In the dim light of Gearing’s PipBuck, Handy quickly scampers the rest of the way out of the hole he’d fallen into and starts trying to shake all of the cold water off of himself. The metal plates of his armor clink and clatter against each other making a racket like some kind of mechanical teeth chattering against the cold.

As Handy is hopping around and shaking to try and get as much of the water off of himself as he can, Gearing comments, “Watch your rads. It’s not strong, but enough prolonged exposure to it can build up to problematic levels for you.”

Handy scowls at him and partially shivers and partially shakes as he says, “I already know how radiation works. Thank you very much.” But Gearing doesn’t seem to pay any mind as he’s busy off to the side of the hole looking at his PipBuck and apparently trying to get his bearings now that they’re actually in the tunnel systems. But, regardless of however much attention Gearing may be paying to it, Handy can’t ignore the slow steady ticking coming from his PipBuck.

As Handy continuously flicks and kicks one leg after another, discarding a bit of water each time, he takes a look at their surroundings for the first time. The ladder down led to the middle of some sort of four way intersection that’s widened out more than necessary to make a circular space with the ladder as its central point. Directly under the four story building that had partially collapsed, and made rubble that Gearing had to dig through just to gain access to the hatch, is a simple standard metal door. A door that’s currently open and with the tell tale dim lighting of a PipBuck pouring through the doorway. The other three directions lead away with tunnels that seem to practically go on forever. With one tunnel going perfectly parallel under the road way above, and offering the group two of their choices for which way to go. The last tunnel that shoots away from the ladder, opposite the only visible door, seems no different than the others, except it helps create the almost ‘t’ shape that they currently have to decide to deal with.

The tunnel system is boringly repetitive in its design in every direction, save the door. Along the walls, and ceiling sections, are a variety of pipes and cables. They run in every possible direction, and once upon a time helped provide the utilities and services for Hoofington in a way that kept it out of the horrid weather Hoofington was, and is, known for. But, even down here, the signs of the constant rain are clear to see.

What Handy had originally thought was a cistern that he unwillingly took a swim in its chest high water, is actually a sinkhole. One created by the constant drip of the water pouring down through the manhole above. And somewhere along the line between now and the end of the war two hundred years ago, the tunnel work decided it’d had enough neglect and abandonment and gave in to the constant weathering. Thus creating a hole in the floor that’d just kept getting bigger as dirt was washed away. The rest of the tunnel system seems to have fared better. Mostly thanks to the fact that the tunnels themselves had drainage built into their very design and have a channel molded into the bottom center of them that funnels any water that might make it down into the tunnels away to the city’s flood control pumps. The floor isn’t perfectly level because of that, with the sides having a slight gradient and a curve to direct the water flow to the central channel running the tunnels’ length. The design is simplistic, but helps explain why the majority of the tunnel system is relatively dry.

The one saving grace is that it’s clear that most of the lights are actually still functioning. Even as dim as they are. And the intersection is an outlier with its near total darkness. Though Handy can’t help grumbling about the lack of light, and wondering if the electrical system is failing given how dim all of the lights seem to be.

His mind runs through a few quick scenarios, all of which grow in horrible outcomes for them, and finds himself asking, “If the lights are this bad, and the power grid’s failing, are the computers even going to be usable?”

“What about the power grid?” Gearing asks as he looks over at Handy and away from his PipBuck.

Handy points over towards the lights set into the side of the tunnels’ walls a distance away. “The lights look like they’re about to go out, so the power grid’s going down, isn’t it?”

Gearing looks over at the lights in question and then back at Handy and replies flatly, “No, they’ve always looked like that. That’s normal.”

Handy’s eyes go wide before he asks, “Why would they have the place so damn dim?!”

“Energy conservation,” Gearing replies flatly.

“Wha? You mean this twilight hours nonsense is intentional? How is anypony expected to work down here? Why would they do this?” Handy asks indignantly.

“Handy, the tunnels stretch on for miles and miles. If they kept all of the lights on daylight bright down here, the energy consumption would be tremendous. To the point of being prohibitive. They did a bit of research to find the optimum return on investment on power usage for lights, while still being mostly usable. And this is the result. The lights are bright enough to get around without any problem. And if you need to do work, you’d most likely have to have an extra flashlight anyway. Or even set up some portable work lights. So that’s not even an argument to be made. It’s way more efficient power wise.”

“So everywhere is this dark down here?” Handy asks with a groan.

Gearing gives a single quick shake of his head. “Not at all. Areas with higher hooftraffic will have proportionally more light. Some areas are lit well enough that it’s like being in any other building. Like train stations and some of the underground work areas. They only did it this extreme for the maintenance access tunnels, since they are so rarely used.”

Handy lets out a sigh as he looks down at the concrete under his hooves and groans again. “Great, so we’ve gotta stumble around in the dark because the designers were a bunch of cheapskates…”

“Handy,” Gearing starts and, when Handy looks up at him he continues, “Just keep your PipBuck light on. And don’t get in front of me and Swift. Let us lead the way so we can warn you of anything you might not notice.”

Handy looks away and mumbles incoherently a bit before he shivers a few times and changes the subject, or tries to. “Why’s the water gotta be so damn cold…”

Gearing smiles and replies, “It’s the downside to the lack of light. The rain’s already typically cold. Add in it being down here and away from the sunlight and it’s not going to heat up any.”

Handy snorts in disgust, sending a plume of droplets from his muzzle before he turns and heads towards the open door. As Handy is getting close to the doorframe, he kicks on his own PipBuck’s light.

Swift pops up at the door, stopping him at the threshold and staring at him with a barely contained laugh held in her muzzle. She looks him over a bit before she asks, “Enjoy your trip?”

Handy smirks and rolls his eyes before he says, “Oh, yeah, you know me, I just love fall weather.”

She giggles and nods behind her as she says, “There’s some real goodies in here, you’re gonna be happy.”

“Oh?”

“Mmmhmmm.”

“Well there’s just one thing first,” Handy replies with a growing smile.

“What’s that?” Swift asks as she tilts her head to look at him sideways.

Handy hops forward and wraps his forelegs around her as he starts nuzzling her abrasively. “I just wanted to say I loooove you, and give you a hug!”

Swift starts struggling, although without very much heart in it, as she flops around within his grasp and tries to push him away as she giggles. “Noooo! You’re wet!”

“And cold too! Warm me up!” Handy chuckles more as he practically tries to climb over her.

“Warm yourself up! Dry off, and then warm yourself up! You’re the one that fell in water; it’s your own fault!” Swift says with a giggle as she flares out her wings, flies up a bit, and pulls away from the still dripping wet buck.

“Well misery loves company, and I looooove you, so I’m gonna get you soaking wet too!” Handy chuckles as he keeps his grip around her neck with his forehooves and doesn’t let go.

“Noooo,” Swift giggles as she playfully pushes his muzzle away with a hoof as he keeps kissing the air in her direction.

“I can’t believe I’m the one asking you two this… but do you need some alone time for a while?” Gearing asks with a grin.

Both Handy and Swift freeze in place as they stare at each other. Causing Swift to come right back down to the ground as she even stops flapping her wings. They both slowly look over at Gearing as their eyes slowly grow to their absolute widest.

“I don’t need to hear about who’s getting who wet, that’s your business, I found the way to go,” Gearing quips before he turns around and starts walking away from the doorway. A couple paces away, Gearing chuckles as he says, “My how the turns have tabled.”

Swift and Handy stare at each other for a few moments, and Handy shrugs as he grins at her. Swift’s cheeks turn just a bit on the rosy side before she pushes his muzzle away, hard this time and practically shoving him over onto his side, before she says, “Don’t gimmie that look…” She starts slowly walking away and adds, “I’m telling Sable, he’s getting cheeky.”

Handy chuckles as he starts getting up, but the growing grin on his muzzle pauses as he actually sees where they are. He calls out after Gearing as he says, “Hey, shouldn’t we empty out this maintenance room before we go?”

Gearing turns around and yells back down the tunnel from where he’d gone. “We can grab the stuff on the way out. We don’t want to get bogged down by junk in case we have to make a run for it.”

“That’s fair,” Swift says as she looks out the door. She looks over her shoulder at Handy and grins as she says, “Come on, ya perv, let’s get this over with.” Then she flicks her tail out and caresses the underside of Handy’s muzzle with her tail before trotting out and into the tunnel system.

Handy and Swift quickly catch up to Gearing down the tunnel that heads out directly across from the doorway. As they are getting close to him, Handy asks, “Think there’s going to be a spot up here where we can stop for a bit and I can dry off my clothes?”

Gearing slowly keeps sweeping his gaze and attention around their surroundings as they walk down the tunnel and replies, “Once we find the terminals you can work on that after I start working on getting into the system. There’s no telling how long that’s going to take. Let alone the download afterwards.”

Handy starts trotting a little faster, and starts overtaking Gearing, as he says, “Well, let’s hurry up and get there, so I can get out of these wet clothes.”

The three pick up speed and continue heading down the maintenance tunnel. Every now and then they come across another intersection as they travel. Sometimes a split off that goes to the right. Sometimes to the left. Sometimes it’s another four way intersection, complete with another ladder up. But each time Gearing stays the course and keeps going forward.

