Rainpril 7th, EOH 47

Lyra spotted the cross in the park as the rescue convoy passed by the pre-war Statehouse on the way to Triple Diamond City. The setting sun cast a long shadow across the snow. Heart in her throat, she parted ways with Rarity’s guards and crept down towards the Combat Zone to see what had happened.

Rascal King’s corpse hung from a T-shaped beam by nails driven through his legs. Crows hopped on the top cross-bar, tearing shreds of flesh from his bloated corpse. Lyra stood at the base and stared up at him, a tight knot of panic forming at the base of her throat.

The door had been torn off the train station. Bad smells came from inside. Cordite, ozone, decay. She didn’t want to know what had happened in there. Yet she needed to go inside. Something had happened to Stable 114 and she needed to know everything she could because her friends in Stable 93 might be next.

A trail of dead started with the bouncers outside the doors and thickened as it led inward. The Combat Zone had been in business when the attack began, and raiders, Talon mercenaries, and Enclave officers had died fighting alongside Triggermares. It took stones to hit the favorite watering hole of all the meanest bastards in the Wasteland, but apparently, the Ponysmith had stones, because every pony that had died heading into the combat zone was a unicorn in a black uniform. They’d been stripped of their expensive Sombra helmets, but it was clear who they’d been fighting for. This must’ve been Easy Money’s ‘special operation’.

The cloying scent of death hung heavy over the casino, and it got stronger deeper inside. She wanted to run, to get out of this horrible place, but she needed to see the stable door. She needed to find out if they’d gotten inside, and how.

She stepped over the last line of triggermare defenders and headed down the stairs to the stable entrance. The stable door might be intact — for all his flaws, Rascal King was brave. He might’ve chosen to die outside the Stable rather than risking his people’s lives by…

Torn open. No. Punched through. Something had ripped through it like a straw through the foil tab on a drink box.

Lyra clambered over the rough, twisted edge of the stable door’s remains. The stink didn’t clear as she moved through the foyer and down the main maintenance corridor, but she found no more dead inside. Maybe the stable was empty. Maybe Easy Money had captured the civilians, and taken them all…

Civilian corpses heaped the atrium floor halfway up to the balcony. Easy Money had herded them here and slaughtered them all. From the placement of the bodies, it looked like he’d lined them up around the railing and shot them in groups, letting them fall to the floor. Lyra stared at them and felt only numb.

“Every time,” she muttered to herself. “Every fucking time I think I’ve seen the worst of it…”

In the center of the mass of bodies lay a mare in a blue checked dress, forelegs spread to cover a pile of dead foals.

✭☆✭☆✭☆✭

“You wanted to speak to me, Mayor Rarity?”

It had been dark when the rescue convoy had gotten back to Triple Diamond City, and Lyra wanted to go straight to Absolutely Everything to see if Ditzy Do had anything she could plug Bon Bon’s soul into. But Rarity’s assistant Frazzle had intercepted her and politely but firmly shepherded her up to Rarity’s box seats. The colossal revolver holstered on her shoulder gave a certain gravitas to her polite request.

She’d rather be doing other things — the need to talk to BON-80n again struggled with the urgency of getting to Stable 93 to warn them about Easy Money, and both struggled against her heavy eyelids. She didn’t have time for whatever ‘oh you’re such a hero thank you so much’ glad hoofing Rarity felt she needed.

“Please. Sit. Would you care for a drink?” Red reading glasses perched on the snout of Rarity’s porcelain mask. Her gnarled forelegs rested on the cover of a closed sketchbook with a pencil arranged neatly across it.

“Coffee would be nice,” said Lyra.

“Frazzle, if you don’t mind.”

Lyra sat down on the cushions in front of Rarity; she could take a moment for coffee. The lights of the city glowed through her window, orange and red and yellow, fire and neon and electric lamp.

“I know you are busy, so I will keep this brief. You’ve been to see the Ponysmith.”

“You have sources,” said Lyra.

