’re hard done to, Kraber? Do you have any idea how hard it is for us to do our damn jobs, thanks to you? Do you have any idea how many of my friends have been shot at, because of people like you and the rest of the ‘Fraktion? And here you are, moping like a teenager because no one likes you? Because no one’s tripping up to make you feel like you’re welcome here?” Richter leant forward. “Let’s make one thing totally clear, Dr Kraber. The Captain affords us many opportunities to do good in this place. The only reason I’m letting you into my theatre is because that got him a lot of goodwill. Frankly, I think he’s out of his mind, and that you’re one step away from deciding being insulted, or around ponies, or even looked at funny, is a good enough reason to kill someone. Oh, don’t fucking pull that face,” he added at Kraber’s hurt look. “Your entire MO is of a man who kills people if they look at him the wrong way. There’s a goddamn betting pool right now in the rec room -”
“And don’t go to the rec room,” Fetlock added from the other side of the room. “You don’t have clearance.”
“- about how long it’ll take you to snap and murder someone!” Richter finished. He took a breath. “I mean, Jesus. There’s you, feeling sorry for yourself. Meanwhile we’re all here wondering whether we’re the unlucky bastard whose eggshells will crunch the wrong way when we step on it around you.”
Kraber
Pulling his uniform back on after the surgery, Kraber paused, looking at himself in the changing room mirror.
As Kraber understood it, uniforms were meant for a sense of cohesion. You looked at someone dressed the same, you knew that that person was with you.
And yet.
Kraber felt so extraordinarily out of place that he might as well have been wearing a halloween costume. As he walked through the hallways of the Columbia, making his way towards the medical bay, it was impossible not to catch stares. Dirty looks. One pony’s gaze lingered on Kraber far too long, and Kraber was hard-pressed to think of a better description than terror for that thought.
At least it was a comfy uniform. It consisted of a mid-blue two-piece with a long-sleeved undershirt: four pockets in the trousers, as well as white piping; hell, they’d even given him a badge, placed on the chest of the single-breasted zip-up jacket.
For the last few days, he had been working in the medical bay. As a surgeon’s assistant.
It was strange: having the badge on, feeling like he was part of something again. More than ever, really: the ‘Fraktion had never bothered with all the officiality.
What I get for working with a biker that got hired by the Russian government, Kraber sighed.
The badge was blank: no name, just the Ex Astris Victoria symbol and a blank space for the name, rank and HLF ID number. Kraber couldn’t even really remember his HLF ID. It had always been ‘Hey, Kraber’ and that was that when he was with in the ‘Fraktion.
Will they change it? he pondered half heartedly. I’m not ‘Fraktion, here.
It was amazing, really. Worrying about something as small as a uniform in the face of the apocalypse.
Dancing Day
“Of course he worried about uniforms,” Verity snorts. “Dad always said, ‘Dan Romero wants to be a Captain’. ‘Dan Romero wants a little fleet, all in little uniforms’. ‘Dan Romero wants everything to be just so on his ships, that’s why we don’t work with him’. The way I heard it, he practically gets off on it.”
“That makes sense,” Yael says quietly. “Uniforms are a big thing among tinpot dictators, fascist regimes.” She holds up a hand at Kraber’s raised eyebrow. “You’ve got to admit, there are some similarities in the psychology.”
“He’d probably agree with you,” Kraber says with a smirk. “And then say it didn’t matter what you thought.”
“Of course,” Verity says irritably.
Kraber
Two or three or four or five days later, Kraber was in the Captain’s office.
“I feel so… isolated,” Kraber had been telling Romero. It was meant as a wellness check - after a few days on the Columbia, manning the medical bay, it’d been nice to have someone say something to him. “The lack of social media is my fault, but nobody wants to talk to me.”
“There’s Fetlock and Richter,” Romero said. “No connection to them?”
“They’d be happier if you bought them a surgical robot,” Kraber said bluntly.
“Don’t sell yourself short,” Romero said. “You’re still an excellent surgeon.”
“Well, I’d be excited to get a robot, but you gave them a war criminal. I just can’t compete with that,” Kraber said. “I know, it doesn’t matter, but…”
“What makes you say it doesn’t matter?” Romero asked.
“Because I’m a terrible person,” Kraber said. “Why should I complain about this? I’m lucky to be alive and deserve what I get.”
He sighed, looking down at the carpet.
“Who told you that, Viktor?” Romero said. Kraber noted that he didn’t explicitly contradict it.
“Everyone,” he said, sighing. “Everyone thinks it. Richter tells me something like that whenever I so much as get itchy. If one of your crew tried to kill me, I’d get that same retort.”
“You really believe that, don’t you,” Romero said, rubbing his forehead with a groan that might have been irritation. “Look, I… I can’t pretend that you’re going to have it easy here. You won’t. Frankly, it’d be naive to think otherwise.”
“No joke,” Kraber said dully.
“That said,” Romero continued, “I have something of a vested interest in your comfort.”
“And that is?” Kraber asked. “Is there some kind of diabolical, secret plan, that-”
“No, it’s just that we were understaffed, hiring another surgeon would be difficult, and you practically fell into our laps,” Romero said, cutting him off.
Kraber blinked. “That’s really all of it?”
“That, and I remember what Yarrow had to say about you. Keeping you isolated and miserable is not in our best interests. Or anyone’s.” He sighed. “Have you tried to visit the rec room yet?”
“No,” Kraber said. “Fetlock told me I didn’t have the clearance to-”
“And you believed him?” Romero asked.
“Well,” Kraber said, “I’ve never been on a naval vessel, and I assumed I was just…”
His voice trailed off. In hindsight, it did sound silly.
“Everybody has rec room clearance,” Romero said, in utter disbelief. “It’s the rec room. That’s how it works. It even has a bar.“
“Thought that was against regulation in the navy,” Kraber said, raising an eyebrow.
“Yeah, well, my navy, my rules,” Romero retorted, chucking. “I’ll take you there myself.”
He stood up from his chair, and headed towards the door. He motioned for Kraber to follow.
“Does it have any good beer?” Kraber asked, as they walked down the hallway.
Romero snorted. “Please. We’ve got beers that nobody even makes anymore. Some people had pretty alcoholic priorities when evacuating Europe.”
“Coors is an endangered species, I see,” Kraber said.
“No it’s not,” Romero said. “That’s… oh. The Stand. I see what you mean.”
“Is there any Glamorgan?” Kraber asked.
“There could be,” Romero said. “I don’t know all of it.”
After a very, very long walk - Kraber wondered if maybe, just maybe, all the complaints that the ship was just too big were on to something - they made their way to the rec room.
For a moment it felt like it was going to be okay. Kraber looked over to a set of four flatscreen TVs against one wall. It looked like they were playing a match of Spacelords.
“Thanks, Captain,” Kraber said, looking over to Romero. He’d walked over to a woman strumming her guitar with an idle expression on her face when they reached it. She was young, petite, pretty in a ‘no makeup but still looks like she’s got six instagram filters’ kinda way. She wore an almost-dandyish outfit, shirt buttoned up to the top, waistcoat and drape coat, that looked like it might have been David Bowie’s in a past life, and her hair was styled in a spiky almost-quiff.
She looked familiar, and Kraber couldn’t place why. But, that was neither here nor there. Because Kraber could, apparently, finally go play some videogames.
It’s been two fokkin’ weeks!
He was so excited. He moved past the tables, towards the little corner of rec room where people were playing Spacelords. He’d missed getting to play Ginebra, too.
Kate had cosplayed Ginebra once. That had been… that had been amazing. He’d told her she was beautiful, that he loved her, and that he could only get so e-
Wait.
His neck prickled a little. He looked from side to side.
Everyone was staring at him. Now that the Captain wasn’t at his side, it suddenly felt like Kraber was drowning again.
This is fokkin’ kak. I’m Viktor Fokking Kraber. I don’t need the Captain to be a security blanket.
But it felt like everyone in the rec room who wasn’t either playing games or talking to the Captain was looking at him. It felt like the Captain and whoever-it-was were off in their own world.
Eyes bored into him on all sides. One pony whispered to their friend. A pegasus fluttered out of their seat and left the room. It looked like everyone else would rather be anywhere else.
This isn’t good.
He walked over to one of the chairs they were using.
“...can’t believe we kept him on the boat.”
“Think we should throw him off?”
“If I didn’t think Strike would kill me, I’d have tried.”
And Kraber, all of a sudden, found himself behind Louis - who sat near one of the armchairs, waiting patiently.
“So, uh,” Kraber said, “How long till I can join in?”
“They just started this up,” Louis said. “I’m next mission, then… maybe you?”
Kraber felt someone glaring at Louis. The rec room felt so quiet - it was like everyone was hanging on to his every word.
“...Alright?” Kraber asked. A pony - or something that looked very much like a pony - glared at him as he said it.
Minute after minute passed by. Kraber sat, waiting for the in-game mission to end. All the while, he could hear people talking about him.
“Louis?” Kraber asked, looking at his… no, not friend. Somehow, that didn’t quite work. But Louis was the only one that’d made him feel anything approaching ‘welcome’ so far.
Louis was silent.
He can’t let them think he’s my friend, Kraber thought. Their eyes are all on him.
Suddenly, it felt like Fetlock might’ve been on to something.
...It wasn’t going to do that. Not for a very, very long time.
Nobody, not even Louis, said a word to Kraber. Everybody looked away whenever he looked in their general direction - human and pony alike.
It was…. Sobering.
Can’t blame them, Kraber thought. This is only fair. I was a bastard. I’m lucky they’re not executing me.
He leaned back against a chair.
Wish I brought a book. Or do I not have library privileges, Fetlock? You kontgesig?
After some time - Kraber wouldn’t remember how long - the guitarist that he’d seen earlier came up.
“Hey, Louis, ‘sup?”
“Hey,” Louis said. “Nothin’ much. Just playin’ some Spacelords.”
“Oh, pfft, gerroff that, you muppet,” she said, shoving him in the shoulder and sitting in the chair next to him. “Fuck you playing that for?”
