Fallout Equestria: Blue Destiny

by MagnetBolt

Chapter 102: Face of the Coin

The thunder of the orbital strikes had petered out after the team of ponies broadcasting targeting data had been captured. Three alive, one dead, one escaped. It was something like a success, but what it really showed was that the escaped Neighvarro fleet remnants were still vulnerable even in Stormreach.

I tried to get comfortable in my seat. The intercom droned with a constant roll of reports on damage control and status. The pony reading out the reports sounded exhausted, and I couldn’t blame them. It was a long list of critical systems that needed to be repaired.

I folded my hooves. We were onboard the wounded Thunderhead-class ship that had led the fleet review. The tough old bird had kept flying even after the first orbital strike had decapitated it, the well-trained crew keeping things going despite all kinds of trouble. Even in the waiting room outside of the combat information center, the walls were blackened by fire from beam rifles. It felt like a metaphor I wasn't smart enough to decode.

“The saboteurs must have put up quite a fight,” Quattro noted. She was less comfortable than I was. I’d put on a Neighvarro-black uniform with a few things Quattro had scavenged, the addition of a long coat and peaked cap making me look very official and imposing.

Quattro had wanted something similar, and was less than pleased that she’d ended up in hoofcuffs.

“Most ponies here are going to count you among those saboteurs,” I pointed out. “A lot of ponies are going to recognize you since Cozy Glow broadcast your face everywhere.”

“A bit of a liability for a spy,” Quattro agreed. “I wonder if she did it on purpose just to make life more difficult for me. She must have suspected I was going to retire from her service.”

“I can’t imagine why she’d expect you to betray her. You’ve never betrayed anypony in your life!”

“Owch,” Quattro sighed. She shifted in her seat. The cuffs jangled. “Can I take these off? You know I can slip out of them anytime I want.”

“The only reason they’re thinking about letting us into the meeting is because a bunch of ponies vouched for me and you’re in custody,” I said. “We’re already lucky they want to grill you for information by asking nicely instead of just beating it out of you.”

“Oh yes, I’m very lucky that I’m going to be interrogated,” Quattro said. She said it sarcastically but part of her was amused by the idea of it. I could smell it on her like the perfume she’d somehow managed to scavenge up just to make herself seem a little more well-dressed and put-together than anypony else in the room we were shortly after let into.

It had been on White Glint’s ship that I’d learned the difference between the bridge and the CIC. Ponies drove the boat from the bridge, but the hard work of waging war was done from the CIC. It was the most heavily armored and secure part of the ship, full of screens and communications equipment, and today, it was also full of Captains.

“Hey,” I said. I probably should have saluted, but the other ponies barely even looked up at me so it was probably just as well. A group of a dozen captains were clustered around a table illuminated with harsh lights, pouring over charts and maps. A mix of coffee mugs and bottles of liquor held the papers down on the table.

“You’re Warrant Officer Chamomile?” One of them asked. He had a slightly fancier uniform than the rest. “I’m told you might have information critical to the new war effort.”

“I hope so,” I said. “So, uh, this is gonna sound weird but I sort of know everypony involved personally.”

“I can’t help but notice you’ve brought one of them with you,” the fancy lad said. He looked a little young to be a Captain. “One of the people responsible for killing General Ravioli along with the entire bridge staff of this ship. I was a Lieutenant until yesterday.”

“You’ve done an excellent job,” one of the other, older captains assured him, putting a hoof on his shoulder. “You kept your ship together.”

“Cozy Glow has been planning all of this for centuries,” Quattro said, before things had a chance to get too positive. “She has intended to conquer Equestria even since before the Great War. She was a member of Celestia’s Belles, sort of a pre-war intelligence and operations group. The kind of ponies where if you know they exist, you know to take orders from them. After all her superiors had accidents, she put herself in place to whisper in Celestia’s ear, and then…”

“And then Luna was put in charge,” I mumbled. “She lost her chance. And then with the Ministries, power got spread out and harder to take.”

“So she changed tactics,” Quattro said. “She put herself in cryosleep and waited for the next big power vacuum.”

“Why didn’t she step in right after the war?” the newest captain asked.

