Fallout Equestria: Blue Destiny

by MagnetBolt

Chapter 132: SkullHacker

I was watching my most persistent enemy literally start to rise from the dead, half-defrosted muscles cracking with frost and melting from the micromachines eating them all at once. It shouldn’t by all rights have been possible. He’d been dead for a good, long time and a doctor had actually checked on that to make sure.

Then again, I’d woken up in a morgue before.

I slammed the lid of the cryopod closed. I wasn’t gonna deal with this today if I could avoid it.

“How do I lock this thing?!” I yelled over at Destiny. She rushed over to the panel on the side of the pod and started pressing buttons.

“I built these things to have emergency exits, not emergency seals!” she yelled back. I held the door shut. Something hit the other side. Not hard. Not yet. I knew it would get stronger. “I’m disabling some of the settings and forcing a test cycle. That should work!”

The metal under my hooves grew colder, liquid air cycling through it. Another blow hit the inside of the lid. I held on tight. The third hit was weaker. A fourth didn’t come immediately. I held a little more, ignoring the chill, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

“Did that do it?” I asked.

“You know, I’m starting to regret ever making SIVA,” Destiny sighed. “We wouldn’t have been able to make the Exodus Arks without its ability to manufacture advanced materials cheaply, but all the ferro-fibrous plating and endo-steel beams in the world aren’t worth this much trouble.”

“Don’t blame yourself,” I said. “Maybe in the end, the real disaster isn’t the rampant micromachines, it’s the friends we made along the way.”

“I don’t think that’s quite the lesson to take away from my lifetime of regrets.”

I tried a different one. “The world-threatening machine plague was inside us all along and we just had to believe in ourselves?”

“Technically true, but I hate it.”

“Wow, are you two going to kiss?” Cozy Glow asked politely, by which I sarcastically mean that she was extremely rude.

“I’m not into mares,” Destiny sighed. “She can kiss Midnight after we finish saving the world.”

“That’s more dangerous than you think,” I said. “She bites.”

We all laughed, because it was a good joke about vampires and I definitely wasn’t the only one who found it funny, please trust me as a narrator my jokes are great.

No matter how funny or unfunny it might have been in that money, the jokes all died a moment later when another sound came from the cryopod. It wasn’t a heavy punch or slam. Instead, more horrifyingly, it was a gentle knock, like someone politely stopped at a door. Destiny looked at the control panel.

“It’s the temperature of liquid nitrogen in there,” she whispered. “Even SIVA should be inert!”

“Chamomile,” said a voice muffled by the thick walls of the cryopod. It wasn’t Rain Shadow’s voice. That would have been bad but I was expecting it. This was worse. It was my mother’s voice. “I know you can hear me.”

She knocked again. I looked at the small port looking into the pod. It was frozen over, a thick layer of frost hiding whatever was inside.

“It could be an illusion,” Cozy Glow said. “She’s trying to distract us. Let’s get out of here and go down to Engineering. We can trigger everything there manually. It’s just more dangerous since we’ll be in the same room as her.”

“Silly girl, all these rooms are mine.”

The door to the pod opened on its own, the locks popping even while Destiny was yelping and tapping at the control panel, trying to stop it. The panel went dark, not even giving her the hope that she might be able to do something.

What stepped out of the pod -- and the stepping was notable since Rain Shadow’s limbs hadn’t been included in what was left of his body -- was a pony even taller than I was. Six draconic wings spread wide, each pair in a different color. Blue, red, and green. Golden scales covered her body in thick armor plates, dotted with gems in those same three colors. Even my mother’s mane was gone, replaced with a crown of glittering horns and a forest of metallic spikes. She looked down at us with black eyes.

“That’s much better,” she said, yawning like she’d woken up from a nap. Her mouth was all fangs, rows of teeth like a shark’s. “I decided it would be nice if we could talk face to face. Nice for me. I haven’t had the chance to stretch my legs for a little while.”

“I don’t appreciate what you’re doing to my ponies,” Cozy Glow said. “I demand you release their minds and bodies immediately. I’m prepared to let you keep the ship as your tomb if you agree to letting them go unharmed. We can go our separate ways and hopefully never encounter each other again.”

