Fallout Equestria: Blue Destiny

by MagnetBolt

Chapter 76: Jitterbug Waltz

“I heard you were dead,” Lady Thresher said. She prodded her food with two thin sticks, eventually picking up a short stalk of asparagus and popping it into her mouth. It was something between spaghetti and stir fry and it wasn’t my biggest worry right now.

“I was dead. I got better. It’s sort of a thing and it’s just impossibly traumatizing so I try and distract myself and think about other things instead of the cold steely reach of the grim reaper-- okay look, how are you using chopsticks without magic?”

She picked up a single grain of rice with careful manipulation of the most basic utensils in the world.

“I’m exceptionally skilled with my hooves,” Lady Thresher explained.

“You’re sure proving it,” I admitted. “Sorry about bothering you during your lunch, but I figured the middle of the day was the least likely time to run into anypony from the Guild.”

“Ah yes,” Lady Thresher nodded. “Fabula spoke highly of you, mourned your death, even bought me a drink, as if I didn’t own the distillery. She had you killed, didn’t she?”

“Yeah,” I sighed.

“I suspected as much when she didn’t call you an idiot for getting yourself killed.”

“She’s coming for you next,” I warned. “She’s working with the cops. They think you’re the biggest threat to whatever plans they have because they can’t control you.”

“I appreciate the warning,” Lady Thresher said. “I assume you didn’t just come here out of the goodness of your heart?”

“Well, I mean…” I hesitated. “I still haven’t found my friend, or gotten my armor back, and on top of that I need to do something about all the ponies Fabula is going to hurt.”

“Yes,” the mare agreed, sitting back. “Fortunately, I can disappear for a while to places even the most dedicated police force can’t find me. I’d suggest you do the same, but I would feel incredibly irresponsible if I didn’t do something to point you in the right direction.”

“Really?”

She motioned to one of her bodyguards and he trotted over. He glared at me. Lady Thresher sighed and motioned again, and he produced a voice recorder.

“Whatever ‘Project H’ is, it now involves some of my capital, since I own two gillwater plants that are both part of it. I was looking into it, to see if I could get in on whatever deal they cut with the authorities and make a profit. I intercepted a recording that you might find interesting.”

---

“Update, Seadate… I don’t know. I still don’t understand why you can’t use a regular time and date! The whole world uses a regular calendar, but no, you need to use one based on a mechanical computer predicting the tides, which isn’t even accurate!

“Anyway, stupid time system aside, I haven’t gotten very far with my research. It’s not a problem with supplies, for once in my life, just in my imagination and creativity. Is it because I’m a ghost? Did I lose my touch along with most of my memories? I can’t do this alone, and the one pony I trust isn’t here to help.

“Enferon is still proving effective. We’ve developed some dispersal methods, but we have to make them one by one, so mass production isn’t possible and it’s not a cure. At best, it’s just like using tear gas to disperse a crowd. It does seem to affect regeneration rates, so if we want to just kill everypony, it can be used as a very expensive solution in terms of money and lives.

“I’m hopeful we’ll find something better. A biological solution might still be possible. There are elements in gillwater that I’ve never seen before or worked with, and they’re transformative and powerful. They might be exactly what I need.”

---

“It’s Destiny,” I said, stopping the recording.

“The concept, or is that a name?” Manzana asked.

“She’s my best friend.” I paused. “No offense. You’re really cool, and you work in a morgue which is a pretty awesome job, but I’ve known Destiny for a lot longer.”

“No offense taken,” the doctor said. “You’re really cool, but a massive liability and you have literally eaten all the food in my house.”

I burped.

“I’m guessing you’re going to go after her,” Manzana suggested.

“I have to,” I said. “According to Lady Thresher, this transmission came out of the Dark Sector, which is apparently a bad place to be.”

“You’re not getting in there,” Manzana said. She opened a cabinet. “Where’s my coffee? Did you actually eat all my coffee grounds?!”

“I was really hungry,” I whined. “And they smelled so good!”