Annoyingly, for all concerned, a few red dots appear on their EFSs sporadically along the way. The vast majority of them seem to be coming from beings above them, at street level or higher. Sometimes in concerning sized groups. Other times it’s just singles. There are other markers too that show up, somecreature just minding its own business here and there, but those don’t even make them slow as whoever it is isn’t even a concern judging by their marker color. But, in a couple cases, the red indicators turn out to be in the tunnel system with them. And the ones that are directly in their path are quickly dispatched without any real difficulty. However they still cause a lot of annoyance. After all, mentally preparing yourself for some massive mutated beast, or group of them, only to be confronted by a solitary over sized roach is on its own level of mind job. Then there were the large tubular shaped creatures the size of their foreleg that, once they were killed, their PipBucks identified the corpse as Giant Leech Meat and, after that, their collective disgust level increased to tragic proportions.

Despite all of the distractions they make decent time to the next step that Gearing is leading them to. Although even he ends up stopping to look at the map on his PipBuck to give it some consideration when the tunnel runs smack into a set of elevator doors at the intersection where another tunnel runs perpendicular to the one they just emerged from.

Swift looks over the large set of doors for the elevator as she asks, “Hey, Gearing, Mr. Insider Information… What’s with the large elevator down here? It’s not like you can get any of this sized stuff to the surface through these tunnels. Ponyholes aren’t big enough.”

“Service elevator for the maintenance techs,” Handy chimes in before Gearing can. “So they can move around equipment down here to where it needs to go.” He waves a hoof back and forth along the tunnel running perpendicular to the elevator face. “Tunnels are more than wide enough for a push cart or small pull wagon.”

“And there’s more elevators around, some of which actually do go to the surface level, or higher. This can let you rapidly get materials to where you need without having to deal with whatever’s going on on the surface,” Gearing adds.

“Out of sight, you mean?” Swift asks as she looks at Gearing sideways.

Gearing shrugs. “That’s part of it. But also allows for rapid response during or after an attack. Anything from emergency repairs to a way to get into areas for search and rescue. If something happened and a train tunnel collapsed, the maintenance tunnels are likely the only way responders could get to the victims.”

“So I suppose they have a lot of goodies down in the tunnels, stored for easy use?” Swift asks with a raised eyebrow.

Handy looks over at her and starts narrowing his eyes as he starts quietly trying to clear his throat enough to get her attention.

Gearing stares at her for a few moments, as he can see where the conversation is heading. After the silence drags on long enough that Handy’s ridiculous throat clearing starts sounding like an engine revving in the tight confines of the tunnel, Gearing says softly, “Not as much as what’s available inside the Core, if that’s what you were actually wondering.”

Handy lets out a groan and hangs his head as his attempts at changing the topic failing have left him more than a bit frustrated.

“Is it really worth getting killed in the process?” Swift asks as she stares straight at Gearing.

“Swift…” Handy’s voice practically begs.

“I have no intention of dying anytime soon,” Gearing replies. But does so in a cryptic tone that is more in line with the way Swift is used to with Gearing’s guarded replies.

“Like the bridge?” Swift asks as she narrows her eyes.

“Swift, that’s enough!” Handy belts out. The other two look over at him and he asks as he looks between the two, “Since when have the rolls got reversed here?!”

“Swift, I’m not taking us into the Core. I’m heading in the straightest way possible to where the computer systems that house the data are supposed to be at. If I was intentionally going anywhere dangerous, I’d warn you two about it. And, probably, ask you to stay behind. Though, I’m sure you wouldn’t listen to the advice. You have the right to know what we’re getting into, and I’m not going to drag someone else into the muck with me and keep them blind,” Gearing replies in a nearly insulted tone. “That’s the entire reason I said we should skip the Green Line tunnels.”

Swift walks over, getting face to face with Gearing as she starts looking him over and sizing him up. “Is that so?”

“Unquestionably,” Gearing says as he snorts and narrows his eyes at her.

“So we’re not just going to run in and loot the place and get out of there?” Swift asks as she tilts her head.

“We can grab whatever we want on the way out. But not until then. There’s no telling what kind of security is still active. And if we accidentally trip something, we’re going to have to make billy goat big steps out of there. So we need to hold off, get the most important thing first, the data, then we can take risks getting whatever other frosting on top of that cake you want. On the way out,” Gearing replies with a huff.

“And what was the deal with that maintenance storage room we first saw?” Swift asks as she narrows one eye at him suspiciously.

“That was a local deposit. It just has a lot of the most common materials that technicians need in order to do their jobs. Fasteners. Adhesives. Spools of wire. Pipe. Couplings. And a few specialized tools that don’t get used too often. That way the techs can just go in, get what they need, and use that instead of having to carry around a lot. It was a shared depot for all of the techs that had to work in the sector.” He waves a hoof as he rolls his eyes. “There are a bunch of them scattered throughout Hoofington. Some of which are in areas that are so minor and small by comparison that the ‘depot’ is little more than a workbench with a couple shelves.” He shrugs as he says, “Any time something ran low, a tech could put in a requisition form to get it restocked. But, generally, they had maintenance bots patrol around, take inventory, and replace anything that’d gotten too low. Some places they’d only go by once a month, in other places it’d be every few days. It all just depends on how much stuff would regularly get used out of them. That one we were just at was one of the particularly bigger ones, that’s all. It’s going to have a lot of common supplies that we could certainly use, but nothing particularly pricey.” He snorts as he narrows his eyes at her and comments flatly, “I don’t see what’s so important about it or why you seem so worried about it.”

“It’s not,” Swift replies flatly.

“Then what’s with the interrogation?” Gearing asks as he raises an eyebrow at her.

A smile slowly breaks across her muzzle before she reaches up with a forehoof, and gives him an abrasive rustling of his metallic mane. “Just wanted to make sure you’re starting to think clearly again. You sneaky little shit.” Gearing’s eyes go wide, and he doesn’t move as the two lock eyes. After a few moments of that, with Gearing’s focus noticeably jumping from one of her eyes to the other Swift asks, “Feeling better now?”

Gearing gently reaches up, and pushes her hoof away from his head as he avoids eye contact and mumbles, “Yeah… I’m fine…”

“Somehow I still don’t entirely believe it,” Swift replies with a frown.

“Well, then, I’m not ‘fine’ as in ‘fine’, I’m ‘fine’ as in ‘you don’t have to worry about me right now’… I’ll be fine, once we’re done with all of this and can finally get back and away from any problematic bodies of water… That sound more believable?” Gearing asks with a smirk.

“I’ll buy that,” Swift replies with a grin.

“Hey, if you two are done doing whatever you’re doing… I got some bad news,” Handy replies as he’s looking over the controls of the elevator.

“What’s that?” Gearing asks as he trots over to join him.

Handy points at the elevator as he looks at Swift. “It’s out of order. And it doesn’t simply seem to be a matter of power loss. The switch is getting power, but it’s doing nothing.”

Gearing heads over to the door and starts using his tools to wedge into the gap between the two doors. “Lemmie see what we’re dealing with.” A few moments later the door parts enough for him to get the edge of his forehoof in between, and he brings up his opposite hindleg hoof and wedges it in under his forehoof, and then he straightens out and quickly shoves the doors open with the same motion. Which, as far as the doors are considered, is a massive violation of protocol and they squeal and scream their objections with metallic scraping the whole way. After the door is open, and shows no sign of trying to close back again. Gearing looks straight in, and then leans in and looks down into the elevator as he says, “So… that’s what we’re dealing with.

Handy and Swift comment, “What?” in unison before hopping over and getting on either side of Gearing to see what he’s talking about.

“Where the hell is the elevator?” Swift asks as her eyes bug out at the darkness below.

Gearing points a hoof down as he says, “Down there somewhere… Looks like the cables broke, and the safeties gave out a long time ago.”

Handy looks at him and asks, “How can you tell that? I can’t even see the elevator?” They both look at him and he scowls as he says, “And don’t give me no shit about my eyesight this time!”

Gearing snickers and shakes his head before pointing straight ahead. “The cables are wrong. There’s at least one entirely missing, and their position is wrong along with not seeming to have any real tension on them beyond their own weight. The elevator probably dropped when the bombs were going off. Damage looks old.”

“How do we get down?” Handy asks as he looks down into the void again.

“We could just jump down,” Swift offers.

“I have no idea how far down that is,” Gearing replies as he groans lightly.

“Well, with the PipBuck light on we could just drop and if it’s too far, or we see the bottom, we can just fly and hover the rest of the way down.”

“You can try that, I’m certainly not,” Gearing quips.

“Why’s that? Not so sure about your reflexes being fast enough to do it?” Swift asks with a grin.

Gearing stares at her for a moment before saying flatly, “If it’s got water in the shaft, and I hit that before I can stop, I’ll sink straight to the bottom in an instant. At least you can climb up enough to fly out since you won’t just automatically sink.”

“Oh…” Swift’s eyes go wide before she lowers her head and looks back over the lip of the elevator shaft. “Sorry.” They all stare down into the shaft for a few moments before she asks, “Want me to scout it out first for us?”

“If you would, yes please…” Gearing admits quietly. He looks over at her and gives a sheepish smile. “But, please hover down the whole way. You might be fine. And you might not sink in water like I do. But if it’s highly irradiated it can be just as dangerous.”

“What makes you think there’s even water down there?” Handy asks with an arched eyebrow.

“Because now he’s back to thinking of what might happen, instead of getting stuck on what’s right in front of him,” Swift replies with a grin. “Right, Gearing?”

Gearing smirks as he looks at her for a moment. “Yeah… but it ain’t paranoia if they’re really out to get ya.” Gearing gives a full body shiver before he says quietly, “Get reamed often enough by ’em and you start anticipating the horn…”

“Yeaaaah… the fates suck,” Handy mutters as he looks down the dark elevator shaft.

