Fallout Equestria: Blue Destiny

by MagnetBolt

Chapter 130: VEGA Core

“That’s not the meaning of friendship,” I said. A shadow passed over us. Cozy Glow and I both looked up, but it was just part of the Cage moving above us. Or not moving. It seemed like some parts rotated around each other like a gyroscope, but it was some kind of illusion created by warping space. I wasn’t nearly as smart as Destiny, but she explained it to me pretty well later. There’s this common explanation of space being like a rubber sheet, gravity being places where the sheet bends around weight, that kind of thing. In Limbo, space was more like a liquid surface that flowed around, and in the Cage it swirled around the drain in the middle. The rock and steel that seemed to be moving around us was staying still, but the space itself was shifting.

“Maybe I didn’t explain it well enough,” Cozy Glow said, once both of us were somewhat more sure there wasn’t immediate danger. We were still surrounded by potential threats, but they were keeping their distance. “We both agree that friendship is important, right?”

“Sure.” I nodded. “It’s how a healthy society functions. Ponies can’t survive on their own.”

“I agree!” Cozy Glow gave me a warm smile. “See? We’re already becoming great friends.”

“You said friendship is only as important as what you get out of it,” I pointed out. “But what about the ponies I help just because I like them and I never get anything back? What about charity?”

“Don’t be stupid,” Cozy scoffed. “See, this is where ponies make a big mistake. Any time you do anything, it’s because you get something out of it! If you do charity work, you’re getting praise from other ponies and letting them know you’re kind and reliable. Even if you do it anonymously, you’re getting a warm and fuzzy feeling, right? Feeling good about yourself is still getting something out of it.”

“That’s stupid. By that logic, nothing anypony does can be for any reason than some kind of… greed!”

“Even if you do something you hate, you chose to do it, and you value being able to make that choice more than you did whatever other option you had.” Cozy Glow shrugged. “Friendship is about finding ponies who want what you want. Maybe it’s because they like spending time with you, so they help with your goals to do it. Maybe they have the same goals and you’re working to the same end. Maybe, like us, we just want to survive and recognize that the other pony helps us do that.”

“Friendship isn’t a business transaction,” I grumbled.

“If you say so.” Cozy stopped and shrugged, looking around. We’d been walking on the same bridge for a while. “I think we were here before. We went in a circle! Even though we walked in a straight line. I even used a compass!”

“Space is really messed up around here,” I reminded her. “Maybe we’re in some kind of loop? I’m pretty sure the deeper we went, the worse it got.”

“I can see why you call it the Cage,” she sighed. “It doesn’t just look like a giant birdcage, it’s clearly designed to trap something inside.”

“Let’s hope we never find out what,” I said. I checked my own compass, using DRACO. “I’ve got a laser rangefinder on this thing. Maybe I can use it to see where we looped?”

“It’s a better idea than I’ve had so far,” Cozy admitted. “See? This is why I decided not to kill you. You’ve been here before so you know some of the hazards.”

I snorted. “I’m so grateful.”

“In return for your help, I’ll make sure the fighting stops when we get back,” she promised. I wasn’t sure how far I could trust her. She was pretty light, so not as far as I could throw her.

Another shadow flashed past. We didn’t look up this time, but we should have. A moment later, with neither of us ready for it, an amorphous black shape dropped down onto Cozy Glow, instantly submerging her in darkness.

“Oh buck!” I swore, backing up.

The thing formed an aura around her, somewhere between black mist rising off her body and shadow cast onto the air itself. Cozy Glow stumbled under some unseen weight.

“Get out of my head…” she growled. “Get out!”

With a roar of pure rage, she ejected the nightmare creature, the thing shredding apart in an unseen gust of wind accompanied by light pouring out of her armor, magic shields flaring. The thing screeched at a frequency I felt more than heard, too high for normal hearing but still making my ears ring. It fled, flitting off shapelessly.

“Stupid thing,” Cozy growled.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

She took a deep breath and composed herself, giving me a quick nod. “I made myself immune to any kind of mental influence a long time ago. I don’t care if it’s a Zebra mystic using voodoo or Luna herself trying to look at my dreams, some things are private.”

“That’s a little paranoid.”