“Probably so you don’t beat me again, Hannah,” Louis replied, speaking more easily. “Oh, uh, you… probably haven’t met… Viktor.”
“Viktor, eh?” the guitarist asked, turning to Kraber. “You doing alright?”
The woman looked at him, and everything clicked into place.
“Wait a fokkin’ minute,” Kraber said to Louis, frowning at the girl. “Aren’t you -?”
Sure enough, she was in fact the guitarist and singer most HLF members called ‘Haze’.
“Sorry, who’s ‘Haze’?” Yael asks.
“Seriously?” Kraber replies. “‘Haze and the Last Choir’? One of the HLF-supporting bands that stuck with the Spader-Loyalists? Big rivalry with the Lost Children even before the Split?” His expression sobered. “She used to do charity gigs before UNAC raided one of their gigs and shot her. Must have been not long after she was on the Columbia.”
Heliotropes eyes widened. “Wait… a gig?”
“Yeah…?” Kraber says, frowning. “Why?”
Heliotrope covers her mouth. “Shit. Shit, shit, shit.”
“What?” Yael asks.
“What was that raid Lorne was on?” Heliotrope asked. “The one he came back from with a bloody nose and that big asshole grin on his face? Summers too? Said it was the most fun he had since he was on the force?”
Yael’s face falls. “Ah. Hell.”
“Wait, what?” Kraber asks. “Do you know something?”
“Tell you later,” Heliotrope murmured. “So, uh… you wanna tell us how meeting her went?”
“Shit, if it isn’t Little Vicky Kraber,” Haze said, running a hand through her hair and grinning.
Kraber winced. Seriously. Everyone around here calls me that.
“Yeah,” was all he said.
Haze looked him up and down in his uniform.
“I didn’t know you were in Ex Astris,” she said after a moment. “Thought you were with the ‘Fraktion on the douchebag side of the split.”
“I, uh, was.” Kraber smiled awkwardly. “We had a sort of mutually agreed falling out. With violence.”
“Oh, right.” Haze shrugged. “Well, cool anyway. I guess it’s better late than never, huh?”
“You… don’t mind me being here?” Kraber asked.
“He let you on, didn’t he?” Haze said, pointing to Romero, who was speaking to some of his crew with an oddly serious expression: in fact, it almost looked grim. Some of them looked concerned, some of them were nodding, though none of them looked happy. And more than a few were glancing at him.
“Cap’s the kinda guy who knows when people are worth takin’ a chance on,” Hase continued.
Kraber turned to look back at her. “Really? Then why the hell am I here?”
“Beats me, mate,” Haze said with a wink. “Cap also happens to be batshit, so his reasons make no sense to like, half the damn ship.”
“Including you?” Kraber asked, raising an eyebrow.
“Oh, nah, I’m not even crew. I’m just hitchin’ a ride, sorta,” the girl said with a grin. “Was gonna play a gig with the Fen Riders, but then some asshole blew them all up. Cap took me and the Choir onboard for protection and shit. Then we’re going with the Corsairs to another gig.”
“Least we could do,” Romero suddenly said. He had apparently walked over, a blue Pegasus mare with a red mane and a couple of men in utility jumpsuits with him. He gave her a small smile. “Never heard anyone play ‘Space Oddity’ like that apart from Bowie himself.”
“Hey, yeah, I think I heard that once,” Kraber said with an easy grin. “Good stuff.”
“Cheers,” Haze said. “You should totally listen to my take on ‘Mr Blue Sky’. I sent Cap the demo.”
“That’s a damn good song,” Kraber said. “Always loved it.”
“I liked it,” Romero said with another smile. “Maybe needs to be a bit faster.”
“Gotcha,” Haze said with a wink. “I’ll have another tweak after me and the girls do the gig.”
“I’ll have a listen too, if you’ve got a file,” Kraber said.
“Hey, sure,” Haze said with an easy grin. She snapped her fingers. “Hey, did Cap tell you about the pheromone thing?”
“The what?” Kraber asked, around about the same time that Romero groaned and put his head in his hands.
“The pheromone thing,” Haze repeated. “It’s this cool theory some of the scientists are coming up with on the chem deck. See, they say -”
“Haze,” Romero said patiently, “that was just a busywork theory. They weren’t serious about that.” He paused. “I hope to God they weren’t serious about that, because it would be terrifying on every conceivable level.”
“Busywork theory or not, it was pretty funny,” Haze said with a wink. “Who’re your mates, Cap?”
“Oh, right, introductions,” Romero said. He motioned to the two men. “This is Biggs,” he motioned to a shaven-headed man with a scar over one eye, “and Wedge.” Here he motioned to the other man, who had a mop of short, curly black hair and a toothy smile. “They’re some of my engineering staff.”
Kraber guffawed. “Seriously? Wedge and Biggs?”
“Not our… not out real names, er, obviously,” ‘Biggs’ said, smiling nervously. “But we, uh, left those behind.”
“What they mean,” the blue mare said with a chirpy smile, “is that they used to work with fuckin’ Taskforce Paris and they’d rather not say who they were.”
“And you are…” Kraber asked, looking at her.
“Jessie,” the mare said, deadpan.
Kraber blinked. “You. Are. Shitting me.”
“Nuh uh,” the mare said, grinning. “These two fuckin’ lunkheads saved me from a PER reconditioning camp back in their Taskforce days, and ran away with me when that rat bastard Janvier wanted me… y’know. ‘Interrogated’.”
The way she said ‘interrogated’ left little to the imagination.
“Since then we’ve… we’ve stuck with her, y’know, kept her safe, kept us safe,” Biggs put in. He didn’t have a stammer, so much as an incredibly soft voice that seemed uncertain whether it even was a voice. “And we, uh, came here.”
“Since the UNAC wouldn’t really want us!” Wedge added, scratching the back of his neck. He sounded permanently excited.
Kraber raised an eyebrow. He looked at Romero.
“I figured speaking with a few more ex-Carter people would put you at ease,” the Captain said, clapping Biggs on the back. “I’d say ‘share stories’, but… well, regardless, I think it’s good for us all to be reminded of where we came from.”
“But we’re one thing!” Wedge put in. “But you? Shit, man, you’re Viktor fucking Kraber!”
“Is it, uh, true you once killed a Newcalf with a spoon?” Biggs asked.
“Yeah, Angus always used to tell that one,” Wedge added, “the little Scottish prick!”
Kraber laughed. “It was a spork, actually. And to be fair, anything would have been dangerous being fired out a blunderbuss I stole from a re-enactor.”
“A blunderbuss?!” Jessie put in, eyes widening. “Fuck the fuck off! How the fuck did you have a blunderbuss?”
”I wanted to use a blunderbuss ever since I was a kid,” Kraber said, shrugging. “Anyway. This was back when Helmetag was still in charge of the ‘Fraktion, and one of his chommies who’d joined with him was a re-enactor who was into the full Jack Sparrow shit, so he had a functioning blunderbuss. Carried the thing all the way through the Barrierfall Front. Then the poor fokker got himself ponified during a PER attack -”
“Wait, this wasn’t the battle of Threetoos, was it?” Louis asked, turning from the game with wide eyes. “My unit was only a few miles from there, we got called in afterwards!”
“Threetoos?” Haze asked.
“Pre-fab camp Two Two Two,” Romero supplied evenly. “Back before they started giving them names like ‘Hadley’s Hope’ and ‘Blink’.”
“Threetoos was hit by PER about a month before Helmetag bit it,” Kraber continued, “and he and his friend were with me, Emory, Gage McCorliss’s brother Riley, and some little squit named Terry. Terry got hit by a spitter two seconds after we got there because he didn’t fokkin’ wear his helmet…”
“Rookie mistake,” Wedge said sadly, shaking his head.
“Definitely,” Biggs agreed. “I, er, knew a guy called Ochre, took a hit like that on the Barrierfall Front. It was nasty… nasty business, y’know?”
“Always is,” Kraber said, nodded. “Anyway, so Helmetag’s friend had this blunderbuss, and it’s a bitch to load and he never fired it. Kinda like Angeal in Crisis Core never uses the Buster sword -”
“Aw, shit, you played Crisis Core?!” Wedge said excitedly.
“Fuckin’ sad ending,” Jessie said mournfully.
“No, I watched the playthroughs on YouTube,” Kraber shook his head. “But the point is, he still has the thing when an Empire-pony’s spell takes his head off. Now naturally this is right when Emory has just been smushed to kak by a fokkin’ newcalf and McCorliss is being throttled by the thing that used to be Terry, because bad shit comes in threes, right?”
“Totally!” Jessie said. “Happened to me the one time I went with Lucky on a mission. First we had fucking Robert Gardner hounding us -”
“Oh that bastard gets everywhere!” Wedge said sympathetically.
“Even the hospital, recently,” Kraber said, smirking.
“What?” Jessie asked.
“His subordinate called me a bad father and said my kids were better off ponified,” Kraber said. “So I called him an ambulance. And I am the ambulance, bitch!”
“What did you do?” Biggs asked, eyebrows raised.
“I kicked him in the fokkin’ eiers with steel-toed boots twice,” Kraber said.
“Man oh man,” Wedge said. “A lot of people would buy you drinks for that one!”
“Tempting, but… I think I need to work my way up to ‘feels safe in kicking range,’ for most people,” Kraber sighed.
“Wish you coulda been there to clean his fuckin’ clock. But then we heard that fucking Quickblade was out there, too!” Jessie continued.
“What, ‘Armando Cain’ Quickblade?!” Kraber said, eyes widening. “FOK no!”
“Fuck yeah!” Jessie replied. “But then it turned out it wasn’t Quickblade, it was Imperial Creed, and a whole battalion of Royal Guard!”
“In threes,” Biggs said evenly. “You, uh, see what we mean?”
“Yeah,” Kraber said, smirking. “In my case, I ended up grabbing the blunderbuss, and in what might have been the third luckiest shot I ever took, the spork that Helmetag’s friend had jammed in there probably a fokkin’ decade ago flies out, hits this fokkin’ Newcalf square in the face, right through the eyeball, and it drops like a goddamn stone. And then I said something stupid, like ‘Looks like the spork is in the other eye now!’”
