Fallout Equestria: Blue Destiny

by MagnetBolt

Chapter 27 - Blues Before Sunrise

I hated lying in bed with nothing to do. I was tired and sore, but being told to rest made me feel restless. Also I was starting to hate having to sleep on a solid surface. A cloud bed would have felt amazing. I even offered to go get one, but Destiny was convinced I’d get blasted out of the sky by the Lightning Shield and the zebra kept warning me about windigos, even though I’d been flying around a bunch and still hadn’t seen any of them.

Back home, I’d spent the night in the hospital a few times. Somehow, despite being a cot in a zebra village, this felt exactly the same. Someone checked on me every hour or two like I was going to up and die on them at any time, so even if I wanted sleep I wasn’t going to get it, and I was uncomfortable enough to never feel actually rested.

“What I wouldn’t give for a movie right now,” I sighed.

“What is a movie?” one of the zebras asked from her cot. Did I mention my roommates? The attacks on the Iron Temple had left a couple of the Companions badly enough off that even they needed bedrest. Apparently if you were really badly hurt, the strain of transforming would just kill you instead of helping you heal.

“It’s sort of a story told with moving pictures,” I said. “They’re a lot of fun, but they need all sort of equipment you don’t have around here.”

“It sounds like you come from a place of wonders, Sky Lady. Moving pictures, living in the clouds… I’d love to see it someday,” the zebra sighed. I didn’t know her name. She was just one of the faces that had been cheering for blood in the crowd when I’d wrestled Two-Bears.

“It wasn’t something I thought about much before. It was just how the world was. This place is nicer in a lot of ways. It’s hard to get anything to grow up there, and everything is just so… big and empty.” I looked up at the roof. “Down here if you walk for a few minutes you find an animal den or an old building or a wrecked cart or something. Up there it’s just a whole lot of clouds.”

“I’ve lived in this valley my whole life,” the zebra said. “It isn’t empty, but it is small. That’s why I joined the Companions. To leave the valley, to go on the hunt… at least the ice and snow are different.”

She held up her left forehoof. It ended at the wrist.

“And now I might never hunt again…” she whispered, tears in her eyes.

“Don’t be silly,” Smoke-in-Water said, stepping inside. “I heard you from outside. I’m sorry for intruding. I brought mead and some poor company.”

“Poor company?” I asked. Destiny floated in behind him, obviously trying to look annoyed. “Oh.”

“You’ll hunt again, Eagle-Shadow,” Smoke said. “You’re not the first Companion to be wounded honorably in combat and you won’t be the last. Before your time there was a warrior named Gold-Eyes-Snake, and she was a terror in battle. She fought like she was invincible, and ended up losing her hoof. Do you know what she did?”

“She never gave up?” Eagle-Shadow guessed. At least I knew her name now.

“She ripped the arm off a bear and wore it over the stump! She turned her weakness into a weapon.” He gave her a pat on the shoulder. “You don’t have to keep fighting, but if you choose to, we will always have a place for you.”

She nodded, closing her eyes and trying not to cry. Smoke poured some mead into a wooden mug and offered it to her. She took it and sat up to sip at it.

“Are you here to give me the same kind of words of encouragement and support?” I asked Destiny.

The ghost tilted in midair slightly. “Why would I do that?”

“It’s the kind of thing friends do.”

“Friends are honest. You need better medical care than these zebras can give you. Their alchemy is… well, I’m not ashamed to admit it, they’re better at making healing potions than Equestrian science. But they have limits. You need corrective surgery in your right thigh and left shoulder.”

“I’ll just go find a surgeon, then,” I sighed. “How hard could it be?!”

“I’m more worried about your SIVA infection,” Destiny said grimly. “I’ve been doing everything I can to keep it from tearing you apart, but the micromachines are still replicating inside your bloodstream. It’s causing a form of arterial hardening.”

“That doesn’t sound too bad.”

“It’s affecting your blood pressure, and there’s no telling how long before you end up with a heart attack or a stroke. They’re already abrading the more delicate blood vessels in your lungs and tissues. You’ve got constant internal bleeding.”

“That’s not too bad.”

“How is that not bad?”

“Internal bleeding isn’t a big deal. That’s where blood is supposed to be. Inside you.”