“The thing with the Zebra happened. More than once. There were plenty of attempts to mind-control members of the Equestrian government. Some of them succeeded. A big part of my job was keeping it from happening.”

“I meant the part with Luna.”

“You wouldn’t think it was paranoid if you met her. A thousand years on the moon weren’t kind to her social skills. You’d be having a normal conversation with her and she’d casually mention a dream you had and you’d realize she saw it and you had no idea how much else she’d seen. Would you want somepony being able to see your nightmares about high school? Your wet dreams about some nice stallion?”

“I’m more into mares.”

“Whatever. You get my point. And don’t think about hitting on me. I’m not into any of that junk. Sex is… ugh. I never understood it.” She shuddered. “How much longer do you think this is going to take? We’ve been walking for an hour. It didn’t take this long to fly here.”

“Wrong question to ask,” I said. “Time is even more messed up than space. No two ponies can agree on how much time actually passes around here. How long was it between when you left me to fight the Queen and when you came back to save me?”

I was pretty sure I could have taken it down myself, eventually, but I was willing to let her have a win.

“Not that long. I flew away for maybe ten minutes before I changed my mind.”

“Yeah, it was barely a minute for me,” I said. “Star Swirl explained it at one point. He said things happened here, but they didn’t really take time. I think it’s like, in the real world things are at specific places on a map, right? That’s how time works in the real world, too. Things happen at specific points in time.”

“I follow you so far,” Cozy agreed.

“In Limbo, things only have places or times when something else interacts with them. It’s sort of relative, sort of an observer effect. He said it was okay if I didn’t entirely understand, but it’s like we’re in a movie and things only happen when we’re ‘on camera’. If you fall asleep in a room totally alone, when somepony comes to check on you, no time will have passed for you because no one was watching, not even you.”

“I hate this place,” Cozy glow sighed. She shook her head. “And I hate that you sent us here, but I have to commend you for picking a great prison. No door to force open and the prisoner can’t even be sure how long they’ve been locked up.”

“I did it to get my Mom out of Equestria. Nothing personal, you’re just not as much of a monster as she is.”

“I know your mother very well. She’s absolutely a monster. You should have seen how much trouble we had locking her up!”

“How did you manage it, anyway?” I asked. Maybe if I knew how she’d dealt with it, I’d have an idea how to kill her myself.

“I hit her with orbital strikes until she was too busy regenerating to stop Four from containing her in a telekinetic bubble,” Cozy Glow said. “And if I still had orbital assets, and we weren’t in Limbo, and Four wasn’t dead or we at least had the Queen as a backup…”

She trailed off, glaring at me.

“Oh yeah, blame me,” I mumbled.

“If it’s somepony else’s fault, feel free to let me know. Anyway, it’s perfectly safe. Even if she has mind control stuff like you said, it’s impossible for her to escape. Only I have the full authority needed to release her.”

The radio in my ear crackled. “...Evacuation is way behind schedule,” the voice said. “We need to do something about the screamers.”

“Are you getting that too?” I asked.

Cozy Glow nodded. She touched her ear. “This is the Grand High Marshal. I’ve been out of contact, but I am returning to the ship. Give me a status report.”

“High Marshal?! You were declared dead! We’re having serious problems. We attempted to transfer the command codes, but something went wrong.”

I saw the expression on Cozy’s face and raised an eyebrow.

“What?” she asked me, making sure not to speak into the radio. “I wasn’t going to reward someone for killing me. I gave them a fancy red envelope and told them to open it if I died.”

“With blank paper inside,” I guessed.

“If I’m dead it’s not my responsibility to fix things,” Cozy Glow scoffed. She switched her mic back on. “Exodus Red, the transfer failed because I’m alive. There’s a…” I saw her invent a reason on the fly. “Soul lock. It’s tied magically to my soul to prevent terrorist activity and misuse of authority. Transfer codes only appear after my death.”

“Understood, Ma’am. I knew we should have had more faith in you!”

I heard the devotion in the voice and I was a little disgusted. Cozy smiled with the opposite of disgust and shut off her mic again with a sigh.

“Just so you know, a soul-lock is a real thing,” she said.

“I might not be able to read your mind, but you’re not that good at lying. I’ve met Quattro, remember? I’ve seen what good lying looks like.”