“Nice!” Wedge said, laughing.
“Yeah,” Biggs added, smirking. “It’s… y’know, it’s nice when things, uh, go to plan. One liners and all.”
“Speak for yourself, I fuckin’ hate one-liners,” Jessie groaned.
“Man, you lot are crazy,” Haze laughed.
Kraber was laughing too, but still, something about that stung.
“Right, well, we’re on fucking shift in a couple of hours so I’m gonna get a nap in,” Jessie said. “See ya around, Kraber.”
“Yeah, s-see you around,” Biggs agreed, nodding.
“You gotta tell us what happened to that blunderbuss next time!” Wedge added excitedly.
“Yeah,” Kraber said.
They headed off, waving and talking amongst themselves as they did so.
“Yeah, I’d better get back to practicing for my new set,” Haze said, stretching. “Got a couple of new songs in it, and no one in the band’s gonna be able to follow the chord progression if I don’t nail it down, right?”
Romero shrugged. “If I knew what that meant, I’d agree. Unfortunately, I’m not a musician.”
“Pity,” Haze said. “Bet you’d be really good at it.” She waved to Kraber. “See you around, Vicky K. Hey, catch me in the canteen later, we’ll catch up. I always wanted to know what the hell happened between you and Yorke.”
(Vaguely, Kraber remembered that thing with Yorke, and how he couldn’t get the words ‘ACHIEVEMENT UNCOCKED’ out of his head.)
He winced again. “You probably don’t.”
“Probably not,” Haze said cheerfully, “but it’s nice to be friendly, at least, right?”
She walked off, and started talking to a couple of the officers sat at another table.
“I’d probably best get going too,” Louis said after a moment. “And, uh, Viktor?”
“Ja?” Kraber said.
“… I’m sorry,” Louis said. “I… people are a bit edgy. Y’know?”
Kraber found himself smiling. “I get it. Really.”
“Thanks, man,” Louis said. “Catch you later.”
He headed out of the rec room.
“Who’d have thought it,” Kraber said quietly. “A kid like that in the HLF.”
“Anyone on the right side of the HLF would have thought it,” Romero replied. Kraber looked at him, and noted the significant look he was giving. “We’ve always been here, Viktor, the whole damn time. Always doing our part, always trying to make the world a little better.” He gave a wistful smile. “You just didn’t look our way.”
“Yeah,” Kraber said quietly. “I guess.”
“Don’t worry, Viktor,” Romero said, clapping him on the shoulder. “Barely anybody wants to remember we’re here. Most people prefer to ignore the good we do, because it’s easier just to think of us as a bunch of atrocity-committing lunatics than to think that maybe it’s more complex than that. People like things to be easy.”
“Must suck,” Kraber murmured, “gettin’ compared to… well, people like I used to be.”
“Suck?” Romero repeated, smiling. “Yeah, a little. But in the end, I don’t need people to believe I’m doing the right things, I’ll just do ‘em. People can think what they want.”
“Excuse me, Operative Kraber?”
Kraber and Romero turned, to see a grey Earth Pony stallion in a white medical jumpsuit, looking at Kraber through a pair of half moon spectacles.
“I’m sorry, Operative,” the pony said, “but you don’t have clearance to be in the recreation room at the moment.”
And just like that, Kraber snapped.
“Oh fok off!” he yelled. “What the absolute fok do you mean I don’t have permission to use the rec room?! Everyfokkingone should be able to do that! I thought Fetlock was just telling me to take the piss and call it ra-”
“Kraber, calm down,” Romero said, holding up a hand. “What do you mean, Dr Well Met?
The Earth Pony - Well Met - blinked, apparently not surprised (or all that perturbed) by the rant. Kraber took a moment to calm himself, suddenly uncomfortably aware of the eyes of everyone on his back.
“If I’m allowed to finish, Captain,” he said evenly, “Operative Kraber isn’t cleared because he never showed up to his initial health assessment.”
Romero raised an eyebrow, giving Kraber a look, and all of Kraber’s anger disappeared.
Fok.
“Uh… sorry?” he said.
“Kraber should have received email and personal notification in the time he’s been here,” Romero said evenly, looking back at Well Met.
“No one wanted to go speak to him, sir,” Well Met said blandly. He looked at Kraber. “They seem to have been sharing stories about a Dr Banes who found a rusty spoon jammed through his rectum hard enough to cause internal bleeding?”
“It was his jugular and a kitchen knife, actually. And he was having too much fun with the rectal exam,” Kraber said before he could stop himself. “That… doesn’t make it sound better, does it?”
“No,” Romero said, hissing. “Kraber… just… go with Well Met. Get your physical done.” He looked at Well Met. “While he’s with you, acquaint him with your work.”
“Sir,” Well Met said, still sounding somewhat uninterested.
Dancing Day
“So hang on, what’s the pheromone theory?” Heliotrope asks.
Kraber chuckles. “Haze told me before she left. Supposedly, pony pheromones are stronger than human ones. Mixed in with a bit of magic. That’s why so many humans are physically attracted to you even though - you know. Cartoon Horses.” He chuckles again. “I mean, it makes sense, I guess?”
Yael and Heliotrope exchange a glance.
“Well,” Heliotrope says after a moment, “if you ever randomly want to strip in front of me, we know why.”
Yael smacks her upside the head.
“Huh,” Kraber says, “And here I was, thinking I was just drunk that one time.”
Heliotrope raises an eyebrow, trying and failing to keep her expression neutral.
Kraber
Dr. Well Met didn’t like this any more than Kraber did: he didn’t look uncomfortable - in fact, he didn’t look like he had an opinion of anything - but he was keeping just enough distance.
When they got to the medical bay, he began running through the motions. He was surprisingly quiet throughout. But Kraber also noticed that he wasn’t giving him the usual looks.
“Uh,” Kraber said, “so…”
“So?”
“You… don’t seem too… bothered by me?” Kraber ventured. “Like… y’know, the funny looks, that kind of thing.”
“I’m not ‘too bothered’ by you,” Well Met replied, giving Kraber a tired smile.
“You’re… not?” Kraber asked.
“On the contrary, I know something of how you must be feeling right now,” Well Met said blandly, looking back at his notes. “It took me a… well, a long time to be welcomed here, and a much, much longer time to feel it.”
“Fok off,” Kraber snorted. “How the everloving fok could you understand -”
“I worked in the early Conversion Bureaus,” Well Met said, staring Kraber down.
There was a momentary pause.
Kraber’s first instinct was to try to stab him. To rush across the room and dropkick him. To gouge his eyes out, do something, anything.
“… you’re not threatening me yet,” Well Met said after a moment. “Interesting. Your psych profile would have suggested something else.”
“Not gonna lie,” Kraber said, “I’m absolutely fokking livid right now. But…”
“But?” Well Met asked, almost blandly curious.
Not murdering someone PER went against everything Kraber knew. Everything was screaming at him to act. But…
If you do that, he’ll give up on you, Kraber thought. You could’ve died in the ocean. You would have died if you got stuck on that island without a boat.
You’re fokked, Viktor.
Suddenly, a thought occurred.
“But this is a test, isn’t it?” Kraber asked.
“Not that I know of,” Well Met said, shaking his head.
“Even if it isn’t,” Kraber said, “It’s still possible for me to fail right now, and hard. If I hurt you, then…”
“Forgive me, Dr Kraber, but my understanding is that you are quite adept at saving your own skin,” Well Met said, giving an almost tired smirk. “All that, and no concern for me.”
“You said you were PER,” Kraber pointed out.
“Not PER,” Well Met said, rearing up on his hind legs. He held a stethoscope pressed to one forehoof. “Never PER.”
“You ponified people,” Kraber said, tightly controlled rage. “Pardon me for not making the fokking distinction.”
“We’ve both done things we regret,” Well Met said tiredly. “My time there… it wasn’t about ‘perfecting humanity’. Certainly nothing to do with… with whatever in Tartarus Shieldwall thinks he’s doing.”
“Then what?” Kraber asked, his fists clenched so hard that the knuckles were turning white.
“You weren’t there,” Well Met whispered. “For us, the early days were about helping sick people, about experimenting and pushing the boundaries of magic.” Something about his expression almost became wistful. “It was… for an Earth Pony, it was beautiful. We’re looked down on, when we try to study magic. But this was different - it was magic and medicine, all at once.”
“Sounding a bit too happy with this, doc,” Kraber said, raising an eyebrow.
“In hindsight, no, but when I was there, when I was doing something that was so… unique…” Well Met paused, closing his eyes. “I did feel happy back th-”
“Still sounding a bit too happy with this,” Kraber interrupted. “What made you leave? I’d expect you to be frothing at the mouth and screaming about how it’s time to ponify the nonbelievers.”
“I told you, I am not PER, and I never was,” Well Met hissed.
“Sure,” Kraber said. “You just ruined people’s lives.”
“The early ponification potion was about repairing lives,” Well Met said, slamming a hoof against the floor. “We thought we were healing. I wouldn’t expect a man who abandoned his Hippocratic oath to understand this, but I took mine seriously, and still do.”
“What the fok do you know about me?!” Kraber yelled, his composure suddenly snapping. “My family was turned into those… those things! They’re gone! When you were ‘helping’ people, how many of them are dead, right now?! How many of them are nothing more than meatshields or fokkin’ worse, right fokkin’ now?!”
“DON’T YOU THINK I KNOW WHAT I DID?!” Well Met screamed, and Kraber actually stepped back. “Don’t you think, you stupid, self-centred hypocrite, that I know precisely what happened to all of them?! Don’t you think I read the reports?! Don’t you think I saw the trials, when the war footing started?! Why the fuck do you think I’m even here?!”
“I don’t fokkin’ know, why the fok are you here?!” Kraber yelled back, though he felt some of his fire dissipating.
“Fine!” Well Met yelled. He closed his eyes, taking a deep breath as if to steady himself. “You want to know what broke me?”
Kraber nodded, not trusting himself to speak.