Destiny sighed. “Be serious, Chamomile.”

“There’s nothing we can do about it right now,” I said. “The best we can do is find something that kills nanomachines, right? It’ll probably be medicine for me and a weapon against the dragon.”

“You’re right,” Destiny agreed. “At least we’re on the same page. The last thing you need to do is get involved in the tangle of these zebras’ lives.”

“May we speak outside, Sky Lady?” Smoke asked.

“I could use a walk,” I said, getting up and feeling several major joints pop. I did my best not to wince and followed him outside. He walked out of hearing distance of the tent and sat down in front of a keg, tapping it and filling a few more mugs.

“Our problems aren’t yours, Sky Lady,” Smoke said, offering me one of the wooden mugs. I sad down and took the mug, sipping at the mead and trying not to guzzle it down. “We are grateful for your help, but you don’t have to carry our burdens.”

“If it makes you feel better, it seems like most of your problems right now are caused by the raiders. Or cultists. Cultist-raiders?”

Smoke snorted a single laugh. “I suppose so. They’re ruthless and terrible opponents. All these young bears I raised are giving their all, and I have to watch them being cut down. I avoided changing for years because I wanted to raise a new generation, and now I wonder if I trained them well enough, if I did all I could…”

“Sorry,” I said.

He took a deep breath. “The call of the bear spirit is strong. I’ve fought it back so far for so long that I thought it was gone, but the anger I felt seeing so many of these foals hurt…” He looked at the tents, and I saw his eyes glow dully before he grimaced and shook his head, fighting it off. “If I change, I’ll never be able to change back. I’ve forgotten how to fight the call. I fear that before this is over, I’ll have to take the Long Walk.”

I didn’t know how to reply to that. He took a mug of his own and downed it.

“On your journey, if you find anything that might help, I would appreciate it,” he said.

“Maybe Fixer would do something?” Destiny suggested. “I used it a few times when my Mint-al habit got the better of me. It made me throw up for hours but I felt much better afterwards.”

“Do we have Fixer?” I asked.

“No. But we can keep our eyes open for it. I’m sure there’s some in the Cosmodrome somewhere!”

I raised my eyebrow. “You’re awfully willing to help for somepony who keeps telling me not to trust zebras.”

“I don’t trust them. But we’re stuck working with them, and if this is going to keep them from turning into pony-eating berserker monsters, I’m all for it!”

“Don’t be rude, didn’t you see how cute Two-Bears was when she transformed?” I asked. Smoke refilled my mug without me even asking, making him my favorite zebra.

“I saw her rip machine-zombie ponies apart with her bare bear claws.”

“And she made the cutest sad face when she was buried under rubble!”

“Don’t tell her she looked cute or she’ll punch you hard enough to knock you out,” Smoke said. “You’re barely holding together as it is, Sky Lady. And I see a young bear who would be devastated if you fell apart.”

“Sky Lady! Sky Lady!” Walks-in-Shadow waved happily while he ran towards us. “I heard you were awake and feeling better!”

“I’m definitely awake,” I agreed.

“I heard about the battle you had!” His excitement faded and his ears pinned back. “Two-Bears said you couldn’t save anyone.”

“There are fates worse than death, and she spared a brave warrior from that,” Smoke said. “She took victory away from the enemy and avenged the deaths of our Companions.”

“She also got herself nearly killed and wrecked my armor after we’d finally gotten it fixed,” Destiny grumbled.

“Oh! That reminds me! I came to see you because your armor is making a sound. Like this! Beep Beep Beep!”

“...What does that mean?” I looked at Destiny.

“I have no idea. Let’s hope it doesn’t mean it’s about to explode.”

---

“What do you think? We got it all fixed up for you!” Walks-in-Shadow said.

“I didn’t know I got hurt that badly,” I said.

Looking at it from the outside was kind of humbling. The left shoulder wasn’t just dinged up, it was gone. When I’d torn myself free of the abomination’s jaws, it took a chunk of the armor with it. Someone had replaced it with an ornate-looking piece of armor painted bright red and hammered into place.

“I already checked it out,” Destiny said. “It’s fine. If this was normal power armor, a major joint loss like that would be crippling, but remember the Exodus armor uses a T-field sheath, not hydraulics. As long as enough of the thaumoframe is intact and powered, the rest is redundant.”