“Subtle spies, like Coloratura. The whole wasteland was talking about how you rescued her. About Bon Bon’s noble sacrifice. How you and Fizzle defeated Easy Money and made him lead you back to Sawhorse to treat for the release of your son.”

Lyra scowled. “Those stories are a little bit exaggerated. Did Fizzle make it out okay?”

“I don’t know. There has been no from her.” Rarity lowered her head for a moment. “Those of us with better information were concerned for you. The Minutemares sent a team of thestrals to Sawhorse in an attempt to rescue you.”

Lyra’s heart sank. “They didn’t! I’m not worth that. Were there casualties?” Blue Note.

“A few,” said Rarity.

Lyra swallowed on a dry throat and nodded. Blue Note would still be pregnant. Wouldn’t she? Recovering at the very least. She couldn't have been on the mission.

“I dissuaded Crispy and Vindaloo from a larger operation. You are allowed to be angry with me, but the Ponysmith is too strong. In numbers, in technology, in tactical acumen. Nothing else but he could make me bless the alicorns. If not for their mutual animosity, his flag would fly over Triple Diamond City.”

Lyra flinched as something dropped into her coffee. She realized she was crying.

“As I said,” said Rarity, “You are allowed to be angry with me. Expected, I would say.”

“No,” said Lyra. “That’s not why. I’m not worth other ponies’ lives. I can’t… I can’t believe…”

Rarity shook her head. “I’m afraid you are, darling. You’re Celestia’s last known living student. I’d say you owe your life to that — Easy Money might simply have killed you, otherwise. There are many who will be interested in you.” She raised her wings a feather’s breadth. “I myself have a great many questions that we simply do not have time for. So. To bring the conversation back to urgent matters: I surmise that you were unsuccessful in rescuing your son.”

Frazzle set a tray with a cup of coffee and several chocolate-covered biscuits in front of Lyra. There was a little cup of cream and a little bowl of sugar, all so artfully arranged that Lyra felt bad about disturbing it. “He helped me escape, but he wouldn’t come.”

“Please, eat. Drink.”

Lyra popped a biscuit in her mouth. A little stale, but the chocolate was delicate and bittersweet. She hadn’t realized how hungry she was until she started eating, but when the biscuits were gone she found herself poking at the crumbs and wishing there were more. She poured all of the sugar into her coffee and took a big gulp of it before continuing to speak. “He sacrificed himself for me. He’s an officer there. He used his rank to get me out. But Ponysmith is going to figure out what happened. He’s going to be in bad trouble if he isn’t already. I need to go back for him.” She took another gulp of coffee. “And Easy Money — you know what happened to Stable 114. He might be on his way to Stable 93. I need to get there as soon as I can.”

“Rest assured we can get you to Stable 93 quickly. But I am more concerned that you might be prepared to seek retribution against the Ponysmith. With your power, and your allies in the Minutemares, you might well be able to successfully exact this retribution. I ask that you do not.”

Lyra almost choked on her coffee. “You want me to what?” she said after she finished coughing.

“As the alicorns are our shield against the Ponysmith, so he is our shield against them. As long as they remain in a stalemate over the contents of the library, the weaker factions of the wasteland are safe.”

Lyra fixed Rarity with a glare and took a deliberate sip of her coffee. “And you don’t have any ability to change any of that.”

“I think we can agree that the flaw in dearest Twilight’s foreign policy was her inability to leave well enough alone,” said Rarity, her tone carefully neutral. “Sometimes a bad situation is the best we can hope for. The Ponysmith is evil, but he serves his purpose. As Fluttershy might’ve said, he is a part of our ecosystem. The apex predator who keeps things from getting out of balance.”

“I can’t believe… I cannot believe I am about to defend Twilight Sparkle’s foreign policy. But what? No! that’s…” Lyra considered a wide variety of words that she did not want to use on an alicorn mayor. Insane. Cowardly. A grotesque abdication of responsibility. Zebraica oppressing miners in Saddle Arabia was hardly the same as a warlord oppressing unicorns in their own city. But pointing that out would only stiffen Rarity’ spine. Lyra willed herself to take a more diplomatic approach. “I talked to Fizzle.”

