Fallout Equestria: Blue Destiny

by MagnetBolt

Chapter 53 - Death on Four Legs

“Dimension Pliers?” Cube asked. The Black Pyramid was silent as it floated in the gym, surrounded by spotlights and equipment trying desperately to tease some sort of answers out of it. At least I think it was silent? There was an itch in my ears like it was humming or buzzing just a little, juuuust outside the range of my hearing.

“Yeah, that’s what she said.” I shrugged. “I’m not actually sure what they are. I thought you might have some idea where we’d find them.”

“You came to the right pony! They’re a magical tool used to make some kinds of talismans,” Cube said. “It’s kind of a big chunky thing as long as your foreleg and sort of…” she thought for a moment. “Imagine a tuning fork, a vice grip, and a jackhammer all jammed together. That’s sort of what it looks like.”

“Huh. Do you have some?”

“No. I know where we can get some,” Cube said. She put down the tablet she was holding. “My transport enhancers were made using a set, so we just have to take a trip to the ponies who made them. Easy!”

“Is this going to be some kind of long trip where we end up on a secret mission to infiltrate a Stable and steal the Pliers from some kind of evil Overmare?” I asked.

“You know, sometimes missions do just go as planned,” Cube said. “Most of the time when I go on a mission, everything’s just fine! It's not my fault you're a jinx. I can send a message to the Reification Lab and we’ll requisition a set. What do you even need them for?”

“Apparently if we use them right, we can get rid of that thing.” I nodded to the Pyramid. “Destiny’s working on the math.”

“Oh no, no, no, you can’t do that!” Ornate Orate came over, looking more haggard than usual. “This is a wonderful, beautiful creation! You can’t just talk about destroying it like that!”

“Every time I’m around this ‘beautiful creation’ I get a migraine,” Cube groused. “And it’s making me see things. Don’t pretend you haven’t noticed that this whole place is basically haunted now!”

“It is somewhat disconcerting,” Professor Ornate agreed. “I actually have a theory regarding that! I don’t believe it’s intentionally harmful, but it’s more like, ah, imagine trying to read a book in another language.”

I shrugged. “You just translate it.” Dad had forced me to learn Old Griffonese and the basics of Minotauran. They were unbelievably useless skills, but at least I’d be all set to chat up the locals if I got flung three thousand years into the past.

“What if you can’t?” the Professor asked. “Assume a language you don’t recognize. You might find a message written in it and start translating and simply get things wrong. I believe the pyramid is attempting to communicate, but it doesn’t speak our language, and of course when I say ‘our language’ I mean the way our minds work. What we see as ghosts and darkness may simply be its attempts to reach out and make peaceful contact!”

“Or it could be haunted,” I said. “Ghosts are very real and I can go get one and she can tell you so herself.”

“This is a precious, probably unique artifact,” Professor Orate said. “It’s unethical to talk about destroying it. What we need to do is learn about it, understand it, and develop methods to mitigate any negative effects. Fire is dangerous, but if we’d reacted to its discovery by stamping it out, we would be living in caves and eating raw grass. Yes, we risk being burned, but that is part of any discovery!”

“Don’t try reasoning with them.” Cypher Decode shoved past me, or at least tried to. Mostly he just bounced off. “They can’t see it. This is how we move the Enclave forwards! We can use this and regain all that we’ve lost and more!”

“You have no idea what it is or what it can do,” Cube said.

“I don’t need to hear that from you!” Cypher spat. “I don’t care what you Internal Affairs ponies think. This is going to make me the most important pony in the Enclave… the most important pony in the world!”

“It’s just a bucking evil triangle!” I snapped, my head starting to hurt. If I looked at the black shape too long some part of me tried to make sense of the way it spun and moved and my brain wasn’t built to visualize that.

“It’s so much more than that,” Cypher whispered, staring up at it, enraptured. “It can do so much, it’s promised me so many things…”

“It promised you?” Cube asked, frowning.

Cypher tore himself away from it, but something of the darkness in it stayed in his eyes when he looked at us. “You’re not the only ones who can ask for favors,” the officer said. “I’ll contact every pony I have to and get you removed from here.”

“Good luck with that,” Cube laughed. “Come on, Chamomile. We’ve got some calls to make.”

---

A few hours later, Cube and I were waiting outside the school. We’d decided to wait out in the open without even needing to discuss it between us. The school looked sinister from here, the windows dark and the clouds it was built from starting to seem stormy.

“I don’t like this whole situation,” Cube said, pacing back and forth on top of a bench. It put her almost at head height with me since I was sitting on the ground.