“As long as it’ll stop a bullet or two, it’s good enough, huh?” I asked.

“Something like that.”

The armor, or something near it, beeped three times.

“There’s that sound!” Walks-in-Shadow said. “What does it mean? Is it angry?”

“That sounds just like a voice mail alarm,” Destiny said. “But it couldn’t be…”

She floated over to DRACO, the rifle making an annoyed noise.

“There’s a transmission logged here!” Destiny bobbed in excitement. I stepped over to look at the screen.

I tried to figure out what I was looking at. “Is it from the Raven’s Nest?! Did Quattro and Emerald get through?”

“It’s--” There was an unpleasant sound and the display started flashing through dozens of different images and files. Distorted music started playing, like a parade march in reverse. “It’s a bunch of different files. What in Tartarus…”

My head started to hurt just looking at it.

“Does it mean anything?” I asked, closing my eyes. Even the music was starting to give me a migraine.

“It reminds me of the stuff we saw in the SPP, from the Warmind.”

I groaned. “So it’s a message from Kulaas? Great. The Greywings spent decades figuring out what she was saying. Maybe if we spend a few years we’ll find out she’s just shy and trying to say hello.”

“It went to a lot of trouble sending this data package to us,” Destiny said. “Let’s try thinking like a Warmind.”

“Destiny, I can barely think like somepony who graduated from High School.”

“Nopony’s perfect. A Warmind wouldn’t be looking at these one at a time. They’d look at them all at once. DRACO, show me the file names in a list.” A list popped up in front of her, scrolling slowly. “Okay, all of the files are numbered, but some have sub-designations. Like there’s images one through ten, but there’s also image 2A and 2B… let’s try stacking the main images on top of each other and excluding the sub-designations.”

I narrowed my eyes at what she was displaying.

“It’s still just a bunch of random lines,” she muttered.

“No, hold on,” I said. “I think this is something. It reminds me of a topographical map. But it’s not just elevation…”

“You’re right! And it’s not vertical slices, either, but… ah! It’s sliced through on an ellipse! It must be data from multiple satellite passes! The rest of the data in each image must be how to unroll it, and the sub-designations show intersecting points to give relationships between the slices… it’s actually extremely efficient.”

“Efficient for what?”

“It’s trying to show us a location.”

“It could have just given us a latitude and longitude!”

“I think, to Kulaas, this amount of data is just as easy to process as simple coordinates. Maybe easier. It doesn’t rely on us knowing anything about latitude or longitude. All it requires is parabolic math. You can in theory derive everything from first principles, while measurements we ponies make are more subjective.”

“I’m going to pretend I know what you’re talking about.”

“You know, with that implant, you can probably do the math yourself. How about I show you--”

“No thanks!” I said very quickly. “I don’t like being reminded I have a computer in my brain.”

“That’s too bad. It always came in handy for me.” Destiny sighed.

“Where’s it pointing to, anyway?” I asked.

“An old lab,” Destiny said quietly.

“One of yours?”

“Yes, but… it was my mom’s lab.”

I swallowed. I’d seen how her mother died in a memory orb that I wasn’t planning on ever revisiting. “That’s rough.”

“I haven’t been there in years. Before I died, I mean. It’s been a lot longer since that, I guess. I know there were still some projects being run out of there but…”

“We don’t have to go,” I said. “There are other places we can check out.”

“If the Warmind thinks we should go, we should go,” Destiny said. “It was designed to make better decisions than any pony. There must be something there it wants us to see.”

“Okay,” I said, patting the floating helmet awkwardly.

“I’ll go with you!” Walks-in-Shadow said.

I smiled at the kid. “We’ve got this. I need you to keep protecting this place with Smoke-in-Water. With all the injured warriors here, it’d be bad if the raiders attacked. They’re counting on you to keep them safe.”

He nodded glumly.

“It’s an important job,” I said. “All the fighting the others are doing will be for nothing if they don’t have somewhere to come home to.”

---

“Is it just me or is this sort of ominous?” I asked.

I’d landed in front of the lab, but I was looking out at what was around us. It was right at the edge of the jungle, and the trees were slowly growing around it, leaving a dead spot around the building.