“You did, didn’t you?” Rarity’s posture stiffened.

“She told me you’d asked her to kill you.”

Rarity looked down at the cover of her sketchbook. She took off her glasses and set them on top of the book. Then she removed her mask. Her skull-like visage barely resembled a pony, soft flesh withered away to leave bare teeth and powerful jaw muscles exposed. “Do you see what I’ve become?” she said, pincer-like jaws smiling ruefully.

“I see a hope and a protector to thousands and a bringer of light to the wasteland. I see a mare whose efforts keep the world alive.”

“I could become a monster at any moment.”

“Is that any reason to waste the moments you have? You do good, here. This is a good city. But you could do so much more. You want to do more. When I called for help, I wasn’t sure you’d respond. You could have delegated; sent mercenaries, called on the Minutemares. Instead, you sent your own guards to arrest the guilty and rescue the innocent. How did that feel?”

Rarity’s scar-whorled face regarded Lyra quietly for a moment. “Honestly? It made me feel complete. For the first time in a long time. The first time ever, perhaps. It is difficult in these times to believe that Harmony has a plan. But perhaps I believe that it still can offer opportunities.”

“My son told me he serves the Ponysmith because he sees no alternative for leadership in the Wasteland. You might consider that there ought to be another choice.”

“I need help,” said Rarity. “This power I’ve been given. I don’t know how to use it. It frightens me.”

Lyra nodded. “You fought alongside Twilight. I know she taught you some things. But I understand that’s different from suddenly being given an alicorn’s power. I don’t know what that’s like, but I can try to help you. May I please see your sketchbook?”

Rarity reclaimed her mask and glasses. “Of course.”

Lyra found a blank page amongst the dress designs. She worked quickly but carefully. “This is a multiple iteration shield spell with automatic threat tracking.” She turned a page. “And this… well, it's a spell by Mage and Starswirl that the Ministry of Peace used as the basis for their healing megaspells. A little bit classified, but hey, that cat’s out of the bag, right?”

“Have you… have you ever used these spells?” said Rarity, tilting her head to one side.

“Oh, of course not,” said Lyra. “Way out of my league. It would probably kill me to ever try. But when I was a school filly, the Stawswirl wing got left unlocked. I wanted to be ready in case I got made an alicorn princess. I had big dreams back then.” She rotated the sketchbook towards Rarity, open to her drawings. “Seriously. Please. I can’t tell you what the future holds. But if we hit the Ponysmith as hard as I want to, then the alicorns might see an opportunity to get you out of their way. You’ll need to be able to defend your city alone.”

Rarity stared at the pages. Her horn flickered, and a tiny white light traced the lines of the complex patterns, committing them to memory. “Interesting. These will work, I think.”

“You might need to make some adjustments, to fit your magic’s pattern. Anyway. When 93 is safe I can come here with my apprentice, and we can show you what we know.”

Rarity nodded. “I will consider that. For now: the Minutemares may act against Ponysmith with my consent. And perhaps my support? If you will allow me a moment to think?”

“If you’ll allow me another cup of coffee.”

Rarity sat still as a sphinx. Lyra found it unnerving — her gaze cast downward, hiding her blue eyes behind the shadow of her mask. Her sides did not move; no breath was audible. Did ghouls have to breathe if they didn’t need to talk? Eventually, Frazzle came with another cup of coffee. Rarity asked her to wait.

After Lyra finished drinking her second cup, Rarity was still thinking. Lyra began to feel awkward, then impatient. Had Rarity fallen asleep? She began to wonder if she should clear her throat, or ‘accidentally’ clang her cup against her tray when Rarity raised her head and spoke.

“Frazzle,” she said, “Give her Little Macintosh.”

Frazzle’s mouth fell open. “Um… are you thure, your Honor?”

“I have given it deep consideration. So if you would be a dear and not make me ask you again?”

Frazzle looked back and forth between Lyra and Rarity. Then she got up and laid the massive revolver in front of Lyra. Lyra observed it only had a five-round cylinder. The bore was .50 caliber if it was a nanometer. Three apples were engraved on the heavily reinforced mouth grip.