“That’s so tempting!” Mom gasped, she chuckled. “Not really. It’s a terrible deal. I already have your people, and your ship, and so much more. You haven’t even noticed that I took your two friends.”

“What?” Cozy asked. She looked at me. When our eyes met I realized who my Mom was talking about.

Quattro fired a rocket at me without even saying a cool one-liner first. I had plenty of time to react. I don’t know if that was because Quattro was a spy and only on the level of a regular-old elite soldier and not a super deadly post-equine killer or because she was fighting the control. Despite my sore feelings about how often she’d betrayed me and other ponies, she had saved my life more times than I could easily count and probably wouldn’t have shot me if she wasn’t being mind-controlled.

A twist of will and a lot of help from thaumoframe put a wall of magic between us. The rocket hit and exploded into a wall of fire and smoke, blinding me.

“This corpse was full of so many useful things,” Mom noted. She hadn’t bothered stepping down herself yet, watching me with amusement. “Now that I know how your little trick to block my enchantment spells works, I can get around it.”

A constellation of pistols flew over the top of my shield and fired, two of the bolts hitting Destiny and the rest scattering across my body. It stung a little but seeing Destiny get shot was what really broke my concentration.

“No!” I yelled.

“I’m okay!” Destiny said. She wasn’t that okay. She had burns where the beams had hit. She was definitely tougher than the average pony. That was when the second rocket hit me in the chest and threw me across the room to smack into the wall like a stupid bat-winged rag doll.

“How are you going to fight when you’ll only hurt ponies you care about?” Mom teased. “I know you don’t care about me, but surely you care about these two.”

“Shut up!” Cozy Glow screamed. “Everypony keeps trying to take what’s mine! This is supposed to be my ship! My ponies! My Equestria! You don’t get to take everything away from me!”

She jumped at my mother. It was almost comical. My mother was more of a pony-sized golden dragon than a pony at this point and simply held Cozy Glow back with a single talon. Cozy Glow fought against the grip, caught up in the grip of some terrible rage.

“Your implants aren’t quite the same,” Mom noted. “You saved the best for yourself, hm?”

“I’m going to rip you out of the ship with my bare hooves!” Cozy Glow shouted.

“Or maybe you’re just too mad to be controlled!” Mom said with a shrug, tossing Cozy aside. “Now, you aren’t going to hurt your friends, so--”

I horfed up a sploot. I’d love to say that it was something dignified like a drake’s breath weapon, but it was way more like a cat violently attacking somepony by having a hairball at them, with the same noises. In my case, though, it wasn’t just hair and sick. When I’d been rebuilt, a glue cannon had been taken apart and used as material, and somehow that ended up translating into a gross but effective weapon.

Foaming glue splashed over Quattro’s forelegs and battle saddle, freezing up her triggers and locking her in place. It set almost instantly, the glue expanding into a connected series of balls like a complex molecule made of concrete-hard epoxy.

“I didn’t know you could do that,” Mom said, surprised.

“It’s not really pleasant,” I told her, shaking off the last of the stunning blow from the rocket that had left me a little shaken. “DRACO, anti-air,” I said.

The smart rifle switched to air-bursting shotgun shrapnel blasts, auto-aiming itself and knocking Cube’s floating pistols out of the air, the beam weapons exploding when their batteries ruptured. Cube looked annoyed, and I was sure that was her real expression and not part of the mind control, because I’d seen it before.

She was so focused on being annoyed at me that she didn’t notice Destiny coming up behind her and clubbing her on the back of the head, knocking her to the ground before she could come up with some deadly attack spell.

“That’s for shooting my brand-new body,” Destiny said, kicking her while she was down.

“Please don’t do that to my sister,” I sighed.

“She deserves it.”

“That’s so cruel,” Mom sighed. “Well, so much for that idea. I should have known being Chamomile’s friend wasn’t any guarantee that they’d actually be useful as hostages. So very many of her friends have died already!”

“You know Mom, you’re a real bitch sometimes,” I said. “Is there any point to me fighting you right now? That’s not your body. You’re just controlling it remotely, like when you had that virtual body back in Gator Land.”

“I’m glad you’ve gotten a little smarter over the years,” Mom sighed, smiling. “It’s true. Even if you dropped a megaspell on this body, it would be no worse for me than if somepony closed a book I’d been reading. I might be a bit startled at how rude they are, but it wouldn’t hurt me.”