“Which part do you like least?” I asked. “The ominous polygon or the ponies starting to worship it?”

Cube snorted. “I’m just glad you seem to be immune to it. I wouldn’t want to have to kill you.”

“Because we’re family?”

“Because you’re a really annoying pony to try and kill.”

I shrugged. “I can’t deny that’s true. I have annoyed a lot of ponies who have tried to kill me.” I was of course humble about that. “Do you think they’re going to be a problem when we get back?”

“Yes,” Cube said bluntly. “They’re already questioning our authority, and that stupid political officer is already wrapped around its hoof. Metaphorically. I’m having problems even reading their minds now. They’re still open books compared to you, but something’s casting a shadow over the pages and it’s hard to make out the words.”

“That sounds extraordinarily bad.”

“It’s why I want to get this over with as soon as we can. We were just supposed to come here to look at some stupid broken airship parts, not get involved in some kind of huge disaster!”

I gave Cube a pat on the shoulder. “Welcome to every day of my life.”

The dull thumping drone of a VertiBuck’s overloaded engines caught my ear, and I looked up to see our ride arriving. Cube waved to the pilots, and the troop transport swung down, blasting us with the prop wash as it landed next to us. The armored door slid open, and a familiar face looked out at us, giving us a salute.

“Good to see you again, Ma’am!” Lieutenant Jet Stream shouted over the engine noise. “I hope you’re not dragging my soldiers into the same kind of mess as last time!”

Cube floated herself into the VertiBuck. “We’re still trying to fix the same mess,” she said. “Stupid ponies made stupid decisions and I have to fix them, like always!”

I let Jet Stream help me up, taking his hoof and hopping into the transport. “For once, I’m not the stupid pony, so I feel like things are getting better!”

Jet Stream laughed. “It’s always good when it’s somepony else’s turn to make a mistake!”

---

“Remember, you just let me do the talking,” Cube said. “The ponies here aren’t going to be happy we’re taking some of their equipment, and if they really push back they can probably screw things up for weeks by demanding more paperwork.”

“Are you going to be polite and make them want to help, or are you going to threaten them until they give in?” I asked.

“I’ll start with politeness, and if that doesn’t work I’ve got a VertiBuck and a fireteam of elite soldiers,” Cube said. “Unfortunately for both of us, this isn’t the surface. There are rules here and I can’t just do what I want and get this done quickly.”

“We might have a problem!” Lieutenant Jet Stream shouted back over the engine noise. “The pilot’s telling me the rad counter is picking up some strange readings up ahead!”

“There shouldn’t be any radiation here!” Cube shot back. “Is it malfunctioning?”

“Doesn’t look like it.” Jet Stream nodded to the soldiers he’d brought. “Masher, Grouse, radiological supplies!”

The two opened up supply boxes, bringing out plastic bottles and sealed pouches, passing some to me and Cube.

“We’re pretty resistant to radiation,” I said. “We don’t really need these.”

“Take them anyway,” Jet Stream said. “It’s doesn’t cost you anything to carry them, but if you do find out you need them later, you’ll be glad to have them on you and not sitting in a cabinet somewhere nice and safe!”

I shrugged and stuffed them into pockets.

“Ma’am, any idea why there might be radiation here?” Masher asked, rubbing his snout and looking at us.

“Is there any unusual weather?” Cube asked. “Maybe it’s some kind of wild surface radstorm that’s breaking through the cloud base! I’ve heard it can happen if the winds are strong enough!”

She hopped up towards the front of the VertiBuck to look and I followed, wanting to see for myself.

“Look!” She pointed past the pilot. “See that black cloud?”

“That looks more like smoke to me,” I said.

“Looks like it to me, too,” Jet Stream agreed. “The lab should be right over there. It’s a unicorn facility, built on top of the mountain. Pilot, try hailing them on the radio! See if they’re having some kind of trouble! We might need to get fire and medical out here if they had an accident!”

“Yes sir, I’m-- ah!” The pilot jerked in surprise. “Something’s wrong with the radio!”

Jet Stream frowned “Define ‘wrong’!”

The pilot flipped a switch, putting the radio on the intercom. A static-filled whispering hiss blasted out of the speakers. I could almost make out some words, but everything was wrong.

“I think…” Cube frowned, listening. “That’s somepony speaking backwards. I don’t know if it’s even in Equestrian.”

“Speaking backwards?” I asked. “Why?”

