Taking Back Canterlot

by Coyote de La Mancha

Episode 7. Rainbooms: Saints.

The AI Twilight had controlling the car was sophisticated, and its task was relatively simple on the face of it. Go from point A to point B and back, along a predesignated route, without hitting anything. But there were traffic lights to be considered, not to mention pedestrians and other drivers. So, even with it drawing data from traffic cameras, it still required supervision.

Glancing at the time and the car’s position, Twilight hesitated, then called up a sound program and clicked PLAY. Opening another window, she accessed police communications, allowing the recording to broadcast along the helicopter’s radio frequency.

Security cams showed Apple Bloom and Rainbow Dash still holding their own, though the halls were filling with cops. Cell towers within range of both the hospital and courthouse were still down, though technicians were already starting counter-measures. Landlines and police radio were still under control.

Meanwhile, the hacker had neutralized the viruses in record time. Whoever they were, they were good. Really good.

Police? FBI?

Twilight frowned again.

Maybe.

Under normal circumstances, she’d have handled them easily. Maybe let them keep their computer, maybe not, depending on who they were. But gods, she’d never been so tired…

She shook herself, slapped herself a few times. She had to stay sharp. The energy drinks weren’t doing anything anymore. Twilight couldn’t remember ever feeling so drained. When she’d first awakened after the escape, she’d only felt hollow… now, she felt like her life was being sucked out a little bit more every time she so much as moved her hands.

The hacker should never have been able to get this close—

Her eyes snapped open. Oh, God! Was she sleeping? Had she just let everyone down again, one last time?

Oh, God, she thought frantically. Oh, God, please, no…!

With difficulty, she refocused on the screens surrounding her. Apparently, she had dropped off, but only for a few seconds. The automated defenses were still keeping the other hacker more or less at bay. But a message was displayed now, sent to Twilight along a courthouse server the hacker had managed to access.

PLEASE. LET ME IN. I CAN HELP YOU.

Twilight stared, what remained of her adrenaline reserves temporarily dispelling her fatigue.

After a moment’s thought, she typed in, WHO ARE YOU?

The hacker replied with a single name.

Twilight stared. It could be a trick. It had to be.

TWILIGHT?

But if it wasn’t, this was the one person who could actually help them, the way they needed the most.

TWILIGHT??

Twilight bit her lower lip, blinked back her tears. Even if it wasn’t a trick…!

TWILIGHT, PLEASE!

The prompt still hovered before Twilight: Allow Access (Y/N)? Her hands were shaking from sheer exhaustion, it was getting hard to see again. Twilight wasn’t sure she could keep the intruder out for much longer, anyway. Not with everything else she was trying to do.

Please, she thought. Please, don’t let this be another mistake.

Trembling, her hand guided the mouse to Y, and with a single click she let the intruder in.

---

From the very beginning, the network had set up everything to interrupt the anchorpeople on a moment’s notice with her feed, ready to scoop every other channel on the so-called ‘Trial of the Century.’ But it had been pretty clear that nothing was going to happen.

Now, Rundown looked around herself at the people milling around, the police chopper suddenly veering away from the courthouse to go God knew where. There had been a moment of something to actually report when the building alarms had gone off, and people poured out from the courthouse in a mix of confusion, panic, and indignation... all of them soaked to the bone.

Then, even as civilians were flooding out, previously hidden cops had swarmed around the courthouse. They’d forced their way through the crowds and into the building, shotguns at the ready, along with what she was pretty sure were at least a couple of assault rifles. But by the time she’d finished even describing the scene and made her own way past the crowd of people, the police were almost all inside.

She’d considered following them in, but they’d left a pair of SWAT officers at the courthouse doors. In full armor. With weapons out.

So, for several minutes, she had continued her narration as gunfire could be heard from within, even over the various alarms going off. Speculating why the city had found it necessary to send in a small army to deal with whatever was inside. Speculating why they’d apparently been expecting to need to.

Once, she’d started approaching the cops playing sentry at the doors. But when they’d stepped towards her in unbridled, silent hostility, her boss had cut in and told her to back off.

Reluctantly, she’d done just that.

And then, the network had cut back to the news desks, giving her instructions to let them know when there were further developments, and they would get her live again.

God dammit. God dammit.

Whatever was going on in there, she was shut out. City hall would put out a statement about a fire or something, and everything would go back to…

She paused in mid-seethe. Someone was speaking to her through her earpiece. Someone she didn’t recognize.

Frowning, Rundown pressed a finger against her earpiece.

“What?” she snapped. “Who is this? No, you listen! How did you…? What?”

Then, staring at her cameraman, “Nat! Go to live feed! Go to live feed right now!”