“It was the first Newcalf trial,” Well Met said evenly. “Every Bureau Doctor I ever knew was there. And they all… they all clapped as this poor human… just broke. Their body twisted, warped, tore, bled… and the sounds. Sweet Luna.” He closed his eyes for a moment. “And… and then what was left, when the screeching stopped and the cracking subsided… was this ugly, brutish, feral thing…”
“You were there?!” Kraber asked, interested despite himself.
“Unfortunately, yes,” Well Met said. “We were still going on and on about peace. I think I was just about able to convince myself until we saw… that. It was… it wasn’t a cute, happy pony. It wasn’t a cancer patient given a new lease on life. It was this slab of muscle and bone. I’d never seen one before then, but it reminded me of one of Sombra’s berserkers. And I knew that whatever I saw seeing, it was a weapon. And if they did it now, they’d do it again. And I found myself wondering just what sort of beings do that to other sentients.” He scowled. “So you can understand, Mr Kraber - there are those who saw me as they saw you. Those who still do. I understand why it’s difficult.”
“Did… did anyone ever really accept you?” Kraber asked.
“Their acceptance wasn’t the problem,” Well Met replied. “I had to accept myself.”
“And did you?”
Well Met’s silence was all the answer Kraber needed.
“Any tips?” Kraber asked weakly.
“It’s a process, Dr Kraber,” Well Met said. “No matter what, you always have to remember why you’re there. You have to realise that… that yes, you did things you regret. You were part of terrible things. But you still have - well, in your case, you still have the hands your God gave you.” He smiled ruefully. “Only you can decide to use them for good or evil. And when you do good, people see that.”
“But what happens when I do good and people decide it doesn’t matter because of all the other fokked-up shit I did?” Kraber asked.
“Then you keep trying. Or perhaps,” he added, “in your cases you remind yourself that yes, you did do enough ‘fokked-up shit’ that you might never win them over. But also remember that doing good is it’s own reward.”
“You think so, huh?” Kraber asked.
“Dr Kraber, you are hardly the first person on this ship to treat me with the sort of contempt you have,” Well Met said evenly. “And you won’t be the last. And I may not have hit the depths of mishippism that some of my ex-colleagues did, but I know what I did.” He let out a sigh. “Now, the physical’s almost over - and might I say, you’re in remarkably good shape. I’d almost think you’d never been in any… scrapes.”
“Well, I did get healed by a Unicorn,” Kraber explained.
Well Met raised an eyebrow. “That’s… we usually don’t do that.”
“Why’s that?” Kraber asked. “I mean, it hurt like hell and all, but…”
“Because the human body isn’t meant to heal that quickly,” Well Met said. “Healing… well, without trying to science the heck out of magic, which - believe me - never works…”
It sounded like a conversation he’d had before.
“... it works by accelerating the rate at which your body’s natural processes operate,” Well Met continued. “Pony bodies have magic that makes that work for us. Humans aren’t evolved for it.”
“I guessed,” Kraber said after a moment. “Honestly, I never want to do that again. I’ll take two months of recovery over feeling torn apart any time.”
“It’s also possible that might have caused unforeseen side effects,” Well Met said. “There’s a… think of it like a magic MRI. Mostly, we use it for Newfoal analysis, but I think it’ll work for you.”
Kraber sighed. It seemed risky.
But…
It’d been a nightmarish few days. Kraber had never really believed that magic was inherently that harmful to humans, but who knew what it’d done to him?
“Sure,” Kraber said. “Sure, that’ll work.”
“Right this way,” Well Met said, leading him towards an orange door in one corner of the room. A keycard reader sat on one side, so low that Kraber would’ve had to bend over to reach it.
Well Met reached into his saddlebags, pulling out a blank white card. Gingerly holding it between his teeth, he maneuvered it into the slot.
Ah, Kraber thought, so that’s why it was so low to the ground.
Well Met gestured to the machine. It did in fact look like an MRI, with a long patient table leading into a cylinder. But there was a strange device with a crystal plugged in, resting on a nearby table.
“Well then,” Well Met said, “Have a seat.”
He gestured to the patient table. Kraber walked up to it, swinging one leg over and lying down on his back. Well Met trotted up to a control panel, and pressed the buttons.
It felt good to lie down for a bit. The patient table hummed, inching forth into the scanner.
“Now,” Well Met said, “Sit still.”
Nothing all too interesting happened while Kraber lay there. Not until-
“Huh,” Well Met said. “Well, what do you know. What the Tartarus is that.”
What the hell?!
Kraber’s eyes darted from side to side. “Doc,” he said, his voice strained, “That’s not something you want to hear in an MRI. What the fok is it?!”
“Don’t move!” Well Met said, voice raised a little too high. “You’ll throw off the scan.”
What is it?! What the fok is it?! Do I have a tumor? Am I going to need brain surgery? Oh God oh God oh God
But Kraber had to keep still. Had to stay down. But he was breathing heavily, trying not to move. What is it, what is it, what in the fok is it?!
After an eternity, the patient table inched out from the tube and Kraber sat up.
“And people say my bedside manner is Godawful,” Kraber said, glaring at Well Met. “What the fok did you find in my kop?!”
“It’s, well,” Well Met said. He pointed to a screen showing Kraber’s brain, looking at the hippocampus. “Someone used magic to do something to your brain. They pulled out a memory.”
“But I do-” Kraber started.
Well Met stared at him expectantly.
“Right,” Kraber said, before slipping into a weirdly high-pitched German accent, “I never built an Amnesia-inator, I think I’d remember something like that…”
“You’re taking this surprisingly well,” Well Met said.
“Am I?” Kraber asked. “I’m sorry. I’m just a little bit absolutely fokking livid right now. How?! When?! WHY?!”
“All I can tell is, it was precise,” Well Met said. “And recent.”
“How recent?” Kraber asked. “Would it be… in the last couple weeks?”
“I’d need to run these results by a few of my colleagues to be sure,” Well Met said. “But I can’t be sure.” He paused. “Any idea what it could…”
Kraber stared back at Well Met.
“Right,” Well Met said, sheepishly.
“The only thing I can think of,” Kraber said, “Is… Someone was smuggling a mare and her foal up to Canada, I think. We had a checkpoint, and I didn’t want to shoot them or hand them over. I’ve been wondering if the mare… did something to me. Could it have been-”
“Do you really want to go through life thinking you needed to have someone do that to you not to hurt a child?” Well Met asked.
Kraber stared at the earth pony. That was…
Am I really that much of a monster?
It wasn’t a comforting thought. How… how could that be possible? How could he have just... Lacked empathy, basic humanity, enough of anything to need people to take little pieces out of his brain to make him do the right thing? Had anything really been his choice?
Kraber felt his heartbeat quickening. Felt himself breathing heavily.
He stumbled into a nearby chair, shaking.
Did I have a choice?!
“N-no,” he said, surprised at the stutter in his voice. “Must have been… s-something else. I… don’t want to think I…”
He looked down at the ground.
“I think I need to go to the ship’s library or something,” Kraber said. “Is the physical done?”
“I think that’s for the best,” Well Met said. “Someone will be there to escort you to the library. I’ll… have the results back soon.”
The ship’s library wasn’t quite what Kraber had hoped for - it was just one large room, the size of a small bookstore. A few portholes poked through spaces between shelves.
Still, there was a comfy chair in one corner, and that was good enough.
“Do you have any Brandon Sanderson books?” Kraber asked, walking up to the librarian - a pale purplish earth pony with their mane in a short pixie cut.
Her eyes widened as she saw him.
“Y-you’ll have to read one of the paperback copies,” she stammered. “I-I’m not really allowed to give you the cinderblock-sized hardback ones.”
Kraber just sighed. Whether she was actually allowed to or not was irrelevant at this point.
“Fok it. Whatever,” he said. “I just… I need to be alone with a long book, and I’m going to be done with all the books they left in my room anyway.”
The mare - who looked weirdly like Twilight Sparkle, which explained the fok out of the short manecut - trotted towards one wall, and Kraber followed.
“It’s… it’s, uh, right here,” she said, rearing up and reaching for a copy of The Way of Kings with her mouth.
Kraber didn’t stop her from biting it, and passing it to him in her mouth.
Feels kind of wet…
So Kraber took the book and moved towards the lumpiest armchair he could find.
“Um, if you need anything else…” the mare said after a moment.
“Thanks,” he tossed out. “Probably won’t. Unless I decide to fokkin’ -”
He paused, thinking better of whatever he’d been about to say.
He sat like that for awhile, until:
“Kraber,” Romero said, looking down towards him. “How was the physical?”
Kraber hadn’t even seen him coming.
“It was… difficult,” Kraber said. “Apparently, I’m mostly fine. Except for the fact that someone went to town on my brain.”
Romero stared at him for a second. His eyes went wide with shock, fear, and…
Recognition?
“You’ve seen this before. What are you not telling me?” Kraber asked.
“Lots,” Romero said. “My office. Now.”
What in the fok is going on? Kraber asked himself.
There were seven of them - Kraber, Well Met, Romero, Lucky Strike, an unfamiliar mare, and two guards - standing in the well-furnished office.
Kraber looked down at the mare.
The lack of cutie mark gave her away as a Newfoal: Kraber might have normally panicked, but Romero had said they let one wander about. Kraber pointed at her.
“Is that Sharon?” he asked.
The Newfoal paused, and turned, frowning at him.
“I’m not Sharon,” she said. She blinked, her eyes widening as she took him in. “Oh, s-s-s-s-darn, you’re Kraber.”
“Ohhhhhh, shit,” Well Met said, his jaw dropping. “Uh. Captain. If you don’t mind me asking, why do you have the two of them here?!”
“Wait,” Kraber said, frowning, “if you’re not Sharon…”
“Viktor,” Romero said, motioning to the Newfoal, “meet Hope. As of now, the last Slow Newfoal known to exist.”
“Oh, shit,” Kraber said.
“Still can’t believe there was a Slow Newfoal,” Yael says. “I genuinely thought they’d all gone native by now. If not extinct.”