“I mean it! There were these black books, and the Belles had most of them under lock and key. Even the Ministries weren’t really allowed to have them, but we let one of them slip to keep ponies busy and see what they did with them. The things were stuffed full of necromancy spells that manipulated souls. Awful stuff, but very useful.”

I shook my head. She scoffed. I flipped on the radio.

“Hey, Lord High Bupkiss Cozy says she’d like to know more about those screamers you mentioned,” I said.

“Hey!” Cozy Glow scowled at me.

“I apologize if there’s an official name, ma’am. It’s the term we’ve been using unofficially. There are ponies that seem to have suddenly come down with Stasis Psychosis. They’re acting in groups in strange ways and control some areas of the ship. We’re trying to recover them for evacuation and treatment, but the ponies we sent in to stop them were also overcome with the psychosis.”

“Shoot,” Cozy huffed.

“It’s got to be my mom doing it. She was able to get control of a bunch of your crew when I infiltrated last time. She’s been biding her time.”

“I hate that you’re probably right. How’s your mental resistance index?”

“I have no idea what that means but I’m immune to brain control if that helps.”

“Excellent.”

---

“Try poking it,” Cozy Glow suggested.

I prodded the glowing crystal totem. I wasn’t sure why my mom had made it look so evil. It was like a tiny office building built as a headquarters for a sinister organization, with distinct strata and layers of crystal. Maybe she’d wanted to get control of Kulaas so she could learn some design skills from the super-AI.

When I touched the crystal I could feel the magic running through it. It was exactly like the crystal pillars back in Gatorland, but cut down in size and range. I could feel in my bones that it was using the same internal design. Mom hadn’t even tried changing it up, but according to Destiny they’d started appearing when they had Mom make repairs to the Exodus Red after the orbital strike, so maybe she’d just never had a chance to make revisions.

It took a few seconds of focus, but I managed to connect to the internal network and shut it down, the glow inside the crystal flickering and fading.

“Got it,” I said. “I thought it’d be harder.”

Cozy Glow peeked out from around cover and walked out to take a look. We were outside the ship, testing things on one of the crystals that had been ejected from the Red in the collision and transition to Limbo.

“So we can deal with them one-by-one,” she said. “How many are there?”

“Thousands, I think,” I admitted. “And knowing Mom they’re stuffed into a lot of odd places behind hatches and in closets. It’s a treasure hunt and we’d never know if we got all of them.”

“Even if we had them lined up for you to deactivate it would take hours with how long you needed to switch that one off. We need to think bigger. We need a solution that solves the problem in one shot.”

“We’re not building a megaspell.”

“Oh I’m sorry, did you have some better idea?” Cozy Glow scoffed. “I know the Ministry of Awesome prototyped several non-destructive megaspells designed to leave ponies unharmed while disrupting spells and electronics. If we could use one of those, we could shut this all down at the press of a button!”

“Do you have one?” I asked.

Cozy Glow sighed. “No. But! Once you know something is possible, all you need to do is put brilliant ponies on the problem and give them resources to solve the issue. You have Destiny Bray, she must have built the megaspell that sent us here. She can build the one we need to fix this. Then we can discuss terms on going back to Equestria.”

“That’s--”

Cozy Glow held up a hoof. “I understand. You don’t want to unleash some awful monster like what Lemon Zinger has become. We’ll find a way to deal with her.”

I wasn’t sure how to tell her that my mom wasn’t the only monster I was afraid of. I wasn’t an oracle but I was absolutely sure Cozy was going to make me regret working with her at some point.

“What I was going to say is, unless we have exactly the spell we need, I don’t know if we can use that option. I don’t have a problem using a megaspell as a big delete button and making the problem go away. Destiny told me before she’s not much of a spell researcher, she’s more of an engineer. Unless we have something she can start with, she’ll need years to get anywhere, and the mind-controlled ponies don’t have years.”

“Shoot,” Cozy sighed. “So much for that.”

“I can’t believe this, I leave you alone for a few hours and you go and make all kind of terrible decisions,” somepony said. I looked up, and Quattro was hovering above us lazily in her golden armor. She shook her head. “She’s going to be a bad influence on you.”

