It's... a thing. A science thing. It hurts robots. Don't worry about it.

“Pull!”

A moment later, a rock roughly the size of a young foal’s head was launched high into the air. I narrowed my gaze at the offending stone and engaged my pipbuck’s Sparkle Assisted Targeting System. Time slowed, and I queued up a trio of strikes, only sparing a passing moment to note the less-than-encouraging numbers that the device on my fetlock was displaying as my chances of scoring a hit. I engaged the spell and promptly launched three quick jabs at the flying rock.

It still felt a little weird to be ‘punching’ at something that was the better part of fifty yards away. Yet, as each of my little rabbit-punches reached their full extension, I felt the slide on my bracers kick forward and discharge. A brilliant bolt of orange fire shot forward at about the speed of an energy bolt that one might expect to see expelled by one of the boxy weapons that the Steel Rangers favored. The first of the trio of lethal shots went wide by what I felt was an insulting margin, but the second struck true, obliterating the stone into a fine mist. The third shot merely punched a harmless little hole through the rapidly dissipating cloud.

I stalled in the air, hovering as I mentally evaluated my latest round of trials with the new weapon that I’d recovered from the secret compartment in my family home. It was like no weapon that I’d ever used before, so it had taken the better part of a week for me to perform reliably well with it. At least at range. The devices discharged whenever my forelegs came to an suitably abrupt halt, which meant that they also fired if I punched something hard enough. They operated much like a power hoof in that regard which, while not a weapon I used, was one that I was at least familiar with.

Given what I had seen these things do to targets so far, I had some pretty serious reservations about using them against flesh and blood ponies at ranges close enough for me to make physical contact. Such a fight would very quickly get quite...messy. Killing dangerous ponies was one thing, but having their heads explode with a good right cross a foot away from my own face? I had vivid enough nightmares as it was, thank you very much!

I looked back down at the pink unicorn and robopony walking along on the ground below me. Starlight Glimmer’s horn was already glowing, holding another rock about the size of my last target in her telekinetic field, “pull!”

On cue, the mare hurled the stone into the air. This time I forewent the magical assistance of my pipbuck and tried to eyeball the shot in real-time. I lashed out with a half dozen punches, tracking the arcing projectile. My first two went wide. The third clipped a piece of it, diverting the stone sharply upward and sending it spinning wildly in the air. The sudden change in direction cost me my fourth and fifth shots as well, but its new nearly perfectly vertical course set it up to very briefly come to a complete stop just before it began to descend to the ground. This was when my sixth and final bolt obliterated it.

Considering I was preparing to fight a stable full of ponies who were the better part of twice the size of the average stallion and I was scoring hits on rocks half the size of bloatsprites at two hundred feet, I didn’t feel that this was a particularly bad performance. I wasn’t the only pony who was demonstrating a marked improvement either. While my initial predictions for her competence with a firearm had left a lot to be desired, Starlight Glimmer was finally hitting targets at a decent range with what even I considered to be respectable level of reliability. She wasn’t going to be winning any marksmareship competitions any time soon, but she was at least at the point where I felt I could rely on her to provide adequate fire support if the need arose.

Her accuracy with her own innate magical strikes far outclassed her ability to hit even a stationary target with her little shotgun of course; and Starlight never missed a moment to remind me of how much more effective those cyan beams of hers were than buckshot. I freely acknowledged that fact too. However, I was also not shy about reminding her of how high the ratio of her time spent with her horn burned out was to the total time we’d known her, and how far into an hour-long firefight she could maintain a nearly constant rate of fire with those magical beams of hers. The response was always some sort of eyeroll and a grumble as she returned to practicing with the shotgun.

The pink mare was holding another rock to throw into the air, but I shook my head and began circling lazily back towards the ground, “that’s enough for today,” I informed the unicorn, “I don’t want to burn through too many of our spark-packs. Not when we’re this close to...well, wherever it is we’re going.”

That was one of the questions burning in my mind during this trip. The flight tracking information that I’d gathered from the Ministry of Awesome installation beneath McMaren before it had been shut down had provided me with the coordinates of our destination, but it hadn’t helped me to understand exactly what it was that we were going to find. Another secret military base? A sealed bunker? An abandoned amusement park? There was no telling with this ministry, honestly; not after everything I’d seen up to this point.

Starlight tossed away the unused stone and let out a long sigh, “how much longer is it going to be, anyway?”

“That depends,” I shrugged, earning a frown from the other mare, “I mean, we can probably be there tonight if we feel like making this a long day. Or we can stop and camp for the night so we reach it while it’s light out.

“Considering we don’t know what we’ll find when we get there, I’m not a fan of doing this in the dark.”

My concerns were seconded by Moonbeam, “agreed.”

“Stopping soon and getting a good night’s rest? No argument here! How much longer then?”

I glanced up at the cloudy sky, noting that it was starting to darken already, “another hour. Maybe a little less,” my wings flitted out once more and I lifted into the air, “I’ll fly ahead and find a good spot to bed down.”

Starlight was getting a little better about dealing with these lengthy desert treks, as well as improving her proficiency with a gun, but her couple months of endurance building still didn’t put her anywhere near my level; or that of a mechanical mare, for that matter. While our pace was certainly vastly improved from what it had been immediately after we’d recovered her, the pink unicorn mare was still the pony in our group dictating the pace we maintained.

On the bright side, things had not been as awkwardly silent as our trip to McMaren had been. Their little emotional breakthrough at the old military base seemed to have been sufficient to tear down whatever barriers had previously existed between them and the two were chatting much more freely. Given that this was still a rather new development between them, I wasn’t too eager to interject myself very often, settling instead for simply listening to them talk about...well, themselves, I guess.

Most of their conversation heavily favored Starlight Glimmer’s own history, as Moonbeam made an effort to learn more details about her parent’s life before being placed into stasis. She was especially interested in hearing about her father as well. While not the most pressing mysteries in my life that I wanted answers to, I did still listen in to what they talked about in the spirit of learning more personal details about my newest traveling companions. The bulk of the revelations happened while we ate dinner around our nightly campfires, just before going to sleep.

Tonight’s first story continued Starlight’s account of how she had come to be part of the Ministry of Arcane Science, “like I said yesterday: I didn’t hear about the war until it had already been going on for several months. The village I was leading was pretty far off the beaten path, which had been the point. We’d heard about the Wonderbolt intervention, and the coal embargo, but none of us imagined that it’d escalate into a war!

“Then, one day, a flight of pegasi showed up and told us we had to evacuate. They said that the zebras had bypassed the Mareginot Line to the east by going through griffon territory, and that our town was now vulnerable. I tried to keep us all together, but we weren’t the only ponies that had to be evacuated. There were too many refugees to send to just one place, so we ended up getting split up,” the pink unicorn sighed, shaking her head, “and, with that, my dream of creating a utopian society died a quiet little death.

“Back in central Equestria, it didn’t take long to get caught up on everything that had happened, and just how dire the situation was. Equestria had been at peace since the Nightmare Rebellion. Other than dealing with the occasional bugbear intrusion or a pack of diamond dogs that was denning a little too close, we’d never had to actually fight a real enemy before. Meanwhile, the zebras were the next best thing to a society of warriors! They had several tribes who were completely dedicated to mastering fighting and warfare.”

Her features grew a little darker, “we learned quickly though. Defeat is a very harsh proctor; and we suffered defeats. A lot of them. Early on, at least. Trotterdam, The Haygue, Geldeberg, the zebras blitzed right through Equestria’s frontier regions in a matter of weeks before finally being stopped at Hoofington. Even that city came close to falling early on, but it managed to hold on just long enough for forces armed with the new ‘firearms’ that had just been developed to get there and finally repel the zebras.

“After that, it all seemed to turn into a game of who could come up with the deadliest weapons first. Celestia had stepped down by then, replaced by Princess Luna and her new ministries. The call went out for all skilled unicorns to apply to the Ministry of Arcane Science and so me, being the most skilled unicorn that I knew,” the pink mare managed a smirk as she said that with no small amount of bravado, “submitted an application.

“I got the impression that some of the unicorns in charge of personnel recognized my name from the papers on the nature of cutie marks that I’d submitted to several of Equestria’s universities early in my career; because I wasn’t given the initial posting that my skill deserved,” she very nearly scowled at the memory, “I got assigned as a research assistant at first. Fortunately, the stallion I worked for was an idiot, and it didn’t take long for my own efforts to completely eclipse his. Within the first year of being hired, I was finally heading my own team.

“Another couple of years after that, I found myself as the acting director for the MAS’s R.A.M.S. division: Research into Artifacts of Magical Significance. Essentially, looking for sources of ancient power that had either been forgotten about or lost. It was that job that eventually got me assigned to the Crystal Empire, since their library contained the most intact editions of the oldest know tomes in the region.

“Being lost in time for a thousand years is a good way to preserve books, it turns out,” the unicorn gave a rueful little wink. Then her expression softened, “it turned out that somepony from the town of my birth had actually been placed in charge of the Empire’s library, which had been rebranded by then as the Imperial Institute of Arcana, a magical academy of sorts. Crystal ponies couldn’t use unicorn magic, but Princess Cadence was determined to try and help Equestria as best she could; especially since their military commitment had been pretty minimal by then.”

My face scrunched up now and I voiced a clarifying question, “why? Did they not have a big army or something?”

“On the contrary,” Starlight corrected, “the Crystal Empire had a pretty extensive military tradition; and, unlike the rest of Equestria, from their point of view they’d fought a pretty big war quite recently. In fact, it was their military advisers that helped to whip the Equestrian military back into shape after their initial defeats.

“And that was also the problem too,” she went on, “the crystal ponies had just come out of a very costly war quite recently. Their armies were still in the process of re-organizing―not to mention upgrading their millenia-old equipment. They were in no condition to fight, and the civilian population really didn’t want to either.

“You have to understand that the Crystal Empire was still only a very loosely integrated part of Equestria at this point,” the unicorn explain patiently. For her this had been common knowledge where she’d come from―er, when she’d come from?―but I didn’t know hardly anything about what was ancient history for me, “there wasn’t much of a unified identity between the two nations. For much of the Empire, the war was between the zebras and Equestria, since none of the events leading up to it had involved the crystal ponies at all. The last thing they wanted was to be dragged into another war, so soon after barely managing to survive their last one.

“Princess Cadance knew this, and so she committed as few line forces as possible, sending mostly advisors and training cadre; and capitalizing on the Empire’s wealth of preserved knowledge to help with Equestria’s research programs. Programs that, as the war became more desperate, weren’t moving along as fast as the MAS wanted.

“So, I got tapped to go there and give everypony at the IIA a swift kick in their collective posteriors.”

“And that’s when you fell in love with Daddy,” Moonbeam interjected, beaming at her mother.

Starlight waggled her hoof in the air noncommittally, “ehh...eventually. He didn’t even remember who I was at first,” she said in a sour tone, “but he soon caught on. And, when he learned that the pony who’d been sent by Ministry Mare Twilight Sparkle herself to find out why he was so far behind on his development quotas wasn’t, in fact, there to give him the boot and take over everything for herself, he warmed up to me pretty quick.

“Over the months, one thing led to another…” she shrugged, and I could see the first signs I’d seen in a while of a genuinely warm smile appearing on her lips, “Sunburst was almost the one to finally propose, but he couldn’t quite get it out,” she snorted with laughter at the memory. But I saw that she also had to wipe the corner of her eye with the back of her hoof as she followed up the amused outburst with a sniff, “he was stuttering so much and he could barely get his levitation magic to work at all. I started laughing at him.

“I already knew exactly what he’d planned for the night,” she admitted, “the adorable little idiot had used our joint account to make the preparations,” she laughed again, “when you see back-to-back charges appear on your bank statement from Rings and Strings, Crystal Rose Florist, and Chard on the Shard―the undisputed most romantic cafe in the Empire―then it’s pretty obvious that something is going to happen.

“But, oh Celestia! When I laughed he just looked so crestfallen! He thought I found it ridiculous that he even thought that I’d marry him. He actually ran out of the restaurant!”

“I assume this story has a happy ending,” I surmised, nodding my head towards her daughter.

“Obviously. I chased him down, froze him with a simple arresto spell and gave him a kiss that made it pretty obvious I had no intention of turning him down,” that warm smile was now broader than ever, “then we went back to the cafe to collect the bottle of champagne that we hadn’t gotten to yet and took it home to finish, erm...celebrating our engagement.

“I don’t think we came out of our bedroom that whole weekend,” she added, a pensive hoof on her chin, “I mean, except for bathroom and water breaks, of course,” she flashed the pair of us a satisfied grin.

Moonbeam’s pink eyes flickered, “wow, Mom. Thanks for that lovely visual.”

Starlight gave her metallic daughter a mischievous look, “oh? That makes you uncomfortable? How about this little tid-bit: backtracking from the day you were born, it’s about a ninety-nine percent chance that you were my birthday present. I’d just gotten back from a three month long string of MAS conferences and briefs and Mama needed some serious lovin’ to unwind. That’s when I found out that Sunburst had apparently picked up a copy of the Pony Sutra while I was gone to ‘surprise’ me.

“Your father is a very studious reader by the way.”

“Oh, Celestia, I can’t know this!” the robopony wailed, burying her face in the ground and covering her ears with her hooves.

I looked briefly at the distraught robopony and then back at Starlight, shrugging, “I could sit here a little longer. So, like, a whole two days, really?”

“It was still pretty early on Friday when we went home, and we may have come into work late that Monday. So, somewhere closer to a full seventy-hours really,” she amended, heedless of the groan coming from her daughter’s buried muzzle.

“How does that even work?”

“Oh,” the unicorn mare chuckled, “it worked very well, trust me. You just need to make sure to stay hydrated, have the stallion pop a healing potion every twelve hours or so to keep him from passing out―oh!―and plenty of lubricant. I think we went through two whole bottles of Hay-Y the night of our engagement…”

“That’s it!” Moonbeam interrupted, “I’m cutting my audio feed. If anything happens, knock on my casing!”

The pair of us glanced briefly at our metallic companion, the pink mare rolling with laughter, “no,” I went on, trying to clarify my earlier question as I also remembered to ask her how motor oil played a role in any of this, “I mean, it’s all over so quick. How can you stretch it out for days? I guess you can make the kissing and stuff go on for a while, but the sex is just over so fast!”

“Wait, what?” Starlight stopped laughing, looking at me dubiously.

“Yeah,” I was feeling a little uneasier talking about this now, seeing the unicorn’s genuinely surprised expression, “the thing goes in, it gets sticky, and then it comes out. It’s like, ten seconds or something.”

“Ten sec―” the mare’d jaw went slack for a moment before she brought up both of her hooves to cover her mouth. At first, I thought she was in shock at the idea that a mare as young as me had been having sex, but then I noticed that her blue eyes were sparkling with barely contained mirth. When she spoke, I could similarly hear the strain as she held back her laughter―though not completely successfully, “oh, honey...that is...I am so sorry for you.