“Maybe there’s something wrong with the soil?” Destiny suggested. “Plants care about that kind of thing, right?”

“How would I know? Where I come from we don’t have dirt! You’re the scientist!”

“A scientist who studied advanced thaumoengineering, not botany!”

I walked closer to the treeline and kicked at the ground, turning over snow and dirt. Copper wires speckled with green patina were right under the surface, but the moment I found them, they started squirming and shrinking back, recoiling into the earth.

“Weird,” I muttered. “Are they hurt by the light?”

“That doesn’t make any sense. Unless…” She brought up a window. “Something here is broadcasting a signal like the one I use to keep your SIVA mostly deactivated, but they’re doing it in a totally different way.”

“What kind of different way?” I asked, backing away from the jungle edge.

“I just broadcast a constant shutdown command. It’s like constantly yelling ‘stop!’ at them. The signal here is matching the signal coming from the forest repeaters and phase-reversing it to cancel out the broadcast entirely.”

“I’ve got no idea what that means, Destiny,” I reminded her.

“Right, um… a metaphor a pegasus can understand… okay, so imagine you’ve got a headwind. It’s coming at you at ten knots, and you fly forward at ten knots. It pushes you back at the same speed you’re going forward, so you stay still!”

“That’s really not how it works,” I said. “There’s lift and turbulence, and no wind really stays at the same exact speed for long.”

“Exactly! Yes! So imagine somepony who was flying so precisely they were always constantly flying at the windspeed, no matter how much it changed!”

“That’s neat. So can we do the same thing?” I asked. “If you could cancel the broadcasts that way, it wouldn’t suck so bad to go near the trees.”

“No. It’s impossible for a pony to do it. I’d have to predict every change the signal was going to make, and as far as I can tell at a glance it’s essentially random. Maybe there’s some logic behind it I don’t understand, but I think there’s only one brain big enough to do it in practice.”

“Kulaas,” I said. “Which is an easy guess since she sent us the message to come here.”

“An easy guess doesn’t make it less valid. This is promising, though. Let’s get inside.”

The building was in pretty good condition, considering it was all above ground. It looked like it had been put together from modules all designed the same way, boxes with the corners and edges rounded off to make them less imposing. There weren’t a lot of windows, and the ones I could see all had bars or steel shutters over them.

I made my way to the front door. A single light flickered next to the door, popping and finally going out almost the same time I touched the door handle.

“Do you think the signal is what Kulaas wanted to show us?” I asked. “Maybe it’s saying ‘turn your radio to the right frequency and I’ll protect you for a while’.”

“Who knows? It doesn’t think like a pony. Let’s just take a look around before we assume anything.”

That seemed like wise advice, so I pulled open the door and prepared myself for some kind of horror. What was it going to be this time? Raiders shooting at me? Killer robots? Mutant animals? A sudden understanding of my tiny place in the world and the weight of history?

“Huh, this place is kind of…”

I looked around.

“It kind of reminds me of a bathroom,” I decided after a minute. Everything was dirty white composite, some kind of plastic that was slowly degrading over the years. There were tiles on the ground and metal supports, but the smooth white chairs and low dividing walls gave it that kind of once-sterile and now-filthy look.

“Thanks for comparing my legacy to a toilet, Chamomile.”

“I’m just calling it like it is.”

Faint music got my attention, and I followed it behind the front desk and through an office space packed with cubicles and slowly decaying paperwork.

“What kind of projects did they work on here?” I asked, as I walked over a carpet of old forms.

“It was more of the development side of R&D. Figuring out how to turn a discovery into a product. We’d put together something amazing in the lab, and then a few months later they’d come back with a version that was cheaper to make, harder to break, and easy enough for the average pony to use.”

“So there could actually be some useful stuff here,” I said. I opened a door and found myself in an office. Two skeletons greeted me, one collapsed at a desk and the other just inside the door. I backed up and quietly closed the door on the scene.

“Yes, but because they weren’t involved in anything in particular, it could be almost anything,” Destiny said.

I followed the sound down another corridor and stopped, kneeling down to look.

“What’s wrong?” Destiny asked.

“There are scrapes on the ground like something heavy was moved, and the ceiling is collapsed. I think this place was full of rubble a little while ago.” I stood up and carefully walked past the next door and around the corner. A robot was lying there, a pony-shaped automaton made of steel, along with a pile of debris.