“They’re jamming the radio,” Jet Stream decided. “It’s classic electronic warfare, taught us about it in school. Never thought I’d see it myself. If you get a powerful enough transmitter, you just blast nonsense over the airwaves and nopony else can talk!”

I shook my head. “Great, but who’s doing it?”

“Probably them, Ma’am!” the pilot said. He pointed ahead of us. For a second I thought it was a bolt of lightning, but it lingered, the bright light a crack in the sky that widened and opened up, showing an impossible place behind it for a moment like an inverted night sky of white void and black stars. I only got the smallest glimpse of it before something started moving through the rift, blocking my view with a wall of blackened, burned steel.

“No way,” Cube said. “No bucking way have things gone this wrong already!”

A Raptor-class Cloudship ripped out of nowhere and into the sky, the captive storms caged at its sides wrapped in new layers of pitted iron and burning radioactive green. The rad counter on the VertiBuck’s control panel moved from the green and into the yellow.

“I know that ship,” I said. “Buck!”

“You-- what is it?” Cube asked. “How many enemies have you bucking made?!”

“It was near Thunderbolt Shoals last time I saw it,” I said. “There were a bunch of Raptors from the Cloudsdale defense force. They got caught in the wash of a Balefire detonation and the wrecks were too radioactive to use for parts. Or at least that’s what somepony told me. They vanished a couple weeks ago.”

“And nopony looked into where they went?” Jet Stream asked. “Raptors don’t grow on trees!”

“They were half-forgotten scrap!” I retorted. “They were dealing with bigger problems.”

“I think she’s right,” the pilot said. “Look at it! There are corrosion holes all through the hull!”

“What the buck is it doing here?” Cube asked. “Who’s crewing it?”

“Did I mention they were crawling with undead last time I was there?” I asked. “That might be important.”

A wave of light washed over the Raptor, runes glowing in sequence across its hull. The main turret slowly turned to track us, the burned and twisted metal jerking as it came to bear.

“You don’t think that thing can fire, do you?” Jet Stream asked.

Everypony gave him a look. A ring of energy flickered at the end of the cannons, hanging in the air and growing brighter.

“Aw damnit, I jinxed us,” he mumbled, just barely audible over the engine roar.

The pilot moved fast, kicking a lever all the way up and pushing on the control yoke, sending us into a sharp dive. A beam of something awful screamed overhead, a thin, jagged stream of energy that sputtered and burst along its length with gouts of fire, swerving to try and hit us.

“Take us down through the clouds!” I yelled.

“On it!” the pilot replied. The world turned white, and the sounds from outside muffled. The pilot immediately put us into a bank, getting us away from our old flight path.

“That should buy us a minute,” I said. “Can you get to the lab just on instruments?”

“Radar’s getting a decent return on the mountainside, but what we need to do is get out of here and bring back an army!” the pilot said. “We can’t take on a cloudship!”

“No, she’s right for once,” Cube said. “I don’t believe in coincidence. This attack is happening because we were coming here. We’ll go in and grab what we need before they can get to it.”

“And evacuate the survivors,” I added.

Cube rolled her eyes. “Duh, obviously,” she said. From the way she said it, I got the distinct impression she hadn’t been intending on that at all.

“Right,” Jet Stream said. “Grouse, Masher -- hot drop situation. The second we leave the transport, we get under hard cover. The weapon that cloudship was using isn’t like anything in our arsenal, but we’re going to assume they’re willing to use it as artillery support. If we get inside, we might be safe. They haven’t leveled the place yet, so they might not want to damage the lab.”

“I’m not going to stick around to pick you back up,” the pilot warned.

“How long can you fly a holding pattern below the clouds?” Jet Stream asked.

“I can take her around the mountain for a few hours. If I can find somewhere to set down, I could stay until something comes to get me, but I don’t fancy cooling my heels with the engines switched off.”

“Okay. Two hours,” Jet Stream nodded. “If we haven’t contacted you by then, you get yourself out of here and get word out about what happened.”

“Roger,” the pilot said. He glanced at his instruments. “I’m bringing us around the mountain. I’ll put as much rock as I can between us and that ship.”

“Good thinking, soldier,” Jet Stream said, patting his shoulder and looking back at me. I nodded and opened the armored hatch, clouds whipping past us in a wall of white. The engines pitched up, and we breached through the thick layer of nimbus. I could smell the ionized air around us, a stink that made the coat on the back of my neck stand on end.

“Everypony out!” I yelled, shoving Cube through the open door and jumping after her. I tucked and rolled, bouncing on the soft clouds. The VertiBuck spent only a few seconds in the clear air before diving again, tearing through the white and vanishing from sight.