He paused, staring at his camera’s screen as he chased her down the wide stone steps. “What the hell?”

“Go to live feed!”

With a nod, he burst into action, even as she positioned herself stage center before the stone building.

“Live feed is up!” he announced as he positioned himself as well. “Okay, streaming their video with your voice and an overlay. Station is picking it up, aaaaand… go!”

Spinning to face the camera, the courthouse and its armed guard positioned behind her, the reporter immediately began speaking with professional intensity.

“This is Rundown reporting live from Canterlot City courthouse,” she said, “where we have gained access to a live feed of security from inside the building! What you are seeing is actual, live footage of Canterlot Police using indiscriminate deadly force, firing blindly into a courtroom without regard to the civilian lives within. Lives which we are told include a city justice and at least two attorneys…”

---

“This is your plan?” Rainbow Dash shouted over the din.

Even as she yelled, machinegun fire continued to tear through the portal between them, bullets slowly chewing through the concrete walls to either side.

“Hole up in a courtroom while they take keep spraying at us, and we’re supposed to keep deaths to a minimum?” she raged. “Great plan, you guys! Awesome plan! And where’s Twilight, on a fucking break? We should be riding into the fucking sunset by now!”

“She said she had t’finish gettin’ our evac here!” Apple Bloom shouted back. “Somethin’ about another rescue, but they’ll be here any time!”

“Well, it’s ‘any time’ now, so where the fuck are they?!?”

And then, without warning, the world simply exploded.

---

No, Rainbow Dash realized, not the world. She could tell it hadn’t been the world. After all, she was lying on top of things. With other things, in turn, on top of her. You need a world for that. Something about gravity? Yeah. That was a gravity thing. She was pretty sure about that.

Feeling more secure about her deductions by the second, she painfully pulled herself into a sitting position and looked around, broken plaster falling from her torso as she did. It was just the outer wall that had exploded. In an amazingly controlled burst of force, in fact, crumbling the stone far more than blasting it inward. And even with her eyes unfocused as they were, Rainbow knew that silhouette, those arms splayed outward in celebration. Just as, even with the ringing in her ears, she could recognize her friend and rescuer’s voice:

“HEEEEEEEERE’S PINKIE!”

With a relieved grin, she fell back into a prone position.

“Well, hiyo goddamn silver,” she said.

Smiling, Pinkie Pie extended both arms and pulled Rainbow and Apple Bloom to their feet, ignoring the confused groans of the others still sheltered by the judge’s bench.

“What about the cops?” Rainbow Dash asked.

“Oh, the other charge just dropped the roof on them,” Pinkie chided with a wave of dismissal, staggering slightly as she did. “They’ll be fine, silly. They’re wearing armor! Twilight distracted the helicopter, and... and did you know Adderall tastes purple?”

Apple Bloom gave her a look of concern. “What? Hey, are you…?“

“No civvies ‘n th’ hall, Twilight checked.” Pinkie interrupted, her words becoming slightly slurred. “An’ all th’ cops outside came in t’shoot at you guys, so if we leave right now, we even gedda, head start!”

“Pinkie,“ Rainbow Dash tried, “slow down. What’s…?”

“C’mon!” Pinkie chirped, suddenly brimming with energy again. “We get to rappel down to the getaway car and Twilight’s going to manage the lights and stuff, and who doesn’t love to rappel?”

“Well…” Apple Bloom started. But Pinkie had already leaped headlong out the massive hole she’d blown in the wall, her voice fading downward.

“Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeee…!”

The other two women exchanged a glance, and then shrugged.

“Aw, what the hell,” Apple Bloom said.

---

Shining Armor had the monitor room to himself, having sent even the security personnel to back up the SWAT teams sent in. When the double-blast had rocked the courthouse, he’d reached out to steady himself, frowning. What was that, explosives? Then, his eyes had widened with realization.

Pinkie Pie.

He hadn’t heard anything about her escape, of course. But with Twily involved that didn’t mean much. Damn it! He should have sent a unit to watch her, or even had her moved to a more secure location…

“Hey, Shining?” Twilight’s unsteady voice cut in, “Not trying to tell you how to do your job, but… do you really need that many monitors for one security room?”

Despite himself, Shining Armor smiled a little as he looked around the empty room, and then at the lone security camera above the door.

“Your tax money at work,” he said. “One building, a hundred rooms… sixteen security monitoring stations, each with its own computer.”

“And one host for the entire building,” she added, the sound of typing plainly heard in the background. “You might want to change that. Also, ‘Lycurgus2000’ isn’t really a secure password.”

“I’ll send a memo,” he said. Then, with a sigh, “You sound like hell, Twily.”