“Applejack made this in commemoration of her brother’s death. She gave it to me for self-defense. I’ve been having dear Frazzle carry it, as insurance against… well, against my having a very bad day. I do not think Applejack would have approved of such a use, and in any event, I can have Artillery and Caisson craft a similar weapon. But Applejack would have liked to see it used by a mother to save her son. It ought to work quite well against power armor, don’t you think?”

Lyra lifted the weapon gently in her magic, rotating it to examine it, careful to keep the cavernous muzzle pointed away from any of them. She opened the cylinder and slid out a round. She could sense that the bullet was enchanted. “Yes. Yes, it would do very well,” she said. “Thank you.”

Rarity nodded. “Frazzle, could you get her the rest of the ammunition we have for that? And see what we have for ballistic fabric in… oh, a nice Fressian blue, if you can find it. I think the Minutemares could use some new uniforms.”

“You’re too generous,” said Lyra, still examining the terrible weapon she held.

Rarity’s eyes sparkled behind her mask. “That is the idea, darling.”

✭☆✭☆✭☆✭

“I didn’t fill my end of the deal,” said Paper Heart, leaning back in his desk chair with his forelegs behind his head. “And I always pay my debts.”

“There are some collection agencies that would say different, honey,” said Grinding Gears.

The couple had been waiting for her outside Rarity’s office. They’d said they could help her with Bon Bon and get her to Stable 93 fast, so Lyra felt ready to listen to them. Now she sat in a chair in the corner of Paper Heart’s dim, cluttered office, clutching the towel holding BON-80n’s soul chip against her chest.

Paper Heart shot a glare at the other hiveling. “I’m not the only one in debt to her. All of us are.”

Smoke from her cigarette curled through the air when she exhaled. “So you want to put her in a Hiveling body?”

“For a private eye, my husband is very public with classified information,” said Grinding Gears, fishing a clipboard out of a desk drawer and levitating it over to Lyra.

Lyra squinted at the paper. “A non-disclosure agreement? How will you enforce this?”

Gears’ sculpted ceramic mouth curled into a slow smile — a rather unnerving effect Lyra assumed was an illusion.

“All right then,” said Lyra, scanning the form. Instead of being written in legalese, it was a politely worded warning that sharing information about the CIM Hive with third parties would render her and those parties liable to termination.

Lots of ponies wanted to terminate her, these days. Potentially adding another to the list didn’t seem like a big deal. She signed. “All right. Dish.”

Gears examined the form, filed it, and reached for his hat and coat. “Paper, she’s all yours now.” He kissed his husband on the head. “You two have fun.”

“Yeah, get lost, punk,” said Paper Heart, socking Grinding Gears in the shoulder and then kissing him back. “All right. Lyra. Listen. The first thing is: Gears and I aren’t the only kind of Hiveling. The most common kind, sure — this getup doesn’t look that great, but it wears well. But there are organic ones too.”

“So I’ve heard.” So, Dr. Vogel Kamph hadn’t been entirely a crackpot. Still a monster, though. “Like a cyborg with pony skin and muscle on the outside?”

“Nope. One hundred percent pony. Forced growth cloned from randomized genetic stock, just waiting for a soul.”

Lyra scooted her chair over to Paper Heart’s desk, set BON-80n’s soul chip down on it, and lit a fresh cigarette. “Why don’t you all do that? What’s the point of being a hiveling, anyway? Are you guys related to changelings, or not?”

Paper Heart shook his head. “Some of us were changelings. I was a pony. Detective Hard Egg, BPD. Supernatural crimes division.

“We don’t all do that because a real body is a real body. It can get sick, get hurt, grow old, and die. All a part of life, but we’ve got work to do. Lots of work. Work that’s going to take a while. And it’s a one-way trip — copying a living creature’s soul onto a soul chip requires necromancy, which we can do, but we won’t unless we have a damn good reason to. Any other questions you can ask in the Hive. Which we need to get you to.”

