Fallout Equestria: Blue Destiny

by MagnetBolt

Chapter 103: Chain Reaction

Following the founding of the Ministries, the Equestrian armed forces established an elite school for the top one percent of its pilots and pegasi. Its purpose was to teach the lost art of aerial combat and to ensure that the handful of mares who graduated were the best fighters in the world.

They succeeded.

Today, the Enclave calls it the Lightning Dust Memorial Academy.

However, the ponies that attend call it the same thing, because it’s the official name and they’re professional ponies doing serious business.

“You’re sure this place is safe?” I asked. There was something about being around a lot of ponies that were all smarter, better trained, and faster than I was that made me slightly nervous. Everypony I passed clearly didn’t respect me at all. It wasn’t just the casual arrogance that special forces always had, these ponies clearly had opinions about Dashites and ponies that went to the surface in general.

It was like just touching the ground made us unclean in their eyes.

“Most of what we needed had to be brought up from the surface anyway,” Klein Bottle said at my side. I’d sort of taken up a role as escort to her, and she used me as a calculator when she couldn’t be bothered with doing the math herself. “You were right about Stalliongrad. Zonda was happy to lead the team to that site you showed him. Most of it is old ICBM parts, but that’s exactly what we need, just with a different payload.”

“That’s good,” I said. Klein Bottle was looking down at a checklist in her hooves as we walked towards the hangar that was serving as a vehicle assembly and testing building. I spotted two ponies whispering to each other as we started to pass them. One stuck out a hoof.

I shoved him hard, before he could trip Klein Bottle. It was more of a punch, really. He fell back with his nose bleeding.

Klein Bottle glanced up, saw him, and kept walking without question. His friend glared at me. I ignored her. What was she gonna do, stab me?

“We built a receiving dock below the academy,” Klein Bottle continued. “We’re assuming they have satellite surveillance. It’d be trivial compared to making orbital strikes. If we do everything below the cloud deck, that renders their surveillance useless. Then it’s just a matter of making sure everything here is business as usual.”

“And that’s why you’re recruiting ponies here?” I asked.

“If we don’t have to do personnel transfers, it means they don’t know where we’re organizing,” Klein Bottle explained. “This almost reminds me of being back in Dark Harbor, doing everything underground and hiding until the right moment.”

She stopped in front of a door to the main hangar.

“This is as far as you go,” she said. “Remember, you aren’t allowed inside. Even if you hear screaming!”

“Because you’re afraid everything will explode if I touch it,” I said. I tried not to roll my eyes. They rolled anyway.

“As a scientist, I have to believe that past experiences inform future events,” Klein Bottle said. She patted my knee, because it was at shoulder height for her. “I know you’re upset you can’t go into space, but you’re huge, heavy, and clumsy, and all of those things are bad in space.”

“I know,” I mumbled. The short list of ponies that were actually being trained for zero-G were also, coincidentally, short themselves. I’d seen the math. I’d done the math. A small pony meant a small capsule and a lighter payload, which was good if we wanted to actually get to space.

“Oh, that reminds me--” Klein Bottle flipped through her checklist. “I think the technicians had some numbers they wanted you to check with orbital calculations.”

“Noooooooo…” I groaned. “That’s math homework! I’m a grown-up, Klein Bottle! You can’t make me do homework!”

“I’ll buy you extra dessert later,” she promised.

---

“This dessert sucks eggs,” I mumbled. To be honest, the food at the Academy was actually pretty great. The Enclave saved the best for the best, and right now we were counted among them.

Where the rest of the military survived on Nutri-loaf and soft, semi-gelatinous casseroles that could be made in great quantities with enough vitamins and minerals to keep ponies going with the minimum of expense, the elite ponies here were destined for special forces. That meant our dinner tonight was roasted vegetables that we could actually see and name, noodles in a thick broth, spicy pickles, and something that appeared to be custard cream and sweet summer squash.

The food tasted good. What really sucked eggs was the company.

Klein Bottle and I were alone at a table and it was like being on an island surrounded by crocodiles. She’d given me her custard squash and picked at the rest of her food. I understood why her appetite wasn’t doing so well.