“Them too,” Gearing says flatly.

Handy raises an eyebrow and looks at Gearing sideways as Swift quips, “Whatever, I don’t believe in fate.” Then she jumps into the darkness and flies straight down the elevator shaft. The only light in the vast void is her PipBuck as she travels down and quickly grows smaller. As she’s getting away she grumbles quietly, but given the closeness of the elevator shaft it’s enough for it to echo up towards Gearing and Handy, “I get to choose what I do or don’t do, so fuck the fates and my dads... Assholes…”

As the light from Swift’s PipBuck turns into a practical twinkling star from being so far away, Handy comments, “That… is a long way down…”

“I doubt it goes all the way to the lowest point… but it could easily be ten or twenty stories or more straight down,” Gearing replies quietly.

“Long way to fall,” Handy mutters.

“It’s not the fall that’ll kill you,” Gearing replies. And when Handy looks over at him Gearing’s lip raises slightly as he adds, “It’s the sudden stop.”

Swift returns a moment later, zipping straight up from out of the darkness and stops in front of them, hovering over the empty elevator shaft, as she comments, “Okay, that’s a long way down.”

“You don’t say,” Handy says with a smirk, causing a grin to cross Gearing’s muzzle as well.

“What’s down there? Find the elevator?” Gearing asks as Handy keeps peeking over the lip of the floor and down into the elevator shaft as if he might actually see something this time.

Swift points down with a forehoof as she nods. “Yeah. Just like you said, it crashed into the bottom. Looks like it’s mostly intact, just warped out of shape mainly.” She looks around as she mutters, “Weird there’s not more elevator doors though… I’m guessing the elevator is blocking the other one.”

Handy nods as he looks down. “Express elevator. Probably not very many stops.” He looks up and nods as he adds, “Yeah, wasn’t meant to be used a whole lot.” He looks between them as he asks, “So, how are we getting down?”

Gearing looks between him and Swift and a mischievous smile crosses his muzzle. “Well, as you both pointed out, the elevator’s out at the moment. So our only real option is flying down.”

Handy’s eyes go wide and he takes a few steps back away from the shaft as he stutters, “B-b- but I can’t fly!”

Gearing looks between them and chuckles as he jumps over the edge and into the shaft without even opening his wings. “Not alone…” As he starts dropping out of sight, with his wings still closed at his side, he adds, “I’ll go see about getting the door open while you two sort out how Handy’s going to be joining us.”

Swift snickers and the bickering between Swift and Handy starts up before Gearing’s even out of earshot. He judges the distance down based on how long it took Swift to make the return trip. When he thinks he’s about half way down he goes ahead and slows his dissent by opening his wings and begins fluttering down with controlled spills of air. But his calculations were a bit off as it becomes very apparent that Swift had returned at a much higher speed than she’d originally left.

Eventually he finds the wayward elevator wreck, sitting tilted at a slight angle. A tell tale sign that either it crushed something under it, or that part of it had actually buckled in. It doesn’t take him long to find the roof hatch to the elevator and get it open. He shines the light of his PipBuck into the elevator, wanting a better view of the damage and destruction so he can figure out what he needs to do. Instead he uncovers more than he’d bargained for.

Inside the elevator car a group of pony skeletons lay scattered around where they had fallen. One of the ponies has a completely crushed skull, from apparently hitting the floor of the elevator when the elevator crashed. The others all likewise have serious injuries evident in their bones, and it’s easy to tell from this distance and even in this poor of lighting. Gearing slips into the elevator, curling around and flipping over so he can slowly drop himself onto an area that isn’t currently being occupied by one of the two century old remains.

All of them have broken bones of one kind or another, and several of them seem to have simply died on impact. One skeleton off to the side, however, seems to have possibly survived the impact. As they are slumped over to the side with another set of remains being held with their forelegs. The empty glass bulb sitting next to the bodies, undamaged and carefully set to the side, testifies further to the initial hunch. Gearing starts checking the bodies over, and it doesn’t take him long before he realizes that the bodies, all four of them, are members of the local maintenance detachment. Judging by the jumpsuit uniforms they all are wearing. But, despite the blood stains, small tears where bones had poked through, and age, they all look in pretty good condition.

Gearing slowly starts looking them over, and the floor of the elevator, for anything of use. Or, at the very least, if there’s any more information he can gleam from the personnel here. He feels more than a little dirty turning out the pockets of the dead like this. Someone trying to kill him and losing the bet is one thing. They wanted to roll the dice, and they lost. But these were simply hard working folks trying to do a job. He finds a variety of items in their pockets, but most of them he simply leaves where they are. Bits included. But the access card he finds in the uniform of the buck being held by the other skeleton is something that he can’t pass up.

And while he’s still carefully looking for anything of use from those remains, he notices a maintenance notebook near the buck’s head. With a blood stained pen next to it. But, judging by the way he’s sitting, and the injuries covering the body, it wasn’t this buck that’d used it last.

Gearing carefully grabs the notebook and looks it over. It’s nothing special. A simple notebook provided for making notes on repairs that were needed, parts that would need to be ordered, and anything out of the ordinary. They’re so trivial that they don’t even put any logos on them. As the information is always expected to be input into the computer system when the technician gets back to their hub. As he’s looking at it, he can’t help but notice that the notebook is actually upside down. Reversed even. So he goes ahead and opens it from the wrong side, looking at the last page first and going through it in reverse order.

And in large mouth scrawl covering the last page is an unmistakably angry message.

Gearing’s not sure what brought that on, but his mind, as it tends to do, starts running away with a variety of reasons for such declarations. And the old blood smear on the page lets Gearing know this had to have been one of the final messages written in it, and likely by the person holding the corpse.

He flips the page and quickly skims it, and after reading it, he closes his eyes and lets out a long slow sigh.

You told me we’d be all right. You said to drink that potion you had me pull out of your bag. And then I could give you the other one you had. But you only had the ONE! And you KNEW it. There wasn’t even any broken bottles in your bag. Why would you do this to me? I’d have rather died with you than sitting here with your corpse!

He can tell there’s more to the situation that’s revealed in the notebook. There’s more pages with writing. But he doesn’t have the heart to go through any more of it at the moment. He’s already read through one family’s horrors of living through the bombs. And now this mare, whoever she was, was left to die alone in an elevator car full of her coworkers. Gearing grabs a metal storage clipboard from under one of the other bodies and looks it over carefully. The rubber gasket still seems intact so he slips the notebook he’d just found into the storage area where maintenance crews normally kept their work orders, and stows it in his meager bag. He drags his eyes away from the corpses, and over to the door. And it’s there, next to the door, that he finds the collection of tools the workers had brought with them. The elevator car door is open. And is currently being held open by a pair of screw drivers. But the door to the level is still closed fast.

The lone survivor had apparently managed to get the door open. Only to find out that the elevator was more than half way below the next door. They’d tried to use a few other smaller items to help them stand on, to boost them up, but apparently they just couldn’t get the outer doors of the elevator open. They’d tried contacting someone through the emergency box, even cracking open the panels and trying to hot wire into the communication lines directly. But, even if she’d managed to get it to work, there wouldn’t have been anyone left to answer her calls for help. She’d apparently tried everything she could think of to either get out on her own, or get help from elsewhere, but still ended up stuck in here until she finally passed on.

Gearing carefully steps around the corpses and items littering the floor of the car as he climbs up the section of the elevator shaft revealed by the open elevator doors. He pulls himself up with his forehooves and stares at the door to the hallway as he tries to figure out why she couldn’t get it open. There are multiple tool markings on the doors. From both apparently crowbar scrapes and hammer blows. But the effect was minimal and did little more than loosen the rubber bumpers that keep the metal hallways doors from clanking against each other when they close. He slowly trails his eyes upwards, and leans forward even more, as he follows the seam up towards the roof of the elevator.

And the problem becomes far more clear to him in an instant.

When the elevator hit the ground it didn’t buckle evenly. The side closest to the doors apparently caved in more for some reason, and caused the elevator car to lean towards the door. Resulting in part of the edge of the elevator to cram into the door and hold it in position by a combination of friction and a piece of the elevator embedded in the sheet metal of the door.

Gearing turns sideways and digs his hooves into the rubber bumper between the outer doors one leg at a time until he’s suspended in the air, almost parallel to the floor, as he’s wedged his hooves into the gap. He starts pushing and straightening out as he had done with the door far above him not long ago. But this time it takes a bit of effort on his part, with the metal screeching and grinding as he slowly forces the door open again. The sheet metal, along with part of the roof of the elevator, whine as it mutually gouges each other under the torque being applied by Gearing pushing on the inside of the doors. His hooves leave indents in the doors where they dig into the metal and after a bit he falls down as he gets the door almost all the way open. He catches himself with his wings, swinging down and back up like a pendulum before scrambling into the hallway that the elevator tried to open up to as designed.

The hallways in this section have less of that industrial chic of the maintenance tunnels he’d just left, and have more of a clean transport tunnel feel to them. The walls, floors, and ceiling are all composed of concrete and steel. With access panels set into recesses in the wall signaling that the pipes that were on full display above are probably hidden behind the walls down here. The hallway is also exceptionally wider, such that a tank could be driven down through it without worry of scraping the paint on the grayish walls.

Gearing turns around, looks down at the corpses in the elevator car, and lets out a sigh as it dawns on him. She just wasn’t strong enough. And she didn’t have the proper tools to cut her way out. If he’d been within ear shot, he could have helped her. Or if anyone ever answered her calls they could have helped her. But nopony came. Not until it was far too late to actually matter.