“There was no rush,” Quattro said. “She could wait for things to stabilize. Build weapons, train soldiers. Let the victims of the war rebuild enough that she was conquering a functioning society instead of having to build it herself.”

“We’re not idiots. We know what she wants,” one of the captains said. “Her past is irrelevant.”

Quattros hook her head. “No, it’s not. She’s had two centuries since the war ended to watch you, develop the perfect plans, the perfect ponies.”

“She’s been running some kind of augmentation lab,” I said. “There was one on the surface that was destroyed when one of the subjects escaped.”

“It wasn’t the only one,” Quattro noted.

“None of this matters if we can’t move against her!” A grizzled captain, easily twenty years senior to the next-oldest pony in the room, slammed his hoof into the table in the center of the CIC, almost knocking over a mug of steaming coffee.

One of the others nodded. “We need to knock out her orbital weapons. A strike against that big ship of hers--”

“It’s not controlled from there,” Quattro said. “I hope I don’t need to tell you that she’s the type of pony that has a deadmare’s switch. If you push her so hard she thinks she’s going to lose, she’ll burn everything just because she can.”

“This whole thing is absurd,” the old captain mumbled. “Weapons in space…”

“Where are they controlled from?” the young captain asked.

“You’re not going to like it when I tell you the answer,” Quattro said. She waited a moment for them to glare at her. “The orbital hub. A space station. It was going to be part of the moon landing program before that got cut down to almost nothing. Allegedly.”

“So it’s still impossible to attack unless we can get into space,” the captain said. The ponies at the table visibly winced. Some of them reached for the less empty liquor bottles. “None of our missiles will reach orbit.”

“They wouldn’t work anyway. You’d have to get ponies there,” Quattro continued. “There’s no telling how many warsats are up there. She’s only used kinetic weapons so far, but for all I know she has something on par with a megaspell waiting for a special occasion. Even missing one could lead to the deaths of countless ponies.”

“So your suggestion is that we give up?” A scarred captain growled. “If you think you can intimidate us, you’re wrong!”

“I’m just laying out the facts,” Quattro said, with a mild shrug.

The scarred captain shook her head. “How are we supposed to put a space program together from scratch? Should I just call up some rocket scientists?”

I thought about it while they talked. A rocket scientist… Destiny would have fit the bill, but if we could rescue her we wouldn’t have needed the rockets to begin with. I’d met plenty of other scientists before. There was Herr Doktor back in Thunderbolt Shoals, but I didn’t actually know if she did rocketry. It wasn’t like every scientist studied every kind of science.

The last time I’d even seen a big rocket was…

I blinked. “Hey!” I raised a hoof. “I think I know a pony, but I’m gonna need to take a trip down to the surface.”

---

Dark Harbor. The last time I’d seen it, it had been turning into a little Enclave surface colony. They’d already set up schools, secured the area, and were slowly draining the city of anything the more worthy ponies above the clouds needed more than ponies scraping a living out of the muck.

Then I’d been involved with starting a small war, some of the city had gotten destroyed, and it had taken a little damage from a capital ship firing plasma cannons. I felt kinda bad about most of it. It hadn’t even been my fault - I was basically a victim too. Unsung had played everypony for fools on a quest for revenge and got what she wanted at the small expense of a lot of innocent lives.

“I hope you know what you’re doing,” the pilot said when he stepped out of the vertibuck, using binoculars to scan the city from the hill where we’d landed. We weren’t sure how the locals would react to seeing the Enclave again.

“Sometimes you have to hope for the best,” I said. “You remember what I said?”

“Watch for raiders and small arms fire,” the pilot said. “And you’ll set off a flare if you need an emergency pickup.”

I nodded and looked over at the soldiers that had come with me. I didn’t really like having them along but for some reason nopony trusted me to do delicate jobs alone, and Quattro absolutely wasn’t allowed out until they could confirm she wasn’t going to betray everypony again.

“It might be good for one of you to stay here,” I suggested. “Watch the pilot’s back and make sure we’ve got a way back.”

“Rosewater, you stay,” Sunray said. It was a lot easier to tell who was who with everypony in uniforms instead of power armor. I could also tell it made them nervous. “If things get hot, leave without us and we’ll figure something out.”

