Fallout Equestria: Blue Destiny

by MagnetBolt

Chapter 101: Blue Skies

I had one very important personal rule when times got tough -- find somepony smarter than I was and ask them how they’re going to solve the problem. It hasn’t always worked out and on occasion, I’ve even had to rely on my own brain, which has almost universally proven to be a mistake. The only times it has failed me are the many times I’ve chosen the wrong pony to ask for help.

“Hey fellow soldiers, what’s hanging?” I asked, setting down next to a group of armored ponies that were discussing exactly what to do in the middle of all the chaos. This chaos included the sudden appearance and then disappearance of an invincible Assault Armor and several orbital strikes that had crippled even more of the fleet that hadn’t been crippled by the last round of orbital strikes we were all in the middle of fleeing from.

I figured if they were trained and professional soldiers, they might have a better idea of what was going on in the big picture. I was hoping to find said big picture not filtered through Quattro Formaggio, the pony who was a spy for the enemy and promised that right now she definitely wasn’t spying.

I could throw her way farther than I trusted her, so asking random soldiers was seeming practically brilliant.

“What happened to you?” one of them asked.

I glanced at myself. I was wearing what was left of a suit of standard-issue Enclave power armor. I’d managed to wreck it in about five minutes of wrestling the Grandus Assault Armor while trying to remind a former marefriend that I thought she was cute and she didn’t really want to murder me today.

“Laundry day,” I decided.

“Oh buck, it’s you,” one of the ponies said. She took off her helmet.

“Oh! You’re one of the recruits Emma was training!” I said happily. “How’s it going?”

“I can’t believe you’re still alive,” Airpony Sunray said. “Don’t worry, everypony, this is Chamomile. I… sort of know her. She’s with special forces.” There was a significant pause. "Special. Forces."

They all visibly relaxed.

“Is she the one you told us about that got you into all that trouble?” one of them asked.

“I know that name! I heard she took a bunch of recruits on a secret mission to the surface and they all came back knowing crazy martial arts!” another added.

“I heard anypony who sees her face doesn’t live to tell about it,” a third whispered. All of them looked at me and the relaxation turned to tension.

“Wow,” I said. “Okay. That last one isn’t true. Obviously. Sunray isn’t dead.”

“Are you responsible for the giant monster?” Sunray asked.

“I scared it off,” I said, not denying that I was partly at fault in a complicated way that involved… actually Destiny had helped fix it. I'd screwed up a bunch of stuff with Four back on the surface, and I guess I really was responsible for it even if I had no idea it would get this far.

Sunray could clearly tell what I was thinking, and also knew it didn’t matter right now. “Right,” she said. “So what do you want?”

“It’s rude to assume I want something,” I said. “But yes, I do want something. We need to stop these orbital strikes. I thought the Grandus was doing it, but she said she was just a distraction and I believe it. That means somepony else is down here.”

“Wonderful,” Sunray groaned. “Of course we’re still in trouble.”

“There’s at least a small chance it’s my half-sister,” I said. “So if you could let me deal with it sort of gently, that’d be great.”
“Gently,” Sunray repeated. Around us, several ships burned.

“You know how family is,” I said. The squad of soldiers seemed less than convinced. Most of them. One of the anonymous ponies nodded in deep understanding. “Look, you’ve got radios, I don’t. We need to search Stormreach and fast.”

“No we don’t,” one of the ponies reported. “We’ve got shots fired in block 8! Unknown assailants!”

“Move, ponies!” Sunray snapped. “Chamomile--”

“I’m coming along,” I said.

“Of course you are,” Sunray said. “I’m requisitioning you as a breaching tool.”

---

Block 8 ended up being an old apartment block. It had once had some fancy name like Wooshing Heights, but that had been before a military takeover and two centuries of neglect. It was maybe five stories tall and set up like a hotel, slab cloud blocks churned out and pressed into place with a simple layout that wasn’t artistic or even efficient, just lazy.

I’d gone in alone and Sunray had the other soldiers form a cordon around the place and shoot anypony who stuck their head out. There wasn’t an exception for me. If they couldn’t tell who they were shooting at, they were going to take the shot. I’d probably be okay.