“Who did you―” she began to ask, but then she stopped short and her eyes grew wide, “wait. McMaren! Mister ‘Fuck or kill’! Arginine?!” she was laughing audibly again, much to my own unreserved chagrin, “that studly glass of tall, dark, and handsome, only went ten seconds? That is...tragic,” the unicorn even looked genuinely mournful, “I guess looks really aren’t everything. A shame.”

“So...I take it that wasn’t a normal amount of time for ponies to have sex?”

“Well…” Starlight said, her lips scrunched up off to the side, “I mean, I’m not going to say it never happens. But, no, I wouldn’t put that up there as being ‘normal’. Even if you take out the foreplay.”

“What-play?”

That mournful look was back again, but her eyes maintained that twinkle of amusement, “oh, honey...we need to have a long talk…”

Last night’s conversation with Starlight had certainly proved to be...illuminating; and I spent even most of the next morning thinking about it. I wasn’t going to go so far as to say that it had answered all my questions about the topic, but I also wasn’t sure that I’d be able to handle any further details. Not yet, at least. I wasn’t sure, either, how I was going to have that same sort of talk with Arginine when I next saw him. Still, I suppose that it was information that I was glad to have. Even if it did further reinforce just how little I knew about a whole lot of things.

We had a light meal just before daybreak, and then packed up our things in order to continue with the last little leg of our trip to...wherever it was we were going. I flew as far ahead as I was comfortable with, given that we were a long way off the ‘beaten path’. This meant that I was, ultimately, a little less concerned about our running into a bandit ambush or camp, since those groups tended to operate closer to where other ponies lived. On the other hoof, that same lack of regular pony trafic meant that there was a much higher chance of coming across a den of some sort of monster.

Goliath hell hounds, manticor swarms, and radroach nests were all things that we most definitely did not want to stumble into unawares.

When I finally caught sight of our destination, I found myself unable to believe what it was. At least, at first. The more that I thought about it, the more sense it made though. To a point. I couldn’t see how it really made our current quest any easier though. If anything, it probably made it a whole lot harder. I perch myself atop a large roadside sign that served to pretty clearly announce this place for what it was. Again, not something that was super surprising for the Ministry of Awesome after everything I’d seen from them thus far.

“Seaddle Municipal Landfill.”

I double and triple checked my pipbuck’s map to be sure that this place really was where we’d been heading. There was no doubt that this was the right place. But I was once again feeling a few doubts about whether or not this really was the ‘right’ place after all.

My rationale had been that this location had been the destination of an absurd amount of air traffic from the MoA. To me, that had implied that it had to be some sort of important facility, specifically the place where they were either stashing or even building a massive stockpile of weapons for use in the war. Now, sitting here and looking out over the expansive mountains of trash and debris, I found myself doubting that conclusion just a little. After all, there certainly was another reason why the ministry would have been sending a lot of traffic to this place: disposing of their actual garbage.

I mean, if you had a bunch of secret bases, I suppose that you couldn’t just place your bins out on the street corner for regular pick-up, could you?

If this had all turned out to be a waste of time…

No. No, I refused to accept that, and not just because it meant that our truly last chance to be able to put up a good fight against Arginine’s stable was a bust. That secret McMaren bunker had been tracking every shipment going here. I refused to believe that they’d put so much effort into simple trash. Plus, this was also in the area that we’d learned a lot of the shipments from Wind Ryder’s was going too. You’re not about to tell me that a fake shipping company was disposing of a lot of trash!

No. Something was here. Probably hidden underground somewhere. How and where we were going to find the entrance in all of that, I couldn’t begin to predict. We had to try though. Maybe Starlight knew a spell that would help us out?

“Oh, wow,” I heard the pink unicorn announce drolly from the nearby road as she and her daughter finally caught up with me, “Windfall, you take me to such wonderful places. You’re not going to tell me that tetanus stopped being a thing in the Wasteland too, are you?”

“Whatever we’re looking for has to be here,” was I trying to convince them, or me?

“If so,” Moonbeam said, looking around, “that’s pretty smart, really,” despite my own hopes, I found myself looking at the robopony with a dubious expression, “think about it: where can you deliver a lot of parts, while bringing nothing back, and nopony thinks twice about it?”

That...actually did make sense. Wagons loaded down with equipment could have rolled into this place, ‘dumped’ their cargos, and left completely empty and nothing would have looked odd about it. If this had been a real factory, or even just a factory being used as a front, somepony―or, more likely, a zebra spy―would have eventually started wondering why a ‘factory’ wasn’t shipping out any product. Since landfills were expected to never ship anything back out, then this made a perfect destination.

Though, that still didn’t address the issue of, “where do we start looking?”

“Well, on the bright side, I think that this is a real dump,” Starlight began, gesturing at the nearest towering pile of garbage and the mountain of broken consumer goods and trash that it was composed of. The she point at a small building located near the entrance, “so maybe there are records of some sort?”

“Records? At a dump?”

“If there isn’t a need for records, then why have an office?” the unicorn pointed out. Then she added, “its a government operation, Windfall. Government operations keep records about everything.”

It couldn’t hurt to at least look, I supposed, so I glided back to the ground and the three of us made our way to the little brick building that sat by the landfill’s entrance. There was indeed a terminal located on a desk inside, and Moonbeam immediately made her way to it and began typing. Meanwhile, I started looking around for clues. I wasn’t completely convinced, after all, that this whole place really was a ‘real’ dump. If the Ministry of Awesome built a ‘fake’ military base to hide one of their installations, then why not a landfill?

By the time Moonbeam gained complete access to the records here, I hadn’t found anything that looked to be out of the ordinary though. Granted, if this building was supposed to be the most visible part of their ‘front’, then I suppose that it would have been designed to look as mundane as possible. The surface features of Wind Ryder’s had looked normal enough at first glance, after all. This place was a lot bigger than Wind Ryder’s though. According to the large map hanging on the wall, it had to cover the better part of ten square miles of land!

“I’m in,” the robopony informed us. Then she added, “and if anypony is interested: according to Selene, the encryption being used isn’t typical of a civilian system.”

“Really?” Okay, I was a little less anxious now.

“Really,” she continued, but then added, “however, there doesn’t seem to be anything out of the ordinary either. Not at first glance,” she gestured at the terminal’s screen as she began to navigate the system, “intake tonnages. Lists of private and corporate dumping permit holders, billing and accounting. It all looks pretty standard.”

“Well, I wasn’t really expecting a file called, ‘super secret stuff. Don’t open!’,” I said, a frown worming its way across my lips. Then a thought occurred to me, “you said that there was a list of companies that dumped here?”

“Yes.”

“Is Wind Ryder one of them?”

The robopony tapped at the console for a few brief seconds before shaking her head, “nope. Nothing listed for them.”

“What? That can’t be right,” I knew for a fact that their wagons had come here. The flight times Foxglove had recovered and the tracking data from McMaren confirmed that, “I know they sent wagons here. They have to be on the list.”

“They’re not,” Moonbeam assured me, sounding just a little irritated that I was doubting her competence with a simple computer terminal, “there is no record of any wagons from ‘Wind Ryder’ ever coming here.”

Then it hit me and I pinched the bridge of my nose, “of course there isn’t,” I sighed, “because there are already records of those wagons going to other places,” I realized, “the last thing that the Ministry of Awesome would want is conflicting records about where their own wagons are. Even if the zebras didn’t notice it, somepony was going to find it weird and start asking a lot of questions,” just like Foxglove and I had when we looked over the flight times that had been recorded for those same wagons.

There was still one other problem though, “but those wagons did come here. There might not be records here,” I quickly added, heading off another comment from Moonbeam, “but there are in McMaren, and I can’t think of a reason why their big underground base would be the place with fake records,” I pointed out. A fact that the other two with me had to agree with, “but I bet they really wouldn’t have logged them coming in here, since I’m betting that somepony in a part of the government that wasn’t the MoA would need these records?” I glanced at Starlight Glimmer, who nodded.

I turned away from the terminal, my gaze shifting to the map of the sprawling landfill that was hanging on the wall, “Then Wind Ryder wagons being seen dumping ‘trash’ off here would have been something that the Ministry of Awesome would want to avoid too. Especially if there were also real garbage ponies working here dumping off trash. If somepony said something they weren’t supposed to, it would bring up a lot of questions.

“Plus,” I added, “if we’re thinking that there’s some big underground place here, then there’s a way into that place, right? I really doubt they’d want ponies dumping trash all over their front door, wherever it is,” I turned back to Moonbeam, “I don’t suppose the ponies here also tracked where the garbage that came in got dumped?”

She tabbed back over to another set of records, “they did,” she confirmed.

“Is there any area that specifically didn’t get used?” I asked, “maybe one that’s really far from all the places that were used regularly?”

The mare began tapping at the console once more as she filtered through the data. After several more seconds, she sat up a little straighter in front of the computer and turned back to look at me, her glowing pink eyes wide with surprise, “there is. Section M-6 hasn’t received any garbage going back at least two years, and no wagon on record has been within two sectors of it.”

A smile spread across my muzzle, “I think that sounds like a good place to start. What about you two?”

The three of us left the small office behind and started making our way deeper into the landfill’s interior, heading towards the section that Moonbeam had identified. We made it just a couple hundred yards, just rounding the first of the massive piles of refuse, before we came to an abrupt halt, gaping at what we saw. For none of us had expected to encounter anything like this.

It was a town.

Emphasis on ‘was’.

A large wooden sign mounted into the side of a mountain of trash proclaimed that this place had once been christened, Junk Town. While I certainly had to grant that it was probably the most fitting name for a settlement that I’d ever encountered, the fact remained that it was probably the last thing that I had expected to see in this place. For a lot of reasons. Chief among them being that I’d never even heard about it. At all.

I would be the first to admit that I wasn’t exactly the most geographically knowledgeable mare in the Wasteland, even when it came to the Neighvada valley of my birth. Indeed, it wasn’t super uncommon for little settlements to spring up in out of the way places that nopony had ever heard of. Notel sprang to mind as exactly one such place. A tiny little village built into a few buildings off the main roads where nopony would bother them. Those places existed, and it wasn’t super surprising to think that they could vanish just as quickly in some sort of tragic catastrophe.

Junk Town didn’t look like it fit into that ‘small town’ demographic though. I flitted up into the air and very quickly figured out that it was big. Really big. Hundreds of ponies would have lived in this place. Maybe as many as a thousand. It was easily bigger than Shady Saddles. This place would have been known about. More importantly, its disappearance wouldn’t have gone unnoticed. Somepony would have said something.

I started having flashbacks to Old Reino.

“I can’t believe that ponies would have set up a town in a landfill,” I heard Starlight say from below as she and Moonbeam slowly advanced through the front gates of the deserted community.

“Plenty of resources―rubber, steel, plastic, wood―all in one place. Far from any war targets during the balefire strikes, which meant little radiation and taint,” her daughter pointed out, “I suspect that this was actually a pretty appealing location for a settlement immediately after the war.”

I suppose that could explain why this place hadn’t been advertised: it was old. Really old. If it had been one of the first places set up in the aftermath of the war, and then disappeared not too long after, that would explain why nopony was talking about it now. I wasn’t sure if that made me feel any better about what this place implied though. Junk Town looked too big and important to have simply just...vanished. Not without a good reason.

“So then why abandon it?” the pink mare asked.

“I don’t think they did,” I said, pointing a hoof at a nearby structure. It was located pretty close to the gates of the town, and had probably served as some sort of guard post or customs office for incoming traders. Most of its walls looked like they were built out of repurposed freight wagon parts, consisting mostly of steel and aluminum. A pretty significant piece of which looked like it had been melted away by...something. Whatever it was, it had to have been pretty big, and powerful too. A typical magical energy weapon would have blackened material like that pretty good. Sustained blasts would even have penetrated it and left some molten bits of slag behind.

But I could fit my head through the hole that had been bored into that thing.

“It looks like they were evicted.”

“Then why didn’t the victors move in?” Starlight asked.

To that, I didn’t have a very good answer, “no idea. This obviously wasn’t the White Hooves. Arginine’s stable wouldn’t have been a problem as long ago as this must have happened. A plague maybe? I don’t see how that could have wiped out everypony though. If this really was one of the first towns set up after the war, then they’d have had a bunch of fresh medicine and doctors who’d gone to real medical schools, right?”

Then I recalled what had happened to the ponies in Old Reino and glanced at my pipbuck. No significantly strong sources of radiation were showing up though.

I pointed out a few more buildings that prominently displayed signs of having been the targets of more massively destructive weaponry, “what if all of this had been, like, right after the bombs fell? Close enough that the war wasn’t even really ‘over’? Could this have been zebras?”

Starlight frowned now, “doubtful,” she said, stepping closer to one of the buildings to get a good look at the damage, “this was obviously done by magical energy weapons. The whole cause of the war was that the zebras didn’t have enough gems to power their more advanced devices. That remained true for most of the war. Most of their heavy weapons relied on conventional munitions.

“Ponies were the only ones who’d have used weapons like this.”

“Nobody said this had to be a pony settlement,” Moonbeam pointed out.

Her mother gave a shrug acknowledging the point, and I also had to admit that I’d sort of assumed that the inhabitants of this place had been ponies. I didn’t think it had been an unfair assumption, given that the Neighvada Valley had been part of Equestria. I suppose that didn’t mean that a community of zebras couldn’t have come up here after the war, fleeing from whatever destruction had ravaged their own lands. That might have even explained why no knowledge of it existed among the local pony populations.

That theory didn’t quite clear up why it had been destroyed and yet never resettled. Moonbeam had been correct in pointing out why this place might have been chosen by ponies to set up a town in the first place. A landfill like this would be a prospector’s wet dream. Valuable salvage and materials as far as the eye could see in just about every direction. Whether pony or zebra, whoever had wiped out the local population should have set up shop here themselves immediately after.

Unless they weren’t interested in settling at all. I glanced upwards, at the thick layer of clouds that completely blanketed the whole valley. Ponies with access to powerful weaponry who didn’t see to have any inclination to set up shop on the surface. That sure sounded an awful lot like what I’d heard about the Grand Pegasus Enclave to me!

On the other hoof, while it was true that the reclusive fliers weren’t what ever could have been described as ‘friendly’ towards ponies living on the surface, I hadn’t heard of them ever doing something like this. They had their spats with the Steel Rangers, I supposed, but I had never encountered a story about the Enclave erasing a whole city.

We kept walking, but found ourselves once more drawing up short as we rounded another massive mound. There was another gate, and a panel of corrugated steel next to it with the word: ‘Junkburg’ written across it. The three of us exchanged confused looks with one another. A town within a town? I hadn’t noticed that from the air earlier. While Starlight and Moonbeam began making a closer examination of the newly discovered suburb, I leaped back up into the air and took the time to make a more detailed assessment of the buildings I’d seen.