“It’s not that bad,” Cozy said. “I admit Chamomile is a bad influence, but she’s endearing in her own, dumb way.”

“That’s not the direction I was going with that, but okay,” Quattro said. She landed, making sure I was between her and Cozy. “How are things?”

“They were going well after you stabbed me in the back,” Cozy said. “And now I’m trapped in some kind of prison dimension. What about you? Have you betrayed anypony lately?”

“I’ve never betrayed anypony in my life,” Quattro said.

“You did sort of betray her,” I admitted.

“See if I save your life again,” Quattro mumbled. “From what I heard, you’re trying to decide how to deal with the mind control. You’re going at this in the wrong direction. If somepony is casting fireball spells at you, do you spend time building a talisman to counter it?”

“No, you have them shot,” Cozy Glow said. “Remove the caster from the board.”

“Right. So?”

“Killing Lemon Zinger is an option on the table,” Cozy admitted.

“I refuse to believe you don’t have some way to do that yourself. Some failsafe that would let you blow off her head the second she started to get loose,” Quattro said. “You only want a way to shut down what she’s doing so you can keep her around to use her.”

“SIVA is an incredibly powerful tool. If I have to, yes, there’s a system. No, it hasn’t been extensively tested. Destiny Bray designed it at my request.”

“Under duress.”

“You are so determined to make me out to be the bad guy!” Cozy yelled. She stomped her hooves in frustration, glaring at Quattro. “I’m a great pony! Everypony who gets to know me likes me! Look at Chamomile, she begged me to stop trying to kill her just so she could work with me!”

“I was mostly focused on the part where I didn’t want you to kill me,” I admitted.

“Carrot and stick,” Cozy Glow said with a shrug. “The point is, I am an altruistic pony. If there’s some way to salvage the SIVA, it could make life better for millions of innocent ponies and maybe even some other races like gryphons. Even zebras, who I am told are occasionally not evil.”

“If we’ve got a special codeword that makes my mom’s head explode I’ll forgive you for at least half of what you’ve done,” I said, interrupting her before she could tell me her very smart opinions on donkeys and changelings.

“It doesn’t make her head explode, it’s some kind of chemical thing,” Cozy explained. “Explosives wouldn’t really work. Orbital strikes only kept her down for a little while. Apparently micromachines are vulnerable to chemical attacks, so we did the logical thing and built a giant tank of acid.”

“And that works?” I frowned. The black SIVA dragon had practically had acid for blood.

“We tested it on samples. It worked. The only problem is… I can’t trigger it remotely. Not from here. I didn’t want to risk the enemy spoofing the right signal and crippling things. It requires biometric confirmation at one of a few specific terminals on the Exodus Red.”

“Assuming Mom hasn’t sent ponies with crowbars to smash them.”

“If all the terminals are offline, the system should activate automatically. It’s a fail-deadly system, not fail-safe.”

“I wish I had a better idea.”

“I’m not letting you two go alone,” Quattro said. “Sorry, Chamomile, but I’m absolutely sure she’ll trick you into doing something stupid.”

“That’s fair.”

“You should be immune to the mind control, you have the same enhancements I do,” Cozy admitted. “You could be a valuable asset, as long as you stay in front of me so you’re not tempted to stab me in the back again.”

“Cube is probably immune for the same reason, right?” I asked. “She’s enhanced.”

Cozy Glow nodded. “Even more immune than I am. Even if something went wrong or the spell gets stronger, she should be able to fight it off.”

“If we’re putting a mission together, we could use her firepower,” Quattro admitted. “Cube is as good as a whole firing line of elite troops. Against a large number of soft targets, I can’t think of anypony better.”

“I wish we could take Emma or Midnight but… they’ll be vulnerable,” I sighed.

“They’re leading the evacuees to the Exodus White,” Quattro said. “Those two make good leaders. Midnight has the charisma, Emma has the discipline. Put them together and you get good ideas and the ability to convince ponies to try them.”

“Destiny Bray will need to come as well,” Cozy Glow said.

“No way,” I said. “My mom tried hacking her last time and almost killed her! Even if she’s immune to mind control, she’s vulnerable in other ways.”

“We’re all vulnerable somehow. Ask her. I’d be shocked if that pony hasn’t come up with a solution already.”