Unlike the ponies I found in the lobby. They’d gone in before we got here, and they’d found trouble. They’d been hacked apart, something going right through the armor like it wasn’t even there. The edges weren’t just burned or melted, they were practically annihilated, degraded by some kind of magical field. It hadn’t stopped them from splashing everywhere. Somepony had rolled out the red carpet in the most vicious way possible.

I could feel an aura of unfocused hate, but I couldn’t tell where it was coming from.

“Rain Shadow,” I mumbled.

Instinct told me that if somepony was spotting for orbital strikes, they’d want to be pretty high up. I trotted up the stairs and stopped when I felt the subtle pressure of other ponies nearby. I slowed my steps, letting my hooves sink into the softened floors and followed my instincts.

Faintly, I heard ponies talking in one of the apartments. I closed my eyes and reached out. I wasn’t good at magic stuff, but I’d been leaning on this sixth sense for a long time. I stopped and touched the wall a few paces to the side of the doorway.

I punched through the prefab cloud wall and grabbed the pony on the other side, dragging the screaming soldier in his ornate power armor out into the hallway. I snapped my knife out and stabbed him a few times until one of the ponies inside the room remembered they were professional soldiers and shot through the big hole we’d punched in the wall. He had pretty good aim, and the three shots he got off hit me in the unarmored face and neck.

Relatively unarmored. The rays stung and I smelled like burning hair but they weren’t very effective.

I picked up the coughing, bleeding pony under me and threw him at what I thought was the smartest pony in the room, since he was shooting instead of just screaming and dying, but then I saw the third member of their team going out the window with a big, complicated piece of kit that meant he was actually the one with aspirations of becoming an officer.

The shooter stumbled back, looked at his friend, and performed the kind of battlefield triage that seemed cruel but often meant the difference between life and death -- he shoved his dying teammate back towards the enemy, me, and bolted out the window after the pony I was mentally tagging as the smart guy.

I walked in through the hole and looked down at the dying, bleeding member of the Exodus Red’s crew.

“Sorry,” I told him, trotting past and leaning out the window. A peppering of laser fire from the cordon around the building made me duck back inside. I spotted the two escapees having similar problems, having only gotten far enough to make it to the floor above me. I wasn’t confident in my ability to follow them outside and around to the window.

I was absolutely sure that the floors were only polite suggestions. I’d broken a lot of them in my day, and even back home they’d been in better condition than these rotten cumuli. I set my shoulders and went for it, smashing up through the floor and into the almost-identical apartment above.

Smart Guy looked at me in horror and kicked open the door to the hallway, running outside. Shooter backed up, trying to shoot me while I climbed through the hole I’d made. I took aim with a rocket launcher and he saw his entire life flash before his eyes. I fired, he threw himself down, and the explosive went over his head and into the hallway beyond, disappearing into the clouds and detonating somewhere in the next room over when it found something more solid, probably a pipe made of plasticized rainbow or a kitchen sink that hadn’t been torn out.

I got to my hooves and stormed over, picking him up.

“I’ll never tell you anything!” he gasped.

I hesitated. “I’m not sure I wanted to ask you anything.”

He looked confused. I shrugged and head-butted him, knocking him out. He was probably still going to get executed later. That was somepony else’s problem to deal with. I threw him politely but firmly through a wall and stomped after the last pony in the fireteam. The whole building shook around me, dislodging mist from the walls.

“A dilapidated wreck might not be the best place for a fight,” I mumbled. I took off in the narrow corridor and flew down it, trying to avoid putting weight on the increasingly spongy and fragile-feeling floor. I was getting a distinct feeling that the prefab slab clouds were starting to come unglued. Having a cloud building fall apart while one was still inside it wasn’t exactly life-threatening but it did mean a lot of wasted time and frustration digging back out.

Smart Guy and I met eyes when I turned the corner. He was still holding onto something that had to be important and expensive if he was holding it instead of throwing it at me or ditching it just so it wouldn’t slow him down. I dove after him, and he went up the stairway to the roof access, twisting in the tight spiral of stairs so I couldn’t get a bead on him.