I was subtle―and it explained why I hadn’t noticed it at first―but I could now trace out vague ‘lines’ in the sprawling settlement where there were clear divides in style and building techniques. It actually wasn’t one single massive city, as I’d first thought; but rather the next best thing to at least five distinct areas, each built onto the bones of the last.

It was as though ponies had come here, found the destruction of a settlement, moved on past it, and then built their own little town. My mind boggled at the mindset that must have existed by the time the fourth and fifth group of settlers moved in, apparently not thinking that it was worth considering why so many other villages in this place had failed before them. Then again, there was a lot of wealth that could be scrounged from this place. Ponies were willing to overlook a lot of implied risk if the payoff was big enough.

What made me a little uneasy was the discovery that Starlight and Moonbeam made during their examination of Junkburg: it had been destroyed by the same weapons as Junk Town. There was also one other finding that they’d made. Or, rather, it concerned what they specifically weren’t finding: bodies.

“The next groups that came here probably cleared them out,” I reasoned.

“Possible,” Moonbeam agreed, “we’ll have to see if we find any bodies when we get to the ‘last’ settlement that was set up in this place.”

It was an odd sensation to be actively hoping that I’d stumble upon a mass grave or a section of this mega-town that was littered with corpses. I could certainly think of a few reasons what there wouldn’t have been any, but none of those reasons felt any more uplifting than the idea that some mysterious force kept wiping out anypony who tried to make a living here.

My unease only grew as we made our way through the rest of Junkburg, and through the gates of Junkville, Junktopia, and finally Trashton. Presumably because by that point the ponies who settled here had concluded that it was the ‘Junk’ naming theme which had been ultimately responsible for the previous residents’ untimely ends. And though this was evidently the last of the attempts at a town that was made before the ponies of Neighvada had finally taken the not-too-subtle hint, there was just as little sign of actual carnage here as there had been anywhere else.

The cause of the destruction was the same though: massive energy beam weaponry.

“If I could feel my actual spine, there’d be a shiver running down it,” Moonbeam mumbled as we emerged on the far side of Trashton and out into the unsettled landfill beyond, “this has been...disturbing.”

“You’re telling me,” her mother added in low tones.

Fifty years. We had concluded that the destruction of those towns had happened over the course of about fifty years, starting from just after the balefire bombs had fallen. Records and notes had been hard to come by, but we’d found a few examples of dates and such in the various sections of the settlements, either written on the backs of photos, or in journals and ledgers; things like that.

A town would spring up, last a few years, get wiped out, another group would move in; rinse, repeat. Until about a century and a half ago when ponies simply stopped coming back. Either because by then the word had gotten out that the landfill was cursed or something, or places like Seaddle and New Reino had become established enough that there wasn’t as much of a motivation to come all the way out to a place like this. The White Hooves would have become a serious threat by that point, and this was pretty close to their territory. It had probably simply become too risky to be worth the trouble.

None of those revelations had brought us any closer to an answer as to the culprit of these repeated exterminations though. The knowledge that the last such incident had happened well over a hundred years ago wasn’t as comforting as it could have been. Whoever―or whatever―had been responsible for those attacks had been conducting them for decades, after all. It was entirely possible that the threat remaned. Somewhere.

“Here we are: M-6,” Moonbeam finally announced, extending a hoof towards the mound of garbage directly ahead of us.

I examined the massive trash pile, cocking my head to the side. A tiny pink pony perched herself on my shoulder, wearing a deerstalker cap and smoking a wooden pipe―wait, scratch that: she was blowing bubbles out of it, for whatever reason. She seemed to agree that, yes, there was indeed something...off. Neither of us knew what it was though. Tentatively, I crept closer, narrowing my eyes at the mound, as though my accusatory gaze alone would compel it to give up its secrets. The other two ponies were watching me with some amusement.

“You good there, Windfall? You look constipated,” Starlight observed with an amused note in her voice.

My eyes were too intent to appropriately roll in response, “there’s something wrong with this pile,” I informed her.

“It looks like a pretty normal pile of garbage to me.”

“Agreed,” Moonbeam said, her own gaze shifting around us, “perhaps not as tall as the others, but it hasn’t been added to in years, so that’s understandable.”

It wasn’t just the height that made it different from the others though, I thought. It was, “...too neat,” I said under my breath. The pink pony’s own eyes widened and she began to prance around in agreement, “it’s too neat,” I repeated loud enough for the others to hear. I flared out my wings and took to the air, whipping my head around to look at the other nearby piles.

“The whole reason for all those settlements was because ponies wanted to search through all this garbage and find useful salvage,” I reminded them, “that means ponies actually had to search,” I zipped between other nearby piles and pointed out various indentations and furrows that existed upon each of the mountains of trash where prospectors had very clearly been rifling through the refuse in their quest for discarded treasures, “that means divots,” I glided to the ground around those piles and gestured at the scattered debris that hugged the bases of the trash heaps, “that means messes where they threw all the useless junk they had to pick through.”

Then I returned to M-6 and began to circle around it, scrutinizing the mound, “no divots. No mess. Just a neat pile of bags of trash and appliances and…” my words died away as I flew. The pink earth pony was gaping at the pile with me, and then she started to prance around my helmet―It Was Under ‘E’!

It wasn’t just ‘bags of trash and appliances’ I realized. It was the same ‘bags of trash and appliances’! All around the base of the mound; I could see it: three bags of trash, a dishwasher, another four bags, a refrigerator, a wagon wheel, and repeat! The second layer was another pattern, and the third layer. Everything repeated!

“It’s fake!” I exclaimed, “it’s a fake pile!” I arced my wings and soared up into the air to get an overhead view. Knowing what I was looking for, I could make out faint lines that divided all of the repeating segments. There were a dozen of them, all growing narrower as they reached the peak of the ‘pile’. Very neat and very symmetrical segments. This had been constructed, there was no doubt about it. It was the entrance to the Ministry of Awesome facility.

Alright, I thought, we found it; now how do we get in it?

It wasn’t like there was any obvious door or anything…

I circled back down and alit upon the top of the mound. I tied to pry away some of the bags of trash, only to find that they clearly weren’t simply placed there. They’d been secured to...whatever it was that was beneath them. They didn’t even seem to be full of actual trash, but where instead formed from solid pieces of plastic or rubber. I frowned as I considered what the three of us had at hoof to get past them. It would have been rather convenient to have Foxglove and her eldritch lance here with us. Maybe Starlight could zap her way through with her beam spell?

My thoughts were interrupted by the sudden appearance of several unexpected text prompts that scrolled by on my helmet’s HUD. I scanned over them and felt my stomach knot up.

>>HANGER PERIMETER BREACH DETECTED

>>SECURITY PROTOCOLS ACTIVATED

>>ACCESS CODE REQUIRED TO OVERRIDE SECURITY SYSTEM DEPLOYMENT

>>30 SECOND COUNTDOWN INITIATED

And then it started counting down.

Oh, horseapples…

“Uh...guys?” I called out, not taking my eyes off of the disguised pile of garbage, even though the nature of the message meant that I could have seen it no matter where I was looking. That being said, the trio of red blips that had appeared directly below me simultaneously with that message was something that I found quite captivating in its own right.

“I see it,” Moonbeam responded in a tone that I did not appreciate hearing filled with as much nervousness as my own, “I’m trying every passcode that Selene and I know and they’re not working!”

“What do you mean they’re not working?” I hadn’t meant to sound as accusatory as I realized that I sounded. The stress of fearing that we were about to discover what had managed to wipe out multiple settlements wasn’t doing a lot for my nerves, “you got into that room in McMaren!”

“I was supposed to be able to get into that room,” the robopony shot back reproachfully, “apparently I’m not supposed to be able to get in here!”

“Well that...sucks!” I didn’t know why I was still yelling. The structure beneath my hooves gave a sudden jerk, startling me into the air, where I proceeded to hover as I watched the mound of ‘trash’ start to break apart along those seams that I’d noticed earlier. The tips near the top folded in on themselves while the bases of the dozen slices began to slowly hinge outward, opening up like the petals of a flower. The contents that were revealed momentarily paralyzed me with fear.

What emerged into the light of day were three of the largest roboponies that I’d ever seen. They were massive, hulking equine behemoths of steel and weaponry. I immediately spotted multiple blisters of machine gun turrets upon the shoulders and haunches of each of them, and there was a double-barreled energy turret mounted on their backs. The calibers of those barrels matched up depressingly well with the sizes of the holes that had been melted into the walls of the settlements that we’d just walked through.

Most disturbing of all though, had to be what lay in between them: it was a pile of pony corpses. Hundreds of corpses, rotted away to little more than bones, barding, and equipment. Well, on the bright side, we’d managed to discover that had become of the inhabitants here. On the downside…

...we had ten seconds to run away.

Granted, I was pretty sure that the past residents of this landfill had also tried to flee when they’d made the repeated mistake of trying to get into this faux garbage pile. Those giant roboponies didn’t appear to have any means of flight―not that I’d have believed such bulky monstrosities could get airborne anyway―so I could probably get out of harm’s way easily enough, even without the Gale Force. Starlight and Moonbeam however…

“Starlight, can you teleport yourselves away from here?”

“Not far,” the unicorn replied, her eyes riveted on the newly appeared threats, “what kind of target tracking ability do they have?” she asked her daughter.

The robopony flashed her an incredulous glare, “how should I know?!”

“Uh...fuck it; preemptive strike!”

Okay, so it wasn’t the most brilliant strategy that had ever been devised and, in hindsight, the three of us hadn’t brought along much in the way of heavy ordinance. In our defense, we hadn’t expected to be fighting the equivalent of giant metal equine tanks. I unclipped and flung every blue-banded spark grenade that I had on me at the trio of targets, and one of them was enveloped completely in a crackling field of magical lightning. It must have done something helpful, because a second later when the countdown on my helmet display reached ‘zero’, the one that I’d bombed didn’t come to life with its fellows.

Not that ‘just’ having to fight two of these things was going to prove itself to be any simply task.

My grenades hadn’t been the only assault launched either. Multiple rapid-fire lances of brilliant cyan energy struck the second mega-robopony, carving deep furrows into its left foreleg and shoulder. She must have hit something vital too, because a moment later there was an audible whine of metal and something could be heard shearing off within. The machine slumped awkwardly to the side, though it was far from toppling completely, at about the same moment it’s eyes flared bright crimson and it powered on.

“Eep!” I involuntarily exclaimed as I saw the turrets upon the backs of the two operational war machines swivel around a lot more quickly than I would have expected out of such high-caliber weaponry and point their barrels directly at me. I kicked the Gale Force into operation and darted off to the side as a quartet of scarlet lances sliced through the air where I’d just been. Starlight and Moonbeam had also scattered as several machine gun barrels oriented themselves towards the grounded mares and unleashed a torrent of lead and tracers. The two mares only just managed to slip around behind one of the mountains of garbage in time to avoid being cut down.

Those large automatons weren’t going to give up easily though, it seemed. The remaining unscathed death machine lurched ahead upon its thick steel legs, lumbering along the ground in an effort to reacquire the fleeing ponies on the ground. Meanwhile, its injured companion continued to try and tag me with the potent beams from its main cannons. I grit my teeth and continued to dodge around, not going in any one direction for too long, while tailing the mobile unit. If I could cripple it as well, then the three of us could make our escape and come back later with a concrete plan to beat these things. I pulled back my foreleg and pumped it forward repeatedly, unleashing a cascade of crimson bolts, targeting the robot’s hind leg in an effort to lame it.

I had a considerably harder time landing a hit on this thing’s moving limb than Starlight had while engaging a stationary target, but I eventually managed to score a couple of solid impacts, sending out eruptions of slagged steel. Nothing particularly vital seemed to get hit and slow it down, but I did at least manage to gain its undivided attention as those intimidating machine gun barrels swiveled skyward.

A powerful stroke of my wings shot me straight upwards as my Gale Force enhanced speed allowed me to climb at a faster rate than those weapons could seem to track effectively. I smacked at my pipbuck, keying in a communication channel, and then banked hard to my right as I arced back around to engage them again, “Moonbeam, I don’t suppose you can do something about these things?”

“What? Me? What am I supposed to do about those?!”

“They’re machines, right? Hack them!”

“That’s not how that works!” the robopony protested.

I flared my wings and strafed hard to the left as another set of quadruple energy beams attempted to incinerate me. My forelegs lashed out in quick succession, peppering the still mobile hulk with shots in an effort to keep its attention off of my more vulnerable companions, “it worked with the Steel Rangers,” I pointed out.

“I had a backdoor into their system,” Moonbeam countered defensively, adding as an aside, “don’t ask me what an MoA AI was doing with backdoor codes designed to sabotage MWT equipment…”

I felt an orange earth pony flash an accusatory glare at a little cyan pegasus who was doing her best to keep her gaze averted as she whistled nonchalantly. I rolled out of the path of a some tracer fire from the stationary behemoth and tossed a couple of passing jabs at the turret on its back. Was it just me, or did it not look as lopsided as it had a minute ago? “well, these are MoA robots! Are you telling me that Selene doesn’t have codes for them?”

“I mean, she might,” the young mare admitted, “but we don’t have a way around their firewalls to imput them,” she protested, “not without a hardline connection to their systems anyway!”

“You mean you need to physically connect with these things?” that sounded like a less than ideal way to deal with these things. If it were easy to get near them, then they wouldn’t exactly represent all that much of a threat, now would they?

“Pretty much,” she confirmed.

I folded my wings and dropped beneath another sweep from their beam cannons and slipped beneath the robopony that I’d disabled initially. I came out the other side swinging, splashing the lamed hulk with a hail of ranged strikes. Then my eyes went suddenly wide as the not-so-lamed goliath of a robopony wheeled around and swung at me with one of its massive steel limbs. I managed to bring the Gale Forece’s alloyed wing covers around in time to shield my body from the blow, but the force of the impact knocked me aside like a pinball. I hit the first pile of garbage at an oblique angle and bounced off, spinning wildly in the air before finally landing in the midsts of some centuries old cabinetry.

“Oww…” I wheezed, my eyes taking a few seconds to once again start seeing only one of something.

“Windfall! Are you alright?!”

I made an effort to pry myself out of the cupboard that I’d landed in, a process that was helped by the fact that it was half rotted away already, “I’m alive,” I groaned in response. Whether I was ‘alright’ remained to be seen, “what about you two?”

“Mom’s looking through her books for useful spells,” Moonbeam replied, “she’s doing a lot of cursing, so I don’t think it’s going well…” there was a moment’s pause, then, “huh? I’m talking to Windfall...built in comm channel...well you never asked!”

I heard the robopony sigh in exasperation, “Mom wants to know if you have a plan.”

“Yup: to get out of this alive,” I snagged a healing potion from my saddlebag and downed it, relishing the feeling of relief as the pain ebbed away.

“Mom says that’s a bad plan...ugh, fine; she says it’s a ‘fusking retarded plan’. Happy now? Well that’s as close as you’re getting out of me. What you really said is just...vile!”

