Fallout Equestria: Blue Destiny

by MagnetBolt

Chapter 58 - Collective Consciousness

I never actually lost consciousness, so that was a nice change of pace for what usually happens when I get caught in the middle of a disaster. I was floating in the darkness for… a while. But it wasn’t really darkness, not in the same way a room with no windows is dark, or a cave is dark. It wasn’t even like the magical darkness from the things I’d been fighting. It was the darkness of being blind. The silence of deafness. Total sensory deprivation, with flashes of something that could have been real or my imagination or some combination of the two.

It wasn’t peaceful or calming like meditation. It was a spiraling night terror that ended with mist clearing from my senses and me falling on my dumb face when weight returned to my hooves before I was ready at all to hold myself up.

“Must not be dead because dead ponies have more dignity than this,” I mumbled, trying to remember how to work all my limbs. Everything just felt sore and stretched past its limit.

“That wasn’t fun,” Destiny said. Her voice was wavering and distorted like it was a damaged recording. “I thought that was actually the end for me there.”

“I don’t think we’re allowed to rest,” I groaned. I stood up, my legs feeling all pins and needles like I’d slept on them wrong. I looked around, blinked, shook my head a few times, and looked around again. “This… isn’t Equestria.”

I was on top of an island, and let me tell you, if there’s anypony in the world who deserves an island vacation, it’s me. I would kill for a week off somewhere nice. The last time I’d gone to a resort it was part of a mission and I’d barely even had time to check out the buffet.

This island wasn’t my idea of a resort. For one thing, it was floating in the way that rocks absolutely shouldn’t float. There was a subtle bobbing motion under my hooves, like standing on the deck of a cloudship. It was floating in… nothing, just hanging in the air. I couldn’t see anything below but pale white mist. I kicked a pebble over the edge and it vanished into the distance, fading from view.

I looked up at the sky. The rock I was on was bright like daylight but the source was directionless, all around me, with no sun or moon. There were a lot of stars, though, bright points in a black sky that formed a dome high over the world. It gave me a disconcerting feeling. Was the air just a thin film with the void above and below?

DRACO beeped three times in alarm.

“No matches in the database,” Destiny said. “Those stars don’t match the night sky anywhere in the world. We’re not just a little lost, Chamomile, we’re extremely lost.”

I sat down. I was too sore and tired to just stand around when I needed to rest and think. “Anything on the radio?”

“Why would there be--” Destiny started. “Actually, yes. I’m getting some signals! There’s someone out there!”

“Great!” I sighed. That was good news for a change.

“...But it’s encrypted. I think it’s a military channel. I can’t decode it.”

“You know what? It’s still good news,” I said. “We can broadcast on an emergency channel or something, right? Let’s send out an SOS and just make our way towards whatever’s making the military signal. At worst they’ll be unfriendly and try to kill us.”

“I don't like that worst-case scenario but it’s better than waiting here,” Destiny agreed. “Are you going to be up for the trip?”

I spread my wings and tried taking to the air. My bones were in the right spots, but my muscles felt shredded. I struggled to gain altitude, and ended up just gliding, aiming for the next rock in the little archipelago of floating boulders and landing.

“I’m not in fighting shape,” I admitted. I was covered in small cuts from fighting the storm of razor blades Cypher Decode had become, and the lacerations I’d gotten from the cursed swords of the undead Steel Rangers ached and just seemed like they were refusing to heal. “Let me know if you see any solid ground. I don’t trust these little rocks and I could use a nap and a snack.”

DRACO beeped urgently.

“What’s wrong?” I asked. I looked down at my hooves. Was it trying to warn me that the floating rock was about to turn into a falling rock?

“The radio signal we were picking up, it’s moving!” Destiny said.

“Closer or further away?”

Destiny didn’t bother answering me, because a small ship about the size of a VertiBuck flew overhead. It wasn’t like any ship I’d seen before, sleek and lightly armored with two big, coffin-shaped engines that tilted as it changed direction and thrummed with the sound of restrained power.