“Are you going to blindfold me, so I don’t see where it is?”

Paper Heart laughed. “Better grab your friend. It’s time.”

The room flashed with shimmering green light. She grabbed Bon Bon’s soul and stuffed it in her jacket pocket. She heard a soft ‘pomph’ of displaced air. Next thing she knew, she stood on a hexagonal platform in a pre-fab metal room similar to but not exactly like a Stable room. Electromagical converters arched overhead, wrapped with cables and bulging with insulating padding.

“Nice teleporter,” said Lyra. “So we’re under CIM?”

“Naw,” said Paper Heart. “Too obvious. Honestly, none of us know where we are. It’s safer that way.”

Lyra walked to the edge of the platform. Steps led down to a corrugated metal floor crisscrossed with more cables. A door irised open; a single hiveling stood waiting for them.

“Lyra Heartstrings,” he said. “It’s good to see you again. Especially after you’ve done so much for us.”

“Again? Wait…” She searched her memory. That voice sounded familiar. “Dr. Vertex? I don’t know if you remember me… I took your magical materials lecture freshman year…”

“Of course I remember you. You were an excellent student. I always knew you’d amount to something. Walk this way please.”

Lyra wanted to be self-effacing — she hadn’t amounted to much of anything in life. But in this living afterlife, she’d done a lot already. She knew she’d never lived up to her potential. Throughout her foalhood, her family and teachers had told her how smart she was. Such a good student. Such a good magician. But in the real world, with nothing to keep her focused… nothing to keep her on task…

The weight of the small parcel in her jacket pocket pulled her mind to it. This wasn’t about her. Anyway, out in the wasteland, where death came from sudden random angles at any time, her distractibility was a merit.

Dr. Vertex led them down a long spare metal corridor. These sorts of corridors were all the rage in wasteland interior design. Would it kill anycreature to build something a little homier?

“So some of you were changelings, and some of you were ponies,” said Lyra. Dr. Vertex had been a changeling; one of the few openly living in Equestrian society before the great metamorphosis.

“Oh, yes, all sorts of creatures. But mostly changelings — both those who had attained the final metamorphosis and those who had not. We all knew megaspell war was coming, sooner or later. And with it a famine of the love we needed to survive. We needed a way to make sure our culture and our genetic legacy continued. So we developed synthetic bodies, we developed soul chip technology — which we sold commercially to finance our operation — and we developed forced growth cloning so that when Equestria flows with love again, we can return to flesh and blood bodies.” He stopped at a door much like the dozens of others they’d passed. “Because being a robot? Living without love? It kind of sucks.”

“Why did you include creatures who aren’t changelings though?”

The room was dominated by a huge semicircular bronze tank taking up one entire wall and half of the available floor space. Most of the rest of the room was filled by a bank of computers — high-end InterStar terminals! Her horn itched to poke around on those things; her hacking skills were getting rusty on RoanCo’s pathetic security.

“That was Paper Heart’s idea,” said Dr. Vertex, taking a stool at one of the terminals. “He was investigating us for necromancy — which of course we were guilty of! But he agreed it was a worthwhile cause, and suggested we try to get as many creatures as could be trusted with the secret on-board. We didn’t know how bad the megaspells would be. What if they’d wiped out all organic life?”

“We would have felt just awful,” said Paper Heart dryly, sitting down next to Vertex.

Vertex entered some commands on his terminal. A cylindrical housing amongst the computers slid open, revealing a socket.

Lyra gently unwrapped the towel and pulled out BON-80n’s soul chip. “Do I just…?”

“It looks like the connections are intact. Go ahead.”

The soul chip slid into its home. Vertex tapped on his keyboard, and the chip began to glow.

“What if she doesn’t want to be a pony?”

“We’re going to ask her,” said Vertex, typing rapidly, making words appear in a text editor. His magic faded away from the keys, but words kept appearing. Lyra leaned over in front of the screen, shoving Vertex aside rather rudely. The screen was filled with code in a language Lyra didn’t know. She began typing, hoping BON-80n’s soul would recognize natural language inputs.