“Maybe she really was the last one,” Kraber says quietly. He shakes his head, looking oddly sad. “I liked Hope. I hope - no pun intended - that she’s okay.”
“I…. how?!” Kraber asked. “How did you… why… when?!”
The Newfoal’s horn - no, Hope’s horn - began to glow.
“Is this a joke?!” she asked. “I… I was worried when you said he was onboard, but us in the same room?! Are you mad?!”
She had a slight British accent. Kraber couldn’t place where.
“Maybe,” Romero said. “But you’re here for a reason. And that reason is: You’re the best source of information on… one of the subjects we’ll be discussing.”
“And what does a Newfoal have to say about this?!” Kraber demanded.
“More than you,” Hope said, bitterly. “I traveled across America to get here. I saw horrible things to get to where I am. I just don’t know which one involves you.”
“You’ll find out. You two,” Romero said, pointing to the two guards. “Outside. This is now a level Omega situation.”
“You’re going to trust them with that?” one guard asked, jerking a thumb to Kraber.
“I absolutely am,” Romero said. “Priority level one, people. Everyone but Kraber, Well Met, Hope, and Lucky Strike out.”
“Don’t worry boys,” Lucky Strike added, glaring at Kraber. “I can handle things if this goes apeshit.”
The guards exchanged glances.
“Alright, boss,” the first guard said to Strike. “We’ll be outside.”
As the two guards left the room, closing the door, Romero pressed a button on his desk.
There was a mechanical whir from within the heavy metal door, then a clunk. A light humming noise filled the room, just quiet enough not to be annoying but loud enough not to be noticed.
“So - level Omega, Captain? What could either of them possibly have,” Lucky Strike asked, pointing towards Kraber with one foreleg, “that would warrant that level of classification?”
“We’re about to find out,” Romero said. “Well Met?”
“So do you want the good news or the bad news?” Well Met asked.
“Bad,” Kraber said mournfully. Romero glanced at him. “The bad news will be the serious one, and the good news will be some irrelevant kak that doesn’t make up for it.”
“He’s right,” Hope said.
Well Met raised an eyebrow. “Whatever makes you think that?”
“I know how my life works,” Kraber said weakly.
“Life’s not like that I’m afraid,” Well Met said quietly. He glanced at Romero. “And you don’t mind the Captain being here?”
“If what Kraber said about his memory loss is true, I need to know about it,” Romero said seriously.
“His what?” Lucky Strike asked. “Do you think it’s… Them?”
Well Met nodded. “It… it could be.” He looked at Kraber. “We couldn’t confirm an exact date for the procedure. I had every specialist I could think of look at it.”
Kraber let out a deep breath. “So she could have done it.” He blinked. “My act of mercy could have just been that.”
Saying it felt like the tolling of a doom bell, and Kraber felt like a weight was settling into his shoulders. Maybe he was irredeemable. Maybe he was -
“No,” Well Met said, cutting the train of thought off so hard it derailed and exploded. “That’s… extremely unlikely.”
Kraber frowned. “Wait, what?”
“It wasn’t done by that mare,” Well Met said. “You’d need an expert. And you’d need to do it in controlled conditions. That’s… I don’t think anypony can do it spur-of-the-moment, just like that.”
Kraber blinked, taking in what Well Met was saying with a sudden cold feeling running down his spine.
“But the HLF don’t have experts like that,” he said. “Do we?”
“No, we don’t,” Romero said quietly. “Not even I have any ponies with that level of skill. Obviously Lovikov doesn’t. And the PHL would doubtless have done more to you than what they did.”
“Wait, do they have mind magic?” Kraber asked.
“They’d say they don’t, just for the sake of covering their flanks,” Lucky Strike said. “Personally, I say yes.”
“According to my sources, they avoid it wherever possible,” Romero said. “I think they’re being sincere about that, if only because we’d all be on their list if they weren’t.”
“Wait,” Aegis says. “Do we?”
“As little as possible,” Spitfire says. “The PHL’s charter forbids mental manipulation through the use of magic.”
“Romero’s right, they’d all be on the list to manipulate if we did,” Yael adds dolefully.
“You are just an expert at inspiring and deflating confidence at the same time,” Aegis says.
“But…” Kraber said. “Your faction didn’t do it. The HLF didn’t do it. The PHL didn’t. So then who…”
“Kraber,” Romero said, and Kraber stopped talking.
The Captain looked… concerned. No, not concerned. Worried. Genuinely worried.
“You know that I’m someone outside of the PHL,” he finally said. “There are plenty of other little outsiders. The People's Liberation Army Conversion War Defense Group. Division E. Shriek’s collective out in the middle of nowhere. Armacham likes to play at it, too. Independents that settled in the middle of nowhere. Little neighborhood defense squads like the ASF or Deschutes Militia. But there’s…”
He paused. Kraber frowned: there was something entirely new in Romero’s expression.
Fear.
“There are others,” Romero finally continued. “People like Gardner don’t know the half of what’s going on in this war. Hell. ‘Half’ is being generous. There are other interests at play, other factions, higher up than him, higher up than his CO... but that’s all irrelevant. I don’t concern myself with who knows what, unless the what is something I need to know.”
“Who are they?” Kraber asked. “What do they do? If they’re not with the Solar Empire, why are we worried about them?”
“Partly because they’ve been financing me and outsourcing work to me,” Romero said, simply. “And because they’ve also done it for Lovikov.”
“That’s…” Kraber started.
“What?” Lucky Strike asked. “Crazy? You can’t believe your friend would work with-”
“Actually?” Kraber said. “I didn’t know about the Ship any more than any of you.”
Hope’s eyes widened.
“But everyone says you two were best friends,” she said. “That you’re his right hand, his brother-”
“Not so fokking much, apparently,” Kraber interrupted. “So I’m thinking all bets are off with that man. Honestly, it makes a lot of sense at this point. The way Lovikov seemed so confident Defiance would never be attacked. The fact that the PHL or National Guard didn’t come until recently. It makes sense.”
“Exactly what I was thinking,” Romero said. “I can’t prove it. But I’m certain of it. The Ship wouldn’t have come from the PHL, so it would have to have come from them. They needed Lovikov for something, and I’m… let’s just say, uneasy about the idea of a world where Lovikov’s vision is a key component.”
“You really think…” Kraber started. “Him?! That fokkin’ kakhuiskriek?!”
“Sounds like a nightmare,” Hope said.
“I’m trying not to think too much about it,” Romero said quietly. “But the fact is, they wouldn’t have saved him if he wasn’t important to them somehow.”
He sighed.
“They’re planning something,” Romero said. “I’m certain of it.”
“Seems to be a lot of that going around,” Kraber said.
“What’s more, we know They’re doing things that’d turn any of the factions against Them,” Lucky Strike said. “During the Blackdog raids, we found an island base. It was littered with vivisected ponies - we couldn’t tell if they were Newfoals. They were… experimenting on them. They torched the base - I think They were expecting the Barrier to erase it - but from what we could tell, They were trying to experiment with ways to boost magical powers.”
“There were signs of heavy, heavy magical rupture,” Well Met said dolefully.
“Magical rupture?” Kraber repeated, but everyone ignored him.
“Like the site I found in the Rockies,” Hope said, shaking slightly.
“Allegedly found,” Lucky Strike said.
“The mare knows what she saw, Strike,” Romero said. “And after Hadley’s Hope, are you really going to be incredulous?”
“Sir, after Hadley’s Hope, I want to be incredulous,” Strike replied evenly. “I happen to like sleeping soundly.”
“Sorry, holding the phone and the mayo for a moment,” Kraber said, pointing to Well Met, “but he said magical rupture. What does that mean?!”
“What happens to a human cell when too much water gets into it?” Well Met replied. “It swells, and too much and the subject dies. Same with magic and pony cells.”
Kraber blinked. “Fok.”
“And there’s one other thing I didn’t mention,” Lucky Strike said quietly.
“And that is?” Kraber asked.
“The base we found had seriously high newtech,” Strike said. “The kind that only the PHL has. Except…”
“Except I checked with my colleagues there,” Romero said. “They didn’t have any records of the equipment found on the base. When I gave them a piece of equipment we managed to recover, they pointed to one with the exact same serial number in a Montreal facility. That’s why I think the Ship came from them.”
“The point, Kraber,” Well Met said, “is that the marks on your brain? We suspect these individuals had something to do with it.”
“But… why?” Kraber asked.
“From what we’ve gathered, it means they were trying to recruit you,” Romero said. “Apparently, you didn’t pass the test.”
“They tried to recruit me too,” Hope said. “They said I’d be the perfect infiltrator. But…”
“That’d be horrible,” Kraber said, surprised by the empathy he felt for this impossible Newfoal. “You’d be… you’d be throwing yourself into the fire. Surrounded by wretched little fokking half-things and ponies that treated you like an automaton.”
Kraber admittedly didn’t know much about life in Equestria beyond televised interviews with ponies that’d managed to escape. They hadn’t painted a happy picture. From what he could tell, there was very little freedom, and most culture was essentially an arm of the Canterlot palace.
...suddenly, the complaints that some of the militia recruits Lovikov had acquired didn’t seem to hold as much water.
“Exactly,” Hope said.
“Okay, so… what?” Kraber asked.
“What?” Romero repeated.
“Why not speak up?” Kraber asked. “If these people are so shadowy…”
“What would I do?” Romero asked. “If I make myself troublesome, they could-”
“Assassinate you?” Hope asked.
“No,” Romero said. “They could end me without a blip in the news cycle, and find someone in my own fleet that’d take my place.”
“But I’d never take over your ship,” Lucky Strike started. “Not -”
“I didn’t say you, Lucky.” Romero’s tone was completely devoid of its usual humour. “And frankly, they’d probably find it easier to sink us all if they decided we weren’t worth their investment.”
Strike blinked, her jaw closing with an audible clack.
Romero continued, his tone deadly serious. “They could throw me in a cell and make it so I never see the light of day. They could confiscate this fleet, and erase or take all of the research I’ve done. And They have resources and reach that most people are too… too moral to imagine.”