“That’s a BrayTech ship!” Destiny said. “It’s a modified cargo VTOL we made for the Exodus ships!”

“What’s one of your ships doing here?” I asked.

“I have no idea, but maybe they can tell us where ‘here’ actually is. Try to follow it!”

“Got it,” I said, doing what I could to shrug off my exhaustion and give chase. There was enough mist in the air that I’d lose track of it if the ship got too far away. I jumped and glided to the next island, then took to the air again without looking where I was going.

“Watch out!” Destiny warned.

I’d been looking for the ship, and I’d made the rookie mistake of pointing my eyes one direction and going the other way. I saw a yawning black maw right where I was going to set down and it was too late to pull up. All I could do was brace myself just before I hit.

---

It was like hitting a wall of static electricity. Everything tingled and then I was through and safe on the other side, for a very specific definition of safe that meant ‘I wasn’t being attacked in that exact moment.’”

“I didn’t think things could get stranger…” I mumbled. The world had turned dark and monochrome, with that almost total lack of color you get when you’re relying entirely on your night vision, when it’s so dark that everything has faded from the world except the barest pastel hints and your eyes strain to make out details.

“The radio signal is gone,” Destiny said. “The terrain isn’t the same, either. Is it some kind of transient dimensional layer?”

“Are you asking me?” I asked, looking around. The light was strange. There was light, as bright as a spotlight, but I couldn’t see where it was coming from. It always seemed to be behind something else, hiding and leaving me standing in the long shadows of the rocks and crystals around me no matter how much I walked around the floating chunk of earth.

I spread my wings and jumped to the next boulder, but the second I went up into the air I knew something was wrong. The armor was suddenly heavy, just dead metal wrapped around me like ballast.

“Woah!” I gasped, slamming too hard into the ground and rolling to a stop in a cloud of dust. “What the heck?”

“This place is flooded with sterile thaums,” Destiny said. “It’s eroding the T-fields that make the armor work! We’re going to be operating at less than half power.”

“This just gets worse and worse,” I mumbled, brushing myself off.

“Why are you here?”

I turned at the voice, trying to find the source. On another floating chunk of rock, I caught movement, a dancing light that seemed to curl around a horn, bobbing just a little as the unseen pony spoke.

“There is no place less suited for the likes of you,” they said. The voice was slightly raspy, dry, echoing in this place among the forlorn rocks. It sounded like a mare, but I couldn’t make much out except a tall, spindly form hiding in the deepest shadows. “Limbo isn’t a place meant for anything alive.”

“Who are you?” I called out.

“Perhaps I am a guide. A shepherd for the lost little pony.” They laughed. “No, there are no guides here. It is a place of scheming queens and traps unsprung.”

I jumped towards the rock, but the light went out before I got there, and the unicorn I’d glimpsed was gone. There was no sign of them, just dust and shades.

A light popped up in the corner of my vision. I saw her there, on another of the isles, her horn lit up. I hadn’t even seen her move. There hadn’t been time for her to move. For a single heartbeat I saw a tall and regal form.

She continued speaking, even as she trotted away. “You walk blind above an abyss, full of trust for a friendly voice. You're playing right into her hooves.”

“Wait up!” I called out.

“Chamomile, over there!” Destiny popped up an arrow in my vision. In the other direction, there was a gateway hanging in midair, a wavering light like a reflection on rippling water and showing a world in sunlight.

“Go. Leave this place while you still can, dear squanderer,” the voice sneered. It seemed to echo from all around me, and the light of the mare’s horn had vanished. “I leave you here.”

“Where…” I muttered.

“I don’t think it’s a good idea to stay here for too long,” Destiny said. “Reality feels… fuzzy.”

“Is fuzzy a technical term?”

“No, but if I told you the technical term you’d be paralyzed with terror.”

“Duly noted,” I said, limping for the door out. I poked it with a hoof to make sure I wasn’t going to fall apart, then ducked through.

---

Light and color returned to the world, and it was almost blinding.