The pink pony saluted, and Sunray followed me along with a pony whose name I didn’t know but had to be something like Dumb Muscle, because he was even taller than I am and looked like he spent all his leave time finding new and exciting ways to lift heavy things.

“I heard there was a big op here that went bad,” Sunray said. She looked at me when she said it and there was a definite hint of accusation there. “Officers killed, a ship destroyed…”

“It was a complicated and dynamic situation,” I said, trying to mimic Quattro’s ability to agree with someone in a way that absolutely provided no information. Dynamic was a good word to use in situations like that because it could fit in almost any description of a pony, place, or event.

“You were in that deep, huh?” she asked.

“I’m starting to think you don’t trust me,” I retorted.

“I didn’t want this assignment! Ponies just heard that I knew you and…” she groaned. “I should never have vouched for you. It would have been so much easier…”

“If it makes you feel better, I didn’t crash the ship. I don’t think I even killed anypony onboard. I did hug somepony and cry for a while, but I was really having a bad day and I think they understood that.”

“That does make me feel slightly better,” she conceded.

“Anyway, we’re just looking for a pony who lived in town,” I said. “She built this big rocket booster thing. It’s been years, so I’m not sure if she’s still here, but I know somepony who definitely hasn’t left and she’ll pride herself on knowing everything.”

---

“And so you came to me,” Asterism said, sitting back in her seat and folding her hooves. She looked good. Last time I’d seen her, she’d been in rough shape, but the time hadn’t weighed on her shoulders at all. If anything, she looked younger, fresher, and richer than before. It helped that she had a small gold plaque on her desk that said ‘Mayor’.

“Was I not flattering enough?” I asked. “I could flatter you more if it’ll help.”

She chuckled. “I have enough ponies flattering me, these days. I do enjoy it.” She watched us for a moment, then got up. “I didn’t think I’d see you with Enclave soldiers except in chains, but times change, don’t they? Now I’m the biggest, most important pony in town.”

“Just like you wanted,” I pointed out.

“Yes. It’s a nice change.” She looked at Sunray and Dumb Muscle. The big stallion was looking off to the side at one of the paintings. “See something you like?” she asked.

“My mother has the same print,” Dumb Muscle said, his voice as deep as a thunderstorm’s growl. “They made about a million of them. Practically worthless, but it looks fancy.”

Asterism scowled. “I’ll have it wrapped up to take with you,” she said. “I don’t think I like that one anyway. Now, what do you want, besides a critique of my taste in art?”

“I need to talk to Klein Bottle,” I said. “Is she still around?”

“You want to talk to--” Asterism looked surprised. “You know she might not be very happy to see you. She definitely won’t like seeing you wearing that.”

“I know,” I sighed. There were a lot of ponies who would be happier never seeing me again. It wasn’t something I wanted to get used to. “So is she here, or not?”

“She’s not in town, exactly,” Asterism said. “She didn’t want to stay after you and Unsung disappeared. She kept expecting you to come back, and then… well, a mare changes when she loses hope.”

“Unsung?” Dumb Muscle looked at me, scowling.

“I don’t even know why I’d be surprised at this point to find out Chamomile knows Dashites,” Sunray grumbled.

“Oh, she does more than just know them.” Asterism stepped in front of me and smirked. She was enjoying this. She was the kind of mare who enjoyed any kind of power, even if she didn’t get anything out of using it. “She was working with them. Or tricked by them, really. We all were. She just happens to be the easiest to really fool.”

I sighed and rolled my eyes.

“This pony we’re supposed to find…” Sunray asked cautiously.

“Yes, she’s a Dashite,” I said. I’d been hoping this wouldn’t come up. I couldn’t think of any way to avoid it, I’d just been hoping a miracle would occur and it wouldn’t be discussed. “She’s also a mechanical genius and built a big rocket pack thing that I used once.”

“She lives in Crashtown,” Asterism said, apparently satisfied. She sat down behind her desk again. “I’m told she doesn’t even come into town much, but there’s decent trade between here and the site.”

“I’ve never heard of Crashtown,” I said.