“You know, if you cooperate I might be able to take you alive!” I shouted after him. A few stray bolts of beam fire came down the stairs, just to try and make me keep my head down. I decided he wasn’t interested in talking things out. Maybe I’d made a bad first impression when I came through the wall and stabbed one of his friends a bunch of times.

I’d have felt worse about it if they weren’t literally marking ships for orbital strikes and getting hundreds of ponies killed. I’d also feel worse if I hadn’t started to get way too used to killing regular ponies. At least they were soldiers. That made it better. They’d signed up for this. If they were on a mission like this, they were probably even special forces, so they were doubly prepared to risk their lives!

That seemed like pretty good justification, right?

I counted the shots he took, realized I actually had no idea how many times a beam rifle could fire before it had to be recharged, and got bored when there was a pause in the suppressive fire. I charged up the stairs and felt them crumble under me, forcing me to jump up to the next level, wings barely useful in the tight space. The stairway was almost an afterthought, slapped together for visitors who didn’t have wings while the ponies who belonged in the clouds would have used the windows. Or at least that would be the best way to get between floors if the building wasn’t surrounded by multiple fireteams ready to shoot anything that moved.

I held a hoof in front of my slightly-more-vulnerable-than-the-rest-of-me face and smashed through the roof access door. We were close to the top of the cloud cavity here, with only a narrow slice of space between the roof and the ceiling. It was only just big enough for what immediately got my attention - the array of antennae and dishes pointing straight up and the two ponies tending to it, one of them the pony I’d been chasing and the other listening to his panicked comrade and trying to figure out what he was talking about.

They both looked at me and I saw the pony who’d been on the roof already with the array immediately understand more than enough about the situation to react appropriately and snap off a shot at me. It was obvious that it was coming, and I wasn’t dumb enough to stand in the way.

I really wanted to ask them to surrender but I didn’t have a lot of cover from which to hide behind and start shouting. I’d been hoping for some giant HVAC system or chest-high walls, but there was just a low safety railing around the very edge of the roof. I guess ponies didn’t need air conditioning when the building itself was built in a controlled environment like Stormreach.

It occurred to me in that moment that I should have brought a radio with me to communicate with the fireteams surrounding the building. It was one more example of why I needed somepony to hold my hoof and do the brain things for me. To be fair, though, I did have a significant amount of head trauma.

Hopefully, a few explosions would do the trick when nothing else would. I twisted around to get a bead on the equipment with my borrowed rocket launchers.

A wordless scream of pure rage distracted me. It was about midway between impossible frustration and total screaming insanity, and I felt it just as much as I heard it. I rolled to the side to try and get out of the way but Rain Shadow, or Tetra, or whatever he was calling himself now was a lot faster than my reaction time.

His shoulder hit my side and we went over the edge, the safety railing snapping like it was made of twine and spit. It was a long way down, and he pinned my wing to my side, not even trying to break our fall all the way to the street below.

A few seconds later, after we landed, I kicked him off me hard enough to dent his fancy suit of power armor.

“Are you an idiot?!” I yelled. “The street is made of packed clouds! It’s like throwing me into a mattress!”

“You should be dead!” he growled. “I stabbed you through the heart!”

“You did,” I confirmed. I could practically see his eyes narrowing. He was trying to figure out how I was tricking him. “Are you really that surprised? A stake through the heart is how you kill vampires, not regular ponies!”

Tetra sputtered in incoherent anger. “Everypony dies when they get stabbed in the heart!”

“Evidence suggests otherwise.” I shrugged.

He drew his power sword. That took him a fraction of a second. During that fraction of a second, I fired two rockets at him, aiming for his hooves. He did a neat, controlled backflip to go over them, and if he’d been standing on something proper, like asphalt, the rockets would have exploded under him and he’d get caught in shrapnel and fire.

Unfortunately, I was an idiot and even though I had just mentioned it, I’d neglected to take into account that the ground was made of clouds. My rockets went right through them, and if the world had been fair they would have at least made a shlorp sound when they vanished.