Bon Bon, it’s Lyra. Is that really you?

Yes.

Are you okay? How are you feeling?

I must admit I am feeling a bit dead at the moment.

What’s it like?

It is.

Vertex patted her on her shoulder. “You’ll get better conversation out of her if you let us put her in a body. If you don’t mind?”

Lyra gnawed on the edge of her hoof wall. “Is it okay if I smoke?”

“Your friend's new lungs will be very delicate when she leaves her tank. She’ll recover quickly but I’d ask you to refrain until you return to the wasteland. At which point cigarette smoke will hardly be the worst thing she’s likely to inhale.”

Lyra nodded. “Okay.” She drummed her hooves against her knees. What was taking so long?

A deep, throbbing hum came from the semicircular tub. It split up the middle, and two doors slid open to show a platform holding ranks of large glass cylinders on a curved conveyor belt. In each cylinder amongst murky fluid and biological-looking coils floated a creature. Changelings — brightly colored and dull-armored alike — a yak, a hippogriff, and two ponies. Lyra stared, open-mouth, as the conveyor beneath the cylinders whirred them away, and brought a new set of bodies, this time all ponies.

Lyra’s eyes flicked across them, wondering which one…

Oh no.

Oh no no no.

Not her.

She floated in the second tank from the left. A small mare, barely larger than a foal, gray, with a brown mane.

Fucking Littlepip. Littlepip was real! In a hiveling lab! Was this a trick? Some kind of joke? She glanced sidelong at Vertex and Paper Heart, but their ceramic faces betrayed no clues. They had better not put Bon Bon in that beast’s body. She’d scream. She’d cry. She’d…

Littlepip and the rest of her batch whirred away, replaced by another set. Then another. This set stayed there for longer. Vertex’s terminal pinged softly.

“She’s chosen.”

One cylinder slid forward. A cream-colored earth pony mare with a blue and pink mane hung nose down in it, still as death. A tremor passed through her body. A glow encased her bottom, fading to reveal a cutie mark of a pile of hard candies. The fluid sloshed and drained, leaving a limp pile of pony covered in a thick white caul. Vertex and Paper Heart rushed up onto the platform. Lyra tried to follow, but Paper Heart held her back with a hoof on her shoulder. “This is delicate, please wait.”

They helped tear the caul away from Bon Bon’s eyes and mouth and pulled it back over her body, leaving her trembling, damp, naked. Her coat stood up in little ruffled spikes. Her mane stuck to her neck. Lyra found herself on the platform next to them despite Paper Heart’s warnings. She reached out to help Bon Bon up.

“Non," said Bon Bon, her voice faint and choked as though it had never been used before. “Let me.” She gathered her four knees under her, hesitantly, one at a time. She pushed up, legs out of synch, and tumbled back down with a soft grunt.

It took her three more tries to find her hooves; three tries until she stood wobbling on thick earth pony legs. She let Lyra help her off the platform, and huddled against her side while the hivelings brought her a blanket.

“These eyes. Is this how you see me?” said Bon Bon.

“Yes,” said Lyra.

“I thought I had seen you before. But now when I look at you, I feel as though I might die. I could look at you forever, and it would never be enough.”

“Yes,” said Lyra.”That’s how I see you.”

“Is this what love is?”

“Sometimes?”

“How do you bear it?”

“I couldn’t tell you.”

✭☆✭☆✭☆✭

Lyra sat beside Bon Bon’s cot, watching her sleep. A doctor — of medicine, not geomancy like Doctor vertex — had checked her vitals and her cognitive functioning. They’d given her some broth and Lyra a pre-war self-heating military ration. Chipped tofu on noodles with creamed corn. Lyra had been so hungry that she’d actually enjoyed it.

After that Lyra had caught Bon Bon up on what had happened since she died — skimming over the month of psychological torture as mere captivity; she wasn’t ready to remember that and Bon Bon didn’t need that kind of stress right now — and expressed her concern about getting back to Stable 93 as quickly as possible. The hivelings had offered to teleport them close to the stable in the morning, but Lyra was worried she’d find Easy Money already besieging the place.