“So?” I asked again.

“So the difference is, if I kill you, it sticks,” she reminded me. I hadn’t considered that. I should have. She moved faster than was actually possible, her image not blurring so much as separating into frames that stretched across the space between us, afterimages hanging in the air that ended with the back of her talon impacting my face.

It hadn’t had any real effort behind it. I was on the ground. The air finally cracked in a sonic boom as physics reasserted itself and the air fought to get out of the way.

“I’m trying to decide if I should offer to let you surrender,” Mom said. I tried to get up. Her talon was on my chest. She squeezed just a little. The edges sliced through the Exodus Armor and into my flesh. “I feel like it would be a wasted effort. For all your failings you’re wonderfully persistent, Chamomile.”

“I’ll let you surrender when I see you in Tartarus!” Cozy Glow screamed. She slammed into Lemon’s back, grabbing around her neck from behind and squeezing. “You think you can ignore me? Ponies have ignored me my whole life, and they always regret it in the end!”

“I am having a family discussion,” Mom said, her voice ice-cold. Her wings twisted, the draconian spans moving like backwards talons to grab the armored pegasus would-be-queen and throwing her off, the edges of the clawed wings biting into Cozy’s armor and leaving her with cuts like she’d fallen into barbed wire.

Destiny ran towards us, and a magical bolt from the constellation of horns crowning Lemon Zinger blasted her in the other direction.

“Now where were we?” Mom asked. Her talon tightened slightly, the points burrowing into my flesh, sliding through skin and hitting my ribs. Something beeped. She stopped in confusion and twisted around like a cat to look at her own back.

Something shaped like a dinner plate was stuck to her spine. The little light on it flashed from green to red, and it exploded with a deafeningly sharp crack. Mom blew apart entirely, a wash of heat and plasma residue rushing over me as her body collapsed into parts.

“I told you not to underestimate me,” Cozy panted. She got up and produced a healing potion, downing it quickly. The small cuts across her body sealed, and she shook herself off, her mane somehow falling back into almost-perfect order. “I brought a few plasma breaching charges in case we needed to go through a bulkhead or two. They work just fine against dragons, too, as long as you can attach them properly.”

The walls around us flickered, revealing the real shape of the room we were in between blinks.

“My head…” Cube groaned. “What happened?”

“You’ve been under mind control,” Destiny told her. She stepped over to her and looked in her eyes. “And you might have a concussion. Or a mild stroke. I’m not the right kind of doctor to tell. Drink a healing potion. Call somepony else in the morning.”

“Why am I glued to the deck?” Quattro asked.

“Because you’re a terrible friend sometimes,” Cozy Glow informed her.

“And the solution is weird bondage?”

“Getting rid of Lemon’s avatar must have disrupted her local control,” Destiny said. “It’s not fatal, but with how directly she was controlling it, it would be like a pony losing a limb, or a computer being shut down improperly. It’ll take time for her to bring it back up.”

“Let’s not waste the opening,” Cozy said. “We’re going to engineering. We’ll do things manually.”

“Leave us here,” Cube sighed. “If she controlled us once she can do it again, Quattro and I are liabilities.”

“I could have told you that,” Cozy Glow scoffed. “Even if she doesn’t control you, you make great hostages. Neither of us wants you hurt. I might not like how things have gone but you two are still my friends and once this is over I want to make things right between us again.”

“Even me?” Quattro asked.

“Even you. I guess.”

“Is that supposed to be twitching?” Cube asked. She pointed to the lump of flesh that was left on the floor. It was starting to move.

“No, it’s not,” Destiny said.

“Let me try something,” I said. I got up off my sore butt and poked the mess. I could feel the SIVA trying to self-organize back into something between organs and mechanisms. It came across the low-frequency network the micromachines made like a distant chatter over the radio. I closed my eyes and pushed my way in.

I had been given a lot of access codes since this whole thing had started. Passwords and protocols for a bunch of networks. Together, they let me sneak inside before my mother could completely restore her connection. Just like the Black Dragon’s SIVA back in Gator Land, I was able to find the kill switch and flip it, turning the machines into nothing more harmful than dust.