I rolled my eyes and glanced at my HUD to check the status of the Gale Force. It was still operational, but it was already half-depleted. Bucky and Kicks were in desperate need of a reload too. I fished out fresh spark-packs for my weapons, casting an eye in the direction of the pair of crimson blips that were both moving around now, though it was hard to tell if they were coming for me or the other two.

“We don’t have the firepower to take those things down. All I’m doing is scratching the paint, and I think they can repair themselves anyway,” I glanced once more at the blips and confirmed for myself that there were just the two of them. It was obvious that the robot that Starlight had crippled was moving around just fine again, but it looked like the one that had been hit by all of my spark grenades was still down for the count. I found myself wishing that I’d brought along a lot more of the blue-banded orbs.

I winced as I heard the sound of their cannons firing again, accompanied by a roar that sounded a lot like an avalanche of garbage rumbling down the side of one of those piles, “we’d need heavy guns like that, honestly; and they’re all currently being used against us!”

With a grunt, I leaped back up into the air and zipped back towards the lumbering automatons tearing up the landfill. Both of them were currently circling around one particular trash mound, and my Eyes Forward Sparkle’s display informed me that it was one which was currently shielding two amber blips. Merely inflicting damage wasn’t going to be enough to stop them, I realized. If they were going to be stopped, they had to be hit hard.

“I might have a plan,” Moonbeam came back over the comm channel, “but it’ll mean that you and Mom need to get shot at for a bit...no, Mom, I said: shot at...well, if you feel like letting yourself get straight up shot, that’s your call. Though I recommend against it.”

I was forced to veer off before I could get to close. It seemed that even though neither of the giant roboponies stalking my friends were currently looking at me, the machine gun blisters on their flanks were perfectly capable of engaging me, “that plan please,” I stressed through clenched teeth as I swerved around to avoid the lines of tracers that were trying to connect with me.

“Right! I have an idea, but I need them to not shoot at me for a bit to see if it’ll work.”

“Oh, is that all―” I grunted as a few of the high-caliber rounds from the heavy automatic weapons glanced off my wing coverings before I could avoid them. It didn’t knock me completely out of the air, but I could feel something putting pressure on my wing now. I quick glance confirmed that the alloy had been dented by the impact, “I thought it was going to be something dangerous.

“Whatever, fine,” it wasn’t like we had a lot of worthwhile options at our disposal anyway, “big, irresistible, distraction coming up!” I darted back in towards one of the massive roboponies, coxing a little more speed out of the Gale Force in an effort to stay ahead of the dotted orange lines of tracer fire. At the last moment, I flared my wings and pulled a hard horizontal loop, arcing around until I was oriented directly at the jaw of my target.

I hit them with as much momentum as I dared, fully aware that the Gale Force rig on my back could have given me enough velocity to effectively liquify myself against the thick steel casing of the hulking machine. Of course, it wasn’t simple physical force that hit the robopony either. The weaponized bracers on my forelegs discharged upon contact, and I felt the thing’s mandible cave in beneath me, leaving behind a Windfall-sized dent. My strike was enough to actually stagger the towering mechanical equine.

The affair didn’t leave me completely unscathed either though. I had to shake away some mild dizziness as my brain settled back down from its own sudden experience of the rapid shift in velocity. I blinked away the faint red haze that was clouding my vision and peered up, finding myself peering directly into one of its glowing red eyes that was about the size of my head.

“Hi there,” I managed to say, giving it a shaky little wave with my hoof, “I don’t suppose a ‘sorry for disturbing you’ would mean anything at this point, would it?” my ear twitched as I heard the sound of whirling gear just below me. I glance back and found myself staring into one of the tri-barreled machine guns mounted in its shoulder, “guess not…”

I pushed myself away just as the weapon’s barrels whined to life and began spinning furiously. A short burst of hot lead round splashed the side of the robopony’s face where I had just been. I saw shredded pieces of armor and circuitry fly off as those heavy rounds tore into its own body. For the briefest of moments, I allowed myself a satisfied grin and a short celebratory pump of my hoof. Then, before my eyes, I could see the area around the self-inflicted wound begin to glow with white light as the metal began to warp and stretch as it slowly started knitting itself back together.

My grin melted instantly into a scowl. I threw a few more punches at the air, directed at the nearby weapon mount, and allowed myself another brief snort of satisfaction as the weapon burst into an explosion of smoke and debris. Just beyond the behemoth that I was fighting, I caught sight of a brilliant cyan flash of light. Suddenly, Starlight Glimmer’s pink form was standing upon the muzzle of the other giant war machine. Her shotgun was floating at the ready, and it instantly began to unload one shell of the twelve-gage buckshot into its vulnerable eyes, wiping them away in a shower of sparks.

Beneath me, out of the corner of my eye, I could also see the silvery form of Moonbeam as she galloped away from the hiding place that she had shared with her mother. Her course took her directly towards the still-offline Ministry of Awesome robopony. I now had an inkling of what she was likely up to. If she could manage to get it operational and under her control, then she could use its own heavy cannons to make short work of the other two.

All that she needed was a little time, “alright, tall, dark, and deadly,” I shouted at the one-eyed hulk in front of me, noting with annoyance that the recently destroyed optic was already starting to struggle back to life with faint red flickers of light, “what say that you and me fight it out, eh? Mare-to-mare. Put ‘em up!”

The energy cannons on its back swiveled in my direction.

Oh, horseapples!

I dipped and swirled around in the air, throwing out the occasionally bolt in response from Bucky and Kicks. Those harried shots were more to satisfy my own sensibilities than because I thought that they were actually going to do any good. I’d come to grudgingly accept that none of the munitions that I had at my disposal were going to be able to inflict a truly devastating blow to these things. Starlight seemed to be coming to the same conclusion as she blinked around the surface of her own opponent, alternating between zapping its armored backside with a blast from her horn or her shotgun.

Every divot that either of us made, or system that we destroyed, were repaired in short order as the self-contained repair systems sought to undo all of the damage that we were trying to inflict. I didn’t have the vocabulary to properly express the frustration that I was feeling about that. These two giant roboponies weren’t making any effort to avoid our blows at all, because they simply didn’t care about what we were trying to do to them.

Unfortunately, that invulnerability wasn’t mutual.

I wasn’t sure if she’d miscalculated one of her teleports, or if it was the result of magical fatigue from having popped in and out a few dozen times in the last minute. In either event, my own attention was diverted by the sound of Starlight Glimmer screaming in pain. By the time I looked, she was tumbling towards the ground. I didn’t think, I just reacted, and surged towards her. It wasn’t the most graceful catch I’d ever made in my life, and the pair of us ended up cartwheeling in a definitively unceremonious fashion into a pile of two century old garbage bags that I guessed must have come from some place that saw the use of a lot of glass bottles in their daily operation.

My hoof was already reaching back into my saddlebag to fish out a healing potion before I’d even started to try and extricate myself from the mountain of filth that we’d crashed into. It was more of an instinctive reaction than something borne out of a conscious thought. A good thing too, since my brain still hadn’t recovered enough from that tumultuous little crash to even let my vision focus onto anything concrete. I was mostly vaguely aware that things were around me in a very general sense.

The vial’s wax stopper proved to be a very worthy opponent as my hooves fought to line it up with my teeth for extraction. My limbs were an interesting combination of firey pain and numbness, which did little to help things along. I finally managed to achieve success and open the bottle at the same moment that my vision coalesced into a singular, sharp, image. Two pairs of large, menacing, barrels were pointed at where I was laying.

A lifetime of reflexes took over, and I vaulted aside. Somehow, a little part of my mind had kept track of Starlight, and I snagged her limp body as my wings and what little energy the Gale Force had left moved the pair of us out of harm’s way. Then the rig went dead, and my tired wings weren’t up to the task of keeping two grown ponies aloft on their own. Once more we went to the ground, bouncing off of an old oven with a resounding ‘clang!’.

Heat blasted the two of us as four thick beams of deadly light blasted the spot that we’d just vacated. We were covered by a rain of powdered glass and debris. Desperately, I reached out and hauled the pink unicorn’s body towards me and rolled us up against a nearby carcass of an old iron wagon. I spared a moment to place my ear to her chest, and breathed a sigh of relief when I heard the sound of a heart that was still beating. Starlight was alive, but unconscious.

How long that would last was anypony’s guess…

“Windfall, I need some help,” I heard Moonbeam saying over my helmet’s headset, “I think I found an access point, but I can’t open it. It’s locked up tight!”

Having lost the last healing potion I’d tried to drink in my rush to avoid being vaporized a few seconds ago, I was reaching for another, “aren’t you a robot? Why can’t you pry it open?”

“Um, I was a foal when they put me in this body?” she responded a little more testily than I’d have preferred, “would you give a toddler a body that can rip apart bulkheads? This thing’s more plastic than metal!”

“Then zap it open!” I snapped before ripping the stopper off the healing potion and gulping it down. Most of the dozens of fresh cuts that I’d just incurred from my run-in with the bags of now-broken bottles sealed up, but not all. My coat was more red than white at the moment.

“Yeah, they didn’t seem to want to give a small child weapons either, funny enough. Get over here and help me!”

I looked over at the mare laying next to me and got another potion ready. She’d taken a bad hit to her gut, and that had been before her unconscious acrobatics into the trash heap. I poured the purple contents over the more serious sources of bleeding and hoped that would be enough. It wasn’t like I could afford to spend a whole lot of time treating either of us, not with those two threats still looming close by. Nothing they’d done up to this point made me think that they were the type of war robots to sit idly by while their targets got up to any mischief, after all―

It was under ‘E’!
Wait a minute, “Moonbeam, where are those things looking?”

“They’re almost right on top of you and Mom. You should get out of there right now,” then, almost as an afterthought, she added, “and come help me before they notice what I’m doing!”

Why hadn’t they noticed what she was up to? They were roboponies, not flesh and blood. Those turrets of theirs could clearly track threats without them needing to be looking right at where they were shooting with their ‘eyes’. I wasn’t going to pretend I was any sort of expert on how automatons worked, but it didn’t take somepony like Foxglove to figure they had to be equipped with something that must at least function a little like a pipbuck’s Eyes Forward Sparkle, that alerted them to threats.

They should be perfectly aware of Moonbeam, and that she was just about right at the door of the facility that they were guarding. Nothing that Starlight or I had done clearly represented any sort of genuine tactical threat to these two, so then why be so focused on us when there was an intruder right on their doorstep?

“Windfall, move now!”

I put my thoughts aside and threw my hooves around the unconscious pink mare beside me. Without the Gale Force to give me a boost, inertia reintroduced herself as a particularly cruel and collouse mistress. We cleared the blast zone, but only in the sense that neither of us were outright killed by the beams that split the very ground we’d been laying out. Even through my thick, reinforced, barding, I felt that intense heat from their weaponry as it melted the garbage pile sheltering us, and took about three quarters of my tail along with it.

Starlight wasn’t particularly light either, and she was just a bit bigger than I was volume-wise as well. I was forced to roll early on in order to place the alloyed flight rig between us and the ground as I bounced along the surface in my highly strained efforts to get us up to speed and into the air. The buzzing of machine guns and the accompanying high-pitched whines of ricochets testified to our continued peril as I tried desperately to keep us the barest wingbeat ahead of death.

Shelter. We needed shelter, and there was none to be had. The three of us had just finished wandering through several failed communities whose ravaged hovels assured us that nothing would keep those things from tracking us down and adding our corpses to that grotesque little pile that they’d amassed. If I couldn’t come up with something rather amazing soon, we’d no doubt be added to it!

Actually, now that I thought about it, that might not be such a bad idea.

Not the dying horribly and having out corpses added to a stack of rotting bodies thing. That was a decidedly undesirable outcome. But that macabre pyre did give me an idea though.

I beat my wings as quickly and as forcefully as I could, feeling my joints burning beneath the added weight of my limp passenger and veered towards the inert metal goliath that Moonbeam was trying to commandeer. I could see her now, fussing with something at the nape of its neck. Her head darted to the side, locking on our rapidly approaching forms, and then she looked anxiously behind us. Clearly, this was the last direction that she could have hoped we’d bring the attention of our attackers in. There was no helping it though. This was the only real shelter available and, hopefully, a source of something more.

As I neared the corpse pile, I engaged SATS. The world slowed to a crawl, and I locked my eyes onto the collection of gathered forms below me. It wasn’t just their flesh that had been gathered after all, but their weapons and supplies as well. Not that I was much interested in guns. Whatever they had hadn’t been much help to them, after all.

No, not weapons. But those had been communities out there in the landfill. Vibrant and lively towns with all that entailed. Specifically they’d been towns built around the idea of collecting salvage, and that meant that, somepony, somewhere, would have had an―

“There you are!”

My wings folded in and I dove for my target. I was glad that Starlight Glimmer wasn’t going to be conscious for this bit, because I suspected that she wouldn’t have been as thankful as I deserved for my efforts. Just above my target, I flared my wings, slowing the two of us rather abruptly such that the unaware unicorn barely moved at all as I released her among the dead. Then a roll to the side brought me past my target. I was winging away again with all the speed I could muster a heartbeat later, clutching a long, slender, pole to my chest where Starlight Glimmer had once been.

My course took me just beneath the belly of the disabled hulk Moonbeam was working on and I looped up sharply, relishing the lull in fire as my pursuers declined to light up their inactive fellow unnecessarily. It was only a brief respite though, as I arced up and over only a second later, passing directly overhead of the frantic robopny mare trying to gain access to the armored behemoth, “catch!” I called out.

Moonbeam glance up in response and her horn flared as her magic reached out and caught the silver staff twirling down towards her. Recognition dawned on her rather quickly, and I saw her ignite the business end of the eldritch lance. She nodded at me in satisfaction before turning her attention back to continuing with her plan.

As for me? Well, I was pretty committed to my own course of action at this point, as I was once more flying head-on at the pair of lumbering war machines. My mouth was set in grim lines as I noted the all-too-numerous barrels of various weapons that were oriented at me. In mere moments, the air around me would be filled with bullets, tracers, and high-energy lasers seeking to cut me to ribbons and cinders respectively.

Not for the first time, either. Well, I suppose that massive she-hound hadn’t been bristling with gun turrets, but she’d certainly been at least as large as these things were, and a single good connection from them would prove as―if not more―crippling when my luck finally ran out.

I certainly hadn’t changed all that much from fillyhood, had I? Memories of my earliest encounters with danger swirled around in the back of my head, stirred by what lay before me today. Delving into the ruins around Seaddle in search of treasures to turn in for the afixed reward, and ending up being confronted by rampaging roboponies intent on vaporizing us. While those had been run-of-the-mill pony-sized robots that one might encounter an any given day of the week while walking where sane ponies knew better, they’d been no less intimidating to a little filly fresh to the wider Wasteland beyond her family’s ranch.