“Move!” Jet Stream yelled. I bolted, getting into the air even before I was oriented, feeling that urge to just get away from where I had been, like a hammer was about to slam down right where we’d been.

The mountain top the lab sat on just barely poked through the cloud layer, a mountain peak dominated by a concrete and steel fortress buttressed with clouds and the telltale signs of constant wear and repair.

We all flew for the shadow of the wall, setting down on solid ground and regrouping almost like we were trained professionals. It probably helped that I was the only one that wasn’t actually trained.

“Anypony hurt?” Jet Stream asked.

“Everything’s good here,” Masher said.

“Wish we actually had some decent firepower with us,” Grouse mumbled.

“On that note, what do we have?” Jet Stream asked.

We quickly took inventory. Between us, we had six beam pistols, two rifles, a few knives, and one grenade that Masher had tucked away in a pocket. Grouse had a small first aid kit, but it wouldn’t be good for much.

“Not much,” I said. “At least we’ve got plenty of anti-rad drugs.”

“You ponies are lucky I came armed,” Cube said. She levitated her four beam pistols into the air, letting them hover around her in a cloud of her aura. “As long as you ponies watch my flanks, I can do the real work.”

“Are you sure you don’t want a gun?” Masher asked me.

“I’ll be fine,” I said. I flicked the knife in my foreleg out and then back in again.

“Oh great, she’s one of those special forces mares that really buys into that ‘guns for show, knives for pros’ bull,” Grouse said, rolling his eyes.

Cube snickered. I felt my ears burn red. I almost started yelling at him about my kill count and then felt even more ashamed because I was one dumb sentence away from bragging about killing ponies like it was a good thing.

“I’m on point,” I growled, storming past him and trying to hide what I was feeling. It was too many emotions and I didn’t like any of them.

We got to the next corner of the building before things went bad. Worse, I mean. I sensed it happening all up and down my spine and didn’t know what I was feeling until it was too late. A patch of the narrow path of rock between the cliffside and wall started glowing, and in a flash of light accompanied by a crackle I could feel in my teeth, a pack of ponies appeared.

“Are those ghouls?” Grouse asked, swinging his rifle to the ready.

I shook my head. The thin, wasted ponies hissed, skin and muscle pulling away from the bone underneath. A third eye drilled into their foreheads burned with the same baleful light as in their empty eye sockets.

“Worse,” I answered.

The undead charged, more coordinated than the feral ghouls on the surface had been. Those had been a bunch of individuals, getting in each other’s way. The zombies here were a pack. They weren’t damaged, broken ponies broken down to their base instincts, they were monsters wearing pony skin.

Cube stepped up next to me and the pistols she was levitating launched out, spinning in the air and moving faster than any pony could manage on their own, swooping through the air and firing shot after shot, diving from above and cutting through the horde. One broke through the wall of laser fire and I braced myself to take the charge, but more shots came from behind me and cut it down.

The last of the undead dropped, and Cube sighed, retrieving her guns and quickly reloading them.

“Looks like the little lady is going to be showing us up,” Masher said, amused. “Too bad you didn’t bring your power armor, huh?” He smirked at me.

“Worry more about the things trying to kill us and less about the way I’m dressed,” I warned him.

“That’s why you get all the ladies, Masher,” Jet Stream said. “You really know how to talk to them.”

“Don’t worry, you can cover me when I need to reload,” Cube said. “You’re all equally good as meat shields.”

Grouse knelt down just outside the ring that had appeared on the ground and deposited the monsters. The runes were gone now, leaving a burned ellipse on the rock. “Deploying troops with some kind of teleportation spell?” he asked.

“It’s not impossible,” Cube said. “I can teleport one or two ponies with me if I have transport enhancers.”

“Then why didn’t you teleport us inside?” I asked.

“One -- I don’t have transport enhancers with me. Two -- I don’t know the layout of the building and we could end up causing a lot of damage. Three -- we can’t teleport anywhere with the Dimension Pliers once we retrieve them. That’s why we brought the VertiBuck in the first place!”

“Ugh, fine, okay, don’t bite my head off,” I mumbled. “How am I supposed to know about teleporting?”

Cube shook her head. “You aren’t. That’s why I’m here. We need to get inside. If they’re using line of sight teleportation they can do that again and again until they run out of zombies.”

Jet Stream nodded and motioned to Masher. The soldier carefully walked around the side of the building. He peeked around the side then ducked back.