She groaned and got a glass of water. “The point is, the Dark Sector is totally quarantined. It has been ever since the Riots. The life support was damaged or something. I don’t know the details. All I know is, it’s not safe to go in there.”

“That’s a likely story,” I mumbled. “There’s something going on in there. Something the government cares enough about to fund her, and that she thinks is a good enough cause to stick herself in the middle of a quarantine zone.”

“Well, it’s not hard to find,” Manzana said. “All you have to do is look for all the signs warning ponies about danger and ignore them.”

“Those sound like exactly like kind of directions I can follow.”

Manzana opened another cabinet. “And be a decent roommate and bring back groceries!”

---

I think at this point I need to actually give a decent description of Seaquestria. I hadn’t really had one myself, but I needed to navigate all the way to the Dark Sector on my own, and that meant a map.

Seaquestria is basically shaped like a big clamshell. The top half is a shield over the rest, an umbrella studded with hanging buildings open to the sea. Looking up at it from below, it’s like seeing the night sky. Most of the city’s hippogriffs, even the very poor ones, live up there and look down on everypony else.

The undersea Stable was built under it, sheltered against detection and invasion. It was roughly in the shape of a ring, with the upper levels turned into towers and enclosed bubbles of air pretending to be city streets. Cables connected the two halves, the Stable’s power and utilities serving as life support for the rest of the city.

The Dark Sector was a black spot on the ring, the block of towers and Stable modules closest to the only way in or out of the city, a kind of underwater elevator leading to an island that had once been the core of Hippogriff society and had been abandoned during the war.

Getting to the Dark Sector meant either walking across the seabed or all the way through a maze of corridors in the utility levels of the undercity. Since I didn’t have a diving suit, the choice was made for me.

Manzana was right about one thing. I mean, aside from me being a terrible roommate. The ‘keep away’ and ‘detour ahead’ signs made it easy to find my way.

The problem came when I got closer. Doors were welded shut. Steel grates locked in place to seal off corridors. I could cut through them, sure, but I might set off any number of alarms. It was like a funnel, narrowing my options until I was right at the entrance to the Dark Sector and looking at a security checkpoint.

And I’d been looking at it through a vent for an hour trying to figure out what to do. I was in what had been an access area for a bunch of pipes and ventilation stuff, sort of a workspace for ponies doing repairs, safely tucked out of the way of the main corridor it ran parallel to.

There were four ponies guarding the checkpoint, and my first instinct had been to wait for a shift change and try to slip through, but it had been an hour and I was getting antsy and bored. They had to change shifts at some point, right? I could just fight through them, but what if a new crew showed up right in the middle of it? What if they got a call out on radio? All it would take was one guard giving my description to a dispatcher and Marshall Law would have Sentinel after me before I was ready for him.

“I need to be smart,” I mumbled. “Can’t kill them or it’s going to get too much attention. And killing ponies is wrong.” That second part came a lot slower than the first. I’d had a really bad time and I was finding it difficult not to just murder ponies.

What I needed was the magic of friendship, but the friends I’d made here couldn’t be trusted. I had almost no supplies. All I had was a flechette gun with no ammunition -- but a working harpoon launcher (tested in Manzana’s apartment, and I also owed her a new window), a couple saddle bags, really basic medical supplies (surprisingly, not a lot of life-saving medicine in the morgue), and an old whistle given to me by a crazy pony.

My hoof lingered over the whistle. Supposedly, according to a crazy pony living in filth, a bunch of trained Radroaches would appear out of nowhere.

It was worth trying. I blew the whistle as softly as I could. It let out a reedy squeal. The four guards looked around, obviously having heard something.

“Look around,” I faintly heard. “Can you tell what direction that came from?”

“It’s probably air in the pipes,” a second one said, relaxing.

“We have to check it out in case it’s a breach,” the first pony said. “You know the rules.”

“I’ve got movement!” one of the ponies yelped. He had a PipBuck. Lucky. “Signal’s clean, twenty meters.”

The others turned around, shining flashlights on the steel gate behind them.

“I don’t see anything,” the last pony reported.