She speared a purple carrot on the end of a fork. “You remember how you offered me a pardon and a giant pile of bits?”

“Yeah,” I sighed.

“I should have asked for two giant piles of bits,” she grumbled.

“Is it that bad?”

“You’ve got no idea,” Klein Bottle said. “We’ve been here a week and I swear some of the ponies I talk to disinfect their hooves and everything I touched after I leave their offices.”

“Sorry,” I mumbled.

“Well, look at what we’ve got here.” A rather short pony backed up by three larger friends came over to the table. “A bunch of surface trash that came wafting back up like a stink.”

One of the big ponies knocked Klein Bottle’s fork out of her grip. I pushed myself away from the table and turned to face them. I recognized some of the bigger ponies. One of them still had a bandaged snout.

“Really?” I asked. “You’re going to start a fight like we’re in bucking grade school? What next, are you going to shoot spitballs at me? Maybe you want to try putting a sign on my back that says ‘kick me’?”

“Dashite scum doesn’t deserve to be anywhere near me!” the short pony huffed. “I’m the best at the academy! I’ve broken a bunch of standing records!”

“I’d be more impressed if you’d broken flying records,” I said flatly. The short pony’s ears folded back.

“Chamomile,” Klein Bottle warned. “That’s Spark Buster, one of the candidates going through astromare training. We might need her for the mission.”

“That’s right, you can’t even touch me. If it wasn’t for me, your stupid mission wouldn’t even have a chance!” Spark smirked.

“So, here’s what’s going to happen,” I said. “First, you’re gonna say one more dumb thing and that’s gonna push me over the edge. Then I’m going to hit you so hard you’ll see the stars even before you get in the rocket. One of your friends, probably that guy--” I pointed to the stallion behind her. “--he’s gonna get angry because he has a crush on you, and I’m gonna break two of his legs when he tries to jump me. The stallion next to him also has a crush, on him, and I’m gonna break every bone in his face and he’ll be in surgery getting his jaw put back together with screws and metal plates.”

“What about the last one?” Klein Bottle asked, looking at the one with a bandaged snout.

“He’s gonna run away, because he’s the smartest one. He’ll come back with an officer later and pretend he’s responsible instead of a coward,” I explained. “And the worst part is, none of them are gonna thank me for not killing them.”

Spark Buster growled and used a slur that I won’t repeat.

---

“House arrest,” I mumbled. “So stupid. I didn’t even really start the fight. I warned everypony and what happens? I get in trouble.”

There was a loud bang on my door. “Quiet in there, prisoner! Get back to the quadratic formula mines!”

“I’m not a prisoner!” I yelled back to the guard. She cracked the door open and looked in, grinning.

“I know that, but it’s a lot funnier to act like you’re in prison for not doing enough algebra,” she said. She was technically guarding me, but it was to keep ponies out instead of keeping me in. The first time somepony had come in trying to cause trouble and made me miss a deadline, they’d stuck an armed guard outside to keep anypony else from having the same idea.

“It is funnier that way,” I admitted.

“It’s weird, you don’t seem like the brainy type,” she said. I could tell she meant it as a compliment, because this was the kind of place where very bad nerds went after they died so they could be bullied for eternity. “How’d you get so good at math?”

“Glitchy brain implant,” I explained. “I got shot in the head and then stuff was crammed into it. I don’t even know if you’d call it being good at math. I don’t really know what I’m doing.”

“Huh?” the guard tilted her head, opening the door a little more to lean in the doorway.

“It’s sort of like, um…” I had to think of a metaphor that an elite enclave shock trooper might understand. “Have you ever been on a field operation where your radio wasn’t strong enough to reach all the way back to base, but you could contact ponies between you, and they could relay the messages back and forth?”

“Sure,” the guard said. “The better comm sets can do the relay automatically if they’re set up for it.”

“Right. I feel like the mare carrying the comm equipment. The scientists send these weird messages in math and I don’t understand them, but I pass it along, and then I get a reply and give it back to them and everypony seems excited and happy that I’m doing the job, but I’m really just in the right place at the right time to be the mare in the middle.”