“The music is coming from that door we passed,” Destiny whispered.

“I know,” I said quietly. I didn’t think we needed to whisper, but this place was literally a tomb. I trotted back to the door and pushed it open. Inside, it looked like an old garage crossed with my Dad’s office back home, just tons of junk and old books along with tools and workbenches.

“We could spend all day looking around in here,” Destiny said. I walked inside, keeping my eyes open for sudden movement. I was so ready for something to kill us that when I stumbled over an empty Sparkle-Cola bottle I panicked and punched my hoof through a cubicle wall to establish dominance.

“Sorry,” I mumbled. I tried to pull my hoof free.

“Are you stuck?” Destiny groaned. “Just rotate your hoof, you’re trying to pull at the wrong angle and--”

I grunted and yanked, breaking the divider even more.

“There were better ways to do that,” she said. “What if Kulaas wanted us to see something on that wall? What if there was, I don’t know, a computer password written on a whiteboard?”

While she talked, I looked around the workbench. It was full of circuit boards and crystal chips… and a memory orb, sitting in a cradle on the desk.

“I bet this is more important,” I said.

“Maybe it’s a log from one of the researchers?” Destiny mused. “Or it could just be a test run from when we were trying to reverse-engineer recollectors.”

“Either way we should take a look, right?”

“We’re probably not going to find anywhere safer. Just lock the door to make sure that robot outside doesn’t decide to visit while we’re occupied.”

---

The orb had been recorded by a mare. And for once, I knew exactly what she looked like, because when the memory started, she was looking into a mirror. She was middle-aged, with a cream-colored coat speckled with multicolored freckles, like sprinkles on ice cream. I’d seen her before, a little older and a little more dressed up.

It was Destiny’s mother.

“This is Doctor Fetti, recording the first successful Warmind startup test,” she smiled. “I considered using the perceptions of one of my co-workers, but using a mirror ended up being extremely appropriate for the occasion.”

She looked behind her in the mirror to where two other ponies were standing. All three of them were wearing labcoats.

The smaller, portly mare smiled and waved when she noticed Destiny’s mom looking her way.

“These are Doctor Ray Tracer and Doctor Touring. They’ve both been of great help to bringing our spoiled little princess to life. Doctor Touring, why don’t you explain?”

“This is the third time you’re recording the ‘first successful test’,” the taller stallion grumbled.

“It’s eventually going to be a success, Doctor. We should always plan for success and bulwark against failure, not the other way around.”

The stallion sighed and took off his glasses, cleaning them with a small cloth. “Very well. Once again from the top. The Warmind project is an attempt to create an artificial general-purpose intelligence. If it works as we expect, it will be able to make correct decisions.”

“It’s important to specify what we mean by correct decisions,” the plump little mare said. “We don’t mean ‘the kind of decisions a skilled tactician would make’. We mean the kind of decisions you can only make if you have absolute and total information awareness.”

“Indeed,” the stallion sighed. He continued like he was reading a script, which he might well have been doing if this was really their third try at recording this. “A battle is a massive chain of events that are all dependent on one another. History paints battles as two big squares of soldiers crashing into each other, and there might be some mention of weather or logistics or one side ambushing another, but that’s a big picture view. At the atomic level, there are individual soldiers, with their own morale, their own interpretation of their orders, the skills and equipment available to them, their condition and health, the tiny patch of ground they’re standing on, and in a big battle you might have tens of thousands of these individual soldiers all bouncing off against one another.”

The small mare nodded. “Ponies need levels of abstraction to be able to make decisions. A general can’t give a thousand soldiers individual orders. But he can give orders to his officers, and they give orders to squad leaders, and they give orders to each individual pony.”

Destiny’s mom nodded. “And there are other considerations as well. How many soldiers do you need to win this battle Which ones? Is it better for the war effort to send this squad to a different area? Should this battle happen at all? When?”

The stallion waved a hoof vaguely. “Not to mention that at the same time, factories need to be told to make the right supplies, often months in advance of using them. Research and development needs to be pointed in the right direction. Equestria is constantly on the back hoof, reacting to what happened last week and last month and last year and saying ‘never again’ while blind to what will happen in the future.”