Bon Bon drowsily agreed that the situation was urgent and that she would insist to the hivelings that they must leave immediately, regardless of her condition.

Then she had fallen asleep. She snored softly, looking so peaceful that Lyra didn’t have the heart to wake her. She’d let the whole world burn for this little pony. But she’d felt that way about Beanpole, once. What had happened to them?

Instead of thinking about that, she worried about Littlepip. What had she seen? A gray mare’s body. Gray wasn’t an uncommon color. She’d been mistaken.

But.

Her small size. Her brown mane. Her earnest expression, severe yet hopeful, even in repose. It had to have been her.

But if it was Littlepip, what did that mean?

Lyra looked at the dial on her EFS, scanning it for neutral brown pips. She was alone. Or at least, theoretically alone. Paper Heart hadn’t shown up on the EFS when he’d been disguised as a trash bin in 114.

If she wanted time on one of those InsterStar terminals, now would be the moment. There wasn’t one in Bon Bon’s room, so she slipped out into the dim corridor. The only sounds were the hum of the lights overhead and the soft whir of the environmental systems. She smelled mostly dust. Where was everybotty? Either there weren’t many hivelings; they were all out on operations, or this complex was much bigger than they needed.

Only a few open doors later, she found an examination room with a terminal in it. She pulled over a rolly office chair and lit a cigarette. How was she even going to do this? She’d started to think of herself as a hotshot hacker since she’d entered the Wasteland, but that was because she knew about the holes in an OS that hadn’t had a security update in twenty years. She pouted at the keyboard for a few minutes, then began guessing passwords. She didn’t recall anything about Vertex’s personal life — he had a pet rhino beetle named Spiny or something, but that didn’t work. She tried nerd passwords — the middle names of important wizards, the hydrogen line, Fibonacci numbers, pi out as far as she could remember it. The terminal tried to lock her out every third try, but she found that if she backed out of the login and then went in again, it completely forgot who she was and she could start over.

It didn’t help. She checked all the drawers in the room for notebooks and scraps of paper. That didn’t help either. She tapped her head against the terminal’s monitor and snorted in frustration. This was going to be a total wash.

As a last resort, she typed twilightisaputz*69.

Littlepip popped up on her screen and waved a hoof at her in a ‘naughty naughty’ gesture. Lyra yelped in surprise.

“Quiet, you’ll wake your friend,” said the examining table.

Lyra yelped again and kicked the chair back towards the wall. “How long have you been there?”

“Pretty much the whole time,” said Paper Heart, reverting to his normal form. “Remember that I met you before — briefly, but it was instructive. We hid the silverware before you came over.”

“Who’s Littlepip?” said Lyra.

“Can’t say I recognize the name,” said Paper Heart. “Should I?”

“I’ve been hallucinating her since I arrived in the wasteland. She’s been haunting my PipBuck. I thought she was a figment of my imagination until I saw her in one of your glass tanks.”

“How do you know that wasn’t a hallucination, too?”

“Stop being a smart ass and tell me the truth.”

“What are you hoping to find, here? That you’re a victim of the hiveling conspiracy?”

Lyra swallowed on a dry throat. That was the least of her worries. “Am I a hiveling? Dr. Vogel Kamph said I was.”

Paper Heart gestured towards the terminal. “You’re in. Why don’t you have a look around.”

Lyra rolled back to the screen. “I just logged in with my old password. This is my school account.” She riffled through her old files, then logged into her Dragonmail account and searched for messages from doctor Vertex.

“If you were a hiveling, and we were keeping it secret from you, how big a conspiracy would that have to be? Everyone you knew from before the war would have to be a hiveling too. Or in on the conspiracy.”

Lyra scowled. Her communications with Vertex were all school bullshit. This was getting her nowhere. “Who would that be? Soft Sounds and Bean. Rarity’s your ally. Bon Bon and Codsworth, but robot memories are pretty easy to tamper with.”

“Your husband?”

