The Conversion Bureau - Mirror Match

A story set in the Conversion Bureau universe, by Silvertie

Chapter 14 - The Dog Has His Day

When you’re about to die, everything snaps into perspective. You wonder if there’s things you could have done better, realize trivial things for what they were and often kick yourself for important things that suddenly seem obvious. The higher the chance of death, the snappier it is.

We were almost certainly going to die, and I realized that I’d wasted my life. Next to me, Gary and M huddled together, eyes shut. Behind me, Dice was muttering a quiet prayer.

Bullets began to leave the barrels -- I didn’t even hear the gunshots. They flew towards us, each one carrying enough power to cut us in half, and-

Thwip

I flinched as a round nicked my ear, and had just enough time to be upset that it didn’t hit me in the head properly, because with my luck, the next one would hit me in the groin and not kill me.

Zing Zwot Thwip

More bullets, passing by me without a pause; Lexicon was an awful shot, it seemed.

“What the hell?” Gary asked, quietly. I looked around, and saw what I hadn’t noticed before. A translucent dome of light surrounded us; the contrails of bullets were clearly visible as they hit the dome, and suddenly banked hard to avoid hitting any of us.

The dome was blue. I looked down, and saw Dice; his teeth gritted, beads of sweat were rolling down his head as his eyes darted all over, bullets deviating from their paths and avoiding us.

“Holy shit, Dice,” I exclaimed. “When did you learn to do that?!”

“I didn’t!” Dice grunted, “I don’t know how I’m doing it!”

“So the unicorn can deflect bullets,” Lexicon snorted. “That is just peachy. You can’t do it forever. Your luck will run out eventually.”

“Luck...” I looked at Dice. “Hey, can you do this thing on the turrets themselves?”

“Oh, you make it sound so easy,” he snarked, taking a wobbly step forward. He closed his eyes, and frowned harder - the dome of light moved forward, and we stayed inside it, ducking low to avoid the bullets.

We walked along the spine of the mechanical dragon, our footsteps echoing on the steel beneath the sounds of gunfire and the rushing wind. Lexicon seemed to get more and more upset with our progress with every second that passed without us dying, yelling at us and lamenting why his weapons were so ineffective against us.

We got to the middle of Lexicon’s back, between the beating wings of steel to either side of us, and Dice halted. We stopped with him, hunkered down low.

“What now?” Gary asked.

“The turrets roll on the mishap table,” I guessed, as Dice’s horn gained a second layer of overglow, and the turrets responded in kind.

The first turret made an awkward clicking sound and the sound of grinding gears was heard -- a bullet contrived to jam itself in the mechanism. The other turret reacted in a more spectacular manner, and simply exploded, ammunition detonating and sending shrapnel everywhere.

“Lucifer’s beard!” Lexicon cursed, looking at his broken turrets and us, as Dice finally let out a breath and sank to the ground. “I don’t believe this.”

“Believe it,” I shot back. “Dice, that was the coolest thing ever.”

“Tell me... about it,” the unicorn gasped. “Never... doing... that... again.”

“Holy hell,” Gary gasped. “I guess you were right. A lifetime of shitty luck for impossible luck when you need it.”

“I think I need to change my pants,” M confessed.

“You can stop bullets,” Lexicon snorted. “Stop gravity.”

With a beat of wings, Lexicon did what we were all hoping he wouldn’t -- he did a barrel roll. A slow, languid affair, his torso turned, and with it, we lost our footing; in the blink of an eye, we were standing on a smooth surface at a sixty degree angle; but even then, we were moving.

I grabbed Dice, whose hooves had no purchase on the armor plates, and threw him ahead of me, to land on Lexicon’s side. Gary and M ran with him, pushing against the edges of plates to find purchase and leap over Lexicon’s rotating torso. I leapt for a handhold, and found one... sort of.

I won’t sugar-coat it. I hung onto the edge of an armor plate with one hand, rocket launcher in the other, and screamed like a little girl.

======

Duke screamed like a little girl, and part of me wanted to snigger. That definitely qualified as a bit of a dick move, though, and I decided to better use my talents by grabbing Duke's shoulders with magic and pulling.

With him pulling himself up as well, he fairly flew into the air, falling down onto a level armor plate, landing by pure chance on both feet. Satisfied that he was safe, I turned my attention to my own predicament.

Being partial to life, I kept moving, running hard and feeling like my heart was going to burst as I struggled to keep pace with the barrel roll. We crossed Lexicon’s belly, jumping across exposed machinery as the barrel roll continued.

Lexicon righted himself, and by good fortune, we’d stayed on top of him, and we hunched over, catching our breath.

“Never... doing... this... again,” Gary gasped. “Fuck adventures.”

I looked behind me, hoping that Duke would claw his way over Lexicon’s side, swearing about how we’d left him for dead. Nothing moved.