As he’s looking at the dead maintenance personnel, he can’t help but feeling like he’s failed them. And as his shoulders sag he hears a long dead buck’s voice scold him.

… maintenance pony of the most ungrateful nation on this fucking planet…

Where the hell is everypony?! I know we aren’t the only ones. We can’t be.

Gearing bows his head and mutters quietly, “Sorry…”

Where the hell were you and why weren’t you doing your job while I was working double shifts doing mine?!

Gearing takes in a slow deep breath before he says, “I’m sorry I wasn’t there to save you…”

They don’t deserve this. To die this way… to hell with you, you worthless bastards.

Gearing jerks and takes a step back from the elevator in fright as he hears hooves clattering on the metal of the elevator and partially expects the maintenance crew to come back from the dead to get vengeance for his lack of helpfulness.

Instead of a squad of maintenance zomponies, Swift’s snoot pokes around the rubble of the top of the elevator car and looks at Gearing through the tiny gap between the roof of the elevator and the doorframe. “Was that you making all that noise? For sure thought you were ripping apart tanks with your bare hooves by the sound echoing up the elevator shaft,” she asks with a smirk. Although the smile falls from her face slowly before she asks, “You okay? You look like you’ve seen a ghost…”

“More like four,” Handy’s voice carries out of the elevator shaft as he eases down into the elevator car. Once inside he looks around quickly before making his way over towards Gearing and hopping up to climb out into the hallway with him. “The car wasn’t exactly empty when it fell.”

Gearing helps pull Handy up into the hallway with him, and a moment later they can hear Swift’s voice from inside the car. “Damn…” She hops up and practically pounces clear through the gap and into the hallway with them in a single bound, aided by a timely snap of her wings, before she looks at Gearing and asks, “Friends of yours?”

Gearing slowly shakes his head before he turns around and starts looking down the length of the long hallway. “No, we just met…”

“Another ridiculously long hallway?” Handy asks with a sigh as he looks down the hallway that seems almost magically created by unimaginative ponies by how repetitive it is with a pair of dim lights set high along the walls at regular intervals. All the way down. At least until the end where they can see a set of heavy security doors barring the way.

“At least we’re deep enough now that all of those red markers are gone from our EFS, so there’s that,” Swift replies with a wide grin.

“There’s also only one way to go, so that makes it an easy decision as well,” Gearing adds as he starts leading the way.

Handy looks over at Gearing and smirks as he raises an eyebrow and asks, “Since when are you the silver lining kinda buck?”

Gearing looks at Handy in the eyes as he keeps walking away for a few moments before he says, “One way in also means one way out and it’s easier to get cornered with nowhere to go…”

Handy’s smirk falls off his face as his eyes go wide. He slowly turns his head to look at Swift, who shrugs and replies with a giggle, “You asked for that one…”

As the group is approaching a set of security doors at the opposite end of the long hallway, Swift looks over her shoulder back from where they’d come from and asks, “Why have a blank hallway that’s like a hundred yards long? Bit of a waste of space, ain’t it?”

“Not if all you care about is getting from point ‘A’ to point ‘B’,” Handy replies as he starts looking over the large set of metal doors in front of them that are nearly as large as the hallway itself.

“Especially for ones that are more ‘underground tunnels’ than they are ‘hallways’. Trust me, if you’re hoping for a confusing maze of doors… we’ll run across it soon enough, I’m sure,” Gearing adds with a chuckle.

Handy starts looking over the large set of metal doors as he says, “Well this is going to take a bit to get through.” He grabs the handle and pushes on the left door, then pulls on it, but it won’t budge. “Sealed tight. Probably some sort of maglock…”

“So cut the power and get it open?” Swift offers as she watches Handy walk back and forth in front of the doors.

“That might work, unless it’s fail secure, then we might have to cut through somehow or trick the system…” Handy mutters as he paces and tries to work through the problem in front of him.

Swift looks at Handy, but spares a glance over towards Gearing as Gearing is carefully examining a security pad on the side of the wall next to the doors. “Well, this is annoying…” Handy sits down and folds his forelegs across his chest as he stares at the door and gives it some consideration, which prompts Swift to ask, “Gearing, think you can get this door open?”

“Yeah, it’ll take me a minute though,” Gearing replies flatly.

“Yeah, a minute, uh huh, with a government grade security lockdown system designed to-” Handy quips with a snort, but stops mid sentence as an affirmative beep comes from the security doors.

A green light appears above both of the doors, and Gearing’s wing stretches out and pushes the door nearest to him open.

“What the fuck?!” Handy asks with his eyes shooting wide open and jaw dropping low.

Swift zips her focus over to Gearing and narrows her eyes as she says, “Okay, ‘repair pony’ my ass. There’s no way you bypassed the system that quickly like that!”

“You’re right,” Gearing replies flatly. Then, with a smug grin, he flicks up a previously unseen-by-them access ID card and waves it side to side with his other wing before he steps into the doorway. “This let me in. Work smarter, not harder…”

“And just why do you happen to have a security pass that works here when you said yourself you didn’t work around here?” Swift asks, but the accusational tone is accompanied with a self satisfied grin as she stares at Gearing and waits for some kind of lame excuse.

Gearing stares her in the eye and slowly swings his wing around, deliberately, and points back the way they’d come using the access card. “I borrowed it from a colleague I just met who doesn’t have a use for it anymore…”

Swift’s eyes go wide and her jaw drops before she whips her head back and forth and quickly puts the pieces together. But any retort or reply is lost in a stream of gurgling and tripping over her own tongue.

Handy walks towards the door and looks at her with a sympathetic smile as he asks, “So, how’s that foot taste?” He pulls a tin can out of his saddle bag and sets it to act as a wedge to keep the door from closing all the way as he hold it open for Swift

Swift gives him a sheepish smile then crams her forehoof into her mouth and starts slobbering on it as she follows them through the security door. “Omma nomma ohm nom.” It doesn’t take her long before she pulls it out and spits off to the side. “Bleh… like dirt and that I should really avoid doing that again…” She catches up quickly to start walking along side Gearing as she says, “Hey, Handy, lookie here; your favorite: long boring hallways…”

“Oh goody,” he replies with an eye roll.

“Not entirely, there’s doors and off shoot hallways coming up that I can see already,” Gearing adds and points further ahead and to the right where a terminal is connected to the wall next to a door frame.

“I’m glad you can,” Handy replies as he swings his gaze back and forth at the mostly smooth concrete surrounding them. “At least it’s brighter down in this section.”

Finally they come up to the first door on the right, with a computer terminal set into the wall right next to it, just as Gearing had mentioned. Handy stops and looks at it as he asks, “Should we just go in through this way?”

Gearing keeps his course heading down the hallway as he comments, “The marker on my PipBuck shows it’s somewhere further down here. Let’s try to get as close as we can before we start randomly opening doors. Never know what’s in there or what we might have to deal with behind them.”

“Well, it’s on the right side of the hall, I can see that much,” Swift adds as she trots along and takes in the sights like she’s window shopping in downtown Manehatten. “Let’s just hope it’s on this level and we don’t have to go snooping up and down floors to figure out which one it’s on…” She looks back at Handy as he catches up with them and grins. “At least there’s no red markers down here!”

“No markers at all, actually,” Handy comments as he watches one door after another that they walk by. “I don’t like that.”

“Worst case scenario: there’s a whole group of cloaked hostiles down here waiting to ambush us… Or there’s a hell of a lot of security that’s powered down, so it doesn’t register, and we’re just walking through a meat grinder waiting to happen…” Gearing comments as he looks to the left and stares down a long hallway that meets up with this one but curves out of view quickly.

“And how are the cloaked attackers worse than the meat grinder option?” Handy asks as he looks at Swift, who just grins at him and shrugs indifferently.

“Because with the mob of security, we’ll see it on our EFS as soon as it’s activated and then we can actually avoid or do something about it…” Gearing comments before turning his head to look at Handy. “An invisible assassin is near impossible to get away from. Which is one reason why cloaked zebra commandos were so terrifying.”

Swift rolls her eyes and smirks as she waves it away with a forehoof. “They weren’t that big of a threat. Seriously now…”

Gearing slowly looks over at her before he narrows his eyes and says flatly, “Tell that to the kids at Littlehorn…”

Swift missteps and recoils as she literally bites her own tongue. “Ow! Oof… okay… that was dirty… but point made…”

“We’re getting closer, I can see the marker moving now that we’re all the way down here,” Handy says as he keeps his focus on the little icon hovering in front of his vision.

“Yeah, I see it too.” Swift looks in its direction, then over at Gearing before she comments, “Hey, Mr. Stable-Tec Liaison… how the hell does this thing do that?” She points through the wall towards the indicator with a forehoof as she arches a brow. “That’s always bugged me. The way you can get a marker like right where it is. But it doesn’t work for everything. Like it can tell us exactly where this terminal is that Lodestar wants us to get information from, in a place we’ve never been to before, but it can’t like, find Handy’s hammer when he’s misplaced it in the stable somewhere.”

“You or the kids hiding my tools on me isn’t ‘misplacing it’, it’s being a jerk and ‘pulling a prank on daddy’,” Handy retorts as he glances at her and smirks.

Swift grins at him as she says, “Hey, if you’re not going to play with the kids, then the kids are going to play with you.”