“But the Warmind can change that!” Doctor Tracer said, excited. “It will be able to take that fractal amount of information, all the way from the biggest picture in the planning rooms of Canterlot to the soldiers in the trenches, and with that total awareness it can predict the best course of action.”

“Assuming it works this time,” Doctor Touring mumbled.

“It will work,” Destiny’s mom said. “Last time we tried to start from zero. It was just a machine shuffling numbers around. It didn’t have intuition and understanding! This time, the seed program is much more advanced.”

“I wasn’t told about this,” Doctor Touring said, with a frown.

“I was keeping it a surprise to get your honest reaction! Surprise!” Doctor Fetti waved her hooves in front of her. “We were given some design documents by one of our trusted sources. A method to record a pony’s entire mind and run it like a computer program!”

“Impossible. You’d need something…” he hesitated.

“At least as powerful as one of the prototype Crusader-class Maneframes, or in other words, basically nothing compared to our Warmind project.”

“Are you sure a pony mind can withstand the amount of information we’re talking about?” Doctor Tracer asked.

“I’m sure a pony mind can’t,” Destiny’s mother admitted. “The Warmind systems will augment it and grow exponentially. But at the core, it will have been a pony once. Instead of building up to something that can weigh options and make decisions, we start with a system that can.”

“I hope that whoever’s mind is being used as the seed can handle that much cognitive stress,” Doctor Touring groused. “It’s more likely they’ll be driven insane than anything else. Did you even consult the Ethics Committee?”

“It’s fine. I used my own brain scan,” Destiny’s mother said, almost dismissively. “I know I can take it.”

She put her hoof on a big red lever and pulled. The lighting in the room changed, and she looked up to a screen that erupted into shimmering light with the sound of every instrument in an orchestra playing the same note at the same time.

---

I blinked and looked around, feeling half-blind and half-deaf after that explosion of color and sound in my head.

“That was… Kulaas being born?” I asked.

“I’m not sure I’m up to answering a lot of questions right now,” Destiny said. “I’m reeling from the implication that my mother put a copy of herself into a supercomputer and so she’s sort of alive? Or does she count as a kind of step-sister since Mom created her? Does she think of me that way? What does she want?”

“You sound like you’re doing okay.”

“I’m having a panic attack. Maybe more than one at the same time. I could really use some Mint-als, some vodka, and maybe a therapist but I’m too dead to have the first two and I have no idea where to even start with the last one.”

“You know what, I’m just gonna…” I took the helmet off and put it on the desk. “I’ll let you have a few minutes to yourself, okay?” I shook out my mane, Helmet hair was real and it was becoming a problem. I needed to see if anyone in the zebra village knew how to give a decent manecut.

I patted her gently and walked off a bit, taking a deep breath. The whole place smelled like dust.

Would Kulaas really take us here just to show us its baby video? It was smarter than me, smarter than anypony. It had started out as a pony’s mind two hundred years ago and now it was evolved so far beyond us that even communication was difficult, like a pony trying to have a conversation with an ant.

It had recognized something in us back at the SPP tower when I’d pulled a command code out of my flank thanks to the used hardware in my skull. It had given us DRACO, and at the time I thought it was just because a gun was a really polite gift to give to somepony you barely knew, but I think the gun didn’t matter and what it really wanted was to make sure we had a computer that could receive its transmissions and decipher them.

And maybe that link went both ways. Was Kulaas listening in on everything DRACO saw? It would probably be trivial for it. But at the same time, it didn’t feel like a threat. It was more like… a goddess watching from far away. The memory orb wasn’t just a random discovery or because it felt nostalgic, Kulaas wanted to show us that particular orb for a reason.
It wanted us to trust it. Specifically, it wanted Destiny to trust it. It was pretty blunt emotional manipulation, but it was working and… I sort of trusted it already anyway. I didn’t think it meant to hurt us.

Something caught my eye. One of the terminals was still working, dim light shining from the monitor. I turned to yell to Destiny, but stopped before saying anything. It’d be better to take a closer look before bothering her, right?

I tapped one of the keys, and it asked me for a password. I’d already reached the limit of my ability. I rolled my eyes and-- the screen flickered and distorted, and the password appeared before entering itself.