“You practically founded it,” Asterism said, leaning a hoof on the desk and waving vaguely towards the windows. I looked the way she was pointing. Just visible, with the height from her office building, I could see a dark shape on the hills outside the city. A broken wreck.

“Oh.”

---

“I can’t believe they’re doing this,” Sunray mumbled as we walked through Crashtown. It wasn’t really a proper town, just sort of a ramshackle collection of buildings made of old shipping containers and scrap, with a few dozen ponies making a living buying and selling scraps and salvage.

“I remember reading about what happens to whale carcasses at the bottom of the ocean,” I said. I shielded my eyes from the light drizzle of rain and looked up at the Spirit of Cloudsdale. It was slowly being taken apart, the most valuable and easiest to remove parts being taken first, with the bulk metal of the hull remaining like a skeleton. A single generator thrummed, providing lights and power across the town and to the ponies still working on the ship even in the worsening weather.

“It’s not their ship!” Sunray growled.

“I’m not sure that’s true,” I said. I looked closer at the ponies selling half-empty spark batteries and bundles of wire. A lot of them were pegasus ponies. “I think some of these are members of the crew.”

“Then why…?” Sunray mumbled.

“AWOL,” Dumb Muscle grumbled. “Deserters.”

“After the ship crashed some of them might not have been able to get back,” I said. “It’s not usually that easy to get to the Enclave from the surface with the Lightning Shield in place.”

“They could have sent a message,” Dumb Muscle countered, adjusting the wrapped-up print tucked behind his wing. I couldn’t believe he’d actually taken it with him, but apparently he liked art.

“They’ve got their reasons,” I said. “Let’s just start asking around.”

I trotted up to one of the stands and glanced at what the pony was selling. Parts of plasma weapons, loose buttons. A whole box of different types of screws. That last thing was probably the most valuable thing he owned.

“Hey there,” I said, trying to sound friendly. He was shivering. I could tell it was because of my uniform and not the chill in the air. “Look, I’m not here to hurt anypony. I just want to find somepony. Think you can point me the right way?”

“I-I don’t know anyone, ma’am,” he squeaked.

“Klein Bottle,” I said. “She’s about this tall--” I held a hoof very low to the ground. “And about this wide.” I indicated roughly the same space, but horizontally instead of vertically.

He looked uncomfortable. I knew we were being watched by all the other ponies in town. Some of them were starting to think about going for weapons. A few really bright eggs already had them drawn behind the counters where nopony would notice a hold-out beam gun.

“We’re not military police,” I said, loud enough to be clear I was addressing everypony listening. “I just want to find my friend and talk to her. Tell her Chamomile is here looking for her, and I know--”

Somepony took a wild shot. It didn’t hit anything, but made everypony dive for cover. Everypony except me, because I wasn’t smart enough. The shot had gone right past my ear from somewhere behind me.

“I didn’t see who did that,” I said, glancing back. I could make a pretty good guess though. There was a terrified looking pegasus mare with the remains of an engineer’s uniform and fumbling with a beam pistol. She shoved it under her counter and looked away from me, sweating. “Since I don’t know for sure, I’m gonna pretend it didn’t happen.”

“I saw who--” Sunray started. Dumb Muscle gently elbowed her, shutting her up. Maybe he wasn’t as dumb as I thought.

Maybe that’s how I looked to other ponies. I could live with that. I set my shoulders and tried to casually flex a little. I put a few bits on the counter of the pony in front of me.

“Please just tell me where to go before this turns into a fight,” I whispered. He must have seen the pleading near-tears in my eyes.

---

Thankfully nopony else tried to mess with us, so we got out of there without having to kill a single pony. So far. To be honest, this mission was going an order of magnitude better than anything else I’d done, so part of me was thinking that Emma had been right all along that oversight and planning was important. The other part of me was waiting for some kind of machine demon to explode out of the inner walls of the wreck to murder me.

It wasn’t even a silly thing to worry about when something similar had happened to me more than once.

Somepony swore loudly ahead of me, and I heard the distinct sound of a tool being thrown across a room in frustration.

“I think we’re in the right place,” I said. “You guys stay here. She might get spooked if she sees too many ponies in uniform.”