---

“Of course I’m going,” Destiny said. She worked on the metal ring she’d fixed to the stand, using a spot welder to fix talismans and pre-scribed talisman sheets to the steel. “SIVA is my invention. I have a responsibility.”

“My responsibility is bigger,” I tried.

She gave me a look that said my response wasn’t a normal thing to say.

“I mean that it’s my mom, and I’ve had my hooves shoulder-deep in this mess for a long time now. We wouldn’t even be here if I was a better judge of character.”

“That’s true for all of us,” Destiny said. She started wrapping gold wire around a ring-shaped river stone. “If I hadn’t built that ship for Cozy Glow… actually if I hadn’t built it she probably would have had my whole family thrown in a gulag on trumped-up charges. But you get my point. I could have done things differently and I didn’t, so I have to do what I can now and not worry about then.”

“It doesn’t matter. I know you’re more or less okay right now, but Mom might try throwing more junk code at you, and you’ll turn inside out or melt or explode into gremlins! All of those things are even worse than mind control!”

“It was annoying how she was able to hack my body like that,” Destiny agreed. “After it happened, it made me think of when we first met, and you had to wear the Exodus Armor all the time just to keep the infection from progressing. Remember? I hacked the near-field transmitter to constantly loop a halt command.”

“Yeah. It helped a lot.”

“So this is going to do the same thing,” Destiny said. She wrapped a layer of electrical tape over the band, fixing everything in place, then took the ring off the stand. “It’s hoof-made. No SIVA involved. Lemon Zinger can’t hack it. It doesn’t even have sensors to interface with. This is designed purely to interfere with junk code. It’ll broadcast a near-field signal that will keep my body’s systems from being overridden.”

“I don’t like it.”

She shrugged and put the collar around her neck. “Yeah well, that’s too bad. I’m not letting you do this without me. You need responsible adult supervision.”

“Quattro is an-- I can’t even finish saying that without feeling like a liar.”

“Exactly. More importantly, I built the systems around your mother and I’m absolutely sure she’s tried to break things. Cozy Glow was right that they’re fail-deadly, but that doesn’t mean they’re immune to sabotage, they’re only immune to clumsy, stupid sabotage. She’s smart enough to come up with a plan.”

“I’m worried that the plan involves us walking face-first into a trap and doing exactly what she wants,” I admitted. “Or that Cozy Glow will betray us.”

“That’s why we’re going in with a backup plan and not telling her about it,” Destiny said. “The Exodus Black’s Arcana Reactor is stable…unless somepony pushes a few buttons, and then it explodes.”

“I’m told that won’t kill her.”

“No, but it will definitely kill Cozy Glow.”

---

“All my ponies had to pull back,” Cozy said, once we’d assembled in front of an airlock. “The ones that get too close get drawn in, and nopony is sure how far the danger zone goes, so I had them retreat to the edge of radio range. We’ll still be able to contact them in an emergency.”

“Can we please go inside?” Destiny asked. “I don’t like being carried like a sack of potatoes.”

I was holding her around the barrel and she drooped, totally unable to maintain any kind of dignity when she was being carried around the way a bird of prey carried around lunch.

“You should have learned self-levitation,” Cube admonished. Unlike Destiny, our other unicorn teammate was floating easily and glowing faintly with her own magical aura.

“I know self-levitation! I used it all the time as a ghost stuck in a hat!” Destiny snapped.

“It must have been a lot easier to get around since that helmet was so small,” Quattro noted. “Compact, easy to grip, one solid piece, lightweight…”

“It was easier to-- lightweight? Are you calling me fat?!” Destiny sputtered.

“Please get the door,” I grunted, holding her up.

“I’m not fat, you can carry me all day!” Destiny shouted up at me. “Stop complaining! You’re making me look bad in front of the pony who foalnapped me!”

“Before we go inside, I know I need to say something,” Cozy Glow said. She looked at all of us seriously. “I’m not a perfect pony, and I’ve made mistakes. Some of them were bad mistakes. Cube, I’m sorry I didn’t believe you about what you experienced on the Hub. I should have trusted you about Lemon Zinger hacking the systems, about Chamomile being a space pirate, and about how you barely escaped alive. I’ve seen the truth with my own eyes now and I was so, so wrong not to trust you when you came back and tried to warn me.”