“Okay, that’s weird…” I mumbled.

Now I was looking at a list of files with glitchy, random names. I tried opening one, and the computer just gave me an error and went back to the list. Maybe it wasn’t weird, maybe it was just broken. I tapped the arrow key and scrolled through, ignoring the junk files. Then one caught my eye, because it was the only one with a name instead of a bunch of garbage letters and symbols.

“Valkyrie protocols?” I opened the file, and the computer hung for a second, ancient fans spinning up as it struggled to do what I asked. Images started flashing across the screen, drawn by vectors and struggling to show in a wireframe something complex and massive. It was like a CAT scan, slices through space, but every slice was in the limited three dimensions the computer could show.

DRACO beeped, and I looked at its screen to see what was going on. It was downloading the file without even being asked.

“What is that?” Destiny asked. I flinched. I hadn’t heard her floating up to me, probably because it was totally silent.

“I don’t know. It was on the computer and…” I shrugged.

She made a sound that was halfway between disapproval and curiosity. She watched the images flash by.

“I know what this is,” she said, after a few moments. “It’s a blueprint. It’s showing different layers and how to build them up… it’s how we made solid-state chips. And SIVA. I think these are plans for a micromachine.”

“We’ve got enough problems with them already,” I said.

“Yeah, but… this part. And this here!” She floated over to the keyboard and tapped a few keys, the images changing to a long list of dense text. “According to the attached reference sheets, this is a nano-disassembler. It’s an Anti-SIVA micromachine!”

“It is? What does that even mean?” I could feel my hopes rising.

“Think of it as SIVA’s natural predator. It’s optimized to hunt down SIVA nanomachines and disable them. Since SIVA is designed to be a general-purpose constructor, it’s not particularly efficient, so anything made specifically to kill it has a huge advantage!”

“Does that mean… we have a cure?”

“...No,” Destiny said after a minute, firmly dashing my hopes against the rocks. “I’m pretty sure this would rip out your implants and kill you, but that’s not a cure.”

“Not a cure, and it’d probably kill me, too. Awesome.”

“There are command codes here. A whitelisting process. I think we can make it safe for you to handle. If we can make it at all.”

“...If?”

“It’s not like the zebras are going to be able to bang out micromachines on an anvil, Chamomile! Making them requires a clean room and tons of specialized equipment. You need to be able to manipulate materials down to the atomic level. There aren’t many tools that can do that. We’ll need to salvage electron microscopes, a vacuum chamber--”

“Woah, woah. I’ve got a better idea.”

“You have a better idea on how to build an extremely advanced nano-scale weapon? I’d love to hear it, Chamomile, because I happen to be an expert and I can’t think of anything!”

“SIVA makes more of itself,” I pointed out. “So it can make these things too.”

“Well… that’s…” Destiny sputtered. “I would have thought of that myself eventually!”

I smirked, feeling particularly clever.

---

That feeling lasted all the way back to the village. Until I saw the smoke.

I flew in hard and fast. A bullet bounced off my armor, and I knew I wasn’t too late. I’d missed the beginning of this mess but I hadn’t arrived after the end. DRACO outlined a shape in bright hostile red for me, and I dropped straight down on it, letting the raider break my fall.

“Sky Lady!” A zebra waved at me from the shadow of one of the huts. It took me a second to recognize Wheel-of-Moon, the village elder. “Thank the winds! They came through the hidden way!”

I glanced up at the path she meant. It was a narrow winding pass, just barely wide enough for what the zebra used it for - getting in and out of the village to hunt and scavenge in the tundra outside the volcanic valley. I’d gone through it before with Walks-in-Shadow. How had they found it?

“Do you know how many there are?” I asked.

“Five? Perhaps six?” She didn’t sound sure.

I nodded. At least it was something to go on. I could take a half-dozen of them by myself. My head jerked up at the sound of gunfire, from the path to the Companions’ encampment.

“Get everyone you can to safety,” I said. I waited for her to nod before rushing off. I had to hope they had somewhere safe to go. I took to the air, ignoring the pain in my legs from the hard landing. I spotted two more raiders, right in front of a burning home.

“I’ve got enough charge for a force bolt,” Destiny said.