It’d been the single most terrifying experience in my life up to that point; and that included when the White Hooves had come to call on my family. I’d been scared, of course, but there hadn’t been that overwhelming sense of imminent doom that there had been as I found myself pinned down by energy fire while the world was literally melted away around me. The only reason that I’d even survived was because Jackboot had bravely risked his own life to save me.

Now I was doing that for somepony else. If I fell here and now, Starlight would surely die. These gargantuan roboponies might even then decide that Moonbeam was finally worth their attention. It wasn’t just my life on the line today. Heck, our deaths might end up dooming the whole Wasteland. I trusted Ramparts and Foxglove to keep trying to rally forces to oppose Arginine’s stable, but they’d be doing so without the financial backing I was here to secure, and that wouldn’t bode well. Whether Arginine would continue to support them after my death was unclear.

No, too much was riding on me surviving this. I couldn’t afford to die. Not here, and not now. Ponies needed me.

I felt the lips in the back of my mouth curl up ever so slightly. A little cyan pegasus mare puffed up her chest and jabbed at the air with a succession of quick rabbit punches. My own blue eyes narrowed at the looming machines.

It was time to Be Awesome!

Bullets filled the air once more, like pissed-off insects intent on getting a bite of my hide. But tracers worked both ways, and it wasn’t hard to roll out of the way of the lead streams now that I was looking right at them. That wasn’t to say that it was an easy achievement with so many of them arcing through the air around me, but I’d been dodging gunfire while flying for about as long as I had been flying. It was almost an instinct at this point. I juked and rolled and even pirouetted a few times until I was right on top of one them.

I dove at the top of its head and landed soundly with a solid ‘clang!’ from both of my forehooves. My bracers discharged, vaulting me back the way I’d come, and I used my wings to turn the maneuver into a simple front flip. In what must have looked to an observer as a dizzying sequence of rolls and loops, I danced along the backside of the robopony, slinging destructive bolts at whatever looked like it might have been protecting something vital. Steel plates buckled and split left and right, briefly exposing the vulnerable internal components before the automated repair systems sealed them back up again. They were never exposed long enough for me to slip a truly debilitating shot through those fleeting chinks in the armor, which was tremendously aggravating.

I was just a gnat, trying to take down a brahmin, and having about the expected amount of success.

On the bright side, my proximity did seem to preclude the use of the massive energy cannons by either of the large death machines. They didn’t feel the same sense of hesitancy where the tri-barreled, high-caliber, automatic weapons were concerned, but I suspected that was because those rounds didn’t seem to do much more than smear lead on each other when they scored friendly hits. Honestly, it was the misses like that that bothered me more than the shots that sailed harmlessly through the air. Those dense lead balls invariably shattered upon impacted with their alloyed steel armor, more than once striking me with the shrapnel remains in blows that―while far from mortal―were agonizingly painful.

Too much more of this, and I was going to jingle when I walked!

My focus soon migrated to their leg joints. Starlight’s own initial attack had demonstrated that it was indeed possible to lame this monsters, of only briefly. I darted beneath one of them and proceeded to pinball between their articulated knees and fetlocks, lashing out at them with both my weaponized bracers and the razor-sharp blades of my unpowered Gale Force. The effort was only marginally more effective than trying to pierce the plating on their backs and sides. Once or twice, I got one of them to lurch slightly as it was forced to shift the weight off of a compromised limb, but I couldn’t keep still long enough to do a truly thorough job on any one limb before I was inevitably chased away by more machine gun fire from their compatriot.

I rounded the outside of the rear leg of one of them, and landed what I had intended to be a solid strike on its hock. However, this time there was no thunderous discharge from my bracer; just the dull echo of metal on metal. My eye darted to the display on my helmet, and I noticed that the power packs of both weapons were completely drained.

In that brief moment of distraction, I hadn’t noticed that the leg that I had just punched was moving. By the time that I was aware, I could see that it was now moving in my direction at a very high rate of speed not possible for a flesh and blood pony. Hydraulic presses in leg form had no such limitations, after all.

Before I could fully register what was about to happen, I was moving again; but not of my own volition. That was about as far as my thoughts went at that point: noting that I was moving, even though I hadn’t chosen to, and that I felt a lot of pain. Then, just as suddenly, I wasn’t moving anymore. This was because my backside had been rather rudely introduced to a porcelain bathtub, which dutifully shattered upon impact.

It was a full five seconds, by my reckoning, before I could breathe again, in the form of a beleaguered gasp as I tried to take in sips of air that my lungs were proving uncharacteristically reluctant to accept. I suspected that I’d broken several ribs. In fact, I suspected that it would be much easier to tally up the unbroken ones, considering that I’d just been bucked by a robopony the size of a large house. Making any sort of movement that involved even the most tangental use of the muscles along my chest proved excruciatingly agonizing, and no amount of mental willpower seemed able to overcome their reluctance.

I was effectively paralyzed.

Even so, I refuse to give up completely. I stretched out a wing, hoping that its dominating use of my scapular muscles would help make it easier to move it. If it did, it was hard to tell. Tears streamed down my face as wave after wave of pain washed over me for every inch that my pinions moved. My feathers fumbled with the clasp on my saddlebag and the healing potions contained within. Through my bleary vision, I could make out to looming gray forms of the giant roboponies turning towards me.

I had to move. I had to get back in the air and get moving, and quickly. Now that I wasn’t figuratively hugging their hides, they wouldn’t hesitate to use those energy turrets mounted to their spines.

Those thoughts didn’t seem to be enough to compel my wing to move more quickly, or with lessened pain. I could feel my pinions wrapping around one of the slender vials of a healing potion, but I could already tell that I wasn’t going to be fast enough. They were going to reduce me to ash, and there wasn’t anything I could do about it.

“Don’t move!”

I opened my mouth to respond to the nervous voice coming in over my headset, but nothing audible came out. Instead, I had to simply content myself with thinking it to myself: Oh, well if you insist…

There was a flash of red light from somewhere behind one of the large automatons. A moment later, it summarily exploded into a cloud of metal and fire, some of the smaller bits plocking down around me. Something that looked vaguely like a gun barrel bounced off the visor of my helmet. It might have been an actuator though. It was pretty badly melted.

“Fuck me! Why do weapons like this exist?! Oh shit―!”

Having noted the sudden and violent demise of its cohort, the other hulking war machine had turned its attention to the source of the new threat: the previously dormant third member of its entourage come back to life. Only, now it was under new management. It didn’t get any time to respond though. It’s main weapons had been focused upon the little pegasus laying imobile on a trash heap, in the exact opposite direction of this new enemy. While it would have been unfair to describe the turning rate of those turrets as anything approaching ‘slow’, there was still no comparison between the time it would take for one of them to completely reverse direction, and one that had only but to pivot slightly to its left.

“Fire in the hole!”

A pair of crimson lances bisected the head of the second large robopony, vaporizing it completely and leaving behind a smoldering crater of a neck that billowed black smoke, “Boom; headshot!” For several long seconds, the rest of the body hung there, and I found myself wondering if a robot losing its head carried along with it the same certainty of death as it would for a living pony. Then, much to my relief, the tall metal frame appeared to lose power and crumpled to the ground in a dead heap of fresh scrap.

I breathed a paradoxically painful sigh of relief as my wing managed to finish getting out the healing potion, and even got it all the way to my mouth without dropping it. I shivered at the unsettling sensation of my ribs and sternum crawling just below my skin as the bones sought to knit themselves back together into an intact ribcage once more. Breathing immediately became a much less arduous endeavour, to the relief of my own lungs. Movement was still a bit of an ordeal though. However, I was reluctant to down another potion. I’d burned through a significant portion of our inventory in the last few minutes, and Starlight still needed some tending to.

“Good work, Moonbeam,” I croaked out, trying to right myself back onto unsteady hooves on a surface that was less than accommodating to sure footing, “how’s Starlight doing? Can you see her?” I winced as one of my legs gave out from beneath me. It didn’t feel broken, but it had definitely been pinched awkwardly when I landed after being bucked by that giant robot. The potion had obviously spent the entirety of it magic on my chest and done nothing for that injury. Again I had to fight the urge to use another potion until I’d taken full stock of the unicorn mare’s injuries. In the interim, I could simply fly in order to avoid putting weight on the afflicted leg.

My ear twitched. I looked out past the two wrecked roboponies to stare at the third, standing tall and menacing beyond their smoldering forms, “Moonbeam? Can you hear me?” I reached up and knocked at my helmet. Had the landing been rougher on my gear than I’d thought? I had clearly been able to hear her transmissions, but I suppose it was possible that the microphone wasn’t working anymore.

Moonbeam’s new ride was staring directly at me. I gave her a wave to let her know that I was okay, and then pointed at the pile of dead bodies next to her, where I’d deposited her mother, “check on Starlight!” I yelled as loud as I could manage with my still-recovering lungs. She still didn’t move. Or rather, the large robopony didn’t move. For all I knew, Moonbeam had already dismounted it and was on the ground.

I’d have felt more confident about that hypothesis if those massive eyes weren’t glowing bright red like its siblings’ had…

...Shouldn’t my EFS be showing her as an amber blip, and not a red one?

A small blurb of text appeared in the upper-left corner of of my helmet’s display. It was a single, short, word. Yet it was the most terrifying word that I could ever remember reading in my life:

>>run

Pinpricks of red light took form at the tips of magical energy weapons mounted to the remaining robopony’s back. Barrels that were aimed directly at me.

“Oh...horseapples.”

I heaved myself down the sloping face of the mountain of garbage I’d been kicked into. It wasn’t the most graceful descent that I’d ever made in my life, as my muscles seemed to have decided that now was the proper time to go on strike and demand better treatment. I assured them that I wholehearted agreed that I was subjecting them to a completely unfair amount of work and pain, but that the matters were far outside my control. If I’d had unilateral say in the matter, I’d be spending the next month or three relaxing in New Reino’s best hotel with twice-daily massages, and an indulgent hooficure/manestyling double-feature!

However, I reminded my obstinate body, that was not what we were going to be doing any time soon if we managed to get vaporized by our own damn friend! Never mind why she was shooting at us a whopping five seconds after she just got done saving our flanks. That was a conversation to have in the future. Right now, the goal was to live long enough to see that future.

Be Unwavering!

Then adrenaline interjected itself into the debate and forced all parties to agree to table the discussion vis-a-vis: pain and discomfort, and I found myself able to once again move with a little more alacrity. Not a huge amount, mind you, but enough to keep myself from outright falling down this tower of trash in my effort to avoid getting blasted.

“The fuck, Moonbeam?! What’s going on?” I screamed over the com line, on the off chance that it was really working just fine. I leaped to the side, my wings helping to swerve out of the way of another torrent of energy fire that sliced a deep furrow where I’d very nearly been. I noted that her accuracy felt like it was a good bit better than the others’ had been, “stop shooting!”

The response that I received was less than inspiring. It came in the form of another blast from her main guns, “that’s the opposite of what I said to do!” I screamed as I pulled a barrel roll around the pair of scarlet beams as they swept through the air after me.

“Alright, somepony needs a serious time-out!” I sneered, glaring balefully at the looming giant robopony that had only a minute ago saved my life. I didn’t know what could have possibly gone wrong, but it was more than sufficiently obvious that something had. Now I just had to figure out what I was going to do about it. Moonbeam wasn’t going to be any easier to take down than the other two had, after all. She was doubtlessly going to have the same tough armor and self-repair capabilities.

Unless I was going to somehow come across a fourth massive robopony with big guns around here that I could commandeer, I was pretty soundly screwed.

I zipped past the giant robopony as close as I dared to get, hoping that my proximity would help me to outpace the rate of rotation for the massive energy turret that was tracking me. For some reason, up until this point, none of the machine guns mounted in the automaton’s hips and shoulders were showing any signs of movement. Not that I was complaining, mind you! I was just exceedingly wary of them, lest this be some sort of ploy to get me to forget they were there in order to catch me by surprise.

The bristling weapons mounts weren’t the only thing that my eye was noting either. After all, this particular massive death-bot had one particular feature that set it apart from its two fallen comrades: a second―smaller―robopony nestled at the nape of its neck. I veered sharply to the side and angled down to do a closer flyby of Moonbeam’s location, juking as another pair of brilliant red lances tried to cut me down.

What I saw confused me at first: the little robopony’s two forelegs looked like they had somehow merged with the back of the larger automaton beneath her. Then I caught sight of the nearby cutting tool and square plate of armor that had been cut away, even though there was no sign of where it had actually been taken from. Those self-repair systems were indeed quite operational, and must have sealed up the breech that she’d cut in the armor around her efforts to gain access to its systems. She wouldn’t be able to detach herself even if she wanted to.

Not that I had any firm notion of where I planned to take any of us, or how I was going to manage to haul two full-sized ponies any sort of meaningful distance without any assistance from my Gale Force, but I knew that the first thing that I had to do was free Moonbeam. After that…? Well, honestly, we’d probably all be immediately killed. But, at least we’d die together!

A quick immelmann allowed me to keep from being tagged by yet another blast and set me diving for Moonbeam. I kept track of the swiveling energy turret out of the corner of my eye as I darted for my friend’s inert body. My wings flared just before I would have tackled her and I wrapped my limbs around her chest. There was only the briefest moment of hesitation as I grimace and whispered in her ear, “sorry about this.”

Moonbeam had been right earlier: her mechanical body really wasn’t all that sturdy. I mean, I knew that those razor-sharp wing-blades built into the Gale Force could eventually slice their way through even Steel Ranger powered barding, so they were nothing to sneer at; but I felt hardly any resistance at all as my wings swept around either side of Moonbeam and deftly severed her limbs just above the elbow. There were brief hisses as hydraulic fluid still under pressure found itself suddenly freed from the confines of the hoses that fed her actuators as her body lifted away from them. I wasted no time and back-winged off the massive robopony, clutching Moonbeam to me tightly, fully expecting to have to begin the arduous task of evading additional attacks while hefting my newly acquired burden.

However, that didn’t seem to be the case after all. The remaining metal behemoth remained completely still. Not even its turret was moving. I listed to the side a little, craning my head to peer hesitantly at its eyes. They were as dark and as dead now as they had been when I’d first hit it with the spark grenades. My gaze darted to my EFS.

No blip of any kind was being associated with the robopony by my pipbuck. As far as my fetlock-mounted computer was concerned: it was out of operation.

The sense of relief that washed over me very nearly made me lose my grip on Moonbeam. As quickly as I could, I rushed us to the ground and laid the dismembered synthetic mare down on the floor next to the pile of desiccated corpses. Not an ideal location, I knew, but I needed to check on Starlight. Honestly, they both needed attention, but I didn’t know enough about roboponies to figure out what was wrong with Moonbeam. The pink unicorn’s wounds were physical and mundane. I knew what needed to be done to treat them.

I’d only managed to just reach Starlight’s side and begin to carefully extract her from among the tangled mound of dead ponies when my attention was drawn upward by the loud rumbling of heavy machinery coming to life. For a fleeting moment, I was terrified that the remaining war machine had come back to life once more to finish us all off, but a quick glance confirmed it was completely still. What was moving was all of the sections of the faux trash mound that had been concealing this place. They were once more raising themselves up and sliding back into their original configuration.