“I think that got it,” I said. The twitching had stopped. “Good thing, too. She’d probably eat you guys for biomass next. You know, just to upset me.”

“I’m glad that didn’t happen,” Cube said, rubbing her sore head. “I’ll try and chip Quattro free and get off this boat before you blow it up. If you get a chance, shoot her in the head for me. I didn’t know mind control hurt like that.”

“Yes, it’s mind control that caused the bruises,” Destiny agreed.

“Good luck,” Cube said. “You’re going to need it.”

---

Flat panels of red, blue, and green had replaced the already bare-bones corridors we ran down. It felt like we’d shrunk down until we were inside a terminal screen, the pixels blown up as large as kite shields.

“Do you have any more of those breaching charges?” Destiny asked.

“I might,” Cozy Glow admitted. “They’re not strong enough for the hull, but they’ll get us through a wall or floor.”

“Good! I’ve been casting detection spells and I’m not convinced she’s simulating a whole ship! I think she’s only rendering what we can see and a small buffer zone around it. If we can get outside that area…”

“We can navigate more easily?” I guessed.

“More than that, she might lose track of us entirely!”

“I like the way you think,” Cozy Glow said. “Where do we breach?”

“Look for a spot where the illusion is thin. That’s where any force fields will be weakest!”

“Does that mean killing more of the ponies she enslaved?” Cozy Glow asked, looking uncomfortable with the idea. The ponies lining the corridors were doing most of the heavy lifting in the simulation. Taking a few out would almost certainly do what we needed, but…

“No,” Destiny said. “I know, I know. It’s not just because of ethics, if it makes you feel better. They’ve been turned into hardware connected directly to Lemon. If we start knocking them out she’ll pinpoint us right away. A place where there’s a natural hole means she might not feel it when we breach, like a blind spot.”

I nodded and kept my eyes open. We only passed one more intersection before I spotted something. “Over here!” I yelled.

A section between two bulkheads was entirely glitched out, the panels not lining up correctly and splitting apart like stained glass before failing entirely, letting us see through to the actual walls and floors of the Exodus Red.

“Perfect,” Destiny said. “Let’s blow through the wall here.”

“No,” Cozy said. “If we go through the wall we’ll probably just loop back around into one of the illusions. We might not even know about it until it’s too late.”

“Plus she’ll look around this area first,” I agreed. “She might be a crazy bitch dragon now, but she used to be a pony and part of her thinks like one. The first place she’ll be looking is this deck.”

Cozy and I both looked up. “Ceiling?” she asked. I nodded, and she flew up to affix the demolition charge, ushering us back away from it once it was magnetically locked in place.

“Why not the floor?” Destiny asked. “Engineering is below us.”

“Exactly why we’re going up,” Cozy said. “Altitude is energy. When you’re in a dangerous situation you want the height advantage.”

“I’m not sure that’s true inside a building.”

The demo charge blew, a shaped explosion blasting a hole in the ceiling edged with plasma residue. Cozy went through without hesitation, and I followed right after her, grabbing Destiny despite her protests. The heat right around the metal was incredible, like flying through a wall of flame for a brief moment before we emerged on the other side.

“You were right,” Cozy Glow said. Beyond that hole, the ship looked normal, or at least as normal as her decorating allowed. It was the familiar white faux-marble and gold trim as far as we could see.

I looked back where we’d come from and experienced a lot of flavors of vertigo all at once. The illusions must have only been visible from one side, because now that I was outside looking in, all the ‘back sides’ of the walls were gone, letting me see a complex of coffins and hallways hanging in space that wasn’t quite empty and black, a void of nothing that trailed afterimages.

“That’s not good to look at,” I decided, turning away.

“Keep moving. I want to get as far away from here as we can before she recovers,” Cozy Glow said. I could tell the simulation below us was starting to recover, the textures of the walls and floors returning. I put Destiny down on the deck, and we started running.

---

“These ships are way too big,” I groaned. We’d been going for at least ten minutes at a dead run. Don’t get me wrong, I was in good physical shape, but it was a lot of going and not a lot of getting there.

“That’s because we’re going on a specific route,” Cozy Glow said. “We can avoid most of the surveillance if we go the right way.”

“And you just happen to know the right way?”