He looked troubled. Which, in and of itself, was troubling.
“There’ve been abductions on the mainland,” Romero said. “All unicorns. Even foals. I’ve seen rumors that soldiers in black, with no insignias, have been committing them. It’s not the PHL, and it’s certainly not the PER’s style.”
“I’ve seen that too,” Hope said. “I was in a homestead once where this happened. I was the only one that got out.”
“What about Hadley’s Hope?” Kraber asked. “Is what happened there part of it?”
Romero shook his head. “No, that’s an entirely different problem, and honestly, I’ve no idea what to make of it, except that it’s proof that this war is far more… far more troublesome, far more complex, than we understand. There is far too much at play here.”
“Who are they?” Kraber asked. “What… do we even know their name?”
“All we know is that they have a symbol like a horse skull,” Romero said. “And not much else.”
“So then,” Kraber said, “What… what do we do? We don’t even know what they’re planning.”
“We’ll discuss it another time, Mr Kraber,” Romero said quietly. “For now, just be thankful that your act of mercy was real. It’s a good sign.”
It was real, Kraber repeated in his head. I did that. I did that. No one else. No one made me do it. It was just me.
“Just like that?” Hope asked. “These people are dangerous, Captain! They...”
Hope’s eyes were wide as she stared up at the three of them.
“Nothing is sacred to them,” she said simply. “They didn’t care what could happen to me if I went to Equestria. They could wipe an entire town off the map without blinking.”
“There’s nothing we can do about it right now,” Romero said. “We don’t know anything. We don’t have leverage. For now, the best thing we can do is make sure we’re off their radar.” He sighed. “Believe me. I don’t like it any more than any of you.”
He sighed, and Kraber was suddenly reminded that this man was older than him. For the first time since he’d been aboard Columbia, Romero looked older.
“Right,” he said. “Well Met, you did the health checkup?”
“Yes,” Well Met said.
“Anything else?” Romero asked.
Well Met let out a weak chuckle. “Apart from the medical miracle that is this man not being a corpse, no. He’s fine.”
Not a word I’d pick, Kraber thought.
The next day, Kraber went looking for Romero. He had questions - lots of them.
Who are these other people? What could they want with Lovikov? Shouldn’t we be trying to stop them?
“That’s still an important question,” Heliotrope says.
“Trust me, we’ll see those guys dealt with,” Yael says darkly.
But he wasn’t at his office, and it took searching half the ship to finally find him on the crew quarters decks. He was talking to a pale, shaven headed unicorn mare - what little mane she had growing back looked red.
And she had no cutie mark.
Sharon, Kraber thought. He hid in an alcove quickly.
“Well, Sunbeam,” Romero was saying to her. “I’m glad you’ve had another productive day. I hope you’ve not been straining yourself.”
“Oh, Captain, you know I don’t strain myself doing jobs like that,” ‘Sunbeam’ said. “I’m just grateful to be here and helping you all. It’s the least I can do.”
“I know,” Romero said softly.
“And…” she paused. Kraber narrowed his eyes at her, as she blinked. “Captain…”
“Sunbeam?”
The Newfoal shook her head. “I… I’m…” She looked up at him. “Dan. It’s… it’s happening again…”
“Sharon,” Romero breathed, a sudden desperate joy sleeping into his tone. “It’s alright, we’ll get -”
“Captain,” Sharon cut him off, “you can’t help. This is the fifth time. It always ends the same. I always go back.”
“Back?” It was half a denial, half a plea. “Back where?”
“I’m remembering more, now!” Sharon murmured, her eyes wide. “More about that place, about… her…”
And then she blinked again, her expression faltering. A moment later, she smiled that half-empty Newfoal smile again.
“Oh, I’m sorry Captain,” Sunbeam said. “I’m probably just tired.”
Romero said nothing for a moment, and when he did speak it was in the sort of tight voice that Kraber knew well from the billion time’s he’d used it, right before breaking some kontgesig’s nose.
“It’s alright, Sunbeam,” he said. “You get some rest. We’ll speak again soon.”
With that, Sunbeam turned and went into her quarters. Kraber frowned, feeling a wellspring of mixed emotions coursing through him… until Romero turned and looked at him.
Until the day he died, Kraber swore down he had never seen an expression so lacking in expression that still contained so much emotion. Romero’s eyes were boiling, even as his face was set perfectly still. He met Kraber’s eyes, blinked once, and then strode past him without a single word.
Fok, Kraber thought. Just… fok.
“This stuff must be heavily classified,” Yael says after a moment. “I’d never even heard of Romero’s Newfoal.”
“Why would we have heard of Romero’s Newfoal?” Heliotrope points out. “Romero was trying to keep Gardner as far away from his shit as possible. He practically said as much when we met him.”
“True,” Yael says. She looks thoughtful for a moment. “I… I don’t want to seem harsh, but part of me feels like Sharon should be…”
“Killed?” Kraber asks.
“No... well, yes, euthanised.” Yael looks distinctly uncomfortable. “I know she represents a new kind of anomalous, but…”
“No, I get where you’re coming from,” Kraber says. “But I think you actually would have a warlord on your hand if you did that.”
“What makes him keeping Sharon around any better than Hatch and her son?” (Someone) asks.
“Hatch mutilated her son,” Kraber replies at once. “And I’m fairly certain that poor kont never actually ‘relapsed’ the way Sharon does.”
Heliotrope swallows. “Did you ever speak to a Romero about it?”
“According to Hope, Sharon is a taboo topic with him,” Kraber replies. “Anyway, the next time we spoke he didn’t even mention it.”
“When was that?” Yael asks.
“Right before Matinicus Island,” Kraber replies, “a couple of days later…”
The two of them - Kraber and Romero - were on the way to the ship’s firing range. It’d been too long since Kraber had been shooting.
Romero has given no indication that he’d seen Kraber watching him and Sharon. He gave no indication that it even crossed his mind. Which, Kraber thought; was probably for the best. It had seemed…
… personal.
“So you were reading our Sanderson collection, then?” Romero asked.
“Yeah,” Kraber admitted, smirking. “Been too long.”
“Was always more of an Honorverse man myself,” Romero said.
“Really, I’m so surprised,” Kraber snarked back.
Romero chuckled. “Believe me, I was halfway to giving myself a black peacoat and white beret for a uniform before I realised that I didn’t actually want to turn my unit into a cosplay group.”
“Atlas Galt did,” Kraber pointed out.
“No, that idiot just named himself after an Ayn Rand novel,” Romero snorted derisively. “You can’t cosplay as objectivism.”
“I dunno, I knew a guy who looked the spitting image of Andrew Ryan,” Kraber said.
Romero rolled his eyes. “Speaking as an old-school Conservative myself, I am legitimately ashamed to be lumped in with people like Galt.”
Somehow, it wasn’t surprising that a man like Romero was right-wing. Kraber winced slightly, but tried to keep an open mind.
“Fiscally Conservative, socially centrist,” Romero said evenly, as though noticing his discomfort. “I’m sure we could debate our respective views on the way governments should be run, Kraber, but believe it or not I don’t have the time, the inclination, or the energy to engage in whatever passes for ‘debate’ these days.”
“Right,” Kraber said, nodding. He paused for a moment, blinking as he replayed the last few sentences of their conversation. “How did we get onto this topic?”
“Cosplay,” Romero said blandly, “and my desire not to center my command around it.”
“Right,” Kraber said, tilting his head thoughtfully. “I dunno, think you’d look better in a black double-breasted peacoat than whatever these blue things are.”
Romero chuckled. “These ‘blue things’ are utility jumpsuits.”
He paused.
“Ah. We’re here.”
“So… what was it like?” Yael asks. “Being on the other side of the Split?”
Kraber pauses. “D’you ever have one of those moments where you suddenly, completely realise that you’ve wasted years doing the wrong thing, crystallised into something so minor that it doesn’t even make sense?”
Yael blinks. “What?”
“I had a moment like that the moment I got my hands on one of Romero’s pistols,” Kraber said.
He held the 9mm pistol in his hand, frowning. It was a dark gray-green, the Ex Astra’s Victoria symbol stamped into it, and a soft glow coming from three small vents on the side.
“Never seen a pistol before, Kraber?” Romero asked, picking an identical pistol up from the weapon’s rack. The two of them were in what Romero called a ‘training range’: a room about twenty by fifty metres long, probably one of the biggest rooms on the ship. There were dozens of different weapons behind him.
Apparently, it hadn’t been intended as a firing range beforehand - it’d been some kind of storeroom.
“That a trick question?” Kraber asked. He held the pistol up. “The fok is this?”
“A pistol,” Romero replied, grinning. At Kraber’s scowl, he rolled his eyes. “Seegert ACM90. Specialised Model, based on the ACM46, but with a few… mods.”
Kraber blinked. “Define ‘mods’.”
“Point at the target and see,” Romero said.
Kraber put the pistol into a two-handed grip. Stared through its reflex sight, aiming at a pony-sized target at the other end of the range.
He squinted, pulled the trigger, and-
BANG
The pistol’s recoil was barely noticeable. What was noticeable, though, was the effect on the target.
It burst into flame.
“You loaded it with incendiaries?” Kraber asked, looking over to Romero.
“Check the magazine,” Romero said.
Kraber tapped the magazine release. The 18-round double-stack magazine slid out, Kraber catching it in his left hand, peering at the bullet caught between the feed lips.
It was definitely not an incendiary round. It was an entirely normal 9x19mm Parabellum round, the kind that’d been used since the Luger was invented.
“A magic gun,” Kraber said, a smile on his face. “You used magic. To enhance the rounds.”
“Well, there’s a couple of different shot types,” Romero said. He tapped a small switch on the side of the pistol, opposite the safety. “Standard, then there’s incendiaries. Pretty boring, really.”
“‘Boring’,” Kraber repeated. “You have fokkin’ incendiary pistols? How come I’ve never seen one?”
“Because the last weapon I gave to the ‘Fraktion,” Romero said slowly, “was a modded AKM that was…” and here, he chuckled, “charitably, ‘an essay in the craft’, before we started making serious strides. That was before Helmetag got killed and the ‘Fraktion started sending my supply teams back in pieces.”