Rotting teeth latched onto my neck, scraping against the armor.

I was being attacked by a zombie. I was sort of slow to respond to it, because I was exhausted, a little disoriented, and nopony really expects the undead to just pop up out of nowhere and get the drop on them. I tried to flick the knife out of my wrist, and I felt a dull ache, the blade refusing to move.

“Guess that’s still regrowing,” I mumbled. I was going to have to be very clever and think of another way to -- nah. I just slapped the rather fragile monster away hard enough to make it ragdoll its way right off the edge and into the abyss below us.

“We’re back! Not… back, back, but we’re where we were before,” Destiny said. “The T-fields are coming back online, and that radio signal is coming from about a kilometer ahead.”

I looked up. We were at the edge of an island large enough that I couldn’t feel it swaying in the breeze, which was an excellent start. A wall of bright silver metal bisected the valley ahead of me, a low bowl-shaped spot between ridges of rock and dotted with tall crystals polished until they were like mirrors. Strange plants grew out of the dirt, like nothing I’d ever seen before.

Also there were zombies, and something worse.

Aside from the dozen or so shambling undead trying to get through the wall of shining metal and clawing at a narrow, tall door, there were three ponies cloaked in shadows standing in the center of the valley. One was huge, all squared-off brawn and muscle. The mare was tall and thin with a mane that moved in a wind I couldn’t feel. The third was shorter than the others, the average-sized pony almost like a child in comparison to them, hovering with his wings held out to his sides, perfectly still and defying gravity. They turned as one to look at me, their eyes shining like spotlights.

“Creepy,” I mumbled.

The three turned back to the wall of metal, and the largest of the three slammed his hoof into the ground. A rift opened up in the rock, splitting apart in a ragged line that hit the door the horde of zombies were pawing at. The undead were thrown back in a wave, and the door burst open. The three shadowy ponies trotted towards it. Half of their steps carried them forward with unnatural bursts of speed, like they were skipping ahead, blinking from one step to the next.

I watched them go. The whole thing had only taken a few seconds, but I hadn’t been able to move or breathe.

“You know, we could just try waiting here and shooting flares,” Destiny suggested. “The ship might turn around and come to see what’s going on.”

“That would be the smart thing,” I agreed. I looked at the zombies. The shockwave hadn’t left them in any real kind of fighting shape. I used DRACO to finish off the last few that were still moving. I shouldn’t have wasted the ammunition, but I wasn’t feeling up to stepping on them.

“Ah. So we’re not doing that, then?” she asked.

“I hate to say it, but there are two problems with the smart plan. First, if I was one of the ponies on the other side of that wall, I wouldn’t want to come out here in case those flares were some kind of trick. Second, even if it’s not a trick, they’re about to be up to their withers in trouble.”

“And you want to save them.”

“In my condition? No, I’m just hoping when I do something stupid there’s somepony around to scrape me up off the ground.”

I braced myself and stepped through the doorway. I’d thought it was just dark inside, but static washed over me, and I was immediately enveloped in inky black.

---

I shivered. It was sort of cold, but in the way it gets in the spring and fall, when the chill hasn’t crept into the bones in the world.

“Which way do we go?” Destiny asked.

“Oh yeah, ask me,” I mumbled. I squinted through the darkness. “Our best bet is probably to just go forward and hope for the best. We’ll try to find another one of those doorways back to the other world.”

“I’ve got an idea. I think if I just…” The Dimension Pliers vibrated, then stopped, then started vibrating again at a different frequency. “I’m sure you know this already, but speakers and microphones are broadly built in the same way. They’re both a piezoelectric crystal and rectifiers and a current, broadly speaking. One is optimized to turn vibrations into electricity and the other turns electricity into vibrations, but--”

“Please, Destiny, I’m slowly dying, but not that slowly.”

“I’m reconfiguring the Pliers to work as a directional antenna to search for topological defects in space-time.”

I nodded, satisfied. “I didn’t understand that at all, so that means it’s advanced science and I trust it implicitly.”