Cozy shrugged. “I learned early in my career that it’s easier for everypony if you deliberately avert your eyes from some things. The state needs ponies who make sure things get done without any record or inconvenient questions.”

“Wow the way you say that makes it sound incredibly sinister.”

“No, no. The Ministries did sinister things. I was doing patriotic things. There’s a big difference between the two.”

“I have this crazy feeling that those things were exactly the same except you got to decide who got disappeared when you were in charge.”

Destiny chuckled. “I think you’ve got her number.”

“It’s not hard,” my Mother’s voice came from around the corner. She stepped into the corridor in front of us with perfect dramatic timing.

“Especially when the number is two,” a second voice added. Another copy of her trotted around lazily from the other side. Both of them grinned and showed fangs.

“Damnit, Chamomile!” Cozy Glow groaned. “I thought you killed her! Why are you so bad at this?”

“I’ll take the one on the right,” I said. “You go left.”

A talon battered me aside like a playful cat deciding to have some fun before dinner. A collection of antique vases and planters caught me, and the hit rattled my marbles enough that for a long moment I was more worried that I’d smashed through a five hundred year old relic than the impossible odds against me. Then I saw hope. There was a Canterlot Museum mark at the bottom of the vase. It had just been a reproduction and basically worthless. Even better, the bonsai tree seemed okay.

I got back to my hooves, trying to keep eyes on Mom. She moved in a series of afterimages, the best my brain could do to process the speed. It might have been entirely invisible if I hadn’t been augmented so much over time. I surged to my own top speed. It was still sluggish compared to her.

I dodged aside with as much speed as I could manage. I was in the best physical shape of my life, and she was exceeding it without even trying. I could tell she wasn’t going all-out. She wasn’t really fighting, she was amusing herself and, at best, testing her own limits. It was disheartening to find that even with my wired reflexes pushing my body as hard as it could, the best I could do was match her non-effort.

Her talon strike hit the deck and crushed the steel with pure force. I could see what she was doing, big obvious movements with no attempt at being subtle. I snapped the blades out of my hoof.

She brought a talon down, and this time I was able to stop it with mine, my lightning claws cutting into her metal flesh. Power fields ripped her apart with inexorable force. She looked surprised and backed away on three legs, having plenty of wings to stabilize her. This was my chance! I rushed her while she was off-balance. I had plenty of sympathy, I knew what it was like to have one bad limb.

We weren’t more than three paces apart. With the first step I took, bones grew from her ruined talon. A second step, and a webbing of tendon and muscle wrapped around them with whiplash speed. A third step and she was grabbing my fetlock while scales erupted from her regenerating hide.

She smiled at me.

I brought the other Lightning Claw down on the smile. Her head went flying. Grabbing me had only locked her in place for the moment I needed. Her headless body stepped back in confusion. Time started flowing again.

“Sorry,” I said. I didn’t mean it. I kicked her aside, the body slumping and going still.

A wash of hot air and ozone rushed over me. I looked to the left. Cozy Glow was panting and heaving, holding one foreleg tight to her chest. Half of her armor was torn away. There was a hole where the other copy of my mother should have been, golden fragments dripping along with the red-hot edges of the deck where the explosive had cut through it.

“So much for my safe route,” Cozy Glow groaned.

“It bought us some time,” Destiny said. “We’re close to Engineering. It’s possible she’s watching all approaches. This could simply be the limit of how far we can go in secret.”

“If we can’t do stealth we can still do speed,” I said. “Taking out one of those avatars bought us a while last time. Taking out two should be twice as long!”

“They didn’t seem as powerful as the first one either,” Cozy Glow said. She wiped her hoof across her lips, looking at the trace of blood across her red and gold armor. “I’m out of demo charges. I’m going to have to be extra creative if we run into more trouble.”

“I doubt they’d keep working. She would eventually adapt. Specialized armor, plasma shields, something,” Destiny said. “You’re lucky it worked twice.”

“It didn’t,” Cozy Glow said. “She’s not magnetic anymore. I couldn’t attach the mine. I had to hold it backwards against my chest like Equestria’s most dangerous shotgun.”

“Is this a good time for a moral about teamwork?” I asked.

“We didn’t use teamwork. At all.”

“Maybe that’s the moral! Next time we’ll work together.”