"Wait," M looked as well, realizing a problem. "Where's Duke?"

"I thought he was behind us," I confessed.

"Aw shit," Gary puffed. "Duke!"

"I'm! Over! Here!" a voice yelled, faintly. We looked back in the direction we were facing, and looked over the side we'd fled over so recently.

Far below us, arms wrapped around Lexicon's mechanical leg, hugging it for dear life as it kicked back and forth to try and dislodge him.

"Stop gawking," he yelled, bobbing up and down, "and help me up!"

======

I clambered back onto Lexicon's back with difficulty. Not only was I performing physical exercise (not my forte), but Lexicon was doing his darndest to throw us off his back with thrashing motions. It was a miracle that none of us fell off.

Or perhaps it was Dice. The unicorn was sweating, and looked exhausted, eyes sunken and head bowed. His horn didn't falter, though, and a faint haze surrounded each of us.

"Dice," I said, regaining my footing. "Thanks for saving me back there."

"No problem," Dice grunted. "Flesh and blood."

There was a loud, grinding sound, and we looked to Lexicon's head. With a grinding of gears, Lexicon's neck was rotating entirely.

"That's not good," Gary guessed. "That is not good!"

Lexicon's reconfiguration completed, and his head looked down at us, as if we were on his belly.

"Your luck cannot last forever," he stated. "Give up now, and I will cyberize you, instead of killing you."

"Jog on,"

"How do you plan to kill us?" I taunted. "Dice broke your stupid guns!"

"There is an ancient chinese proverb," Lexicon stated, opening his mouth wide to reveal a complex array of nozzles and emitters. "If you want a job done right, do it yourself."

"Don't tell me he's gonna use that beam," Dice gasped. "I can't turn that aside!"

"He'd also vaporize part of his own back!" M muttered.

"Do you think I'm stupid?" Lexicon asked, offended. "Of course I'd vaporize part of my own back if I used the Hadron Cannon! That's why I'm using the flamethrower."

"Oh, great," Dice snorted sarcastically. "Can't stop that, either. At least the cannon would have been quick and painless."

There was a revving of a fan deep within Lexicon's maw, and one tube began to gurgle, sounds echoing up the tube from deep within Lexicon. Fuel.

"Well, since we're going to die," Gary said, resignedly, "I've got a confession to make. I'm with the Human Liberation Front. Well, my dad is, and by proxy, so am I."

"What." M just looked at Gary. "You are shitting me."

"No joke," Gary said. "My old man's not a fan of ponies, and he expects his son to be the same. I think it's good that we're going to die, or he'd have me killed for helping a bunch of ponies and pony-lovers."

"Well," I said, dropping to one knee and readying the rocket launcher. "You're going to live, and if he wants to kill you, he'll have to go through me first." I flicked a switch, and the safety deactivated. "Duke Cooper, Dragonslayer."

"We're too close!" M protested. "The rocket won't have time to activate the homing mechanism!"

"Then we'll have to get lucky," I said, adjusting my aim to the pilot light in Lexicon's mouth. "You ready to use the force, Dice?"

Dice realized my intent, looked between me and the pipe from which death would seek us out, and grinned. "Hell yeah, motherfucker."

I wasted no more time, and pulled the trigger on the rocket launcher. With a click, the rocket in the tube was unleashed with a dull whump.

The first puffs of fuel and gas leapt out of Lexicon's mouth, orange flame blossoming and catching light.

The missile leapt towards it, encased with a blue light, and passed through the flames without hindrance. Spinning a tight corkscrew, the missile approached the tube from which the fuel was starting to spill out of, and with a sharp screech of steel, slipped into the tube, shaving off it's fins in the process.

Then the thruster activated, and the explosive forced itself down the tube. Lexicon's mechanical brow creased in confusion briefly, before-

Boom

A small explosion rocked our impromptu island, and the triumphant grin was wiped off my face as Lexicon merely stopped preparing his attack to look at us with "what the hell was that" written all over his face. A few wisps of smoke were coming out of his mouth, bit otherwise there was no apparent damage.

"Well, that was a bit shit," Gary muttered. "I thought the explosion'd be bigger."

Then, the fire that was burning away inside Lexicon's gullet got into his flamethrower's mixing chamber, with predictable results.

======

As a unicorn, flight is not something that comes naturally to me. Some flightless ponies even go to extraordinary lengths to achieve flight.

They're mad. Flying is essentially falling with style at great altitude, and falling is terrifying at any altitude. More so when you're high up enough to see the clouds below.

The ringing in my ears began to subside, and I got my bearings. My three human companions were "flying" alongside me. Well. Duke and M were, at any rate. Both were screaming inaudibly in terror, and rightly so.