Gearing shakes his head and chuckles as their ongoing back and forth continues. But, after a bit longer, and Swift hopping sideways and nudging Gearing in the side to let him know she’s not going to let him get away from the question, Gearing replies, “Your guess is as good as mine about that.”

Swift leans away from his as she stares at him with suspicion oozing out of her glare. “Oh come on, seriously? You’re gonna be like that?”

Gearing looks over at her and shakes his head. “No, seriously. I don’t know.” To the pair of unamused stares he gets in response he adds, “You’re gonna have to ask Apple Bloom about that. She’s the one that invented it. I’m just a pegasus repairpony. That’s all.”

Swift wraps a foreleg over, grabs hold of Handy around his neck, and pulls him into a sideways hug as she points at him with her other foreleg and temporarily walks on just her hindlegs. “Yeah, right. Apple Bloom’s just an earth pony, not a unicorn, no magic there either, she’s got as much as you do, so don’t give me that nonsense. What’s really going on? Not willing to share company secrets even after the whole thing went belly up?”

Gearing rolls his eyes and shakes his head slowly. “Look. I know how to work on them. I can repair and rebuild them if I have the parts. I know enough about the spell matrices to use, reboot, and restart them. But I can’t make them from scratch from raw materials. And I can guarantee you Apple Bloom didn’t make the various parts from scratch all on her little ole lonesome either.” Gearing looks over at Swift as he narrows his eyes and adds, “She’s a brilliant engineer, no doubt about it. But she also had entire teams working with her and some serious support. Both her and Sweetie Belle’s sisters are ministry mares, in case you didn’t know. And even if they didn’t intend on it, that clout helped them out considerably in getting started and attracting talents. After that, success begets success…”

“So you’re going to just sit there and try and use the fact that she had a company supporting her to brush off the question?” Swift asks as she narrows her eyes right back at him.

Gearing pointedly looks in a different direction as he grumbles, “Arcane Sciences have always been my weakest subject… I’m not some damn machine with all the answers; I don’t know everything.”

Swift flinches a bit before quickly recovering and yelling, “I didn’t say you were! But how about-”

“How about why this terminal’s already open like somepony’s been through here recently?” Handy interrupts the conversation and draws both of their attention to the fact that Handy’s standing at a computer terminal, next to a door, that seems to be close to the marker they’re all following.

Gearing walks over as he’s looking at it and snips, “Because some amateur probably left it open after unlocking it…” He walks right up next to Handy and starts tapping out on the keys with his forehooves as he looks at the screen. “Yeah, whoever unlocked the computer never relocked it… this is a massive breach of security protocol…”

“Good for us?” Handy asks. Gearing hits another key on the terminal’s keyboard and looks over at the doorway as the heavy security door starts sliding out of the way, causing Handy to grin and nod as he adds, “Good for us!”

Handy starts inside but gets stopped by Gearing before he can even make it to the threshold by a solid grip on his armor.

“Me first, Handy, we don’t know what’s in there,” Gearing says flatly as he squeezes between him and the entryway and starts heading inside.

Handy takes a step back before he sighs and relents, “Yeah… you probably should.” He shakes his head as he sways side to side to see as much as he can as he comments, “Looks like a lot of terminals and computer equipment though. Some of it looks like communication stations.”

“Good eye,” Gearing comments as he very slowly looks the room over for anything that might unpleasantly surprise them.

The room is a bit bigger than it would first appear, and from Gearing’s quick look it does seem to be some sort of communications hub. The door from the hallway opens near the corner of the room, with the walls directly to their right, and across from them, being covered floor to ceiling with equipment humming and going about its own business of randomly blinking a light here and there. Another ‘L’ shape of equipment starts to Gearing’s left, at the door frame, and wraps around to meet the equipment in the opposite corner from the entry door. However, the equipment doesn’t quite make it the whole way, and it’s only about chest high along that one wall instead of going all the way up. And the reason becomes clear after looking beyond it. This room is partitioned into two parts. With the area opposite the door having a security gate that seems to be the only way into the part segmented off with thick mesh reinforced glass that runs behind the shorter line of equipment.

Gearing keeps his eyes and focus traveling around the room in slow deliberate scans as he comments, “It seems to be some sort of communications relay hub.”

Handy slowly follows Gearing in, with his ears swiveling around about as quickly as they’ll go, as he asks, “Why would there be any schematics in a relay station?”

Swift casually trots in, and heads straight towards the middle of the shorter line of equipment as she says, “Well, let’s crack it open and find out…” She taps on the keyboard a few times and then sheepishly smirks as she looks over at Gearing. “Uhm…yeah… I think this is why he suggested you do it…”

As Gearing is walking over to join Swift, Handy asks, “Well, can we hurry up and grab it and get out of here? I’m still wet and it’s cold as hell down here.”

“You’re cold because you’re wet, Handy,” Gearing comments as he slowly taps one key at a time on the computer.

“Well, either way, hurry up would ya?” Handy asks as he shivers again and his metallic armor clatters and clacks against itself like someone trying to do a drum roll on cymbals.

Gearing steps sideways and Swift pulls back and motions him towards the console as she watches from the side. After a few minutes of his hooves tap dancing across the keyboard, Gearing looks over his shoulder at Handy and comments with a sheepish smile, “This… is going to take a few minutes...”

Swift grins as she tilts her head to look at him sideways with the profile of her smirk aimed right at him. “It’s already been a ‘few minutes’, Mr. Greatest Technician Bar None.” She giggles as she asks, “What’s wrong, can’t do it?”

Handy slaps a hoof over his eyes as he groans, “Please don’t tell me we came all the way out here for nothing…”

Gearing narrows his eyes and blindly taps on the keyboard, bringing up the security back door access screen again as he says, “I can do it… it’s just going to take time.”

“How much time?” Handy asks with a frown. A split second later he takes in a sniveling snorting snuff of air through his nostrils that sounds disturbing and overly moist. “I still need to get out of these clothes and dry off.”

“I’ll be able to answer that after I’m done,” Gearing replies flatly. Handy lets out a long moaning groan as he sags his shoulders and hangs his head. Gearing looks over at Swift and nods towards the door. “How about you two go back the way we came, find an open room, and get yourself sorted. There’s bound to be something in there to help dry off and warm up. Might even find some usable salvage. Just stay away from anywhere that screams ‘High Security’… You know what I mean, right?”

Swift nods and reaches over with a wing, grabs Handy, and starts towards the door as she says, “Sure. Don’t worry. I won’t draw the attention of a bunch of murder bots… Come on, Handy, let’s go get you out of those clothes before you get sick.”

Handy grumbles as he follows along slowly, “I think it’s too late for that already.”

Swift giggles as she swats him on the flank after he makes it out the door. “Oooohh you big baby. Come on.”

After they’ve gone on their quest of finding a way to get more comfortable, and the door shuts behind them, Gearing turns his undivided attention towards the problem at hoof. His eyes dart side to side a bit as he moves to block the view from the door to the screen, using his own body. He quickly connects his PipBuck to the terminal, and starts going through his various screens.

A snarl crosses Gearing’s muzzle as his vision gets covered with a stream of code and at the end is a string of warnings he’s been seeing for a while, and, in this instance, they go from being an annoyance to genuinely pissing him off.

>Credential Matrix Unavailable.

>‘BlueMac.Cred’ Partitioned and Locked.

>No Further Entries Detected.

>No Security Keys Detected.

>Credential Matrix Refers to Entries That Do Not Exist or Have Been Removed.

>Security Bypass: Unavailable.

“I knew this was going to bite me in the ass…” Gearing growls as he appears to stare off into space, but looks at the blinking code across his vision being provided by the same spell that generates his EFS for him. He lets out an annoyed sigh as he says, “Time to do this the old fashioned way then…” He disconnects his PipBuck from the system and glances at the door out for a moment before he says quietly, “Gotta make sure to check Handy’s rads before we go. He’s been wet for a while and that ticking never stopped…”

‘And when there’s not a fucking thing else to do besides sit on a stone floor and stare at your hooves, guess what they want to do? They want to play. They want to live. So, when they found a hidey-hole behind a panel that had a small pool in it they went to town,’ a disgruntled buck’s voice snarls at Gearing from the void between time and space.

“Not now, Billiard,” Gearing groans as he drops his gaze to the floor.

‘Did I mention the water was highly contaminated? No?’

“Not now, Billiard!” Gearing yells as he looks around in the small communications relay hub.

‘Well then you’re just a dumbass for not figuring that part out yet. Because it was.’

“I’m sorry, Billiard. For you and your family…”

‘My children. My babies,’ the cracking sobbing buck’s voice moans. And before the echoing tones cease, his voice strikes up with a renewed panic to it. ‘Run. Please. Run, Annie. Run as fast as you can. Please make it.’

Sirens quietly blare in Gearing’s mind’s eye and he looks around quickly with his eyes going wide with fright. No, none of the system is alerting. Everything’s fine. Otherwise the system would show him and warn him.

And it finally dawns on him why he can’t stop thinking about those recordings. The room is most likely a doppelganger for the room Billiard had been in when the war came to its horrific end. That systems monitoring closet Billiard had been in when he was caught on record having a smutty call with his wife. Gearing walks around slowly, looking the equipment over, and lets himself recognize one system after another. It’s a relay station alright. And inside of it, it has all of the kit connected to the early warning monitoring systems one would expect or need. Or, if you were Billiard, all of the alarms you’d need in order to know the world is in the process of ending.

Which makes the high security of the room make sense.