“They never act like this,” the first pony said.

“Fifteen meters,” the pony with the PipBuck reported. “It’s red all around us!”

“All around us?” the second pony said, sweeping his air rifle around. “I don’t see anything!”

The leader swept his light up, almost catching me in it when he passed over the vent I was spying on them through. “They must be in the walls, the floor, something we missed!”

PipBuck was starting to panic. “I can’t tell, this thing doesn’t give altitude, just radial detection! Eight meters!”

“That’s inside the barricade. It must be wrong!”

“I’m reading it right! Four meters!”

The second pony, the lazy one, sighed. “There’s nothing here!” He raised up his hooves, and at that moment, the vents popped open from the pressure on the other side, dozens of radroaches scuttling out in a wave of chitin, some of them glowing from within. The guards screamed and broke, fleeing away from the barricade, and the roaches gave chase.

I waited a few more seconds.

“I can’t believe that worked,” I sighed.

I kicked the vent open and jumped down, bolting for the door. The guards were armed, and it wouldn’t take them long to stomp on the bugs. A thick chain and padlock held the steel grate shut. It wasn’t knife-proof, so it was a matter of seconds to get through.

The door closed behind me more loudly than I would have liked, making me wince at the crashing din. I waited a moment for an alarm, and when it didn’t happen, I ran for it. I needed to get out of sight. I ran past side corridors and dark alcoves and out into the open, an atrium that looked almost like a dark courtyard. I ducked to the side, under a balcony, and tried to catch my breath.

Getting killed was not great for your health. It felt like I couldn’t breathe and my heart was pounding. I was probably far enough in that nopony was going to find me right away, so that meant it was safe to sit down until my vision wasn’t coming from the bottom of a well.

Something moved in the shadows and my already-strained heart almost stopped. I let out a strangled yelp.

It was the one thing I hadn’t expected to see. A mare-made horror that had once been a pony but had become something else. It had been a young earth pony mare, and now she had blue steel scales sprouting from her skin like lesions and plastic, throbbing cords running in and out of her skin.

“SIVA…” I whispered. The infected pony stumbled towards me, moaning, and I readied myself to--

The zombie just trotted past me, ignoring me like I wasn’t there. No, not quite that. It had definitely seen me. It actually stepped around me, careful not to bump into me on its way to the very important business of stopping in the middle of the courtyard on unsteady hooves and staring at a spot on the wall.

“But how could SIVA get here?” I asked myself, lowering my hoof. I’d been ready to cut the pony’s head off, but it seemed more interested in going for a little trot than attacking me. “The only source of SIVA around is…”

Oh buck.

It must have come from me. Somehow, I’d spread it like a plague. How was that possible? I’d been through half of the city and there hadn’t been any outbreaks! Yet. Had I doomed the whole city? Did I need to go into isolation? Was I the real monster?

“I need to find Destiny,” I decided. “She’ll know what to do.”

---

I knew she had to have power. Lady Thresher had intercepted a transmission, so Destiny had a radio, and there weren’t a lot of places in the Dark Sector that were still in good enough condition to host a lab.

I limped into the sector’s core, a wide-open space like the Galleria or Promenade, the canals in the streets making it feel like I was walking through a half-flooded city, like the pictures of old Veneighs I’d seen in pre-war books. It had probably been beautiful, a few months ago.

The streets were full of garbage and the remnants of violence. Broken glass, ashes, barricades torn apart by monsters or just desperate ponies trying to flee and getting caught in a stampede. Some of the facades of shops and businesses were marred by fire or blown open completely by explosives.

The worst parts were the traces of something eldritch and never made by pony hooves. Violence and destruction were one thing, but seeing lumpy plastic pipes and steel-edged ferns growing over the wreckage like tumors on the steel and concrete? That was something else.

While I was looking at what had once been a shop selling fancy dresses, a few more SIVA zombies stumbled past, every one of them making me feel worse and worse. I really hoped this was all somepony else’s fault.