Destiny sighed. “I’ll just take it as a compliment.”

I walked forward carefully. I couldn’t really see the floor under my hooves, and no amount of image processing from the armor’s HUD was helping with that. I made my way forward until I saw that obscured light again through a break in the walls around me. I stepped out into the half-light and looked around at what surrounded me. There were columns and twists of cloud into partly-dissolved cloud houses, withered plants covering the ground and cracking under my hooves like charcoal, and deep cracks in the rock.

“Is it just me or does this look like the end of the world?” I asked.

The ground rumbled. I stepped back in alarm and bumped into something. I looked over my shoulder already knowing what I’d find there. The huge shadow pony was standing there silently, staring at me with those big spotlight eyes blazing stark white.

“...Yo,” I said. “How’s it hanging?”

It reared up and slammed down onto the ground, and the cracks already in the rock split apart. Heat welled up around me, and I stumbled into the chasm before I could catch myself.

“Buck!” I swore, spreading my wings, but because I was stupid and clumsy I didn’t do it evenly and my dumb butt swerved into the wall and smacked into it hard. I scrabbled for a grip on the rock and it crumbled in my hooves like sand. I slid more than halfway down the rift before I grabbed onto something solid enough to stop me. The rocks were hot, a mix of volcanic glass and black charred stone, and there should have been magma below me, but everything just faded into mist.

“Are you okay?” Destiny asked.

“I really don’t want to be one of the very few pegasus ponies who fell to their deaths,” I groaned. “Can you do anything about the armor losing power?”

“The best I can do is divert everything to weight reduction, but you’re going to have to fly back up there on your own.” I felt the weight of the armor pull slightly away from my shoulders, still present but less like a metal coffin strapped around me.

“Got anything that’ll help with that?” I asked.

“We’re out of almost everything. Maybe Mint-Als? They won’t actually help but they always improved my mood when I was feeling down.”

“Maybe later,” I sighed, bracing myself and jumping, catching one of the stray thermals rising out of the rift and struggling to fly. I’d swear it wasn’t just my exhaustion. It felt like something was robbing lift from my wings. I barely made it. Sweat dripped down my neck, and I tried to find the huge pony that had tried to drop me into the abyss.

There was no sign of him. He’d vanished the same way he’d appeared. A chill ran down my spine.

“What was that?” I asked. It hadn’t just been my imagination. Some sixth sense was trying really hard to warn me that I was in a ton of danger.

The air vibrated, like a storm surge ahead of an oncoming typhoon. Notes followed after it, somepony singing, soft and mournful and-- I felt my heart skip, and I stumbled.

“Something’s wrong,” I gasped. My heart wasn’t cooperating. I felt it falling into a rhythm on its own, rebelling against my body’s demands like it had a mind of its own. It took me a few pained moments to realize what was happening. “The song…”

“Your heart is being forced into the same rhythm as the song,” Destiny said. “Stay calm, you’re going to be okay.”

I was not going to be okay. I could feel it and hear it happening at the same time. The song was slowing moment by moment. I had to stop whoever was singing before they stopped and my heart stopped along with it.

I spotted her high above me, standing on a tiny floating stone barely large enough to hold her. It was the lanky unicorn I’d seen, her mane flowing around her while she softly chanted that deadly dirge.

DRACO locked onto her, firing without even bothering waiting for my trigger pull. A bolt of lightning crashed through the air between us at the same time, and the shot never landed.

“What the buck?” I swore. I looked up. The smallest of the three shadow ponies was flying high in the air, gathering light around his hooves for another blast. “Did he shoot down my bullet?!”

I threw myself back, very nearly doing a cool backflip out of the way of a deadly thunderbolt. I did manage the part where I got out of the way, but my breath caught in my throat halfway through the landing and I ended up rolling head over hooves in the dust.

“Chamomile, we don’t have time to fight them,” Destiny said. “I’ve got a fix on a possible exit. You need to leave!”