The guard nodded. “I get it. But hey, if it makes you feel better, that’s how a lot of ponies get on the promotion track. Warrant Officer is sort of a weird rank anyway. Once this is over maybe they’ll make you an actual officer instead of just a subject matter expert.”

“Funny thing is that’s exactly what I would have wanted when I was a filly,” I sighed. I wasn’t sure it was what I wanted now, but at the same time, this was by far the most organization and support I’d ever gotten and I didn’t even think anypony was likely to stab me in the back. Part of me had started thinking of the Enclave military as the bad guys, after being thrown in prison. Now I could blame one pony as the mastermind of all of it, and it made the rest simple.

“I’m gonna take a five-minute break and grab a coffee,” the guard said. “Do you want anything from the vending machine?”

“Do they have--” I stopped. A twinge hit me. A stray thought that didn’t feel like it came from inside my head. I stood up and looked around.

“...You okay?” she asked.

“Something’s off,” I said. I frowned and tried to feel it out like a pony might try to figure out how badly they’d sprained their ankle by carefully walking on it. I probed the feeling and found it just a little too familiar.

To her credit, the guard didn’t question it. She adjusted her service rifle at her side and waited for me to continue, her expression firming up.

“Cube,” I mumbled. She was close by. And if she was here, that was bad news on more than one level. I pushed away from the desk, my homework unimportant in the face of actual danger. “We need to find out what’s happening. I think we’ve got an intruder.”

“I’ll make sure everypony’s on alert,” the guard said. She touched her ear and spoke quietly with the ponies on duty. “Point C checking in,” she said. “All points, alert for a possible intruder. Requesting all points report in and perform immediate patrol.”

The radio chattered quietly, an unintelligible blur of voices that I could only half hear.

“Point D isn’t reporting in,” my guard said quietly, looking up at me.

“Where are they?” I asked.

“They’re pretty close,” she said. “They were stationed to watch the astromare trainees.”

So they were in personnel quarters, just like we were.

“We should check on them,” I said.

“I can’t leave my station,” my guard warned.

“Your orders are to guard me, right?” I asked. “I’m going to go take a look. You’re just gonna have to stick with me.”

---

“What the buck?” my guard whispered.

She was acting like this was the first time she’d seen a room full of dead ponies and beam weapon damage. It took me a moment to realize that it really might be her first time. Most ponies in the Enclave, even most in the military, never saw anything approaching real combat. They definitely never saw their friends get gunned down.

“Too late,” I said, punching the wall.

“I don’t understand, why didn’t they raise an alarm?” she asked.

“They didn’t have a chance to fight back,” I said.

“I’m not stupid. There are scorch marks on every wall. That means there was a real firefight in here.”

I shook my head. “This was done by a unicorn. An all-range attack using multiple guns controlled telekinetically. I’d guess somewhere between six and eight of them. It’s Cube’s specialty. She’s like having a whole squad of ponies, but the enemy doesn’t have anything to shoot back at.”

The guard was already reporting what we’d found. I knelt down next to the dead ponies. Half of them had died trying to get out of their bunks. The pony I’d fought in the cafeteria was tangled up in her bedsheets and shot in the back.

“So much for the best of the best,” I mumbled. That was going to set everything back by weeks, if it even mattered anymore. Cube being here meant that Cozy Glow knew something. We’d spent so much effort trying to keep a secret and it hadn’t mattered. Was it a traitor? Was it Quattro? I still wasn’t sure if I could trust her, but she shouldn’t have known anything. She was still in Stormreach, as far as I was aware.

I stood up and looked around. Cube had hit here first. It wasn’t where I would have gone. I had to get to the next obvious target before she did.

“Stay here,” I said. “Try to find how she got on-base!”

I spread my wings and bolted, flying for the hangar. Killing ponies in training was only going to delay things a little while. If somepony wanted to kill our hope of fighting back, they had to take down the only ponies who could get everything started again if the base burned down.