“Oops,” I mumbled. Somepony on the surface was going to have a bad day.

Tetra launched himself off the ground before I even thought he had the footing to do it, moving so fast the tip of his sword cracked like a whip. There was just enough distance for me to throw myself out of the way of a fatal blow, but not enough to turn it into a clean miss. The crackling edge of his blade missed my body and carved though the rocket launcher on my right side.

It reacted appropriately, and predictably, by blowing the buck up. This was a good and a bad thing. The bad part was that I lost a weapon and the blast hit me hard enough to toss me back and knock the wind out of me. The good part was that reactive armor is extremely effective at deflecting an attack and Tetra caught a buckload of shrapnel when the blast tossed him just as hard in the other direction.

I shook myself off more quickly than he did, presumably because I had a lot of experience with being blown up and ragdolled. Tetra actually stayed on the ground for almost a full second collecting himself and shaking off the effects of the blast. Total amateur. I flicked the knife out of my hoof.

“Give it up,” I advised him. “I’ve never even once tried seriously to kill you and you know it.”

“You killed my sister. You killed a pony I was falling in love with. You ruined my life!” He shouted louder and louder, getting to his hooves. He’d really played it cool before, doing the whole mystery stallion act with a cloak and mask and everything. Now he just sounded like the angry, pouting colt I was more used to.

“It’s my fault they’re dead,” I agreed. “I’m sorry. I didn’t want them to die, believe it or not. I tried to save both of them.”

“If you really want to apologize then let me kill you and stay dead!” he screamed and charged. He was unbelievably fast. It couldn’t just be wired reflexes like mine. He had to be absolutely pumped to the gills with some expensive, exotic combat drugs.

I got my knife up in time and knocked his attack aside. I couldn’t cross blades with him for long - the aura around his sword burned away at the layers of composite my knife was made out of - but I could strike it hard enough to throw his aim off.

A spark ran through me. I ducked. Tetra twisted his blade to the side and swung in a wide arc that went over my head, right through where my neck would have been. I went forward inside his reach and slammed my head into his helmet. He swore and stepped back, off-balance. I shook it off faster than him because, well, I had less brains to get scrambled.

My knife went into his right elbow when I threw it. That’s actually where I’d aimed, so things were going pretty well. He swore in pain but didn’t drop the sword. Probably because it was attached to his foreleg with some kind of complicated armature that was feeding it power, but also because of discipline.

I tugged the blade back with the magnetic tether and saw the color of his blood for the first time. It was pale blue, exactly like blood shouldn’t be.

“You really did ruin yourself, didn’t you?” I asked. “Why?”

“To kill you!” he hissed.

“Everypony thought I was dead for years! Cube and Quattro both had to know about it, and that means your boss, Cozy Glow, had to know too! So what’s the real reason?”

“I knew you weren’t dead,” Tetra said, his voice shaking. “I could feel it. I dreamed about it every night! You’re just some thug from a backwater town in the middle of nowhere. A criminal. A traitor. A killer!”

“Those are all pretty accurate,” I agreed.

He stomped in anger. The street cracked, loose mist flying out of the crumbling clouds. “So why are you still alive?! How could the universe be so unfair?!”

“Well…” I considered that. “I’m only in this mess because of my mom. And she was working with Polar Orbit. And he works for your boss. So really, if you think about it logically--”

He screamed and charged. He was not in the mood to think about it logically.

Tetra’s rage was so strong it was like a bright, shining flare in the dark. That sixth sense I had saw right through him.
After the fourth parried attack, he was getting more frustrated and more sloppy. Two more and he stopped even trying to feint or do anything except swing as hard as possible.

Even though he was moving just as fast, if not faster, than my wired reflexes, I could sense his attacks before they happened. I was reacting before he moved. I could only move at speed for tiny fractions of a second, but it was enough as long as I followed my instincts.