“Good news, found a way in,” Masher said. “Bad news, we’re not the first ponies to get here.”

The rest of us took turns looking. More zombies were lurking in the remains of what had been a security door and was now twisted metal. From the deep, still-glowing burn mark across the face of the fortress and trailing down to the rock, I guessed the Cloudship had blown it open with that energy weapon it was using.

“You’re familiar with these hostiles,” Jet Stream said, quietly. “What should we be ready for?”

“That last pack was just zombies,” I said. “They’re not a huge threat on their own. Watch for anything bigger. If anything starts throwing around evil-looking fire, shoot it first. If it’s got a sword, get the buck away from it. They like setting traps, too.”

“This gets better all the time,” Grouse said.

“All this talking is pointless. We’re just going to storm the front door,” Cube said. “We need to go inside and we can’t blow open the wall.”

I shrugged and nodded.

Cube checked her pistols and walked out without even giving us warning. Jet Stream swore and ran after her, reacting faster than I did. Zombies poured out of the shadows, popping up from blind corners and coming in a wave, dozens swarming towards Cube.

I learned one thing very quickly in the first few moments watching her. First, beam pistols were a lot more dangerous than I thought. They’d never really seemed like a big deal to me. I’d been shot a few times and they were annoying and painful, but I hadn’t thought of them as deadly until I saw what they did to unarmored targets.

Cube really was worth a whole squad of ponies on her own. She gunned down zombies, even hitting ones in what should have been blind spots with her floating array of weapons. For a solid minute she was a killing machine, and then she ran out of ammunition.

“Reloading!” She called out. “Cover me!”

She stepped back and I just sort of stood there feeling useless as the three trained soldiers formed a firing line and held the wave back until Cube finished swapping batteries and blasted through the rest of the undead.

Everything was quiet for a moment, and all of us looked around, checking the shadows in the abrupt peace.

“Easy,” Cube boasted. She looked back at me and smirked. “Maybe I didn’t need to bring you along!”

“I don’t mind taking a break,” I said. “I’d rather do it out of the weather, though.” I looked up. The black shape of the burned Raptor was starting to emerge from a bank of twisted cloud and smoke.

“Everypony inside!” Jet Stream barked, waving. They took to the air, skimming just above the surface and winging toward the open door. I ran along the ground, keeping next to Cube. Masher and Grouse suddenly pulled away, diving for cover, and I spotted the movement inside and shoved her to the side, shielding my face and jumping the other way. A grenade exploded in the air between us, shrapnel peppering my skin.

“Oh buck,” Grouse swore. A pony in thick steel armor stepped out of the doorway, the Steel Ranger armor pitted and blackened with age. The grenade launcher moved to track the thing’s gaze.

I’ll give Cube this -- she takes after me in that she absolutely does not hesitate to bite off more than she can chew. She was bleeding from shrapnel wounds and was still able to focus enough to fire a barrage of laser blasts at the power armored undead. Not that it did anything. The armor just deflected or absorbed the beams.

“Fire in the hole!” Masher yelled. He tossed his grenade, and it bounced and rolled right under the Steel Ranger. It looked down, and the explosive went off with a sharp crack, the Steel Ranger falling to its knees in a burst of flame and smoke.

“Got him!” Grouse called out, sounding happy for once. “Nice throw!”

The armored monster shuddered back into motion, getting back up and turning to face Masher. The stupidest thing I could have done was run at it armed with just a knife, and I was a really stupid pony, so I was halfway there before I realized how bad of an idea it really was.

I slammed into the wall of steel and threw off its aim, sending the grenade flying wild into a pile of rotting corpses. The Steel Ranger might have already been dead, but the zombie had a great reaction time, totally unburdened by the confusion that a living pony might have felt as it immediately turned and tried to bowl me over with a shove from the armor’s piston-powered foreleg.

I caught it, my hooves digging into the ground and finding purchase. The armor strained, poorly-maintained hydraulics and talismans straining. I shifted my grip, freeing my right forehoof, and popped my knife, bringing it down on the knee joint of the leg I was holding. In a shower of sparks, I slashed right through it, the edges glowing red-hot from the sudden violence. The zombie stumbled, unbalanced, black ichor pouring out of the wound.

I spun around and kicked it in the chest, knocking it down and jumping on top of it, riding it to the dirt. The grenade launcher twisted on its mount, trying to aim at me. I stabbed through it and into the dirt, slicing it off the armor and tossing it aside before grabbing the zombie’s helmet and tearing, stabbing into the metal and meat, straining and finally overcoming the tempered steel’s limits.