“You get one and I’ll take the other one!” I yelled, swooping down and flying just over the ground, coming at them from the side. The magical bolt knocked one off his hooves and into a garden, slamming head-first into the dirt. The other one turned to look at me and opened up jaws like a bear trap, breathing out a cone of flame.

I soared through it and picked him up before looping up into the air, still moving as fast as I could. He struggled in my grasp, so after I’d gained some altitude I just let go. He looked surprised all the way down. The one Destiny had shot started to get up, until his friend landed on him and ruptured, spilling out whatever fuel was powering that fire breath.

They exploded into flames.

Two zebras escaped from the other side of the burning house. I gave them a quick wave, and they waved back before bolting away from the flames and the danger.

Another gunshot rang out, followed by a terrible roar. I flew towards it, and I found them at the bottleneck between the village and the Companions’ campsite. The passage was splattered with gore. I hadn’t been too late to get to the village but I’d been too late to get here.

Three raiders were lying in the dirt, but so was one white-furred bear wearing a silvery, shining blanket like a cape.

I landed next to him, and he looked up at me before making a pitiful sound and shrinking in on himself, bones twisting painfully and slowly as Walks-in-Shadow turned back.

“Sky Lady…” he gasped, coughing up blood.

“Hold on,” I said. “Destiny, give me whatever potions we’ve got left.”

“We don’t have anything,” Destiny whispered. “I used the last of your medical supplies when your shoulder got ripped apart.”

“Smoke-in-Water… he went to guard the pass,” Walks-in-Shadow whispered. “Can you tell him… I fought well?”

“You’ll tell him yourself,” I said, grabbing his hoof and squeezing. He smiled and closed his eyes. “No! Stay with me!”

“It might not be too late,” Destiny said. “We need to go get help!”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “We’ll--” I saw movement. Light and shadows inside the Companions’ Hall. “There’s more of them. They must have slipped past Walks-in-Shadow.” I unlatched the helmet and took it off. Destiny floated out of my hooves. “You go get the elders and bring them back here. I’ll deal with the stragglers.”

“Got it,” Destiny agreed, flying off as quickly as she could hover.

I gave Walks-in-Shadow a gentle pat and adjusted his silver blanket before rushing up to the wooden hall, bursting through the door. The cloaked pony inside jerked in surprise, dropping what he was holding. Rockhoof’s Shovel fell to the floor, sinking in blade-deep.

I slammed the intruder into the wall. I flipped my hoofblade into place and stabbed, and the point hung in the air, just barely held back by a pale grey aura.

“I did not come here to harm anyone!” the pony said. In the light of his aura, I could see he was an older, bearded unicorn stallion. He looked positively ancient, but his eyes burned with a determined light. Importantly, I didn’t see any sign of SIVA infection. No cybernetics or steel plating. Not even proper barding.

“You’ve got a funny way of showing it,” I growled.

“I had nothing to do with the raiders. I was merely using their attack as a convenient distraction. There aren’t many places on the timeline where I can do what I need.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I backed off a step, but held my knife at the ready. If he was going to try anything, I could throw it and have a decent chance of catching him before he could get a spell off. “Who are you?”

“You don’t need to know my name. I’m trying not to interfere in events,” he said, brushing himself off. “I was hoping to avoid even being noticed. That’s why I came here now. You would have assumed the raiders just took the shovel.”

I frowned. “You haven’t done a great job. This is at least the third time I’ve seen you.”

“I suppose so,” the stallion sighed. “I need Rockhoof’s Shovel.”

“It doesn’t belong to you.”

“No, it doesn’t. My hooves aren’t the right ones for this gift, but I know where it needs to go.” He sighed. “I don’t even have time to explain all the things I don’t have time to explain! I’ll give you fair trade for it.”

“What do you mean?”

“You need more advanced medicine than these primitives can offer. I can tell you where to get it. In return, I need Rockhoof’s shovel.”

I only hesitated for a second. I tossed the shovel to him, and he caught it in his hooves, like his magic slipped off it.

“Deal. Now tell me where I need to go to save my friend.”

Comments

[Thought Prism]

Oh, dang. I didn't see that coming. And honestly, those zebra repairing the armor picked the right color. I'd say Cammy has more than earned the name Red Shoulder at this point.

[Ahsoka Tano]

the real Doctor has arrived. :P