Tetra aimed a kick at my chest, but that put him off balance and right in front of me. And I had one rocket launcher left. The rocket caught him in the chest and blasted him through the wall of the rapidly deteriorating apartment complex. I was under absolutely no illusions that it was going to kill him, so I did what any sane pony would do and sat down to wait, detaching the now-empty rocket launcher from its mount and tossing it aside. It promptly fell through the floor.

“Good thing I didn’t sign for that or I’d get in a lot of trouble,” I said. The Enclave was very strict about keeping track of expensive equipment.

It took almost a full minute for Rain Shadow to stomp back through the hole, trailing the distinctive chunky mist that came from impromptu demolition work on a cloud building’s structural elements. He wasn’t dead, obviously, but he looked upset and very badly injured.

The blast had torn off a few pieces of armor and exposed what was underneath and to put it kindly, Rain Shadow looked like he belonged in a horror show. The stallion’s mask had cracked in half to reveal a drained and wasted face with feeding and air tubes snaked through his nostrils and eyes so bloodshot he must not have slept in weeks. Obvious surgical scars went down his neck and exposed left foreleg, and he seemed like he was being held together with skin grafts and implanted shunts.

“What the buck happened to you?” I asked quietly. I was actually starting to feel a little sympathy for the guy. It was one thing to fight a pony when they were a scary guy in a mask and power armor. It was something else when they looked like they belonged in a hospital bed.

“You happened,” he spat. His voice changer was broken. Instead of that imposing electronic growl his voice was a weak wheeze.

“Dude, the last time I saw you, you were absolutely fine,” I said. “Physically. Emotionally you were fucked up but you weren’t… like this.” I gestured vaguely to his whole body.

“I had to get revenge! Do you even remember her name?!” He screamed, tears streaming down his exposed cheek.

“Your sister was named Snow Shadow,” I said quietly. “Your marefriend was named… Star… something.”

“Stella Nova,” Rain Shadow corrected.

“I have big chunks missing in my brain and replaced with a calculator. It’s amazing I even got close. I got shot in the head, what’s your excuse for looking like you wrestled a blender?”

“I had to… get stronger to beat you,” he grunted. The shunts and IV lines running along his body gurgled, pale blue liquid pumping into his veins. “I volunteered for this. Cut out the weak parts. Regrow them stronger. Again and again.”

His voice and breathing steadied as more of that blue stuff was fed into him. Muscles twitched and swelled in time with his heartbeat.

Rain Shadow swung his sword in an arc, the edge cracking through the air and leaving a trail of sparks. He was even easier to read now that I could see his eyes. He charged. The idiot used the same kind of strategy I always did. It made sense when ninety percent of the time getting shot once or twice was fine as long as I ended up close enough to stab whoever had been doing the shooting.

The strategy had also repeatedly failed me and it was clear Rain Shadow, despite trying to make a new start as some kind of crazy supersoldier, had yet to learn from the same kind of mistakes I had. Looking at it objectively, he wasn’t nearly as dangerous as the undead Steel Rangers I’d taken out a few times. Sure, he was ten times faster, but they’d been stronger and their swords had been super-cursed. That’s why I hadn’t taken any of them back with me.

I was thinking all this in the time it took for him to charge me. Like I said, I saw it coming from a while away. Instead of dodging or parrying the attack, I kicked loose clouds into his face. He stumbled, blind for an instant. I grabbed his outstretched hoof at the wrist and twisted the mechanical linkage that was connecting his sword to his armor. The frame bent and snapped and that dangerous power field around the blade winked out.

He yelped in surprise and pain. Blue blood spurted from where broken bones pierced his skin.

“Oh shoot, sorry,” I said. I wasn’t really sorry though. I ripped the power sword the rest of the way out of his hooves and he was darn lucky I didn’t disarm him in a literal way that ends with hooves being detached from bodies. A few broken bones were light punishment by comparison.

He stumbled, still carrying momentum from his charge, instinctively tried to catch himself with his broken leg, and tumbled to the ground.

I stowed the sword away and walked over to the groaning pony, calmer now.