It's not everyday a robotic dragon blows up underneath you. Metal had flown everywhere, as did we; in a flash of light, Lexicon was reduced to a pretty, flower-shaped cloud of dirty smoke and a rain of  metal scrap that flew for miles in every direction, trailing fumes. For all his claims of invulnerability, it seemed that a simple internal detonation was enough to tear him to pieces.

The metal plates we were standing on had been our saving grace. Shielding us from the raw fury of the explosion, they acted like a catapult, and we were thrown high into the sky.

And here we were; so far above the earth, we could see it curve into the horizon, the city below us no more than a speck. Peaceful. You know, if we weren’t about to die horribly.

A large shape flashed by -- the Valkyrie. Like missiles, three shapes leapt off the deck, pursuing us down to the earth, racing gravity.

The first shape to reach us was a pegasus. A special one, as he didn't have a wing on his back, his neck craned forward as he accelerated his dive.

"Shield!" I shouted. "What the hell are you doing?"

"Saving my girl," he grunted. "I'm a pegasus, but flying ain't all I can do!"

Like a white missile, he tucked his legs in and dived even faster, shooting past me to catch up with M. The pair collided and went into a tumble, the pair halting their spin with Shield on the bottom.

As we approached the cloud layer, I realized Shield’s game. He couldn’t fly. But he could still touch the clouds.

The pair hit cloud with a strange puff of clouds; it behaved like firm dirt in that it stopped their fall, and at the same time, it parted like water - slowly, slowing their fall to a speed that wouldn’t crush the two flat.

No such luck for the rest of us; we plunged through the clouds unimpeded, and the other two pegasi were revealed for who they were; Chocolate Cake and Chord Thorn.

“Get him first!” I pointed at Gary, who was still out cold, his face rippling in a way that would have been hilarious if we weren’t falling to our deaths. Cake grimaced, nodded, and banked away to  grab my friend. With a whump, Cake pulled up and rapidly fell away.

“We got us a problem,” Thorn yelled over the wind. “There’s two of you, and only one o’ me.”

“Him,” Duke said, without hesitating. “Take Dice.”

“Fuck off,” I said. “Take Duke!”

“Why?!” Duke gesticulated, clothes flapping in the wind. “I’m just a clone! You’re the original! If the truth ever gets out, I’m dead anyway! At least give me the satisfaction of taking one for the team!”

I clenched my eyes shut, willing back the tears. I couldn’t find an argument to use against him, of the two of us... he was the logical choice. “Fine. You win, Duke.”

Thorn grabbed me under the shoulders, and Duke looked down, then back up, and gave me a small wave.

“Tell mum and dad I love ‘em.”

======

With a second whump, Thorn yanked Dice up into the sky, and I watched them go, and sighed. I rotated languidly in the air, looking at the ground far below.

All things considered, today was a good day to die, right?

I mulled it over, and thought about my last few days. Twenty-odd years of jack shit, and then a week of mayhem. You couldn’t make this stuff up.

I watched the building far below loom, and gritted my teeth. Today was not a good day to die. Today was a good day to die hard. If that guy from The Da Vinci Code could jump out of a helicopter without a parachute and not die, so could I. Right? If I did it, I’d be godlike, and nobody would ever trump me for exciting stories again!

Or I’d die trying. So really, no loss. I spread my arms and legs out, and with a whud, felt the increase in resistance and my fall slowed, giving me time to think. There was a distinct lack of convenient rivers to land in, much to my distress, and I saw the building below; a glass-roofed structure to let the sun in, and below that...

A glistening, rippling body of water. An indoor pool. I thought fast. Me. Glass. Water. I needed to hit that water to have any chance of surviving. Glass was a problem. Water might possibly give, although chances were it’d be more like concrete at this speed. Glass, however, would just flay the flesh from my bones and kill me.

I looked around for something that might possibly remove the obstacle for me. I spotted something large and heavy in the air, drifting towards me.

“Rocket launcher!” I whooped, grabbing the weapon, and fingers crossed, threw it downwards of me.

The heavy weapon surged ahead of me, the distance growing between us rapidly. The weapon blazed a vertical path, and as I began to see myself in the reflection of the glass on the building, the rocket launcher hit it.

With a spiderweb of cracks, the glass fractured and splintered, but did not give way; the resilent glass wobbled violently, but otherwise sent the destroyed rocket launcher flying away like a soccer ball off the goalposts. I winced, and abandoned my spread-eagled posture to go for a fist-first approach.

I approached the glass myself, and I saw a thousand copies of myself, all surging towards me, fist-first. I noted how I looked, and wondered how the hell in a million years that this had happened to me, of all people.

When you’re about to die, everything snaps into perspective.

I shut my eyes, and prepared for pain. Flesh, bone and sinew met glass, steel and carbide alloys. There was one winner.