I heard the noise before I saw the light. The dull thumps of explosives, sharp pops of gunfire, and distant yelling. The uneven surface of the street made me skid and almost fall in my mad rush, the noise getting more frantic with every passing moment. I barely got into the air, my heavy body feeling twice its size thanks to the fatigue weighing down on me.

Up above the debris and wreckage, I could see where I needed to go. A single point of light in the dark, one building was still lit up. It was a squat, slab-sided building, like a fortress in the middle of the streets. Spotlights swept over fences and concrete walls, and from here I could see ponies shooting down into a crowd of shambling half-dead infected.

There were only three of them holding out against a small horde. I hesitated for a second, hovering and watching. I could just let the SIVA-infected monsters do the work for me. I wouldn’t have to lift a hoof.

One of the security ponies went down screaming when a unicorn charged him, goring him on a horn that had grown long and twisted and as sharp as a drill bit.

That settled it for me. I wasn’t the kind of pony that could watch them die, even if they were probably jerks. I swooped down and landed on top of one of the zombies, slicing into the neck with my knife and severing the spinal cord. It had worked on me, and it worked on the monster too, leaving only its eyes rolling and mouth gasping but unable to actually kill anypony.

One of the last officers raised a big gun and shot right next to me, hitting a zombie in the chest. A canister bounced off its tattered flesh and to the ground, erupting into a plume of smoke. At almost the same time, another one of the monsters caught up to him, grabbing his hoof and pulling him down into biting range.

The dark gas washed over me, and it was like being doused with pepper spray. I sneezed and coughed, my knees buckling and my skin burning almost as badly as my eyes and snout.

“Oh buck, what is that stuff?” I gasped, blindly fumbling for a way out of the cloud.

Bullets hit the sidewalk around me, pinging off in all directions. Through bleary eyes, I saw a zombie get hit and stay down, not even twitching.

One of the cops, the last one standing, grabbed me, pulling me out of the cloud and towards the station.

“You okay?!” he shouted. “I don’t know how you got in here, but this is a bad time to be looting! These things are acting crazy today! They haven’t been this active since the Riots!”

“What the buck is in those gas grenades?” I asked, spitting to try and get the iodine taste out of my mouth. It was like pure poison.

“Enferon. It keeps them from healing. Sorry for catching you in it. It’s a mild irritant for some ponies, and looks like you’ve got it bad.”

“Just my luck,” I mumbled.

A monster stumbled out of the crowd, its mouth filled with steel fangs. The officer pushed me out of the way and raised his gun, taking one wild shot that went way off-target before it was on him, ripping and tearing at his armor with ragged metal claws and trying to force its way closer with that deadly maw.

I pulled the zombie off the thrashing pony, throwing it aside and helping the cop up. Even if I didn’t like Stable security, I couldn’t let somepony die right in front of me when they probably didn’t deserve it.

“We need to get inside,” he croaked, one hoof pressed against his side. Blood dripped from the wound, starting to pool under him. “The gas grenades usually drive them off, but it’s like they went rabid all of a sudden!”

“Right,” I agreed, letting him lean on my shoulder and lead me inside, limping on three legs. He had a card key for the door, and ushered me in before shutting it firmly behind us.

“Buck,” he groaned. “Get me over to the couch.” He pointed vaguely in the direction, and I helped him over to it. The lobby of the Stable Security building was more open and ornate than the one I’d been to before, more like something that belonged in a hotel. Monitors and portable terminal boxes were set up into a kind of command center, and I got him onto the couch behind it.

“That’s a pretty nasty wound,” I said. “If you’ve got a healing potion--”

“Like we can requisition those,” he chuckled. Instead, he pulled a spray can from his barding and braced himself before giving his wound a long, hard spray. I only caught a little bit of it, and it made my eyes water like I was cutting onions. It was the same junk that had been in the grenades.

“Enferon should keep the infection at bay,” he mumbled. “I hope. You got any cuts from those things? You need to wash them out right away or you end up just like them.”

“I’m fine,” I said. I really doubted they could infect me in any meaningful way. Buck, they weren’t even interested in me. I found some bandages and gauze and motioned for him to sit up. He struggled, but managed to get in a position where I could pack his wound and keep him from bleeding out.