“Celestia liked giving ponies morals, and you know what?” Cozy Glow said, stomping up to me and glaring up. “She was a really great pony. Never be afraid to learn a lesson no matter who you learn it from.”

Cozy Glow gave me a solid pat on the shoulder.

“Also I think most of my ribs are broken, so I’m going to chug down some healing potions until my heart isn’t being poked by bone spurs.”

“Good plan,” I agreed. “Destiny, we still going the right way?”

“I think so. I’m less sure now that I know she can affect this area. Assuming the serial numbers on these wall panels are accurate, we’re very close.” She pointed to the serial coordinates printed on the corner. “Since it looks like we might actually get there, we need a plan for when we do.”

“Activate the acid pumps, melt her into sludge, shoot anything that moves?” I suggested.

“We’re going to be in the room with the acid pumps, and so will whoever she has in Engineering. A lot of ponies were stationed there. We might have to accept more casualties.”

“There’s a good chance they’re gone already,” I admitted quietly. “I’ll try to save them if I can. I don’t know if Cozy Glow will do her best to rescue them or just shoot them herself to keep my mom from having hostages.”

“I don’t want us arguing about what to prioritize when we get in there,” Destiny explained. “Teamwork is important. The acid tank is going to be at the top, it’s gravity-fed so it works even in the worst case scenarios. If we have to, we can shoot the valves open.”

“What’s our plan for not melting?” I asked.

“Don’t stand in front of the acid,” Destiny said with a shrug. “It seems silly to come up with a detailed plan when we don’t know what the room looks like right now. We might be able to simply walk in and press the big red ‘Stop’ button. Or we might have to kick pipes apart. Or we might decide it’s not worth it and run away to ask Flurry Heart for help.”

“I’m really hoping she shows up at the end to blast all this to atoms,” I admitted. “Even if she terrifies me almost as much as, you know.”

“Did you mean me?” my mother asked, a golden avatar stepping into the corridor behind us.

“Or maybe me?” A second one got out ahead of us.

“You don’t have to be afraid of me, Chamomile.” A third one joined them. Then a fourth. A fifth. I stopped counting because I was out of hooves and already demoralized. “Of us.”

“Remember that thing I said about teamwork?” I asked.

“I do,” Cozy Glow confirmed. She eyed the wall of deadly enemies, their golden scales shining chromed and almost blinding in the bright light of the ship’s corridor. Cozy Glow held her fire, not that a beam rifle was going to do a lot of good.

“I hate teamwork when the enemy gets to use it. Got any clever ideas? You’re some kind of strategic genius, right?”

“If I was really a genius I wouldn’t have walked into a trap,” she mumbled. “When you’re facing an overwhelming force, there are three options. Keep them from using that force with a careful choice of battleground.”

“I don’t think that’s an option.” Even if we ducked into a narrow side corridor or room with a single door, the bulkheads wouldn’t hold up forever and there was no Enclave cavalry coming to save the day as reinforcements.

“Two, we surrender and wait for rescue.”

I looked at my mother’s mad grin. “I think that isn’t really an option either.”

“Three, fight like crazy and hope for the best.”

Destiny gave her a skeptical look. “Does that ever work?”

“If you don’t like it, bring your own guns next time,” Cozy Glow said. She shoved a beam rifle into Destiny’s magical grip and drew a sword from her Exodus Armor’s vector trap. With a squeeze on the handle, a crackling power field sparked along the edge of the blade. “I’ll take the hundred on the right this time, and you get the hundred on the left.”

Comments

[FridayPie]

“Also I think most of my ribs are broken, so I’m going to chug down some healing potions until my heart isn’t being poked by bone spurs.”

I think , she doesn't have that threat, but might have broken shoulders and her heart in more vulnerable in that direction compared to human... quadrupeds don't have rib "armor" in front. There is alot of muscle between chest and heart though.

[howard035]

I’ll take the hundred on the right this time, and you get the hundred on the left.”

I love a DBZ reference!

"I can't believe every golden dragon kicked Cozy in the plot!"

[Reese]

"or unfunny it might have been in that money, the jokes"
"or unfunny it might have been in that moment, the jokes"?

"even with my wired reflexes pushing my body as hard as it could"
"even with my wired reflexes pushing my body as hard as they could"?

Exciting! :D