“Please give up,” I said. “Honestly you’re pretty great as a fighter but I’ve seen some really awesome ponies and you don’t compare. There was this one stallion named Split Moon and he was so good with a sword it was like magic--”

“Shut up!” Rain Shadow yelled. “I’m not here to banter with you or reason with you or… or… anything! I’m here to kill you!”

“For revenge, yeah, I got that,” I said. “You’ve literally tried the same thing like… twice already? There was the Heaven’s Sword, which basically shattered your whole body when you piloted it. Then the thing in Dark Harbor…”

“You’ll never understand how it feels to live for revenge!” he spat.

“No, probably not,” I agreed. “I don’t even have time for revenge right now. I have ponies I need to save. You’re just dumb and selfish. While we’re wrestling here in the street, everypony you came here with is being arrested.”

I’d noticed the fireteams closing in on the building while I’d been sitting in the street waiting. Rain Shadow looked up at the roof, and we could just see the antenna array being taken down.

“No!” he groaned. “Not again! I can’t fail again! Why do you always do this?!”

“If you want me to give you a big reassuring pat on the back and tell you it’s not your fault, it ain’t happening,” I told him flatly.

He growled at me, shaking with impotent rage. Maybe literally. There were rumors about what happened if you overdosed on combat drugs. He reached for something under his wing and pulled out an apple-sized ball of metal.

“Put the grenade down,” I warned him. “You don’t have to die.”

“This isn’t a suicide, this is an escape plan,” he hissed. He set it off in his hooves. Instead of an explosion, the thing sparked and made a deep unsound, a burst of white noise and static. I’d felt something like it before, in the Shadowed Places back in Limbo what seemed like ages ago.

Magic itself faded in the blast radius. The clouds under Rain Shadow stopped supporting his weight and he dropped through them like a rock, vanishing from sight almost instantly. What was left of my borrowed suit of armor failed as neatly as if it had been switched off, the weight crashing down on my shoulders.

The clouds under my hooves started to soften. I felt a pulse in my chest, a weak fizzle like being dunked in carbonated water. I tried to fly to avoid the fall straight down to the surface and to my surprise, my wings caught the wind. It wasn’t as much as usual, but it was just enough to glide and fly and get away from the invisible threat.

“Some kind of antimagic field,” I mumbled. “That’s cute.”

It was already fading, the clouds going solid again. I couldn’t follow him, not with my own natural pegasus magic working against me. He could be clear out of the other side and in clear air, and I’d have to dig and kick through Celestia knew how many layers to get there. He’d be long gone.

“Chamomile!” Airpony Sunray called down from the roof She was poised at the edge, looking down at me. ”Are you okay?”

“I’m fine!” I yelled back. She seemed slightly disappointed, but only in the normal way a pony would feel about somepony they didn’t particularly like, not in a weird traitory way. I was pretty sure she was on the level. “Did you get those ponies?”

“Two up here and one alive inside,” she confirmed. “Is that all of them?”

“Yeah,” I sighed. “That’s all we’re gonna get today.”

She looked around as if sure this was some kind of trick and carefully landed next to me. I could tell what she was thinking. Not because of any psycho-powers but because I had a tiny amount of regular empathy. Sunray was sure that something awful was going to pop up and try to kill me any moment now, and she didn’t want to get caught in the danger zone.

“I hate this,” I sighed.

“The fighting and killing?” she asked.

“No. Well, yes. But mostly I hate feeling stupid and not knowing what I’m doing. I’m ten steps behind everypony and I need somepony smarter than me to drag me along.” I kicked at the ground sullenly. “Dangit. I guess I’m going to have to trust Quattro. She’s the only one tricky and smart enough to figure out a plan.”

That assumed that this wasn’t all some slow-burning plan of hers to do… something. There was no way she’d be doing all this with no reason. I had to figure it out and hope I could trust her long enough to learn how to end this little war.

Comments

[Thought Prism]

She's grown so much. 😭

[Reese]

"and carved though the rocket launcher on my right side"
"and carved through the rocket launcher on my right side"?

"down from the roof She was poised at the edge"
"down from the roof. She was poised at the edge"?

[howard035]

11451481
Rain Shadow provides a great contrast, since he hasn't grown at all.