The head came free along with the helmet, and I threw it aside like garbage, kicking the twitching, already dead mass.

I wiped rotting, toxic blood off my face. Jet Stream’s squad was just staring at me. Even Cube seemed impressed.

“What?” I asked. “You’ve never had to get your hooves dirty?”

“Good thing we brought our own monster to deal with the ones here,” Jet Stream said, breaking the silence and walking over to pat my shoulder. “Got ourselves a real ace!” He turned back to the other soldiers. “Remember, try to find survivors! Stick together! Shoot the big ones!”

“Very motivational,” Cube said, dripping with sarcasm. She stopped at the doorway and looked at me. I got the hint and took point, walking in first.

The first thing that hit me was the stink of fresh blood. I was getting way too familiar with what dead ponies looked and smelled like. There were corpses everywhere. A few of them had at least a suggestion of body armor, but I didn’t see any weapons heavier than a baton and a lone beam pistol.

“This place wasn’t ready for an attack like this,” I said.

“Of course not,” Jet Stream said. “This is the Enclave. It’s supposed to be safe here. This kind of thing is only supposed to happen on the surface.”

“Why bother building this place like a fortress if you aren’t going to defend it?” I asked.

Jet Stream shrugged. “You know how it is. You’re in the military. Every time there’s a shakeup in the change of command, we get to see all the cracks around the edges. A place like this is a tempting target if Thunderhead or Neighvaro start butting heads, but that comes with a lot of warning. Plenty of time to bring a couple ships here to form a perimeter.”

“Yeah, Chamomile, you know how it is,” Cube teased.

We walked past the first broken barricade and into the flickering lights of the next room, which was some kind of reception area.

“Keep your eyes open,” I said. “Those things like to set traps. I’ve seen magical barriers and these floating skull things that shot some kind of magic fire that went right through power armor.”

“Look at this,” Cube said. She cast a light spell, shining it on the wall.

“Zebra runes,” I decided.

“Zebra?” Masher asked.

“Did I forget to mention that these things are lead by zebra necromancers?” I asked.

“You did skip that detail,” Grouse mumbled.

“Just assume that there’s a lot of Bad Stuff,” I said.

Before I could start elaborating on what Bad Stuff was, a hacking cough had all of us turning to a corner of the room. Masher fired a wild shot that, thankfully, went into the wall, because when Cube’s light spell spilled into the corner, we found a wounded unicorn mare trying to hold back an awful lot of bleeding and losing.

“We got a survivor!” Jet Stream snapped. “Grouse!”

The soldier slung his rifle and ran over, popping his first aid kit open and kneeling next to the injured pony.

“We didn’t think word got out,” the mare gasped. She had to be in agony. “Thank the stars.”

“You’re going to be okay,” Jet Stream said. He was so sure that it almost sounded like the truth and not a wild lie. “Can you tell us what happened?”

“They came out of nowhere,” the mare said. “A few hours ago they just appeared out of these huge rifts in the sky. We held them off for a little while, but then they teleported on top of us. Most of the survivors ran for the Spatial Flexure section. It’s shielded against teleportation.”

“They left you behind?” I asked.

“I stayed back to cover them, but one of the big ones just… stabbed me and shoved me out of the way, like it didn’t even care if I lived or died.” She laughed, blood splattering from her lips as it turned into a deep cough. “Or maybe it just knew it had done enough.”

Grouse looked up at Jet Stream and tilted his head, grimacing.

“I know you can’t save me,” the mare whispered. “Just… go get the others. My daughter is with them. Please--”

“We’ll get her out,” I promised.

“Thank you,” she sighed. She shuddered and went still.

Grouse closed the mare’s eyes and pulled something from her uniform, standing up and giving it to Jet Stream.

“Security pass, sir,” he said. “We might need it.”

Jet Stream nodded. He looked at the mare for a few moments then back at me. “You’re the expert here. What’s the play? Do we need to do anything with the bodies?”

“I’m pretty sure they can reanimate them,” I said. “I have no idea how long it takes.”

“Right,” Jet Stream said. He pulled his pistol and shot the mare in the head twice. “Let’s hope that keeps her down. I would expect any of you to do the same for me if they bring me down. Understood?”

Grouse and Masher nodded.

“Good. Now, let’s show these monsters what it’s like fighting professionals.”

Comments

[Ahsoka Tano]

I like Jet Streams squad i hope they dont die a gruesome death but knowing fallout equestria.