There was no obvious trail of destruction and carnage. No swathe of destruction in Cube’s wake. If it had been up to me to attack the base, it would have been a blunt and direct strike like artillery. In Thunderbolt Shoals, even doing my best to be quiet and smart and listening to other ponies, it still ended with explosions and death.

Cube’s trail was a surgical scar. Instead of fire and broken walls, there were doors cracked open, with ponies slumped in the rooms beyond, struck down in near-silence and never knowing or seeing what killed them.

She was fast and efficient and I knew for a fact that she couldn’t read my mind and that’s the only reason I was able to catch her by surprise when I spotted the unicorn calmly walking up to the hangar door. I tackled her, slamming her to the ground with my much greater weight and speed.

Cube bounced off the cloud floor of the base, her cloudwalking magic making her sink in for a moment before kicking in and shoving her out like a cork all buoyant and bobbing.

“Chamomile?!” she gasped in surprise. Cube was wearing angular armor, light but thick, with thin metal plates arranged like radiator grids instead of dense armor. It looked expensive, impossible to maintain, and designed more as a vanity project than as effective protection.

“Not as dead as you thought?” I asked. “I figured Four or Tetra would have told you.”

“You’re not supposed to be here!” she hissed. “I don’t want to fight you!”

Her horn lit up, and she shoved me away with a wild blast of spellcraft. It only carried me back a half-pace, the wave of force crackling along my coat and dissipating like a grounded lightning bolt. Cube and I were both sort of surprised about that. She reacted more quickly than I did in that moment, teleporting herself well out of reach. Slim, silenced beam weapons detached from her sides, the weapons designed for a unicorn and lacking a handle or obvious trigger.

“Chamomile, listen to me,” Cube said. “We don’t have to do this! I know you’re a good pony. We can work this out. All you have to do is just walk away, or, buck, come with me after this is over!”

“Are you… are you doing the thing I do when I try to reason with a crazy pony who’s gone murder-happy?”

“Yes?” she shrugged. “I guess? I’m in the middle of trying to keep ponies from blowing up Equestria’s last real chance at coming back from the dead, and you’re trying to stop me!”

“No, I’m trying to stop you from killing a bunch of ponies working to wrestle a weapon away from a megalomaniac that wants to conquer the world!” I countered.

“It’s not like that! Cozy Glow is really nice as long as you’re on her side! I know she’ll let you come with me. You might have to go on house arrest for a little while, but then we can be a family! You want that, right?”

I groaned. I did sort of want that, but only in the vague way that you want something that you know you should want. Like you should want a good, respectable job. You should want to eat healthy food. You should want a big house. I should want to make what was left of my family proud.

“This is hard right now, but once it’s over you’ll understand it’s for the best,” Cube said. “Even your dad said you need a smart pony to do the thinking for you, so just let me do the thinking this time.”

Cube looked to the side, and I saw her calculating something in her head before vanishing in a flash of teleportation, not even giving me a chance to give chase. I swore and ran for the door, smashing through what counted as security when most buildings were made of water vapor and rainbows turned into plastic with magic and chemistry. It exploded in the casual soft way a pillow might.

The ponies standing just inside looked surprised. One of them was an armed guard who was mostly armed with a book. The rest were the scientists, clustered in the small lab room and working on some small model made out of spare parts.

“We’re under attack!” I yelled. “She’s in the building! Everypony out!”

The majority of ponies in the room were Enclave technicians, and not even experienced ones. Half of them were civilians or just overeducated mares from rich families with no problematic ties to Thunderhead that might compromise them. There was exactly one pony who’d been through a real fight among them, and she’d known what was happening just from my expression.

Beam fire crashed into the room from a half-dozen angles, and Klein Bottle took down the ponies next to her at the knees, knocking them prone and saving their lives. A slim beam weapon flew into the room in a corona of magic, getting a different angle. I snatched it out of the air, wrestling it out of Cube’s grip and pointing it down where she couldn’t hurt anypony.

“Get them out of here!” I yelled.

“But--” Klein Bottle looked over at the rest of the hangar. It was a massive, open space filled with half-assembled tanks and machines. Most of them couldn’t be replaced.