“Wait, he what?” Kraber asked.
Romero glared at Kraber.
“Don’t tell me you didn’t know,” he said. "After all, you were there.”
It was true. The evidence, in hindsight, was all there. He’d never seen them or their vehicle leave, he’d never gotten his hands on it, and the party line of “No horsefuckers” had been thrown out.
“Oh, you would be amazed the shit Lovikov did not tell me,” Kraber said after a moment. “Apparently, he didn’t tell me his backing could summon the kind of gunship I’d almost trust to you, he didn’t show me all the hidden tunnels under Defiance -”
“I had wondered about that,” Romero mused.
“He didn’t tell me that he’d throw all my shit out on the floor and destroy it,” Kraber fumed, “right in fokking front of me…”
Kraber scowled.
“He just told me we’d never work with horsefuckers and left it at that after the supply team came,” Kraber said. “I swear to God, I didn’t know any more than that. I don’t even know what happened to the gun.”
“And yet he let you keep a gun you stole,” Romero added. “What kind of man would rather loot the dead than accept a gift, I’d wonder…”
“It means he’s a bastard,” Kraber said, bitterly looking at the pistol. How many more ways did I fok up? How many more awful things did I just refuse to notice?
“So how common are these?” he asked.
“We’re phasing the M90 in as a standard sidearm, replacing the M46. Currently this is in the hands of our elites,” Romero said. “Then there’s the VES Advanced Rifles, and the ATC laser stuff our specialists use…”
Just what does he deploy them against, anyway? Kraber wondered.
“So, common,” he said after a moment. “Fok, I really was on the wrong side.”
“You keep saying that,” Romero pointed out, “like you’re surprised. I’d have thought you’d be past the novelty stage.”
“I…” Kraber shook his head, before leaning against the wall. “Honestly? Every minute I’m here, I wonder what the fok any of the HLF I was with were thinking. Not being here, not having access to this stuff… the fok, y’know? Hating ponies more than wanting to make a difference?!”
Romero, either because he realised Kraber needed to talk, or because he didn’t know what to say, didn’t reply. He holstered the sidearm, folding his arms.
Kraber took a deep breath. “Working with ponies isn’t so bad here that it’s enough to make working with a borz look good. And… and you people are doing stuff I didn’t even think HLF thought about. You're working on stuff I’d never even considered.”
“You’re wondering why you didn’t join us sooner?” Romero asked.
“No,” Kraber replied. “I’m wondering what the fok my side’s even doing. You show Hakim or Jomi this, and they’d act like the outhouse they dug was as important as cold fokkin’ fusion. And if you’re doing it, the PHL is working on it too.”
“So that,” Kraber says, “Is why the pistol was so meaningful: It created a sense of, eh… ultimate futility.”
“What?” Aegis asks.
“I’m just surprised to see you use those words,” Spitfire says.
“You’d be surprised what inveigled itself into my fokking vocabulary,” Kraber says, smirking. “Anyway. It was… this one guy here has incendiary weapons. The Reavers are working with the PHL, who... are the PHL. There’s also these assholes that apparently have the PHL’s resources. It made being HLF feel… small. Irrelevant. Like there wasn’t any future to it.”
“I don’t think Romero or Yarrow would appreciate you saying that,” Aegis says.
“They really wouldn’t,” Kraber says. “You’re right - not so much that, more… the Defiance sort of lifestyle. Hunkering down in the woods, getting more and more bosbefok, and stockpiling guns wasn’t the future. And if people like Lovikov and Galt were planning on antagonizing the PHL…”
“You don’t need to say it,” Heliotrope says.
“Your side is doing the wrong things,” Romero said with a sigh. He folded his arms. “War is coming, Kraber. A war we don’t have time to fight. I'm just pleased you're picking the right side.”
“I'm fighting for humanity, aren't I?” Kraber asked.
“There’s far too many people who would think of it along those lines,” Romero said. “No. Not just humanity. As long as you're fighting for the freedom of all species to live outside Queen Celestia's rule, then you'll be fine. But… there's an undercurrent I've noticed. With Lovikov. Some of the more far-right groups out west. A desire for war among humanity.”
“That’s…” Kraber said.
“This is the part where you’re about to protest,” Romero said.
“I literally had to swim out of Portland,” Kraber said. “So no. Even if I wanted to, I really can’t.”
“I’m just going to stop having expectations for you, Mr Kraber,” Romero said with a grin. “Feels like they exist just to get undercut in these talks of ours.”
“Fokking with people’s expectations was my favorite thing to do back in school,” Kraber replied.
“I’m relieved that you’re getting it,” Romero said. “You know that among many groups, the desire has always been there. From the days before the PHL and UNAC, from people like Senator Goleman. Believe it or not, I don’t get funding from him.”
“Something tells me you two would never be on speaking terms,” Kraber said. Going by what Goleman had said in interviews, the good senator was more in line with Lovikov.
“You presume correctly. there’s always been an undercurrent. An idea that the wrong people are in charge. And if that idea takes root in fertile ground then… we may very well have war. A pointless, stupid war, against the stupid leading the insane or the desperate, dragging us all down to the level where Celestia wants us.”
“Of all the times for the boogaloo, this is literally the most dof fokkin one,” Kraber sighed.
Romero raised an eyebrow. “A childish term for it, but I couldn’t agree more.”
“I just… I don’t get it. Why they’re so… so bone dead fokkin’ stupid?!”
Romero took a deep breath. “I don’t know. Truth be told, I really don’t know.”
Kraber let out a short, harsh laugh. “That’s not comforting.”
“Wasn’t meant to be,” Romero said quietly. “Kraber, I’ll level with you. I’ve anti-pony people on my crew. Yarrow’s got anti-pony people in the Reavers. It’s inevitable.”
“Is it?” Kraber asked.
Romero snorted at that. “Really? Your wife was black.”
Kraber bristled. “What the fok -”
“Can I finish?!” Romero snapped. “You know full well - more than me, certainly - that some people don’t need a reason to have irrational, pointless prejudices. Ponies? As a group, they’re far more different than having a slightly different shade of brown skin.” He sighed, looking more tired than Kraber had seen. “I mean seriously. You’re gonna ask if the human race’s first alien species, whose leader decided to commit cultural and actual genocide on us with her super magic, really would cause a racist - or speciesist, whatever - reaction?”
Kraber felt the anger drain out of him. When out that way, it almost made sense, in the way that all sorts of pretty horrible things made sense.
“Hey, somebody’s gonna ask if it was really inevitable,” he pointed out. “Anyway, everything sounds bad when you say it like that.”
Romero snorted. “There’s always gonna be people who hate ‘em, and there’s always gonna be people who screw ‘em. Personally, wouldn't have minded green space women for our first alien race, but that’s the dice roll.” He sighed. “But the Carter side? I don’t get ‘em. I don’t get the stupidity. Just look at Portland. I’m half-convinced Lovikov or Galt will take a truce with the PER at some point if it means screwing the PHL over more.”
“You really think so?” Kraber asked. “Even for Lovikov, that sounds… fokkin’ chop. They’re meant to fight for humanity.”
“Even now, you’re defending them?” Romero asked.
“No,” Kraber said. “I’m saying that even I have a hard time believing they’d find the people that carry FOKKING POTION less objectionable than the PHL!”
“Again,” Romero said. “Portland. If people like Lovikov are so capable of critically failing at helping humanity once, I believe they’ll do it again.” He paused, before looking sideways at Kraber. “Sometimes… sometimes I think it’s destiny.”
Kraber snorted. “Fok destiny. It’s shit. And I preferred Warframe.”
“Maybe,” Romero said quietly. “But sometimes… sometimes I get the awful feeling of deja vu. Like… like I’ve been here before, but not.” He paused. “It was that deja vu that made me join the HLF, you know.”
“Really?” Kraber asked.
“I just…” Romero sighed. “I went on the forums. In the start, when the ponification started, when… when people changed.” He had the look on his face that Kraber had seen ten thousand times: the look of remembering someone who was now just another somepony, if that. “I didn’t like what I saw.”
“I know what you mean,” Kraber said. “I… was very skeptical. I mean, what are the side effects? Then mom kept hearing rumors about Newfoals acting weird. I… it scared me.”
“It wasn’t just that,” Romero said. “I saw a powderkeg. I thought to myself, there’s potential there, but there’s risk. And then, out of the blue, the thought occurred to me: ‘this thing needs me’.”
“High opinion of yourself much?” Kraber asked.
Romero chuckled. “Might have been ego. Lord knows, more than one person’s accused me of it.” His smile faded. “But I knew - I just knew that the Front needed firm hands, strong leaders. Or it’d…”
He trailed off, looking wistful.
“It’d what?” Kraber asked.
Romero considered that for a moment, before looking at Kraber with such an intense gaze that Kraber felt that most unfamiliar of sensations, true concern.
“Imagine the Carter side, but it’s all the HLF units, all the commanders, thousands more men and all of them crazy, scared, and desperate,” the Captain said quietly. “Imagine Max is the only sane one, if he’s even alive. Imagine there was no Spader, no Charter, that they’re all just out there, nothing but a name and nothing to say what the cause really is. Not an army, just...”
“The Buzzards and Rock Riders from Mad Max, more or less?” Kraber asked.
“I suppose so, but I have to ask: Why them?”
“They’re not with the heroes,” Kraber said. “They’re not the villains, either, they just sort of… are. And they’re mostly around to make things worse for everyone else.”
“That’s why I was afraid,” Romero said quietly. “I could almost see that future. All the pain, all the death, all the misery, for nothing at all, no reason. Almost as though some malicious entity had just said, ‘these people exist to hate, fail, die, and nothing else’.” He chuckled. “Turned out, Algie Spader had the same fear. That’s why he wrote the charter. That’s why he took command.”
Kraber found himself thinking back to his hallucinations: the other worlds he had seen, the other versions of his life. Captain Grey, David Elliot, that figure in the black armour that had chilled his soul… all those visions… could they have been real? Could they have happened, somewhere, some time?