“That sounds like a good idea,” I agreed. Destiny gave me an arrow and I took to the air, kicking off and struggling against my own failing body. The song echoed through the empty space around me, and my lungs were burning. It was worse than when I’d visited the Graywings in their home at the edge of space. I couldn’t get enough air no matter how hard and fast I tried to suck in air. My vision was going dark around the edges.

“Just a little more!” Destiny encouraged me. “You can do it! Do you see it?”

I couldn’t see anything. No, that wasn’t it. I couldn’t focus. There were rocks and a blur of light and dark around me and I couldn’t process it. I was dizzy and disoriented and all I could do was focus on one thing, and I put all my trust in that marker Destiny was shining into my HUD.

I glanced off a floating boulder, the tips of my hooves and wings going numb.

Time seemed to flow like sludge around me.

The marker blinked and got bigger, and just as everything was crashing down, the world turned white and bright and warm.

---

I gasped and came back to full consciousness, my chest as sore as when Four had stomped my ribs into powder.

“Oh buck, did we make it?” I rasped. We were in something like a garden, and I was lying on a path of flat, hexagonal stones. Plants moved in the soft breeze around us, diffuse light shining through the leaves.

“You’re okay!” Destiny sounded relieved. “Your heart completely stopped, and I thought… I was worried you were…”

“Not yet, I assured her. “That was too close.”

“Just rest for a little while,” Destiny said. “How about I get you a drink and a snack?”

“Mmph.” She was acting like a worried mom. Not my mom, but a theoretical, better mom. “Yeah, maybe that’s a good idea.”

Destiny detached the helmet and floated up to give me a critical look. I had to imagine I wasn’t looking great. I’d coughed up blood a few times and hadn’t even had a chance to wash my face. She didn’t say anything, and that got me even more worried. She popped a bottle of water out of the armor and held it to my mouth, helping me drink. It was tepid and tasted stagnant in the way water did when it’d been bottled for a long time, but it got the lingering taste of iron out of my mouth.

I sat there for a minute or two just getting back to normal. The darkness at the edges of my vision faded and the feeling of imminent death faded to a background soreness.

“Not doing that again,” I said, my voice rough. I coughed and cleared my throat. “We’re staying away from those dark spots.”

“Agreed,” Destiny said. “I want you to take a look at something.”

She floated up a delicate silver-colored plant. No, not silver-colored. It was actually silver, shining in the light with black, glossy leaves traced with metallic filigree.

“No pony made that,” I said. “It grew.”

Destiny bobbed in agreement. “It’s SIVA. It’s not dangerous like the random growths that were in the wreckage of the Exodus Blue, but this whole place is being held together by it. This is some kind of low-power photovoltaic cell. Passive energy collection. None of these are real plants.”

“I guess we found one of the other ships,” I said. “It must have ended up here. Wherever here actually is.” I looked around again. It was pleasant here. Maybe escaping death was just making me appreciate what was around me. I stood up and walked over to a crystal monolith standing between two silvery ferns. The surface was polished to a mirror finish, and I could see myself. I looked like I was somewhere between hung over and dead. I splashed the last of the water from the bottle on my face and wiped off some of the grime and dried blood.

“I’m hopeful we can figure that out,” Destiny said. “The Exodus White would have everything we need to learn where we are, what’s happening, and how to get back to Equestria.”

I nodded. “And we know it can be done because parts from the White ended up in that old Ministry bunker.”

“Exactly. We disabled the pyramid, but we’ve got the Pliers if we need to tear a hole in space and close it behind us. It’s just not a good idea to play around with that until we know what we’re doing.”

DRACO beeped while I was in the middle of chewing my way through a pre-war emergency ration bar. I tried to swallow rancid peanut butter as quickly as I could, but my tongue was still tied when the message popped up on the gun’s screen.

“That ship is right ahead of us,” Destiny read. “If they’re friendly…”

“Can’t be less friendly than the ponies we just met,” I said, wiping my lips. “Let’s leave the helmet off. I might need to show them a friendly face to convince them I’m not undead.” I gave myself a quick look-over in the reflection of the crystal to make sure that wasn’t a self-defeating idea and tried to fix my mane a little before giving up on it.