Gearing’s eyes settle on a phone set into one of the terminals, and he slowly walks over to it. He knows Billiard’s group was in the Manehatten branch. Far far away. But, this bit of something to touch somehow helps him. He reaches out with a hoof and slowly pats on the phone receiver as he imagines Billiard setting it back on the hook as he desperately tapped out messages to his friends to try and save as many as he could.

With the realization managing to climb itself out of Gearing’s subconscious, and to the forefront of Gearing’s thoughts, the haunting alarms and Billiard’s traumatized voice fade from Gearing’s ears. The simple act of acknowledging it seemingly being enough to quiet it and give Gearing some peace in order to work.

And work he does as he attacks the keyboard with a fervor that would make a programmer getting paid by the job, instead of by the hour, proud.

Even so it takes several repeated attempts until he finally sees a deeply gratifying message appear across the screen.

>Access Granted

And as deeply satisfying as it is to figure it out finally, to solve this digital puzzle, it’s no wonder it took him so long when the password turned out to be some alpha-numeric monstrosity twenty characters long in a language that he hasn’t even come across yet. At least that’s how it looked.

By the time he finally gets in, some time has passed, and he realizes he has a couple messages from Swift and Handy updating him on their own progress. They were all sent as low priority so he wasn’t bothered while he was working, so he’s not particularly concerned. They’d found a room to hole up in, had locked themselves in, and were going to just dry off and then rest up in there until Gearing was finished.

After sending them a quick update on his own progress, including the unfortunate news that, judging by what he’s seeing in the system, it’s going to take a while to get everything they need, he gets back to sorting through the various subsections available through this terminal’s access.

Although it doesn’t take him long to make a very important discovery, and it causes him to start giggling.

Somehow, somewhere, someone made some kind of deal to use the government relay system to handle the backups of their data and information. What Gearing realizes is that this isn’t some data repository. It simply has access to multiple information repositories in order to transfer whatever the user wants to its destination. Whether Lodestar had actually realized it or not, what he’d stumbled across wasn’t simply the location of schematics sent from some random manufacturing company.

Because of the way this is set up, and the high level access required by this equipment, what it is, is a backdoor into data streams. Lodestar was right, in that he’d found a way to get into a repository of schematics. Sort of. What it really is, is a connection point giving them access to where the backups are being stored. And, in truth, it’s far more than just schematics.

Gearing randomly pulls one file after another up, and when he finds an actual schematic, and not just another report some from poor sod that simply reported on his report on some other report that he failed to submit on time had to do, he goes over the diagrams with a keen eye. And, the excitement starts welling up in him rapidly. Although, it quickly gets tempered as a realization dawns on him.

These documents and files are the original schematics. They are probably a duplicate of the master set that were being stored for long term usage. With this, and a bit of technical know-how, and the right supplies and equipment, namely a shop capable of high speed machining, they would be able to manufacture weapons to the exact specifications from during the war. There’s no guesswork. Everything has been included in the mechanical dossier. Including acceptable and unacceptable tolerances. For absolutely every single part.

The little blue pegasus in Gearing’s head crawls up through a mind cloud and pokes its head up just enough to peek out at what’s happening. Deep diving into the information has drawn its attention enough that it slowly crawls out a bit more and comments, ‘Uhm… with this… we’ll be able to crank them out once we get into the Core and get access to the factories… Even if the systems are down, we can reprogram the entire procedure using these schematics…’

Gearing lets out a snort of self amusement as he nods in acknowledgement to the thought. “Yes, once I’m in I’ll have all of the facilities at my disposal… especially the robotics assembly.” Gearing’s muzzle cracks into an unsavory grin as he mutters, “Let’s see the fucking raiders try and eat a horde of fresh sentry bots…”

The little blue pegasus hops out of the cloud and sits on its edge as it starts waving around a long flag with a group of repair bots charging across its surface fixing everything in sight. ‘And then we can have the maintenance drones cleaning up. Raw materials might be a problem for a while, but we can use the rubble to rebuild homes and buildings all over. Won’t be as many buildings, but they’ll be better for sure!’

“And once basic needs for survival and safety start being easier to maintain with the added help… it’ll be easier to work together and come together. Others won’t be competition,” Gearing mutters as he momentarily pauses.

‘A sense of belonging and love is also important to health, and for a society as a whole to stay and grow…’ the little blue pesasus comments.

“Yeah,” Gearing mutters as his mind starts zipping through another set of possibilities.

The little blue pegasus flips up, flops out lazily onto its back on a mind cloud, and holds a book over its face with his forehooves as he shoves his snoot into its pages and giggles. ‘And folks kept saying studying psychology was going to be pointless…’

“Yeah,” Gearing says flatly.

There’s a few moment delay before the little pegasus comments, with it’s muzzle still in the book, ‘You know as well as I do what we need to do.’

“I can’t just give this all to Lodestar without going through it first,” Gearing mutters as he starts going through one file after another as quickly as he can to try and see what they all are.

‘And we need to get in,’ his mental companion retorts.

Gearing snarls as he says, “And figure out who changed the damned white list.”

The little blue pegasus jumps up, flicks the book off into the void, and starts stomping around and flailing his limbs as he starts screaming in an irate rage. ‘Yeah! What the fuck was that all about!? How the hell did they even find that hidden subsystem to change the white list, let alone having the clearance to change it!’

“It had to be someone on the inside,” Gearing mutters as his eyes jump over towards the only door to the room. “That’s the only thing I can think of. I made a point of being plainly identifiable and got rid of the cloak so the system would recognize me as I approached. But it didn’t. And that’s concerning. Did they wipe the whole list or something?”

‘More likely they have some kind of override and not letting anyone in,’ the little blue pegasus comments reasonably.

“If that’s the case then maybe I can punch a hole in the system enough to get me through…” Gearing mutters as he slowly looks down at the floor.

The little blue pegasus starts marching back and forth as it rattles on. ‘Shadow Bolt tower’s high enough that we can go in there and come in from the top. It wouldn’t be the first time we had to. Especially with the air and cold issues that made it such a bitch for most other ponies to do any maintenance or installations. Once we’re at ground level we’d be inside the defensive net so it wouldn’t be as hard… Except…’

“Except for the fucking lightening generator rods… Handy was right. He might not have known what it was that’d ‘fry me’ when he warned me about some kind of defense network keeping things from getting up to cloud level when he mentioned it back at the station, but I’ve seen the little fuckers poking through the bottom of the cloud layer. They’re all over the place. And my brass ass ain’t messing with the kind of voltage those are capable of. I’ll get turned into a tack welded hunk of brass in a flash and crash to the ground…” Gearing grumbles as he starts grinding a hoof into the concrete of the floor.

‘Well… there’s always option ‘B’,’ the little blue pegasus in Gearing’s head comments before turning and nodding towards the area on the other side of the mesh and glass security wall.

Gearing’s focus lands on the locked security door separating the two areas as the little blue pegasus keeps directing him towards it with a pair of glowing sticks like used to get used on the air force landing strips to help the incoming fliers see the ground to land safely and communicate nonverbally. “You’re right… plan ‘B’ it is…” Gearing comments flatly before he whips his attention back towards the console. “Buck it.”

Gearing quickly sets up the system to mass download the entire database that he’s currently connected to, and sets it to actively download to his PipBuck before turning and walking over towards the security door. He squats down and starts giving the lock a discerning eye as he mutters, “They already know this is going to take a while and as long as I stay within range, it should keep connected and downloading… Which leaves me free to give the system the ole reach around…”

The lock proves to be far less problematic than the computer had been, and Gearing soon finds himself cracking open the cases of one computer system after another within the confines of the partitioned area. While sitting on the floor, to have both access to the electronics under the panel, and the terminal keyboard and screen set into the equipment, Gearing begins giving his skills a thorough exercise. And in doing so he begins demonstrating to the world why a talented technician is the most dangerous thing to have around security equipment. Because as long as he has physical access to it, it’s his.

The little blue pegasus in his head prances around as it giggles, ‘Yeaaahh… that’s right… let me have all your secrets…’

By patching into one system after another as a hitchhiker, within the system’s own network, Gearing starts electronically tracing a path through and into the virtual landscape of Hoofington itself. And, more importantly, starts cybernetically drilling into the Core’s infrastructure.

As one line of code after another scrolls across the screen, giving Gearing little tidbits of information and a trail of breadcrumbs to chase after, he eagerly follows them. But, while he’s got his head covered in hanging wires and partially disassembled communication’s equipment, he loses all track of time. His entire thought process is focused on the problem at hand. Because with the way things are going, he can’t bypass any opportunities any more. And this one might be the biggest carrot he’s had dangled in front of him thus far. If he can only get into the central core for administration, he can insert a variety of backdoors to let him outright bypass security. Yeah, his normal credentials are meaningless and aren’t going to help him since they’ve started playing a messed up game of hide and seek.

But when you turn the system into your own little puppet, it’ll spit out all of the credentials you could possibly ever need that it can produce. Or at least something to fake it well enough. So it’s not a complete loss.

While digging through a segment of subdirectories and trying to figure out what they do and where they would be in relation to where he’s trying to get to, a not altogether unexpected problem pops up for him. He notices that someone, or something, has started tracing his connection back to him. He quickly switches over to one of the terminals next to him and activates the segmented spoof he’d set up just in case. It won’t stop them from finding out what room he’s in, but while they are busy fighting it and trying to figure him out, he can keep working via a separate connection entirely. It’ll buy him time. And the amount of time depends on how good the other individual is, or group at that.