“I’ll do what I can,” I promised. “But I’m not good at saving lives. I’m only good at making ponies mad and getting shot at, and that’s what I’m gonna do right now.”

Klein Bottle nodded and grabbed a hardshell case from one of the benches, sliding it across the floor to me. “Here! I had some time to work on that side project for you! Maybe it’ll help!”

I popped open the latches and looked inside. The sword I’d taken from Tetra was inside, with patched power leads and a brace fitted to hold spark batteries to power the weapon. I pulled it on over my left forehoof, adjusting the straps with my teeth.

“It’s good for at least a few minutes,” Klein said. “It probably won’t explode!”

“Probably is good enough for me,” I said. I flicked my wrist, making sure I could flip the blade out correctly. “I need every edge I can get.”

“Is that a sword joke?” one of the technicians asked.

Klein Bottle rolled her eyes. “Get moving!” she snapped, kicking the young ponies who’d been helping her figure out how to get ponies into orbit. I didn’t know how to tell her that their pilots were all dead already. They fled, and I snapped the beam weapon over my knee, the fragile thing sparking and dying.

“Come on, Cube!” I yelled. “You’re holding back! Are you afraid you’ll hit me?”

“Would it matter?” Cube’s voice echoed in the open air of the hangar. I couldn’t tell exactly where she was. A beam shot went past me, just close enough to be a threat without being an actual attempt to hit. A warning. “You don’t stay down even when you do get hit.”

“Yeah, I’m trouble like that,” I agreed, taking to the air and looking for her. It exposed me to attacks from all sides but I was already exposed just by existing. I saw a pop of light, then another closer by. A teleport flash.

I moved as fast as I could and ran head-first right into three floating rifles. They opened fire, beams tearing into my wings. I activated the power sword, energy crackling along the blade, and blocked the next wave of shots. The magical field around the edge ate up the spells, cutting them like they were physical.

It was obvious Cube had forgotten what a real fight was like because the remote weapons held their ground and fired, trying to get me to dodge aside in a deadly game of chicken. I cut two of them out of the air, the third teleporting away on its own. She’d never been here at all.

I thought I’d need a moment to find her, but a blast shook the hangar and a plume of fire shot into the ceiling, tearing away the cloud roof in a wash of heat and smoke. The enchanted cargo pallets that were holding up the heavy rocket equipment slumped, the floor creaking.

“Do you have any idea what it’s like?” Cube demanded, her voice hard to hear over the increasing sounds of destruction. Another blast went off like a grenade. “I tried to find you for so long, and now that you’re back you can’t even make an attempt to see things from my side! Cozy Glow said I spent all that time imagining a sister that never existed and she was right, because all you are is an idiot jerk!”

“Don’t give me that!” I shot back. “You’re working for somepony who literally said her dream is world domination!”

I flew up, trying to spot Cube through the smoke. She’d blasted open one of the fuel tanks. Thankfully it hadn’t been full, or else we wouldn’t be having this conversation and instead, we’d be spread out in a fine mist over several miles of open sky.

“And you’re working for ponies who will waste Equestria’s last chance! I’ve read their minds, I know what they’re like! They only care about making themselves comfortable and damn the rest!”

Cube stepped out of the shadows next to an engine, casually tearing apart the delicate plumbing of the liquid-fueled rocket with her telekinesis and looking up at me, scowling.

I landed, looking across the distance between us. I couldn’t see her remote weapons, but she had to still be controlling them. I could see the aura around her horn and feel the magic in the air like cobwebs, sticky and tangled.

“I’d have been a lot more likely to sign up for your team if you hadn’t started by murdering a pony I liked and kidnapping my best friend,” I told her.

“That was bad timing,” Cube admitted, looking guilty. “There were timing issues and we needed Destiny Bray. If you’d come back sooner, we could have eased you into it.”

“Why did you need her?” I asked.

“It’s for the best. Even she’d agree, we just didn’t have time to chance it. If Mother escaped--”

I felt my blood run cold, and Cube must have seen the expression flash across my face, because she clammed up right away.