With some sugar and water in me I felt slightly better. I wasn’t anywhere near a hundred percent, but anything was better than literally having my heart seize up in my chest.

“This has to be a deliberate path,” Destiny said. The hexagonal stones of the garden walkway kept going off the edge, floating close together like a slightly unstable disjointed staircase leading to a half-finished structure on the next island. It was like a sketch that somepony had started drawing and then stopped working on, empty walls and windows too finished to be in the middle of construction but not adding up to anything except suggestions of a larger shape.

The small transport hovered halfway inside the structure, up near the second or third floor. I approached cautiously, expecting a barrage of bolts at any moment. It didn’t look as heavily armed or armored as a VertiBuck but underestimating things had almost killed me too many times.

“Hello?” I called out loudly. “Is anypony there? I’m not from around here but I promise I mean no… harm?” I’d almost stumbled on something in the silvery grass. A zombie was lying there, the head half blown off. It wasn’t easy to tell with the undead, but I was pretty sure this had been done recently.

“There are more over here,” Destiny said. “It looks like we missed the action.”

“I don’t see anypony who isn’t a zombie,” I said. “I guess they won?”

“The ship is still here, so they’ll have to come back for it at some point,” Destiny said. She looked up at it. I followed her gaze. “Never thought I’d see one of those again. They were designed as a kind of shuttle, so the Exodus ships could send teams down to scout landing sites.”

“It’s a nice little ship,” I said.

“My brother designed it,” Destiny said, her tone souring. “He was a good engineer, until he went crazy.”

I sat down, getting the weight off my hooves. “Sorry.”

“So am I. I should have seen it coming. Some of the contracts he made, the ponies he talked to…” She shook herself. “Two hundred years too late.”

I looked around. “Hey, uh…”

“I know. Nothing I could do.”

“Actually I was gonna ask if you think any of these plants are edible.”

“Chamomile, they’re made of micromachines, spun metal, and silicon. They’re not even really plants!”

I looked at the grass and whined a little. My stomach rumbled. I was hungry. Probably because I was healing, and that took a lot of energy. It hadn’t even been all that long since I’d had to regrow a whole skeleton.

A laser hit the dirt at my hooves.

“Don’t move!” Somepony ordered. “Hooves where I can see them!”

“I don’t want any trouble!” I said. “But, um… do you want me to raise my hooves, or stay still? I can’t do both.”

Three ponies in armored flight suits surrounded me, their faces totally obscured by visored helmets and rebreathers. I held up my hooves, but very slowly. The armor they wore wasn’t like anything I’d seen before. It was mostly dark purple, the fabric having a weird sheen to it like solid rainbow or metal fibers.

“How did you get here?” one of them demanded. There was something familiar about their rifles. I’d seen them before, the curved, almost organic shapes.

“It’s a long story,” I said. “Would you believe I fell through a portal?”

“She’s not undead,” one of the others said, lowering his rifle slightly. “What do we do with her?”

“We don’t have standing orders for anything like this,” the first one said.

“There’s only one thing to do, and both of you know it,” the third pony said firmly. “If she came here it might mean others could, too.” He must have been in charge, because he started giving orders. He pointed at the first pony. “You go radio this in.”

“I promise, I didn’t come here on purpose, and I don’t want trouble,” I said.

“You and your floating friend can explain it to the Queen,” the pony said. He nodded to the other pony, and a net was thrown over Destiny, dragging her down.

“Hey!” Destiny protested.

I reached for her and a shot went just past my nose. I froze.

The armored pony motioned towards the docked ship. “Stand up. Let’s go.”

I stood slowly, not wanting to get shot.

“The Queen will know what to do with you,” the leader said. He took off his helmet, revealing a brand new kind of horror. Glowing blue eyes and chitin where fur should have been, glaring at me like I was the strange one. “She always knows what to do.”

“Why can’t things ever be simple?” I groaned.