“We’ll watch your back,” Dumb Muscle agreed. Sunray distinctly looked like she wasn’t happy with having me do all the talking.

“Are you sure you can do this?” Sunray asked quietly. “She’s a Dashite! You said it yourself! They’re all crazy killers and they want to bring down the Enclave and… do other bad things! Like they want a world where instead of everypony getting what they want and deserve according to their need, they all live in some kind of awful nightmare world where ponies starve in the streets and it’s a mare-eats-mare world!”

“In a sexual way or in a cannibal way?” I asked.

“Pretty sure she means cannibal,” Dumb Muscle rumbled.

“I’m sure she’s not a cannibal,” I said over my shoulder as I walked in. The room was mostly taken up by a big machine, with half of the panels on the walls ripped off and tossed aside. The cursing I’d heard outside was still there, coming in a constant stream from somewhere out of sight.

I knelt down to look and saw the back half of a small, plush pegasus that was mostly fluff.

“Give me a ten-millimeter socket,” she said.

“Um…” I looked around, spotted a tool box, and rummaged around in it, eventually finding the right tool and lying down on the ground so I could reach far enough to put it in her hooves. She took it and slid a little further inside, muttering to herself and wrenching, literally, at something out of sight.

I waited a minute, and she started wiggling her way out of the tight space. I backed up and watched as Klein Bottle emerged with a square hunk of technology in her hooves. She pulled goggles down over her eyes and examined it more closely in the better light of the room before standing up and putting it in a box with some other parts.

“So,” she said, looking away from me and going through the bin of parts she’d presumably pulled out of…

“What is this thing, anyway?” I asked, instead of guessing.

“It’s one of the cloud engines. It converted electricity into pegasus magic to keep the captive storms powered and adjust them,” Klein Bottle said.

She stared into the bin in front of her for a few more moments, then turned around to look at me with tears in her eyes.

“I thought you were dead,” she squeaked. She ran into me forehead-first and nuzzled into my chest, muffling quiet sobs. “I thought I got you killed!”

“I’m okay,” I told her, keeping my voice low and soft. “Sorry if I worried you.”

“Where did you go? Why are you wearing that uniform?!”

“It’s a really long story.” I sat down. “I got back up into the Enclave riding this hulk through the Lightning Shield. Then I ended up pretending to be a military officer because of family stuff. Then I was sucked into another dimension. After that there was a time warp, and I was underwater, and there were vampires, and now some crazy pony called Cozy Glow is trying to kill everypony with orbital weapons.”

“Orbital weapons?” Klein Bottle wiped her tears on my uniform and stepped back, sniffling and rubbing her nose.

“Some kind of satellites in orbit with big guns,” I explained. “The only way to stop them is to get ponies up there, and for that, we need a rocket scientist. Naturally, you were the first pony I thought of!”

“Because I, one time, built a bunch of rockets and strapped them to you?” Klein Bottle asked, trying to confirm my line of thought.

I nodded. “Exactly! That’s basically what we need to do now, right? Strap rockets to ponies and point them up!”

“I… Okay.” Klein Bottle groaned. “There are so many problems with this I don’t even know where to start. I need to…” she grabbed a marker out of her toolbox and adjusted a relatively clean panel from the wall to make it more roughly upright.

“Are you really going to draw things?” I asked, amused.

“I need to make a list,” she said. “Look, first problem, I don’t like or care about the Enclave! I don’t even want to fight them! I just want to live a quiet life, away from all the drama and dying and ponies getting shot!”

She wrote the number one on the metal, then added ‘No Drama’ after it.

Not good for my chances if that was number one. “Oof,” I mumbled.

“If we ignore that, and it’s really really hard for me to pretend to be able to do that…” Klein wrote a big ‘Two’ on the metal plate. “Rockets are hard!”

“You can build them,” I said. “We just need to go up.”

She gave me a flat look, which was a bad sign. She started drawing diagrams.

“If you want to get to orbit, you don’t just go up. Up can get you really high, and maybe you’ll manage to get into what is technically space at around a hundred kilometers. Do you know what happens then?”

“...You float?” I guessed.