“Oh, um…” Cube blinked. “Thank you?”

Cozy Glow nodded. “Chamomile, I’m sorry I tried to have you killed a bunch of times but I think you can understand where I was coming from.”

“Hey, you called me a space pirate and that’s one of the cooler things anypony has ever said about me,” I replied with a shrug.

“Destiny Bray, foalnapping you was rude. I’m also sorry for essentially enslaving you for several months, but I thought it was for the greater good at the time.”

“I’ll forgive you if we get out of this alive,” Destiny said.

Cozy Glow nodded. “Okay, now let’s get this hatch open-- what is it Quattro?”

The golden-colored pegasus had cleared her throat and was waiting expectantly.

“What about my apology?” Quattro asked.

“I accept your apology,” Cozy Glow said.

“I meant, aren’t you going to say sorry to me?”

Cozy Glow laughed. “Quattro Formaggio, you and I both know you don’t want an apology.” She smirked. “You like it better knowing I don’t forgive you, that I haven’t forgotten what you did, and that I’m still relying on you despite all that because you’re one of the most skilled operatives in this or any other world. You love that I’m forced to work with you despite everything.”

“Shoot, you’ve really got me in a box,” Quattro admitted. “Let’s get inside before I start getting really sentimental.”

Cozy Glow pulled on the manual release handle, and air gushed out of the hatch as pressure equalized. It stank like electricity and ozone, alive in a way the dead space of Limbo just wasn’t.

“That’s not normal,” Destiny said. I didn’t put her down, because what was inside the hatch wasn’t what we expected.

Quattro took off her sunglasses to peer inside. “I didn’t study the blueprints but we might be in the wrong place. I don’t remember any part of the ship having an endless corridor made of neon lights and concrete.”

“It could be an illusion,” Cube suggested. She cast a spell and frowned. “That’s… really strange. It’s sort of real, but there’s a boundary layer. I haven’t seen anything like it before.”

Destiny cast her own spell, and it made my hooves tingle. “I have,” she said after a moment. “I’ve seen it before. The space itself is folded. It’s similar to the vector trap in the Exodus Armor.”

“What does that mean for us?” Cozy Glow asked.

“The vector trap works by altering space to fairly arbitrary specifications. I don’t have time to go over the math, but you remember those choose-your-own-adventure books they made when we were foals? If normal space is reading a book from front to back, the altered space would be more like following those instructions. The vector trap itself works by making a closed loop. A pony puts something inside, and then it stays there until something else acts on it.”

“So if we go inside we could get trapped,” Cube noted. “That explains the boundary layer. It’s almost like an open-ended teleportation spell or a portal connecting two spaces.”

“We’ll find another way,” Cozy Glow said. She closed the hatch.

---

We opened the third hatch.

“It looks the same as the first two,” I said.

“It doesn’t just look the same, it is the same. Every external hatch has been rerouted to this virtual space.” Destiny shook her head. “She’s telling us we don’t have a choice. If we want to go inside, this is where we’re going.”

“Okay. Hold this.” I gave Destiny over to Cube. She levitated her up by the scruff of her neck, and Destiny looked even less pleased about this than when I’d been carrying her. I braced myself for some kind of awful disaster and cautiously flew inside the Exodus Red.

Passing through the hatch was like stepping into another world. The air pressure changed, the air was filled with static, and when I gingerly landed on the ground I felt something familiar.

“Are you dead?” Quattro asked.

“No, but… I’ve been here before,” I said. I looked around. There were open doorways going off in other directions, chest high walls and scattered objects made of simply, polygonal shapes.

“You have?” Cube asked.

“Yeah. This looks almost exactly like the illusions created by the virtual rides at Gator Land.”

Comments

[Thought Prism]

I'm surprised she didn't blow a hole in the hull at the end there.

[FridayPie]

“I accept your apology,” Cozy Glow said.

That's absolutely a CG's thing to say

[Reese]

"can be for any reason than some kind of"
"can be for any reason other than some kind of"?

"and make all kind of terrible decisions"
"and make all kinds of terrible decisions"?

"scattered objects made of simply, polygonal shapes."
"scattered objects made of simple, polygonal shapes."?