He continues digging through the system, using the two systems in tandem, and the grin on his muzzle just gets wider when he realizes that, yes, he’s in. He’s definitely inside the architecture of the Core. Now he just needs to locate the databases he needs and he can insert himself in some nice toys to get around the security in certain areas.

But then the unexpected happens when the second terminal that he’d been using unexpectedly clears. A moment after the screen goes dark a simple line of text pops up with the blinking cursor.

>Hello? Who’s there? _

Gearing stares at the text out of the corner of his eye as he keeps tapping away at the controls for the first one. “Shit. Didn’t last as long as I’d hoped… Maybe it’s enough though.” He narrows his eyes as he snorts. “Who the hell’s in there?” He stretches over a wing and taps out a message back.

>Hello, I’m from maintenance. _

>Where are you? _

Gearing stares at the screen for a moment as he can’t help thinking how odd that question is. He smirks as he wonders if he can play twenty questions long enough for him to do what he wants and get out again. Though, he does realize they may be doing this as a distraction as well. To slow him down and buy them time to actually find him and stop him.

>Hoofington. _

>I can’t see you. _

Gearing quickly looks around and takes note of the lack of security cameras. And grins even wider as he realizes how frustrated they must be at trying to track him down.

>I’m here. _

>Where? _

>Hoofington. _

>But I can’t see you! _

>I’m here. _

>Where? _

>Hoofington. _

Gearing chuckles as he wonders how long he can keep them going with the circular conversation and logic. And as he’s tapping away, a sound he’s heard recently begins making itself known again. But this time it’s not the faint echo of a memory. This time the sirens are loud and clear. And they grow louder and clearer as the equipment in the relay station comes alive and starts screaming out a chorus of alarms and alerts. The room begins duplicating the sound that he’d heard on the recording with Billiard so clearly he starts wondering if he’s just hearing things again.

But the text on the second computer puts an end to that idea quickly.

>WHAT WAS THAT?! _

>Checking _

>Well hurry up with it already! _

Gearing hops into the first segmented room, and starts checking all of the systems. And it becomes clear that it’s not a bug in the system. Another thing that becomes clear is that his sense of Déjà vu was entirely merited.

Because the system clearly indicates there’s been a detonation. Specifically, some kind of mega spell detonation. This earns a raised eyebrow from Gearing as he starts delving into it more. And then a smile cracks across his muzzle as he realizes where the blast was.

Miramare Air Station.

A smug grin crosses his muzzle as he starts having particularly smug thoughts. He’d said he wanted to stay away from that area, because of the hazard it posed. Because of how there could have been something waiting on some poor fool to stumble across it and end them. Well, not on Gearing’s watch is he going to let his friends run into such obvious threats.

The little blue pegasus in his head floats around as he giggles and gloats, ‘I wonder if those Gunner Mercs went back on their word and went that way looking for Nahlah? Timing’s sort of about right. They could have got there, messed with something they shouldn’t have, and got blown straight to the moon.’

“Would serve them right, then,” Gearing comments with a strong nod of his head. He trots back over to the other side of the partition feeling particularly superior as he looks over the computer systems and tries to ignore the sirens.

On the screen he’d been talking to with the unknown individual there’s a string of messages.

>Are you there?

>Are you okay?

>What happened?

>Where are you?

>Answer me, I command it!

>Hello?

>Are you dead?

>You’re not allowed to die until you answer me! _

Gearing smirks and sits down before he replies back.

>I’m back. There was a megaspell detonation. _

>We’re under attack!? _

>No, I believe it was an accidental detonation. There was only one. Possibly from a containment failure. _

>We’re under attack! _

Gearing rolls his eyes and goes back to tapping on the other console. He’s getting so close. He’s almost there. He can feel it.

>W-what are you doing? _

Gearing glances at the screen the message popped up on, but doesn’t bother wasting time replying as he keeps burrowing in.

>Stop what you’re doing! I order you to cease what you are doing this instant! _

Gearing spares the screen a quick glance before his grin just starts getting wider. “So you don’t know how to stop me and are resorting to that? Fat chance…”

>You’re not supposed to be here! Stay out! Stay away from me!

Gearing rolls his eyes and says, “I’m nowhere near you, moron…”

>I can feel what you are doing, you need to stop, NOW! I order you to stop!

Gearing pauses as he looks at the screen and gives it his undivided attention. “What? ‘Feel’? What are you some kind of AI or something?” He checks the directories he’s currently delving into and starts wondering if he’s actually gotten into some area he didn’t intend on. But, no, he’s pretty sure he’s on target to the access control section.

“I know what you’re trying to do!” a mechanized mare’s voice comes through a speaker on one of the terminals.

The little blue pegasus in Gearing’s head’s eyes go wide as it says quietly, ‘It’s taaaalking nooow… I think it heard us somehow…’

“Shit,” Gearing mutters. “Well it’s too late now, I’m already in.”

“You can’t have it!” the voice bellows in response.

Gearing looks over at the screen and scowls. “I’ll be out of your mane in a few seconds more, I swear!”

“Equestria is mine! And you’re not taking it from me, peasant!” A shrill shrieking scream comes out of the speakers.

“Almost there,” Gearing mutters as he types as fast as he can and begins uploading a few little digital toolboxes for him to use later. Gearing grins as he glances at the terminal with a smug grin, “And yell all you want to, that’s not stopping anything.”

A shrill scream answers from the speakers again with unequine tones in uninhibited rage.

Gearing’s eyes jump open to their fullest as his focus is drawn back to where he’d been working on uploading the various backdoor widgets he’d made to help him avoid the security net. His jaw drops as he reads the only text viewable on the screen now.

[Connection to Host Disrupted. Connection Lost.]

“No way…” Gearing mutters as he starts tapping out one command after another. But all in vain. Nothing responds anymore. He can’t even pull up any of the directory listings. “They… they cut the fucking hard line?!” He lets out a snort then slowly looks over at the other screen where the screaming voice had come from. “You couldn’t stop me in time, so you cut the hard line… Physically cut the cables, huh? Or did you intentionally blow a relay? As annoying as that is… I gotta admit, I’m impressed… that’s some quick thinking and some real dedication.”

“I’m going to cut up a lot more than that cable! You insufferable ungrateful little monster!” the voice screams out of the speaker. “I’m going to make you suffer for your insolence, fool!”

The tone and manner of speaking strikes a chord with Gearing that he really doesn’t like. And the little blue pegasus in his head likes it even less as it starts zipping around and waving warning flags.

Gearing heads towards the door out of the relay station as he hurries up and types out a message to Swift and Handy on his PipBuck. He opens the door to the hallway, looks at the progression marker for the download, and groans at how it’s not complete. He stands there in the open door, watching the download continue at a slow pace. He can’t even tell how much of it he’s managed to get, only the relative speed. He knows he can’t just stay there. Whoever had been screaming at him, knows exactly where he’s at. And they aren’t happy with him. In fact, they seem down right pissed with him.

“Yup, pissed. Definitely pissed,” Gearing comments as he looks to his right and sees a red marker show up within his peripheral vision. And then another. And another. And quickly the entire line starts growing across his vision as there seems to be some hostile thing in every direction of the compass. He quickly turns to the left and starts running down the hallway as fast as he can.

It doesn’t take long for him to see Swift and Handy coming out of a room, with Handy struggling to get his saddle bag back over his back. Swift looks at Gearing and gives him a cringing smile as she says, “Sorry! I didn’t think it would cause any problems just playing some game on that terminal!”

Gearing starts running by them as he yells, “Nope, wasn’t you, was what I was doing.”

Handy gets his bag on enough and starts running with Swift to catch up with Gearing as he yells, “The communications room?! Are you kidding me?!”

Gearing shakes his head and looks back at Handy. “Nope. Someone was monitoring the entire thing. They back traced it to me and apparently they aren’t very happy with me right now.”

“Heads up!” Swift yells as she jumps and takes flight.

Gearing starts turning his head back forward, and quickly drops down and tumbles to the side, away from the hallway intersection he was just crossing, as a whirling saw blade buzzes through the airspace where his head should have been. The floating maintenance bot turns all three of its eye stalks towards Gearing and brings up its welding torch. It starts spewing the torch in his direction, but with the settings modified to make a short range improvised flamethrower as it chases after Gearing.

Swift impacts into the side of it with her powerhoof. The first strike knocks one of the eye stocks entirely off the bots frame as she crashes into it from the side. The hovering bot spins around from the impact, and Swift hangs on as she starts pounding on it with one blow after another. Another maintenance bot comes from the same side hallway, and from the sounds coming from that way they all know the pair of bots aren’t alone.

Handy’s pneumatic hammer comes swinging from the side, and hits the second maintenance bot hard enough that it flies back into the concrete wall, and bounces further down the hallway. Handy glances down the hallway they were just crossing, and jumps out of the way onto the other side a moment before a chorus of laser fire comes shooting down the hallway at him. “We’ve got company! A whole lot of company!”

Swift hovers over the bot she’d been beating on, and starts tap dancing on its head with one strong hoof strike after another, powerhoof included, as she says, “Good! I need the exercise anyway!” She glances down at the robot as it’s sparking and hitting the floor. “Down! Go down you stupid thing!”

Gearing hops over, grabs the battered maintenance bot’s long limb with the saw, as it tries to slash at Swift, and yanks it out from under her. He spins around with it and chucks it at the intersection they’d just passed as he yells, “We got a lot more coming, we got to get to somewhere we can bottleneck them or we’re screwed!” The battered robot crosses the intersection, and explodes as it’s flung into the line of fire from all of the laser blasts coming blindly down that hall at anything that moves.