My first instinct was to grab my friends and run. After all, if those three things were what had greeted us here, I didn’t want to think about what dangers could be lurking deeper within. However, there was no way that I’d be able to carry them both out of here at the same time, and the roof was reassembling itself too quickly for me to be certain I could perform multiple trips without the aid of the Gale Force.

Somepony would get left behind, with no guarantee that I’d be able to get back inside in time to help them.

So, I just stood there, glaring up at the ceiling high overhead as the pointed sections maneuvered back into their original locations and locked together, sealing the three of us away in darkness. Then, much to my surprise, that darkness was lifted as an array of fluorescent lights flickered to life all around us, bathing the domed chamber in light. A high-pitched trill sounded from the far end, causing my head to snap around to see what the source could be, and what new threat was sure to spring out at us.

A section of the floor was indeed opening up. I felt my heart sink. Both of my companions were down for the count, and all of my weapons were out of power. Frantically, I lunged for the pile of bodies and grabbed up the nearest gun that I could get my hooves on. It was some form of semi-automatic carbine, and my pipbuck’s HUD assured me that there were still a few rounds left in its magazine. Whether it would fire or not remained to be seen.

The massive segments of flooring swung aside, revealing a black pit beyond. I braced the weapon against my body, trying desperately to get a good hold of the unfamiliar weapon and keep it trained on the opening and whatever was able to come spilling out of it and finish us off.

But nothing did.

All that appeared was a platform with a small terminal mounted upon it. An elevator, leading down into the heart of the hidden facility. I kept the weapon leveled in the direction of the lift, but let out the anxious breath that I’d been holding. My mind raced to try and make sense of why it had appeared so unexpectedly. For that matter, I was trying to figure out why the roof had closed over top of us again.

“Is she going to be okay?”

I jumped instantly into the air and whirled around with the weapon before I even processed that the voice which had spoken belonged to Moonbeam. Silently cursing my frayed nerves, and opting to toss away the weapon before I let my stress levels take things too far as the result of another unexpected surprise, I took a deep breath and shifted my gaze from the now responsive robopony to the still unconscious form of Starlight Glimmer. My EFS was still mercifully associating her body with an amber blip, so she was at least alive. Beyond that…

“I don’t know,” I admitted, stepping closer to the pink unicorn mare and slipping off my saddlebags. I took a quick stock of what medical supplies remained between the two of us. There wasn’t all that much left really. Nor was there any telling how truly bad off Starlight was. I wasn’t a medical pony. Arginine would have known what to do though. I should have brought him along.

Glancing at the exposed internals of Moonbeam’s severed limbs, it probably wouldn’t have been a bad idea to have Foxglove here with us either. I let out an annoyed snort. This wasn’t this first time that I’d found myself in way over my head and woefully unprepared for what I was up against as a result of being separated from the rest of my friends. Only, this time it had been completely voluntary.

I hadn’t been drugged and abducted. I hadn’t left in a huff after taking out an entire barroom’s worth of patrons. I hadn’t simply jumped the wrong way while escaping a massive explosion and a collapsing building. I’d made a conscious and―what I’d thought―well-reasoned decision to split our forces in the interests of time. Of course, shaving a week or two off of this grand campaign we were on wasn’t going to mean a whole lot if one of the teams got themselves wiped out, now did it?

Foxglove and Ramparts would have been able to help with those giant roboponies, and Arginine would have been able to get any of us that were seriously injured back on our hooves. Instead, I’d decided that myself, a newcomer to the Wasteland who was only barely competent with firearms, and a foal inside of an unarmed, underpowered, mechanical body, was the team most ideally suited to braving a location with a previously undiscovered Ministry of Awesome base. A base which any marginally intelligent pony would have guessed might have been a lot like the last one of those that I’d found only a month ago!

Remember, Windfall? The secret underground base that had defenses that overpowered a team of armed and armored Steel Rangers?! Are Starlight and Moonbeam on the level of Steel Rangers? No!

This was stupid, Windfall. Stupid, reckless, and very nearly lethal for all three of you. In fact, there was every reason to believe that it could still prove lethal. Starlight was alive now, sure, but she might not be an hour from now. Or maybe in two hours. Who knew? I sure didn’t!

“Windfall?”

I jerked with a start, only now realizing that I’d been letting out a low growl of frustration at my own monumental levels of incompetence. I was a child who had let her recent successes get to her head. I had no business trying to lead ponies to a place like this, “I’m alright,” I assured the robopony, in spite of my very real doubts to the contrary. What mattered now was surviving long enough to get Starlight the help that she needed, “I’m just trying to figure out what we need to do next,” I glanced up at the vaulted ceiling, “and how to get out of here again.”

“We’ll have to get to the command center,” the robopony informed me, “I reset the system, but I don’t have viable network access anymore. This place has very tough encryption. I can’t get past it without an access point.”

“You did this?” I asked in surprise, gesturing to the ceiling above us.

“Apparently,” the metal mare said, “after I’d used that Übersentinel to destroy the others, I tried to use its access codes to open the facility,” she grew silent for a moment, averting her eyes, “she’s never done anything like this before.”

“Who?”

“Selene. She’s never just taken over like that and refused to deactivate,” Moonbeam sounded genuinely shaken by the experience as she spoke, absently kneading the stumps of her legs against one another, “she shut me out completely. I didn’t even know she could do that…

“I barely had time to try and get a warning out before I lost all control,” she shook her head, “I almost killed you!” the mare seethed, “I’ve never felt so helpless before.”

“It’s alright,” I said, stepping over and stretching a wing across the metal mare’s back. Could she even feel like real ponies? Whether she could or not, Moonbeam responded to the gesture and leaned into my side all the same, “I know what it’s like to feel helpless. To watch ponies you care about get hurt, and not be able to do anything about it. To know that you were partly responsible,” I fought back the visions of both my mother’s decapitation, and Jackboot’s vaporization, “dwelling on it...it doesn’t help. We just have to move on and try to do better.

“We were lucky this time though,” I assured her, “nothing that you did got anypony hurt, and you did save my life,” I hugged her to me a little more tightly, not sure if she could actually tell through her chassis, “thanks for that, by the way.

“And sorry about your legs,” I added, mustering an apologetic smile for the mare.

“It’s fine,” she sighed, “it doesn’t hurt or anything. I should still be able to get around,” her gaze went to her mother, “she’s the one that needs attention, not me.”

“Maybe there’s an infirmary in this place,” I offered, trying my best to sound positive, “I bet I can reach Ramparts and have him get Arginine to guide us through treating her,” it was a plan, at least.

Moonbeam was shaking her head though, “not with your pipbuck, no,” she glanced up at the curved ceiling, “this place is shielded against unauthorized transmissions.”

“How do you know?”

“Turn on your radio.”

I did so, tuning it to the frequency of Homily’s broadcasts. My speakers emitted nothing but soft static. I tried DJ Pon3’s frequency and got the same result. Even the channel for Ebony Song’s Seaddle broadcasts wasn’t sending out a clear signal. If nothing was getting in, then it made sense that nothing would get out either, I supposed. I still tried to raise Ramparts all the same.

“Secret base, remember?” Moonbeam said, “nopony here wanted to risk the enemy picking up stray signals. Everything has to come in through the comm arrays.”

“We really need to find that control room, don’t we?”

“The sooner, the better,” she confirmed. I removed my wing and stepped away as the metal mare began to try and right herself. I offered her some help, but she waved away my efforts, “I’m good. Just need to find the right drivers. Give me a second,” she briefly closed her eyes. A moment later, they were open again, and I heard the sound of straining motors coming from her hips as the robopony suddenly shifted from her quasi-prone position on the floor, to a fully upright one.

And I meant fully upright, balanced soundly on only her rear hooves. Her mangled forelegs hung awkwardly across her chest, and it was the most peculiar manner that I’d ever seen a pony stand in my life, but she didn’t seem to be teetering in the slightest.

“Wow,” I heard myself saying in surprise, adding in a skeptical tone, “and you’re sure you can get around like that?”

Moonbeam nodded and demonstrated her mobility by taking several careful steps towards the lift, “I’ll be alright for a little while. My gyros have to be red-lined just to keep me balanced though, so I’m not going to be able to move very fast like this,” she frowned, “this body’s also two hundred years past its last scheduled maintenance overhaul, so there’s no telling how long it’ll be before a bearing seizes up and I fall flat on my face…”

“In that case, we should get moving,” I looked back to Starlight and frowned. It was going to be quite the ordeal to haul her around everywhere. She wasn’t particularly light, after all. Even with the help of the Gale Force, it’d be awkward trying to move her around―

Actually, that wasn’t a bad idea!

I promptly began to shuck my barding and the flight assist system that Foxglove had been kind enough to integrate into it. Fitting it onto the pink unicorn mare took some doing, but eventually I was able to get most of the buckles secured. Once I was confident that she wouldn’t simply slip out of my barding, I replaced the spent spark batteries with the freshest ones that I had and turned the system on. Levitation talismans built into the metal wing covers hummed to life and lifted the unconscious mare just off the ground.

After all, this system had been designed by a mare who’d been missing a wing. It was intended not simply to augment flight, but also to grant it, when needed. I flashed Moonbeam a triumphant smile and gently prodded her mother’s floating body, watching it list slowly above the floor, “heh...her first day as an alicorn, and she’s going to sleep through it.”

Moonbeam managed to roll her glowing eyes somehow as the three of us made out way to the waiting platform. A pegasus walking along, pushing a flying unicorn, while a robot walked behind on two legs. Never could the Wasteland possibly have seen an odder looking group of ponies. The robopony seemed to have noticed this as well as she reached over with a severed limb and tapped a button on the console that controlled the lift.

“I’m a two-hundred year old foal with a computer grafted into her brain, suspended in a jar of saline, and sealed in a robopony body,” she let the comment hang in the air for several seconds, prompting me to look up at her questioningly, “I also occasionally lose control of my body from time to time because that computer takes over and tries to kill my friends.”

“...and?”

“Just reminding myself of the baseline that I’m working off of when it comes to ‘weirdness’ so that I’m not shocked by whatever we end up finding down here.”

“Oh,” that actually seemed to make a little sense. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that.

The lift jerked and began to slowly descend into the underground facility’s interior. What surprised me the most was how open our surrounding were, even now that we were clearly going below ground. After about ten or so feet, the sides of the elevator shaft fell away, leaving us surrounded by blackness that stretched out in every direction. It was a little disconcerting, I had to admit. The solid void of darkness surrounding us made it hard to get a clear idea of how far down we were really going, or what we’d find when we got there.

I turned on my pipbuck light and shined it around, but either it was far weaker than I’d thought, or this cavern that we were in was stupendously large, because nothing was revealed by the device’s integrated light source. I certainly wasn’t going to risk trying to fly out either, lest I either collide with something or become lost.

With a sharp jerk and a resounding banging of metal, the platform that we were riding came to an abrupt halt. Moonbeam let out a terrified yelp and began to flail, prompting me to reach out and help to steady the robopony as the sudden change in motion overwhelmed her body’s ability to remain upright.

“Thanks,” she said, trying to calm herself, “now where the fuck are...we…”

Even as the mare was speaking, lights began to snap to life, just as they had above in the doomed area. Massive banks of dozens of powerful lamps mounted into the ceiling a hundred feet or more above our heads burst to life one row at a time. They didn’t provide much light at first, as their filaments struggled to warm themselves after so much time spend dormant. Those faint glows brightened quickly though, and in a little less than a minute, the illumination that they provided finally managed to penetrate the darkness all the way to the ground of the facility.

That was when we saw them, and I heard Moonbeam mutter under her breath, “didn’t work; still shocked.”

Nor was she the only one, because my brain was still trying to process what it was seeing too.

The sheer scope and scale of the operation wasn’t helping much either. Seeing even one of those things had been shocking enough the first time. Now I was being confronted by dozens, hundreds―no, thousands―of them, for all I knew. Additional banks of lights were still coming to life, revealing heavily shadowed forms that were almost completely obstructed from view by the horde’s worth that stood in front of them.

“That’s...a lot of Lunas…” I heard myself whisper.

For that’s what they were: a legion of robot Princess Lunas, not all that dissimilar from the one that Moonbeam had been controlling in Seaddle. Yet, to say that these examples were identical to what Ebony Song had been using to prop up his own power in the Republic would have been doing a disserving. If anything, I got the impression that the robotic alicorn in the capital must have been some sort of early prototype, or even just a proof of the basic concept.

It clearly hadn’t been one of the production models that we were seeing here.

Each example that stood before us, dormant and unmoving―thankfully―was at least half again as large as the drone that Moonbeam had piloted. The metal casings were smooth and elegant, the parts that hadn’t been covered by an inch of dust glimmered, showing that they’d been polished to a mirror black shine. Each of them sported a suped-up adaptation of the Gale Force rig that I owned, leaving me to ponder what sorts of speeds they could achieve with the massive turbines that were bolted to their backs.

“They were building an army,” I finally managed to say at a more audible volume, “that’s what the Ministry of Awesome wanted to keep a secret from everypony. They must not have wanted the zebras to know that this was going to be coming at them.”

Though, I had to admit that didn’t quite explain everything. I could understand wanting to move all of the pieces to build these things using a fake ‘shipping company’, and to want to hide the factory that was housing―and probably building―them. Those all made perfect sense to me for anypony to do while fighting a desperate war for the very survival of an entire species.

It didn’t explain why it had been kept a secret from the other ministries though. Had the MoA been so obsessively paranoid about this getting out that they felt that they could even trust the very ponies that they had to work the most closely with? The Ministry of Peace had known nothing about their apparent plans to use foals-powered computers in their facilities. I could only assume that more of them would have been used to control these things too, since Moonbeam had been using one to pretend to be the real Princess Luna.

They’d also lied to the Ministry of Arcane Science about the locations of their bases in the valley. Who knew how many other ponies high up in the Equestrian government they were keeping out of the loop! Did they really think that they couldn’t trust anypony outside of their own ministry with any of this?

...unless that had been the point.

Could Rainbow Dash have been planning a coup?

“I’m not even sure what ‘this’ is,” Moonbeam said, “I mean...why? What was any of this supposed to achieve? It’s not like Equestria didn’t already use roboponies,” she frowned at the army arrayed before us, “what made these things so special?”

“I mean, they do look pretty impressive,” I pointed out.

“So did the three giant ones we just had to fight above us,” the mare pointed out, “it just seems like a lot of effort to go through to make yet another version of roboponies,” she scowled at the sight, “I swear, if this is the whole reason they were fucking with me brain…” she let the threat hang unfinished. After all, it wasn’t like there was anypony left for her to take vengeance on.