“What’s your name?” he asked, while I worked on him. “Been a long time since we had a looter in here. I’m Lieutenant Brownie.”

“Chamomile,” I said, distracted. I tucked the ends of the bandage away. “That should hold for a little while.”

“You know some first aid?” he asked.

“I think anypony can figure out this much,” I said. “If I really knew first aid I’d be trying to give you stitches or something.”

“Good point,” the stallion laughed, his voice weak. “Oof. I need to be careful. I laugh too hard and I might turn inside-out. Where did you come from, anyway?”

At this point, honesty was probably the best policy. “I’m here looking for Destiny,” I said. “She’s a friend.”

“You’re kidding,” he said.

I shrugged.

“I should have known that this assignment was trouble. She’s upstairs in the lab. Take my card and it’ll open the doors.” He tossed me his card key. “Before you go -- I sure hope you’re the mare she keeps mentioning when nopony else is looking. If not, you should be jealous.”

I hesitated at the door. I wanted to see Destiny. I knew it had to be her. But at the same time, if this was all my fault…

If it was all my fault, I needed to fix it, and that meant I needed her. I knocked before I could think twice about it. It slid open on the second knock, letting me into what had once been a gun range and was now repurposed with long tables and a lot of equipment that I didn’t recognize.

“Remember to decontaminate,” a voice said from across the room. “I don’t think SIVA can get airborne, but I don’t want to risk it.”

“I don’t think it’s a big concern in my case,” I said.

There was the very distinct sound of metal and very expensive glassware falling to the ground and shattering. A crimson glow grew brighter, and a very familiar blue helmet crested over the rows of equipment.

“Chamomile?!” Destiny asked, shocked. “I thought-- You--”

“Hey,” I said, my voice wavering.

She jetted over to me, knocking into my forehead and just staying there. It took a second for me to realize this was as close as she could come to a hug with no body. I put a hoof around her.

“What the buck happened? Where have you been?” she asked.

“It’s been a long week,” I said. “Can I sit down before I start?”

She led me over to a chair, and I explained everything I remembered, from the first time I woke up in the morgue to getting killed again and ending up finding my own lead on her. If I skipped all the parts where I did something stupid, it wasn’t a very long story, but it was mostly me going around in circles and being tricked by ponies that were smarter than me.

“So you’ve only been up and around for a few days?” Destiny asked.

“Call it a week,” I said. “It’s been hectic, even if I was dead for half of it. Can you tell me what I missed?”

Destiny bobbed in a quick nod. “After you were… mugged…”

“And shoved out an airlock. I’m still traumatized, just to be clear.”

“Right. That.” She sounded like she wanted to avoid the topic even more than I did. “I ended up in a cage and sold off to the highest bidder. That ended up being the local head of security. I refused to cooperate with him, naturally.”

“So how did his best friend end up with my armor?” I asked.

“Since you’re here, you must know the truth about the riots,” Destiny said. “There was a SIVA outbreak. It started with isolated attacks, and they all got blamed on a single killer. It was easier to believe. One mad pony, probably from the last group of refugees, made more sense than multiple spree killers.”

“He must have been real busy to just be one pony.”

“Yeah. One pony turned into packs of infected, barricades, the whole sector being cut off… they wrapped some story around it to keep ponies from panicking. When I realized what was happening, I had to start helping. Even if I didn’t like the ponies involved, I couldn’t do nothing.”

“That explains why you’re trying to find a cure, not why my armor--”

“Sentinel is infected,” Destiny interrupted. “He got attacked. His second in command turned, cut him up, and I stuck him in the armor to stabilize him.”

“He betrayed his second in command. Deep Blue wasn’t going to go along with the plan to turn organized crime into a branch of the local police department.”

“Going to be deeply honest here,” Destiny said. “I don’t care at all about the local politics. If they want to hold an election with a knife fight, more power to them. I just want to make sure my invention doesn’t kill them. My invention which, by the way, is out of control almost certainly because of you!”