Swift spins around and bucks the robot that Handy had hit, sending the flying bot flying even faster into the intersection before the three start running again.

As they are stampeding down the hallway, Gearing comments, “Don’t worry, with the head start we got, we should be able to stay ahead of them no problem. We can handle a few at a time no problem!”

Swift takes to the air again and a moment later the group starts having to jump and dodge around as the protectaponies that had been shooting down the hallway had turned the corner, reestablished a line of sight with them, and began firing incessantly at them as they steadily march in their direction.

Swift’s eyes go wide as she looks under herself, back the way they’re coming from, and asks, “What the hell is that noise?!”

“What noise?!” Handy asks as he hops and stutter dances around laser fire. “The lasers? The metallic hooves of doom? Or my heart about to explode in my chest?!”

“That rumbling noise!” Swift yells.

“Oh no,” Gearing mutters. He looks over his shoulder and starts twitching his ears around in the direction they are running from before he screams, “That bitch!”

“What?! What’s wrong?!” Handy asks as he looks over at Gearing.

“You’ll see soon enough. Just run. Don’t look back. Just run!” Gearing retorts as he starts running and flapping his wings as he tries to increase his own speed.

“Who turned on the fire hose?!” Swift asks as she turns and flies sideways while looking back the way they’d come.

“I said don’t look back, damn it!” Gearing comments as he keeps running.

“What the-“ Handy starts, looks behind himself, then screams as he jumps into the air, “Water! Water?! Why water?!”

Gearing snorts before he says with a partial laugh. “What did I just say?!”

“What are we going to do!?” Handy asks as he runs as fast as he can.

Gearing turns his head and looks behind them and as soon as his head is turned enough to get a view behind himself, he activates SATS.

And his fears are instantly justified.

A group of protectaponies are in hot pursuit of them. But, being protectaponies, their ‘hot pursuit’ is relatively slow. In fact they could probably out pace them at a decent trot speed given enough time. Their laser weaponry is a problem. But their targeting systems aren’t that advanced so at a far enough distance it’s easier to dodge. And their armor is practically nonexistent. So even though that group outnumbers them, Gearing knows his group could wipe them out in short order once they got close enough. Either him or Swift could do it alone. Easily. So they aren’t that big of a threat.

But in the distance, he can see a quickly approaching column of water. Coming straight up the hallway like some kind of system flush. Which, he realizes, isn’t far from the truth. Whoever is in the system, isn’t happy he’s here. And since they couldn’t stop him directly, they are finding other ways to try and deal with him. So they have apparently shut off the flood control system, and redirected all of the water from the system to flood this entire section. They probably figure that anyone in the area would need to breathe. So that would be a good solution for most infiltrators.

Most. But not Gearing.

But Gearing has more than his own hide to worry about. He’d glanced back and watched the approaching water to give him a good estimate on the speed the water is coming at. He starts running through the math in his head. With how quickly the water is coming. Roughly how fast they themselves can travel. And how much further they have to get to the elevator shaft up.

The little blue pegasus starts writing on the air itself in front of his very eyes with a marker with the various math calculations with a solid blue ink. He does the calculations repeatedly, but, again, the results are the same.

The little blue pegasus turns and gives him a slow shake of his head before he says, ‘Can’t make it to the elevator.’

Well… there’s option ‘B’, Gearing mentally replies.

The little blue pegasus lets out a heavy sigh before snapping the cap back onto the marker and asking, ‘Buck it?’

Buck it. Gearing mentally agrees. Buck it all.

The world takes on its normal appearance as Gearing cancels SATS prematurely.

“Get to the elevator!” Gearing yells as he looks ahead to the security door that is partially propped open with the rusty tin can that Handy had left behind on their way in.

“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but we’ve got a wall of water coming for us, and it’s going to get us before we’re even half way there! The hallway’s too long!” Handy yells as he throws the door open for Swift to fly through. Handy looks over at Gearing as he yells, “I don’t think we’re gonna make it!”

Handy’s eyes go wide as he sees Gearing plant his forehooves, spin around, and swing around towards him. Handy has just enough time to clinch and tighten his muscles before Gearing plants a double hoofed buck right to Handy’s armored chest. But, having experienced this once before, Handy can feel Gearing’s hind hooves asking him, rather rudely, to get the hell out of the way already. Verses what Gearing’s hooves are normally capable of, it’s the most polite they can be given the situation.

Swift whips her head over, watching Handy skid across the ground past her, before she snaps it back the other direction to yell at Gearing. But the snarl falls off her muzzle as she locks eyes with Gearing at the doorway.

“You, will,” Gearing states matter-of-factly, before slamming the security door shut between them and remaining on the other side.

As Handy is picking himself up off the concrete, he groans out, “Again with the kicking across the room…”

The pair look up at the door and Swift zips towards it as she yells, “The hell, Gearing?!” Before she gets there a large pressure change in the air hits them as the door shudders and the sound of metallic banging and scraping across the metal greets her ears. Along with the unmistakable sound of a gush of water. The door buckles slightly, with the joining edges of the two doors turning red in a little semi circle. And a moment later a laser beam shoots through it and arcs wildly up towards the ceiling.

Through the small hole made by the laser, and the crack where the door had started to buckle, water starts leaking, and then pouring, into the hallway with them.

Swift zips around and flies towards Handy as she screams, “Dammit! Dammit, dammit, dammit!”

Before Handy can even ask, he gets scooped up by Swift, and the two fly down the hallway as fast as her wings can take them.

“Not this flying shit again!” Handy yells as he curls up and simply tries to turn into as small of a package a grown earth pony buck can get.

“I don’t wanna hear it, Handy! Next time I see him I’m gonna kick him right in his ass!” Swift bellows as she aims right for the elevator entrance.

Handy, not having anything else to do, looks behind them then lets out a long low groan before he moans, “Swift…?”

“What is it now, Handy? I’m a little busy here!”

“Must go faster,” Handy mutters.

“What?”

“Must go faster.”

The security doors at the end of the hallway whine and groan as the pressure behind them builds up to points that they weren’t designed to handle. And that becomes painfully clear when they both buckle in more, with the one on the right twisting and opening up almost completely.

With the doors out of the way, a wall of water quickly starts making up time to greet Handy and Swift. And at the front of it is a collection of twisted metal and debris. A good portion of which looks to be very angry robots that got caught in the stream and swept up off their feet and out of the air.

Handy’s body shivers as he lets out an involuntary shriek at the sight quickly chasing after them. Then he begins chanting, “Must go faster. Must go faster. Must go faster!”

“Shut it!” Swift yells before she abruptly halts, while whipping Handy towards the gap in the elevator doors. “And get inside already!” She lands and as he’s scrambling to get into the elevator, she rears up, and bucks him right in the butt to get him in faster.

“Ow! My ass! My face! I landed on a fucking tool box! Why’s everyone gotta kick me today?!” Handy groans as he’s picking himself back up off the maintenance crew’s equipment.

Swift promptly zips in, and half helps him up, half throws him towards the roof access, as she says, “More moving, less bitching!” She hovers up and helps push him through the gap the rest of the way before jumping up and joining him.

But Handy doesn’t even get a chance to make a snide remark, because his eyes are focused on the wall of water that is about to greet them. “Swift!”

Swift grabs Handy with her forelegs, kicks off with her hind legs, and starts flapping as hard as she can as the water crashes into the elevator. The water gushes in through the small gap over the top of the elevator where it had crashed unevenly. And a split second later the water pressure sends the water shooting up at them through the elevator escape hatch creating a geyser that neither of them want any part of. Though the water rapidly filling the elevator ruins the effect as it completely consumes the geyser as well in short order.

Handy kicks on his PipBuck light as he keeps looking down while they’re climbing. “It looks like it’s slowing down.”

“Well we’re not until we’re at the next level,” Swift quips.

Swift zips in through the still open elevator door, and drops Handy before landing and sitting off to the side against the wall along the elevator as she continues to pant and try to catch her breath.

“That was a lot of water,” Handy groans as he picks himself up and walks over to look down the elevator shaft.

“Yeah,” Swift pants before she asks, “Is it still coming?”

“No, looks like it’s stopped…” Handy comments as he looks over the edge down the elevator shaft. He shakes his leg, sending a scattering of water off of himself, before he groans, “I’m all wet again… dammit I just got dry too…”

“Yeah…” Swift replies with a smirk between sucking in air. “Bet that sucks.”

“How are we going to get him out of there this time?” Handy asks as he keeps looking over the edge. After not getting any response for a few moments he looks over at Swift and nods down the elevator shaft. “I mean, I know there’s no silt to get stuck in this time… but the water’s pretty deep… and he can’t swim.”

Swift lays back against the wall in a seated position on her haunches before she slams her head backwards and bangs the back of her head against the wall. “Fuck! Dammit, Gearing!”

“It’s gonna take a lot of chain and rope to reach that far down,” Handy mutters as he goes back to looking down the elevator shaft.

Swift bangs her head against the wall again before she flails her forelegs out in front of herself as if she’s trying to pummel the air itself. “His ass, my hoof, I swear! I’m tired of him pulling this shit!”

---

Footnote: !!!WARNING!!! Breech detected!

Unknown Index Reference. . .

Please Stand By. . .

Next Chapter: 71 H2 Oh NO! Estimated time remaining: 14 Hours, 53 Minutes