I cast my gaze back over my shoulder, in the opposite direction of the derelict robot alicorn army. There was a massive wall with doors of various shapes and sizes built into it. A couple of them looked like they were designed for regular-sized ponies. Presumably that was where the heart of this facility was located, “we should start looking for the infirmary and the control center,” I suggested.

“Yeah,” Moonbeam agreed, letting out one finally snort of disgust at the Luna-bots before following me through the nearest personnel door.

My guess about the nature of this place proved correct: it wasn’t merely a storage facility, it was where things things were built as well. Most of the interior was composed of fabrication equipment and assembly bays. Which worked out in our favor considerably. After all, where there was an abundance of heavy machinery, there was the high likelihood of somepony suffering a serious injury. Since the ministry running this operation was so intent on keeping what was going on here a secret even from their companion ministries, the last thing that they wanted was to try and explain to the staff at nearby MoP hospitals how so many Awesome members were getting seriously injured.

That meant designing this place with a completely decked out clinic of its own that was capable of managing just about any kind of injury, even the very serious ones. It was just a shame that neither me or Moonbeam knew enough about medicine to be able to make full use of it. Somepony like Doctor Lancet probably could have brought a patient back from the dead if he had access to the equipment and supplies here though. All that we could manage was to get Starlight out of my barding and into one of the beds.

Moonbeam found a terminal that let her download a manual on how to operate some of the diagnostic stuff. Technically, she could have learned how to use all of the sophisticated equipment in this place; but she was very quick to point out that knowing how something worked, and actually being able to use it with any degree of skill were not remotely the same thing. Besides, it turned out that there really wasn’t all that much more that could be done for Starlight anyway.

“She’s stable,” Moonbeam confirmed, looking over the display, “she just lost a lot of blood is all. The healing potion you already used on her plugged up the holes, so she’s not bleeding anymore. But her body is going to need time to recover.

“All we can do is wait,” she said. I could hear the relief in her voice, and it matched up with my own.

“That’s good to hear. I think all of us could do with a good night’s rest,” I remarked, knowing that I was certainly looking forward to sleeping somewhere that wasn’t the open Wasteland, “or three…”

“Even if I did sleep, it wouldn’t do me any good,” Moonbeam lifted her damaged limbs and waved their stubs around.

“There’s all that heavy machinery out there,” I pointed out, “and this was a place where they built robots. We might be able to find some parts that’ll fit,” I tried to sound optimistic, even though I did seriously doubt that this place specifically would stock anything that was compatible with her current body. On the other hoof, “or maybe we can put you inside one of those Luna-bots?”

The robopony didn’t look nearly as convinced of that as I was, “the part of this body that’s actually keeping me alive is technically designed to be able to be swapped into other bodies, yeah; but I can’t just be put into any old robopony. The power requirements and connections for the sensors are very specific. We’re better off trying to find replacement parts. Finding new legs in this place will be pretty easy. Finding new legs that’ll fit, on the other hoof…”

I nodded my understanding. I’d been afraid that it wouldn’t be that easy. I looked briefly at the monitors that were tracking Starlight’s condition, “well, if she’d going to be fine, and there’s nothing else that we can do for her, we might as well get something productive accomplished,” I reasoned, “why don’t you go see about tracking down suitable parts while I look for this place’s command center and get word out to Ramparts and the others.”

“Alright,” she nodded, “but be careful though. I reset the security system, and that let us inside, but I don’t know what might set it off again, or what kinds of defenses it has in here.”

“Noted,” I didn’t feel particularly inclined to find out, honestly, “I know we can’t call anypony outside, but will we be able to talk to each other using my broadcaster while we’re both inside?”

“That should work just fine,” I heard Moonlight say through my pipbuck’s speakers, though the robopony’s mouth remained completely motionless.

“Good to know. We’ll call each other at the first sign of trouble, alright?”

“Agreed.”

It didn’t take me long to appreciate the scale of this place, even more so than what the Ministry of Awesome had seen fit to hide beneath McMaren. Steps had been taken to keep this facility as low profile that it probably would never have occurred to me to consider, but that seemed rather obvious in hindsight. The clinic covered only some of the bases where not drawing undo attention to the MoA was concerned, after all. It was one thing to manage personnel issues, but what about material ones?

I had already known a few of the details on that end, from what I’d learned at places like Arc Lightning and Wind Ryders. Rainbow Dash’s ministry had been buying components from otherwise discontinued projects undertaken by private companies; and their use of their own in-house shipping contractor meant that few outsiders would catch on to anything, if it even occurred to them to look. But that would only be part of the assembly process for that army of robot alicorns. They’d also have required a lot of raw materials as well. Steel, aluminum, copper, plastics.

The sorts of things that a landfill had lying around by the ton, that nopony would ever miss, or even notice was gone. If the ponies here simply went to the surface and recycled the raw material being hauled in daily by the wagon loads, then they didn’t have to worry about anypony wondering where so much processed metal was being diverted to, with no obvious result. For all I knew, they’d used those same means to build this whole place over time.

This place was more than an assembly line. I saw massive crucibles and forges that had been used to melt down and reforge the salvaged metal taken from the dump. There were even wings of dormitories to house the workforce that labored here so nopony would wonder why so many ponies were commuting every day to a landfill. It actually took me a while to finally find what would have been considered the administrative section of this place. I still had yet to find a true ‘command center’ where I could hope to get out a clear signal, but I decided that I’d start looking through some of the offices anyway, in case it turned out that I’d need some sort of access card or password to get into it when I finally did find the place.

“OPERATIONS DIRECTOR NIGHTJAR” sounded like a pretty good place to start, I thought.

The sight that greeted me when I opened the door had me wondering if I’d be leaving with more questions than answers though. Up to this point, everything had appeared to be completely deserted, but nothing that gave the impression that the exodus had been done in haste or panic. Tools had been put away, doors had been closed―a few of them locked―even chairs had been neatly pushed into their desks. When the ponies had left here, they done so in a very calm and deliberate fashion.

Director Nightjar had not been so lucky, it seemed.

At least, I assumed that the desiccated corpse of a winged pony still sitting at the chair behind the desk had been the owner of the office. The tattered remnants of a suit that still clung to what was left of the body looked like the sort of thing that a pony in a position of authority might have worn anyway. Whoever they were though, they had very clearly not been privy to the same deliberate departure that everypony else who’d worked here had been a part of.

Which left me wondering: “why?”

What had set this pony apart from the others, other than his position either at or very near the top of the local pecking order? Surely it couldn’t have been as simple as an employee with a personal grudge taking care of things on what they saw as their last opportunity to do so. This didn’t strike me as being nearly that random.

I approached the body, and very quickly deduced what had killed him, as evidenced by the charred hole that had been drilled through his head, and the scorch mark on the wall behind him. High-energy discharge from a magical beam weapon of some sort. He’d been facing the door when it happened it looked like. Nothing else about the office looked out of sorts though. There was a bit of a mess on the top of the desk, but nothing that didn’t look like it hadn’t just been typical clutter created by a pony who’d been hard at work when they’d been interrupted. None of the drawers were left open, and nothing was scattered on the ground, implying that nothing had been taken after the director was murdered.

Unless, of course, he hadn’t been murdered. I noticed that the small calendar on his desk marked the likely date of his death as one that any seasoned veteran of the Wasteland eventually became quite familiar with: the day that the balefire bombs had fallen. Another common sight were the bodies of ponies who had chosen to take their own lives in the immediate aftermath. It was possible that was what had happened here. Though, if that were the case, then there should be a gun somewhere around here.

I dipped my head down and began to search the floor immediately around and beneath the desk. That was when I spied something that I doubted very much was a standard feature among office equipment. Well, two things, actually. The first feature which caught my eye was indeed a gun, a small compact pistol, that had been tucked into a holster mounted to the underside of the desk’s surface. However, as it was still very cosily nestled in its sheath, and since it was a slug-thrower, I highly doubted that it had been the one used for this deed. Though I did find myself wondering why Director Nightjar had felt the need for that kind of protection. While a great many pains had obviously been taken to hide this place, I refused to believe that it didn’t have security staff on site to deal with any problems.

The second anomaly did give me a clue about what this pony had felt the need to have the weapon close by though. It was a small open cubby that had been set into the drawers of the desk, hidden from view. In fact, if it hadn’t been open when I’d begun my casual search, I probably wouldn’t ever have known that it was there. Fortunately, it had been open, and its contents promised to provide me with quite a few interesting tidbits of information.

There was a small audio recorder, and several additional holodisks, all marked with dates and a brief description of their contents. I pulled everything out, noting that there was still a disk in the recorder, and that the ‘record’ button was even still depressed. The tape had obviously long ago run out of space, and the device’s battery was completely dead, but I felt that my questions about the exact nature of this pony’s death would be succinctly answered by its contents. I popped out the recording and loaded it into my pipbuck.

A stallion’s voice began to play over the speakers, “Operative Nightjar, final report. Construction of the last of the drones has been completed. Ministry Mare Rainbow Dash has been notified and is making preparations for their first demonstration. However, by now our teams are already either moving in on the other Neighvada facilities, or are preparing to do so. It won’t be long before she learns that something is wrong and takes action. Suggest that a team be dispatched to arrest the Ministry Mare herself as quickly as possible.

“I’ve dismissed the workforce at the facility as a ‘reward’ for finishing the project. I will deactivate the entrance defenses upon receiving confirmation that a team is on the way to retrieve the drones. With this recording is the additional evidence to be used when the Ministry Mare is charged with treason against the Crown. I will also be―” the voice stopped abruptly at the sound of door opening. This was immediately followed by some loud banging as the stallion frantically shoved the recorder into the hidden recess of his desk.

“Who in the―! Rainbow?!” in his surprise, the stallion seemed to have forgotten all of the decorum that he’d been keeping throughout his earlier monologue. The next voice that spoke had a raspy quality, but clearly belonged to a mare.

“How’s your night, Night? Heh…” the brief laugh sounded anemic and empty. There was no joy in this mare’s voice, “the MoA has a policy against moonlighting, you know. We don’t want ponies getting distracted from the important work they’re doing here.”

“I’m...sure I don’t know what you’re talking about, Ministry Mare,” the stallion cleared his throat, having recovered from his earlier shock, “I thought you were in Cloudsdale?”

“That is what my schedule says,” the mare agreed, then her tone hardened, “my personal schedule. The one that’s one my personal network. That only I’m supposed to have access to,” if this was the pony that had shot the director, I was surprised that she’d even bothered with an energy weapon. Whatever look that she must have been giving him to go with that unadulterated rage dripping over every word she spoke should have been more than sufficient to kill him, “my official schedule―the one that I send out to my department heads―made it pretty clear I was coming here today.

“But I’m guessing that you haven’t bothered to check between the two in a long time, have you, Night?”

“I...um…”

“You’re not going to find her, by the way,” Rainbow Dash continued, cutting off the stallion’s sputtering response, “Selene. I had her moved months ago. When the authorities arrive, they’ll just find the same decoy that her mother’s been talking to this whole time.”

When he was finally able to speak again, it was with a cold voice that was devoid of all pretence of ignorance. The stallion recognized when he’d been caught, “how long have you known?”

“Not as long as I’d have liked,” the mare admitted bitterly, “you’re a damn good spy, I’ll give you that. I didn’t suspect a thing.”

“That’s obviously not entirely true,” the stallion countered, “or you wouldn’t be here now.”

“Fair enough. Funny thing is, it wasn’t actually anything you said. It was what you weren’t saying. You know more than anypony what the control requirements for those drones are. You’re also in a position to know that the MASEBS can’t handle them. In fact, there’s no known command and control system that could work with the drones. You knew that from day one.

“Well, that’s obviously what the McMaren base is for―”

“Even McMaren doesn’t know what they’re for!” Rainbow Dash snapped, nearly snarling at the other pony, “the official specks they have for their generator outputs are wrong; and they don’t know about the relays. They think their tower is just a tower, and that Selene is going to be a replacement for their current Poseidon Core. Every official piece of correspondence I’ve sent them has made it perfectly clear that Selene is just nothing more than an ‘upgrade’ for their existing system.

I could hear the mare take a deep breath, “every project lead I have involved in this has…‘expressed concerns’, let’s say, about one thing or another. Egghead wants to know why the AIs for their patients are ‘over-engineered’. McMaren wants to know why, if Selene is just going to be an ‘upgrade’, she needs her own station, instead of just being swapped out with their current core. Ryder’s wants to know why I’m using them to ship ‘toys’ here.

“Do you think that I don’t know what my own reputation is? I’ll be the first pony to admit that I can’t complete with Twilight’s eggheadedness. Heck, after seeing some of what MWT puts out, I’ve occasionally wondered if AJ has me beat in the brainpower department! I’ve learned to accept that not everypony is willing to take it for granted that I know what I’m talking about every time I come up with a new ‘hairbrained scheme’. I’ve learned to accept that ponies will question them. That it’s not because they think I’m an idiot, but because they want to make sure that I didn’t accidentally overlook something important by acting too impulsively.

“With something like Selene? Oh, you better believe that ponies have been asking me a lot of questions.

“Everypony has questions. Everypony...except you. You haven’t questioned why the drones are being built without even the most basic local control nodes that get put into every other robopony in Equestria so that they could operate on their own. You haven’t questioned why we’re building so many of them when there is no known transmitter array that can handle the bandwidth they’d need to all be working.

“Only somepony who had all of the pieces wouldn’t be asking those questions. Since I’m supposed to be the only pony who does have all those pieces...well...it makes a mare wonder.

“I just want to know why, Nightjar? I thought you believed in what we were doing? You know what’s at stake!”

“Her Majesty made it clear that she did not approve of this project of yours. She found it...in poor taste.”

“Pony-feathers! If that was true, then why let me finish it? She obviously knows everything about it, what with you apparently having hacked my personal network! Why didn’t she and the Night Guard swoop in here the moment you told her and―” Rainbow Dash’s voice died off for several brief moments, “Princess Luna doesn’t know about this, does she? You’re not one of her agents, are you? Then who…

“Goldenblood…” it sounded like even the act of uttering that name had made the mare physically ill, “you’re one of his! That’s why you let me finish; he wants them! How is that even possible? He’s fucking dead! He was executed this morning!”

“I have my instructions,” the stallion said in a tone that at least sounded pretty calm, granted the circumstances, “and they do not end simply because the issuing party is dead. I will carry them out, as I have been ordered,” then the director continued in a much more condescending tone, “which will include submitting all the evidence Her Majesty will need to order your own arrest, by the way. You will want to find yourself a very competent attorney, Miss Dash. With any luck, your death penalty will be waived in favor of exile―”

The stallion’s words died suddenly on the whine of an energy blast. The recording was silent for several long seconds, “fuck you, fuck the OIA, and fuck Goldenblood. Selene’s going to save all of us in spite of that damned unicorn. Charge me with treason? Treason?! I’m the literal embodiment of Loyalty itself! If that stallion wasn’t already dead I’d take him by the neck and strangle out every little last raspy breath he had with my bare―” a series of brief chirps interrupted the mare, who let out an exasperated snarl at having her tirade cut short, “RD. What’s going on? What? When? How many? All of them?! Scramble every interception team we’ve got! I want every pegasus with two wings and gun in the air five minutes ago! I’m on my way to The Tower right now…” the voice of Rainbow Dash died off as she must have left the office. Presumably on her way to whatever it was ‘the tower’ happened to be. A few more seconds after that, I heard a siren start up on the recording, ringing throughout the facility.