I winced at that. Also at the tug on my ear. Destiny was pulling harder than she needed to.

“Stop it!” I yelped. “Those are like the only parts of my body that are still sensitive!”

“I’ll stop when we fix this. I’ve been trying to find a cure. The best I’ve been able to do is get a production line for Enferon and find a way to put down a few suffering ponies for good.” Destiny floated over to one of the lab tables. “Right after we see a shining example of what SIVA can do, there’s this!”

She threw a flask across the room.

“Damnit,” she mumbled. “That was the last of my diethyl ether.”

“Sorry,” I said quietly.

“I know you’re sorry,” Destiny said glumly. “You’re always sorry. I’m always sorry. We go from place to place finding things to be sorry about, and buck me if we don’t find a lot of them.”

“Yeah,” I agreed, wiping my eyes. “Sorry. The Enferon really messed up my sinuses. Stuff is like tear gas.”

“It’s like tear gas for infected ponies,” Destiny agreed. “Like you.”

“So are you behind the gillwater stuff too?” I asked.

“I didn’t invent it, if that’s what you’re asking. I did suggest using the distilleries to mass-produce Enferon as a stop-gap measure.”

“What about the sedatives and the other drugs?” I asked.

“...What?”

“It was something called Project H, which I messed up. Really badly. I don’t feel sorry about that. So what’s the plan?”

Destiny settled down on the table. “Bold of you to assume I have a grand plan. I still haven’t figured out how I’m supposed to cure the infected.”

“I have an idea,” I suggested. “The Valkyrie.”

“The weapon Kulaas gave us?” Destiny asked.

“It fights SIVA, right? What if we inject it into ponies?”

“I have… no idea what that would do to them.”

“I thought you were running a lab here. Why not do some experiments?”

“I’d need a test subject. A living one, and healthy enough that a half-baked treatment won’t kill them right away. I’m not going to infect some random pony just to see if I can cure them, you’re… you, and the infected outside aren’t going to cooperate.”

A heavy hoof pounded at the lab door.

I looked at Destiny, then carefully trotted over to it, my flechette gun at the ready. It was probably the worst weapon for fighting the infected. Went right through armor without causing a lot of tissue damage when what I really wanted was something that’d cause massive tissue damage. Say, a grenade launcher.

Destiny popped the door open.

The wounded Security pony stumbled in. Lieutenant Brownie coughed, clutching his side, and looked up at the floating helmet.

“Doc? Things aren’t looking good down there. I don’t know if she told you this yet, but we lost most of the security team. The infected are getting more and more active. It’s like something woke all of them up at once!”

Destiny turned to face me.

“If something’s happening, I’m not doing it on purpose,” I swore. She flew over to the bench and grabbed a tool like a magic wand with a power lead coming out of the back end and leading to a battery, waving it over my body.

It crackled and squealed when it got close to me.

“Your near-field transmission is going crazy,” Destiny said. “It was never this bad before! Not even when the infection was almost killing you!”

I swallowed. “So the zombies are all going crazy because of me?”

“Your cortical node is the only thing with authority anywhere on the local network. It’s the only explanation. If we can find a way to give commands, maybe we can use this to our advantage! We could get them all under control, maybe even reverse the damage!”

“Doc, before you get too carried away,” Brownie groaned. “I could really use some help here. I used the spray like you said, but…”

He collapsed forward. I barely caught him before he hit the floor. The stallion’s hoof fell away from his side, and I could see something peeking out around the edges of the rough bandage work I’d done. Pulsing green tubes, only as thick as hairs.

“That’s not good,” Destiny mumbled.

“You wanted a test subject,” I said. “I think you just got one.”

Comments

[Thought Prism]

Oh, wow, the plot is really moving now. Glad our protagonists found eachother again.

[Reese]

"Those sound like exactly like kind of directions"
"Those sound like exactly the kind of directions"?

[Ahsoka Tano]

Me screaming at Cham too get into the armor the whole time :P

Good thing it was just the friendly officer that walked in.