“Maybe it was real,” he finally said. “That future you were afraid of?”
“You think?” Romero asked, looking at him with surprise.
Kraber let out a sigh. “I don’t know. What I do know is that, real or not, you dodged a bullet in this world.” He paused, scowling. “I still worked with Lovikov, though.”
“But not anymore,” Romero pointed out.
“True,” Kraber said quietly. “Wonder if I was smart enough in whatever world you were afraid of…”
He didn’t finish the thought.
“Whether you were or not doesn’t matter, Viktor,” Romero finally said. “You made the right choices here. Keep makin’ ‘em. Keep being the best you you can be.”
“Is there such a thing?” Kraber asked.
“I think so,” Romero replied, smiling. “I think there’s more good in you than you let yourself believe. And you owe it to the world to find that person. We all owe it to the world to find, and become, the best versions of ourselves.”
He straightened, before drawing his pistol.
“Come on,” he said. “We’ve got target practice to do.”
Kraber snorted at that. “Watch me beat you hands down, Captain.”
“I’d be happy to see it,” Romero chuckled. “I happen to like my security people to shoot better than I d-”
“Action stations, action stations, all hands.”
Kraber frowned at Romero through the corridor, uncertain what to make of the ringing klaxons and the call.
“Oh, no,” Romero said. He pointed to Kraber. “Right, Kraber, you’re with me. We’re going to the bridge.”
“What do I do on the bridge?” Kraber asked, raising an eyebrow.
“You’re on guard detail, aren’t you?” Romero retorted, scowling. “I need a guard on the bridge. Think of it as a learning experience.”
“One guard?” Kraber asked. “I might be a certified badass,” and here Romero rolled his eyes, “but even I’m not going to be much use if we’re boarded and overrun.”
“You know how to shoot people in the head, don’t you?” Romero asked. “If we’re boarded and there’s no way to hold the ship, that’s your job.”
Kraber blinked, shocked by the callousness of it. “Dark.”
“Practical,” Romero replied. He tapped his head. “This cannot be allowed to serve the enemy. Neither can any other mind on that bridge. We know too much. I will not allow it.”
Kraber let out a sigh. “Right. But I need a shotgun.”
“Follow me,” Romero said, leading Kraber to the stairway that led to the bridge. “I’ll call Ledger and make sure he has something you’d like.”
“If he gets me a Cobray Terminator out of spite, I’ll stab him,” Kraber said. “I’ll fokkin’ do it.”
Romero stopped dead in his tracks, before looking at Kraber with the same cold expression he had used before on the tardy scientists. Kraber stopped dead, feeling the blood drain from his face.
“Don’t threaten people on my ship,” Romero said.
Kraber blinked. “I wasn’t -”
“I am not finished,” Romero hissed. “I want you here, Kraber, because you’re an asset and I think there’s something about you that makes you worth the time and effort. But make no damn mistake,” and here he pointed at Kraber so emphatically that he took a step back. “I listen to my crew. I know they’re scared of you. That might have been you joking, but to my people, they don’t know it’s a joke. You do stab people in the eye, or worse, when they piss you off, Kraber. I read the reports about the PHL operative at Stanley Bridge.”
“That was… not one I read about,” Yael says.
“It’s not really called Stanley Bridge,” Kraber explains. “It’s ‘prefab village two-seven-zero’, or something along those lines. Like Hadley’s Hope or Daisypusher town, just sort of a place with a few dirt tracks and a small PHL garrison. Kinda like that place where Aegis lives, the Neigh-”
Kraber’s voice trails off. “Fokdammit,” he says, chuckling a little despite himself.
“Who even names these places?” Aegis asks.
“This isn’t important,” Heliotrope says. “Was it where you stabbed a PHL guy in the eye?”
“That was a different one,” Kraber says mournfully, and leaves it at that.
“Feeling at home here is a two way street,” Romero continued. “You can’t whine about people not liking you and not making you feel welcome if you never fucking try to prove them wrong about you.”
That was one of the few times Romero had sworn around Kraber, and it was so vehement that - for one of the equally rare times in his life - Kraber had nothing to say.
“You understand me, Kraber?” Romero asked.
Kraber’s mind was blank.
When Kraber didn’t reply, Romero’s voice raised a notch. “I said, do you understand me, Viktor Kraber?”
Kraber nodded slowly. “Yes. Sir.”
“You’re damn right,” Romero said shortly. “Now let’s go get you a Vollmer and get to the bridge.”
Kraber had actually been hoping for an autoshotgun of some kind, but this didn’t seem like the best time to press the issue. He was still thinking about one particular sentence the Captain had said.
What if they’re not wrong about me? he asked himself. What if that’s the whole problem?
It wasn’t a question he could imagine any good answers to.
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Speaking of video games (@the rec room scene), have you seen/played Half-Life: Alyx? As a Half-Life fan, I absolutely loved it and what it did for the series. You should totally mention it at some point in a later chapter, it'd make Kraber's comment about there not being a new Half-Life game pretty funny in hindsight. As for why Kraber didn't know about Half-Life: Alyx's existence (since iirc the story so far takes place in 2022, and HL:A would've been released in 2020), the answer is pretty simple: he's been holed up in Defiance, and has had more important things to concern himself with than a game series that for the longest time most had presumed dead.
🤔
That... doesn't make it any better.
Exactly the thing a centrist would say. I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm sick to death of American politics (cause nothing's ever going to get done in this shithole), but still's a bit of a copout.
And then you have people like me, who want to become one. As long as that doesn't mean becoming one of the zombie-like newfoals, that is.
10184622
Speaking as someone on the left wing side of the political spectrum, I’ve made it my business to never discuss politics on fimfiction 😂 Romero being centre-right made sense to me - he’s an older guy (probably born in the 70s) who probably fits with an older school of political thought, before everything went to hell in 2016.
ETA: He and I happen to share a perspective on debating anything in politics in the modern day, however. Legitimately every bit of discourse I see devolves into insults in the space it takes to say “every bit of discourse I see devolves into insults” 😂.
10184682
Oh yeah, don't get me wrong, it makes sense for the character. I just think it's something interesting to comment on.
As for "debating", I can't say anything, since I don't know what exactly that entails. I just enjoy thinking and discussing politics, cause politics are interesting to me - and they're everywhere, can't escape 'em.
10184707
“Debating” is a pretty catch-all term in my book, but in my experience, it’s about actually discussing with the other person like they’re a person. This is where modern political factionalism fails, in that it ceases presuming that the other side are people, they’re instead a “commie”, or a “fascist”, or a “Marxist”, or whatever other pejorative term to dehumanise the other person people want to throw out. It’s the difference between how John McCain talked about Obama during his campaign in 2008 (to wit, “He’s a decent family man [and] citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues”) and how Trump talked about him... well, ever (I don’t think I want to repeat that man’s words on the topic, and I don’t think anyone else wants me to either 🤢).
... and that’s my cue to shut up about politics 😂
10184730
Discussing politics is always confusing to me because usually "discussing politics" means discussing American politics, and those are very different from Dutch politics. I mean, by American standards as I understand them we don't even have a right. I'm not even sure we have a left.
Anyhoo:
Multiversal shenanigans! Yeah, in most TCB universes the HLF is just one big pile of squig dung. Then again, most TCB universes also don't have a PHL so... yay small victories?
10188302
In most Straight-TCB universes the HLF is the “villain” to a “heroic” PER, and in Spectrum Classic the HLF were written as the most braindead pieces of shit in the history of the world, end of (if you’ll pardon my language). I don’t exaggerate when I say I despise the original Spectrum HLF, hence why I’ve done everything I could to fix that problem in the 2.0/Reduxverse.
(As for politics, yeah, there is a certain Anglo/American-centric bent to a lot of discourse. Frankly I envy a country which doesn’t have the dichotomy of crap we’ve got here in the UK.)
10188323
Personally, my preference goes to TCB stories where the barrier is a cosmic accident rather than an invasion and the potion is just the only solution they have, not a blessing for the filthy humans to ascend. PER doesn't get a hero treatment in those stories either.
10188430
Y’know, I don’t think I’ve ever read one of those. I know they exist, but I came into this fandom (ironically) because of Spectrum (well, that and John De Lancie, because Q), so I never read much of “straight” TCB.
10189030
Well, most TCB stories that aren't one-shot Tyrantlestia or Humanity! Fuck Yeah! stories are the domain of Chatoyance, whom your fellow authors might have mentioned once or twice, and which are... unique in their view on humanity and ponification.
I myself would recommend Cloudhammer's TCB setting. While it doesn't exactly do subtlety when it comes to HLF, at the same time it doesn't shy away from very bluntly making PER little better either.
10189303
I’ll take you up on that recommendation at some point. 🙂 I can’t exactly blame any author for not being subtle with the HLF. I suspect I’m the only author in this sub-genre (Fluffy aside) who cares enough about the faction to write them as anything other than bit-parts, secondary antagonists and psychos 😂
(Oh yeah. I think I might have heard of Chatoyance 😜 Joke’s aside, I’m not gonna go there anymore. That woman has issues no commenter on a ponyfic could ever begin to address, and I say that as a ponyfic writer replete with his own fair share of issues 😂.)
10189316
To be fair, it has always been sort of their point for HLF to be the faction of racists and douchebags, the Al Quaidas or Nazis or whatever other extremist group you can think off. Outside of Humanity Fuck Yeah stories, which really only flip the morality line around, The SPECTRUM crew is as far as I know the first and only author group that approaches the HLF as a multi-sided faction. Which is really only possible because of your unique setting which not only has two Equestrias, but also has the PHL and its own less-than-moral people.
10189579
Funnily enough that description applied to the HLF in classic Spectrum too, until I realised it bored the ever loving crap out of me and I tried something else 😂 I’m not quite a “rooting for the Empire” guy, but I’m a fan of the Star Trek mode of villain writing, where you almost never encounter someone truly evil for the sake of evil. Everyone has a reason, everyone has a modus operandi, everyone has something they believe in or wish to achieve, even if you don’t get it at surface level.