“Mom?” I whispered. I know she couldn’t hear me over the distance and the noise of the fires. Another blast went off and a tank of something explosive and dangerous went shooting through the space between us like a torpedo.

“This whole place is going to go up like a bomb,” Cube said. “You should get out of here. It’s already over.”

I hated to admit it, but she was right. There was no saving it now. The massive frame of one of the ICBMs lying down in the hangar groaned, tilting and starting to fall through the floor. And then the last thing that I expected happened. The entire ceiling rumbled. Cube and I both looked up in surprise.

As it turned out, the hangar had a pre-war fire suppression system that had been waiting for two centuries for its chance to shine, and even if the passage of time had made it slow to start, starting that kind of blaze was awakening a sleeping giant, almost literally. The clouds above us changed color from white to black and started pouring themselves out in a torrent. It came down with hurricane force, the weight of the water dousing and crushing the fire and hitting both Cube and I with enough force to buckle knees.

It was the kind of system that was designed to prevent a disaster even if it meant sacrificing a few ponies caught in the way. A greater good type of thing. It was the closest I’ve ever come to drowning.

Wait, no. That’s not even remotely true. I’ve literally drowned. It was the closest I came to drowning without actually being underwater, though! That was more than enough to give me a minor panic attack. Major panic attack. I couldn’t breathe. There was water all around me. I was going to die.

Again.

I started to black out, and--

“You idiot!” Cube shouted. I felt telekinesis trying to get a grip on me and failing. “What did you-- I can’t even-- it’s like you’re oiled up!”

She grunted with effort and there was a massive shove of force that threw me through a wall and out into the open, the cascade of water vanishing. I coughed and sputtered, trying to bring up water that had somehow found its way down into my lungs.

“Calm down!” she shouted in my face. “You’re not even drowning! You’re just having a panic attack!”

She put a hoof on my chest and I grabbed it, holding on and calming down over a long minute where neither of us tried to kill the other, not that we’d put much effort into it.

“Sorry,” I coughed.

Cube sighed. “Don’t die when I’m trying really hard not to kill you,” she admonished. “Do you have any idea how much you complicated things?”

“Probably not much at all,” I guessed.

“I don’t like to brag, but I am the best at what I do,” Cube bragged. She kicked me in the ribs, but in the caring way a family member might when they love you but are also really annoyed at you. I let go of her hoof. “Just so you know, there are a lot of ponies who want Cozy Glow to succeed. This isn’t one pony trying to take over the world. Probably half of the Enclave is ready to stand behind her.”

“And what about the other half?” I groaned. “They can go to Tartarus?”

“They’ll fall in line,” Cube said. “The reason she started with such a big show of force is to keep ponies from thinking they’ve got a chance. I’m on the inside of this Chamomile. I’ve seen what she can do. The warsats are just flash and style. She wants to win with a minimum number of casualties. If you really want to save lives, convince ponies to give up and join her. She’ll forgive them as long as they come to her.”

Cube looked up. I followed her gaze. The base’s security staff was finally showing up, winging towards us.

She gave me one last forlorn look and vanished in a blink of teleportation. I sighed and got up, shaking water out of my mane. There was no telling where she’d gone. Her presence was already fading and getting more distant by the moment.

“I hate losing,” I sighed. Smoke mixed with the dissipating storm clouds, the roof dissolving in the process of turning its mass into rain. I started back inside, hoping there was something left to salvage.

Comments

[Just a tree]

I’ve read their minds, I know what they’re like! They only care about making themselves comfortable and damn the rest!

This makes me think, Cube is probably over reliant on her telepathy.
She's read Cozy Glow's mind, too, so part of what keeps Cube on her side is that Cozy Glow really believes in what she's saying.
It might be that Chamomile's immunity to telepathy is actually a hindrance, and it's part of why Cube doesn't trust her.

[Reese]

Thanks for writing!

11464158
Ooh, interesting thoughts; thanks.
...Er. Pun not intended. :D

[Ahsoka Tano]

I’ve read their minds, I know what they’re like! They only care about making themselves comfortable and damn the rest!”

Isnt that literally everypony in the wasteland besides the ones that are main characters in stories :P