“You fall like a big idiot because you’re not in orbit! If you want to be in orbit you have to go sideways really, really fast! Even a low orbit is around seven and a half kilometers per second!”

She sighed and shook her head.

“And then there’s the problem of getting into the same orbit if you even wanted a chance at an interception… it’s like trying to shoot a bullet out of the air, except even harder because the orbits are elliptical. Okay, technically bullet trajectories are also elliptical ballistic arcs, but that’s besides the point. It’s tough!”

“Assume you’d have the resources of most of the Enclave,” I said. “Could you do it?”

“I don’t know,” Klein sighed. “I can build rockets. I can’t plan missions. I launched you sideways, and that’s just engineering. The planning part, figuring out how to make two speeding bullets intersect? Even getting into orbit isn’t easy. Rockets have this equation, see…”

She started writing up a complicated-looking math equation.

“This is the Trotovsky Rocket Equation. See, you have to go really fast, so with a rocket that takes fuel, but that fuel weighs something, so you have to carry the fuel to accelerate that fuel, then the fuel to accelerate that fuel--”

I sort of zoned out. She talked for a little bit about impulse and delta-v and dry mass. I nodded along because it was the polite thing to do. She filled in a few numbers as an example and then seemed to struggle. I helped her out by taking the marker and filling in the parts she was missing.

Klein Bottle blinked. She looked at the metal, then at me, then started writing other equations, double-checking some of what I’d written.

“How the buck…” she mumbled. “I was using a really simplified example, but even so! How did you do that?!”

“Half my brain is a computer,” I said. “I honestly can’t remember if I mentioned it to you before. The brain damage, I mean. I have really weird dreams sometimes but I’m good at math now! Kind of. I don’t know how math works but I can write down the correct answers.”

“Oh my stars, you’re an idiot savant,” Klein Bottle whispered.

“It’s better than being a regular idiot,” I joked.

“I still don’t want to help the Enclave,” Klein Bottle said firmly. “If they want to have a civil war, they’re welcome to it. Ponies down here won’t notice or care. Buck, maybe we’ll get some nice salvage once the cities start falling from the sky!”

She sounded angrier than the last time we’d met. I couldn’t blame her.

“Cozy Glow is going to conquer the Enclave, then Equestria,” I said. “You remember what Dark Harbor was like under occupation? It’ll be like that, except worse, and everywhere.”

Klein Bottle snorted. “So? It wasn’t that bad. As long as the right ponies get hurt maybe I’m fine with that!”

“I know you’re not really okay with it,” I said quietly. “I don’t know exactly what they did to you, but…”

“I fell in love,” Klein Bottle said quietly.

“Oh.”

“With the husband of my commanding officer.”

“Oh.” Now things were making sense.

“She found out, and had me assigned to a mission on the surface. Then… everything else happened. I wasn’t even a real Dashite! It was just an easy excuse to get rid of me without anypony asking questions! You know what the worst part was?”

I looked at her cutie marks. Where they should have been. “Um…”

“He was there. She made sure he was part of it, so I wouldn’t come running back. He went along with it, and you know who he apologized to? Her! I was just trash and once they got rid of me everything would be fine again! So yes, Chamomile, I’m fine with letting everything burn!”

“Sorry,” I mumbled.

She smoothed down her fluffy coat, trying to calm down. “So you better have a bucking much better offer than ‘do the right thing’ if you want anything except for me to tell you to get lost and come back without that uniform.”

“I can get you a pardon and a giant pile of bits,” I said.

“...That’s a good start,” she admitted.

“Pretty sure I can ruin a couple careers if you give me the right names,” I said. “I can at least punch them if I ever meet them.”

Klein Bottle snorted and laughed.

“You realize that even if I said yes, it’s basically impossible, right? There are so many parts we’d need, and so much planning and science. It’d take years!”

“How do you feel about weeks, at most?”

“Double impossible. Would I still get the pardon and the bits?”

“Sure.”

“Fine, I’ll blow up some wannabe astromares. Let’s go to space.”

Comments

[Reese]

"Quattros hook her head."
"Quattro shook her head."?

Thanks for writing! I continue to enjoy this story. :)

[FridayPie]

Now I'm curious if Klein Bottle got a reference sheet as a character