“Yeah, well, keeping your friends from being killed is pretty tiring. So is staying alive while doctors and prison guards are trying to murder you. But I manage.”

He stared at the camera in disbelief. “Is that what you think you were doing here? Saving lives?”

There was the slightest pause. For a moment, he thought he’d reached her.

“I know I was,” Twilight snapped. “Rainbow Dash would have been killed if I hadn’t gotten her out. And what they were doing to Pinkie was a living hell!”

“They had their day at court! They both--!”

“Oh, cut the crap, big bro!” Twilight interrupted. “We saved people! We saved Canterlot! We even saved you!”

“Dammit, Twily, that’s not how the real world works!” Shining snapped back. “If you want to help people, be a firefighter or a cop, or join the service! Don’t--!”

“Shut up, Shining!” she spat. “You don’t get to talk to me about ‘the real world’ like I’m still a child, or like I’ve lived my entire life in some VR simulation while you had the only keys to reality!

“You want to know why we’re wanted felons? It’s because magical monsters from another world turned the city into a war zone and were taking over the planet, and we stopped them! Not the cops, not the army, us! We were outnumbered, outclassed, and overwhelmed by their magic. Magic that had become more powerful than ours. And we fought anyway, with everything we had!

“And after the school was blown up and our friends were killed and we started using the only tools we had left, your precious cops started trying to kill us! Not the Sirens, us! And do you know why?”

“Because you broke the law! Twilight, you killed people!”

She sighed again then, a tired, almost dried-out sound.

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, we did. Given the choice between killing and dying, we learned how to kill. And now, we’ve killed again. That’s not something I’m proud of. None of us are.

“But don’t fool yourself, Shining. That’s not why we’re targets now. We’re targets because throughout history, the purpose of a police force has always been to enforce normalcy. No matter what their professed intent might be, as individuals or as an organization, at the end of the day their function is to maintain the status quo. And as soon as the Sirens gained power over Canterlot and then the country, corruption and murder became normal. It became the status quo. And it has been, ever since.

“And if you’re going to protect that… then…”

There was a pause, and with an unsteady voice she finished, “…then you’re the enemy, Shining.”

“Twilight, listen to yourself!” he cried. “How can you be so blind? I have a duty to the public--!”

“You mean the same public your own cops brutalize and keep in mortal terror every day?” she demanded, fatigue finally disintegrating what little control she had left. “The public your own cops kill with impunity? I’ve seen what you call ‘protect and serve,’ we all have! So don’t try to take the high road on this one, big brother. You don’t get to pull some ‘higher office’ or ‘public trust’ card. You don’t have the public trust anymore. You haven’t for a long time.”

“What I have is a responsibility! A moral obligation to keep order through upholding the law! Do you remember what that’s like? To have morals?”

“What you have is owners, Shining! Whoever took over in the power vacuum Rich Hues and the Sirens left behind, they own you. That’s the only way you went from undercover snitch to police commissioner almost overnight. You are bought and paid for, and they’ve got three years of our lives as the receipts!”

Her voice became soft again, full of tears as she went on, “And you know what? One fine day, your office phone is going to ring. You’ll pick it up, and it’ll be whoever is pulling your strings, saying it’s time to take us down. To bring us in so we can be executed, nice and legal, as a message to anyone else who dares to fight them. And when they do, you’ll do everything in your power to make it happen.”

“What? Twily, I’d never--!”

“Why not? You have before.”

As Shining Armor stood in shocked silence, his sister’s voice became soft, filled with regret.

“And yes, we’re public enemy number one,” she said. “Thank you for that. But history has shown what happens when a person’s society and its rulers turn against them. Compare the examples of Trotsky and Alcibiades to those of Tepes and Sombra. When you’re in our position, you’ve got two options. You can either spend the rest of your life in hiding, waiting to have your head smashed in or get shot while running out of a burning house…

“…or, you can conquer.”

The Rainbooms logo began vanishing from the various monitors one by one, but Twilight’s voice continued with crystal clarity over the connection.

“So we’re taking back Canterlot, Shining,” she said. “And yes, we’re doing it for the people. But we’re also doing it for us. And if you’re smart, you’ll stay the hell out of our way.”

The silence that followed was deafening. Shining Armor barely realized he was moving as he slowly slumped into a chair. He was too dizzy to stand, too nauseous to speak. He barely noticed that the systems were again completely under local control, barely heard when the door opened again, a young officer informing him that the press were gathered outside, wanting to talk to him.

Only one thought ruled his mind.

Twilight.

Author's Note:

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Ending Credits: (s)AINT, by Marilyn Manson. (Lyrics = NSFW)