An annoyingly calm mare’s voice made an announcement along with the klaxon’s clamoring, “MISSILE LAUNCHES DETECTED. ALL MINISTRY OF AWESOME PERSONNEL ARE ADVISED TO CONTACT THEIR IMMEDIATE SUPERVISORS FOR ASSIGNMENT DETAILS OR EVACUATION INSTRUCTIONS. THIS IS NOT A DRILL. MISSILE LAUNCHES DETECTED…”

I ended the recording after it became clear that the remainder of the disk would have been the continuing blare of that siren. It seemed that there had been trouble in paradise. My eye wandered back to the pegasus stallion with the hole that had been burned through his head. Why a pony would have been trying to do anything to undermine a ministry project was a more complicated question than I was prepared to answer. In fact, even more confounding than that was the implication that Princess Luna herself had apparently been against what was going on here.

Or, maybe not. Starlight Glimmer had been adamant that the princess would not have approved of what was being done with the foals that the MoA was using. Maybe that was what the stallion had been talking about? No, that couldn’t be it. Maybe that pegasus spy had known what was going on with the foals, but he’d admitted that he wasn’t working for the princess, so there wasn’t any reason for him to have passed the information off to her; and I got the feeling that this whole project was something that Luna had killed long before anything had actually been done to get it going. If Rainbow Dash was reluctant to clue even the ponies working the most closely with her in on what the whole plan was, would she have told Luna about it?

She was the leader of Equestria, so maybe…

Had it been only the use of the foals that she’d objected to though? I felt confident that she’d have let a plan that sounded as important as Rainbow Dash made it sound go on ahead, if only with some alterations. Surely it hadn’t been the whole concept that had been vetoed, right?

I let out a frustrated growl. Two hundred year old questions weren’t very easy to answer. Besides, the who’s and the why’s of the events before the end of the war weren’t material to my own reason for being here. What truly mattered to me was what was contained in this bunker. Or, rather, what I’d desperately hoped had been contained here: weapons.

It was starting to look like I’d only been half right. There were certainly war materials of some sort here. Just not the kind that would have proven easy to turn directly into hard currency in order to fund the mercenary army I was trying to build. Guns and ammo could have been sold to just about any merchant in the valley for a tidy sum. That army of Princess Luna drones was undeniably valuable, sure; but locating buyers who’d be interested, and have the financial backing to to able to pay out what I’d need was another matter.

Maybe if I had time to let word spread to Manehattan, or Hoofington, or even places further away than that who’d have need of an army of flying combat roboponies, then everything would be fine. However, that could take months; maybe even as long as a year or more. I wasn’t a hundred percent sure of the timetable that I was working with where Arginine’s stable was concerned, but I highly doubted that we’d have anywhere near that amount of time.

I needed to find that command center or wherever and get word to Ramparts so that he’d know our financial situation wasn’t going to be quite as sound as we’d hoped.

Director Nightjar, it turned out, did have an ID card clipped to his jacket that looked like it was used for more than just letting ponies know who he was, so I appropriated it and left the office. It took me another fifteen minutes of navigating the hallways and a few double-backs before I finally located a suitably impressive steel door that simply screamed, ‘this is where important stuff happens!’. The ID card proved itself to have been a worthwhile acquisition, as I held it up to a small black box mounted into the wall next to the door. There was an acknowledging ‘beep!’, and then the door slid open.

Beyond was a large room than left me with a strong sense of deja vu from my experience beneath McMaren. Rows of computer terminals, walls that were hardly anything more than massive display screens, and a central island that was built of the same cloud material as the one in the underground tracking station. Most of the terminals were either off or in a stand-by mode. Everything still seemed to at least have power running to it though, so I set about locating the station that would let me transmit to the outside world.

Again, Nightjar’s badge proved quite the boon and allowed me to access the communication’s terminal once I’d managed to locate it. After that, it was a simple matter of inputting Ramparts’ pipbuck tag number and connecting, “hey, Ramps; can you hear me?”

There was a long pause, then, “Windfall, is that you? I don’t recognize this frequency.”

“Sorry about that. Apparently that MoA cache we were after is shielded or something. That’s what Moonbeam said anyway. Only the local comm terminal can transmit.”

“So you found it then? The weapon cache?”

I bit my lip, wincing, “kind of...we found the place, for sure. Only…” I let out a defeated sigh, “no weapons. Not really. Apparently this was some sort of factory, but not for guns. They were building an army of those Luna roboponies. Like the kind Ebony Song had. Only more badass, it looks like.”

“Really? Wow,” then I heard the earth pony stallion come to the same conclusion that I had earlier, “that’s going to make things harder, money-wise, isn’t it?”

“Probably.”

There was another lengthy pause, “that alicorn robopony was pretty tough, even on its own. How many exactly is in this ‘army’ you’re talking about?”

I snorted, “thousands, easily,” then I caught onto what the former Republic courser was getting at, “that would certainly give us quite an advantage if we could get them working for us,” I found myself musing. Though I certainly had reservations, “assuming that they didn’t just immediately turn on the whole valley the moment we turned them on,” I pointed out. Wasteland roboponies had a frustrating tendency to shoot at absolutely anypony they encountered on sight, after all. Unleashing a swarm of flying versions of those things upon the local population wouldn’t exactly be very ‘helpful’.

“Moonbeam was able to control the one in the palace,” Ramparts pointed out, “maybe we can find a way for her to do that with those too.”

“Maybe,” I said, rubbing my chin in thought. In Seaddle, Moonbeam had been hooked up to a tiny local radio relay by a wire while she sat curled up beneath the palace. I had to wonder now if that hadn’t been part of the reason that ‘Princess Luna’ had never strayed far from Seaddle, or even left the palace propper all that much that I could recall. How exactly we’d be able to make it so that Moonbeam could control so many of those drones at a range long enough to matter―

That’s obviously what the McMaren base is for…

The room in the underground facility bearing Selene’s name. That had been built as the control node for all of these drones! Which meant…

“This is the hangar!” I blurted out, overwhelmed by my own realization.

“The what now?” Ramparts said over the comm channel, not having been privy to either my internal mental processes, or the readouts on the computer terminal display when Moonbeam had been trying to access the alcove that had apparently been designated for her use. So I related to him the relevant information and events, “I see...so you’re saying that it could work?”

“It might,” I offered, though I kept a cautionary note in my response, “I only know that this was how the Ministry of Awesome intended things to work. Honestly, I can’t even be sure that everything was actually finished. I mean, this sounds like something that they’d have wanted to use during the war, doesn’t it? If it was all ready and working, then why wouldn’t they have used it?”

“That’s a fair point,” Ramparts admitted, “but it certainly sounds like they were at least really close to getting it all put together. The radio tower in McMaren works. Moonbeam is up and about, and can obviously control the drones. Even if we assume that they didn’t manage to build enough of the drones to protect the entirety of Equestria, it sounds like there’s more than enough for Neighvada, at least,” the stallion pointed out, “maybe we can find the resources to finish up the last few details.

“I’ll have Foxglove coordinate with Homily’s ponies on making sure the broadcast tower can do the job,” there was a brief pause, “maybe we should even head back to McMaren, if we’re not going to have the money for mercenaries after all…”

“No,” I insisted, “keep recruiting. I’ll figure out something to do about the money,” not that I had even the faintest clue what that was going to be, “I don’t want us to bet everything on getting those two-hundred year old drones off the ground,” after all, even if the MoA had been confident that everything was in working order then, didn’t mean that held true now.

“Alright,” Ramparts said, “we’ll keep at it. It’s not going to be cheap though,” he warned me, “we’ve gotten a few quotes already. We’re talking almost a thousand caps a head, Windfall.”

“A thousand caps a―!” I blurted, my eye nearly popping out of my head in surprise. Raising an army would cost millions at those rates! I wasn’t even sure there were that many caps in the whole valley. Heck, if I gathered up every cap and bit, I might not even have enough for a viable force.

I took a deep breath to calm myself. Maybe we could find a way to sweeten the deal in order to get the mercenaries to come down on their asking price, “why don’t you try reminding them that we’re going after a stable. Offer them a cut of the salvage. Weapons, equipment, drugs, there’ll be all sorts of valuables in there. And see if they’ll go for half of the cash fee up front, and half when it’s over,” if we survived, I could always find a way to come up with the money later. If we all died anyway...well, then the problem kind of solved itself, didn’t it?

“I’ll let them know our counter-offer tomorrow,” I could have hoped that Ramparts might have sounded a little more hopeful about the prospect of our success, “I just want you to understand that it’s kind of a seller’s market for mercs these days. When Ebony Song recalled the whole Guard to Seaddle, that left a lot of the outlying towns pretty SOL where defenders were concerned. Those towns are buying up mercenary contracts left and right. It’s almost a bidding war.”

Because of course Ebony Song would have to be able to find a way to fuck me over on getting Republic soldiers and freelance mercenaries, I thought with a bitter growl. One break, Celestia; for the love of what was once Equestria, could you just please give me one, fucking, break! “I understand,” I finally said in an exasperated sigh, “maybe you can remind them that if this doesn’t work there won’t be any towns left for them to guard?”

“Noted.

“I take it you’ll be coming to New Reino earlier than you intended?”

“We’ll most likely be leaving in the morning,” I assured him, “Starlight needs some time to recover but, yeah, there’s not much point in hanging around here. Give my regards to Foxglove and RG. I’ll call you again when we’re close to New Reino.”

“Sounds good,” the stallion acknowledged, “Safe travels,” then the line went dead.

I sat back and rubbed my temples with my hooves. A thousand caps per mercenary? How was I going to be able to afford that? Even if we had found a cache of weapons down here, would that have been nearly enough to cover that kind of expense? As it stood, the closest thing we had would be whatever weapons we could scavenge off the corpses above ground. There would be a lot of weapons, sure, but nothing of the kind of quality that I’d been anticipating finding down here. We’d be lucky enough to get ten thousand caps for that haul. Which meant that we’d have the ability to hire fewer than a dozen mercenaries.

My mounting exasperation prompted me to lash out at a nearby console with a frustrated buck, denting the computer and eliciting a small cloud of acrid blue smoke. Hopefully that hadn’t been anything important…

After taking a minute to calm myself, I left the control center and headed out to see how Moonbeam was doing with her repairs. Maybe she could think of a few ways for us to raise some capital. Barring that, she could at least offer some insights into how likely it was we could use the drones housed here, because that was suddenly looking like our best hope after all.

“Moonbeam?” I started calling out once I’d gotten back to the clinic where I’d left her. There was no response. This was a big place, there was no telling where she’d gotten off to. So I brought up my pipbuck and keyed in her personal tag, “Moonbeam, where are you? I managed to contact Ramparts. We need to talk.”

There was no response. I repeated my request. Still nothing. Frowning, I checked to make sure the problem wasn’t on my end. Everything with my pipbuck looked like it was functioning properly. This actually made me worry more, of course. Why wasn’t she answering?

I shifted away from the broadcaster function and instead studied my Eyes Forward Sparkle. I spotted Starlight’s amber blib first, still located in the clinic and resting on the bed. That meant that the remaining amber hash mark had to be Moonbeam. I used it as a guide as I navigated through what appeared to be the heart of the facility’s manufacturing sector. Large pieces of machinery that were used to forge material and fabricate parts lay about. A surprisingly bitter odor caught my attention: burning metal. Upon closer inspection, I discovered that some of the machinery looked like it had been put to use recently. Very recently.

“Moonbeam?” I tried once more. She had to be somewhere close by. I kept my eye on the amber blip as I bypassed the machinery and continued making my way towards it.

A few yards further on, my ear twitched as I started to pick up the sounds of whirring servos and welding metal. From behind a partition, I spied bright flickering light and the occasional gout of sparks, “Moonbeam?” I called again, more tentatively. My approach slowed, cautioned by the continued lack of a response from an individual who was clearly close enough to have heard me.

Mindful that some potentially hazardous work was going on, I very carefully peeked my head around the vertical partition to see what was going on. My eye widened in surprise at what I saw. It seemed that Moonbeam had opted for more than a simple repair job.

In fact, it looked like hardly any part of her hadn’t been subjected to an overhaul. Her body kept most of its previously delicate looking contours, but there was clear evidence that much of her casing had been thickened and reinforced with denser alloys than what she’d been built out of before. Her forelimbs had been completely replaced but a new pair which were quite obviously designed to be able to exert more force than she’d initially been designed with.

The most drastic alteration had to be the wings though. Moonbeam had decided to have herself fitted with a modified version of my Gale Force rig, not unlike those possessed by the drones in the nearby hangar. Even her head hadn’t been left unaltered. Aesthetically, her features were more severe and angular looking; taking the place of the rounded and foal-like plastic face that her original body had been built with. Her new face barely even qualified as one, if I was being honest. It was only the barest approximation of one, lacking any definitive mouth or nose. Even her horn had been changed, now longer with a reinforced base connecting it with her skull.

It seemed that I’d caught her in the final moments of her transformation. My mind had barely had time enough to take in all of the robopony’s many changes before the articulating robotic arms tipped with various tools that was whirling around her suspended body came to an abrupt halt and pulled away from her body. A final lifting arm that was attached to her spine whirred to life and extracted the now much larger mare from the midst of the retracted limbs and gently deposited Moonbeam a few yards away from me.

As though awaking from a nap, the mare’s pink eyes flickered and then glowed back to life. However, I noticed that as they got brighter, their normally pink tint got progressively more washed out by a pale blue light. By the time they’d reached their full brightness, they were a baby blue color. Her head gave a brief jerk, and then her slender neck craned smoothly to peer down at me. Reflexively, I took a step back from the blank, angular, face that was glaring at me.

“Moon...be―um...Selene?”

A pair of diamonds mounted into her cheeks began to glow, and I was suddenly looking into a genuine face; one that possessed elegant features, but still retained a coolness about them that I had not come to associate with Starlight’s daughter. It was at least a lot less off-putting to find that a mouth was moving with the words that the robopony spoke. I did find myself wondering why the holographic rendering of her face was midnight black though...

“Have you come to request an audience with your Princess?”

That voice hadn’t been the voice that Moonbeam had ever used while speaking with us. In fact, it sounded an awful lot like the voice that that I’d heard used in Seaddle by―

“Speak,” the robopony who was feeling progressively less and less like Moonbeam said as she straightened back up, regarding me with those menacing blue. Eyes, which possessed the vertically slit pupils that I’d only ever seen ringed by powder blue once before, “and pray that you make this worth Our attention.”

“Oh, horseapples…”

Footnote:...

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