“Does he even exist?” Lyra felt her voice cracking. “Am I even real?” She searched her account for ‘Littlepip’. She found a single entry; a drawing a friend had sent her. A cowgirl unicorn firing a pair of six guns. Her coat looked gray on the monochrome monitor.

“You’re real right now. What does it matter who you are or where you’d come from?”

“I notice you’re not saying ‘oh, don’t worry, Lyra. You’re not a hiveling.’”

Paper heart took off his hat and rubbed his hoof against his head. “You’re giving me a headache, kid. What makes you think I know? We don’t have any kind of hierarchy here. It’s a stupid story; completely absurd. It’s not impossible. Somebotty might’ve set you up as a sleeper agent, but it’d pull a lot of resources and we have bigger fish to fry.”

Lyra spun around to face him and crossed her forelegs across her chest. “Like what?”

“I imagine you’ll be going hoof to hoof with Ponysmith soon. I don’t think you’ll have trouble talking the Minutemares into backing you up. There’s a lot of bad blood there.”

Lyra rolled her eyes. “Let me guess. You want me to leave him alone to maintain the balance of power in the wasteland.”

Paper Heart’s ceramic lower eyelid twitched. “What?!”

“That’s what Rarity wanted.”

“Rarity? Damn that mare.” He shook his head. “She’s naive. She thinks everything is sunshine and friendship problems like it was for her in the old days. That the bad guys are all tripping over each other to repent. It never was like that — when I was a cop, I saw things that’d curdle a raider’s blood. But she’s still an innocent small-town pony at heart. I wish it was Fluttershy who’d gotten Twilight’s power. Her, Pinkie, Applejack. Someone with the will to do what needs to be done. But… well, she’s the element bearer we’ve got. She’s better than nothing. But she’s wrong. A lot. Especially about Ponysmith. Show him no mercy. Kill him if you get a chance. He’s a damn monster, as I think you well know.”

“I wouldn’t worry about it,” said Lyra, logging out of the terminal. “Fuck all this intrigue. I’m going to go try to get some sleep.”

✭☆✭☆✭☆✭

Rainpril 8th, EOH 47

The flash of the teleport gave way to the blinding glow of morning light on snow. Lyra squinted and shaded her eyes with her hoof. They were on a hilltop. A sign swung in the breeze, offering pies.

“Oh!” said Bon Bon. “We are not far from the stable at all!”

Lyra turned to look at the sturdy mare standing knee-deep in fresh snow, wearing a puffy jacket, knit cap, boots, and no pants. She was staring at the snowflakes blowing off the trees as though she had never seen such a thing before and could not begin to imagine how something so wonderful could exist. Noticing Lyra’s stare, she looked at her without altering her expression.

“Bon Bon!” said Lyra.

“Que?” said Bon Bon.

“Bon Bon!” said Lyra.

“Everything is so new!”

“You’re so new!” said Lyra, prancing around Bon Bon in a circle.

Bon Bon laughed and spun in place to keep facing Lyra. “I thought I knew what it was to feel! But everything feels so raw! So powerful! So… how do you say… so intense!”

“You’re intense!”

“You are moving so fast!” said Bon Bon, still spinning. “Oh, and now I am dizzy.” She sat butt down in the snow.

Lyra was considering whether she and Bon Bon had reached the stage of their relationship where it was okay to jump on her and stuff snow down her collar when she felt a familiar tingle at the base of her tail. She lifted her ears and raised a hoof. Bon Bon became silent and still.

Lyra turned her head, looking for red pips on her EFS. A few of them came around the edge of the compass dial. And then more. And more. Then her EFS crashed.

Haystack Overflow. Insufficient memory. Please contact your licensed PipBuck technician.

Lyra swore and shut off her EFS. “Bon Bon. Get down and stay there until I tell you to. Do you understand?”

Bon Bon nodded and nestled into the snow. Lyra got on her belly and crawled across the hilltop. She poked her head over a low stone wall and looked down to the valley. There was a camp down there — a large, orderly one with packed snow walls and square blocks of tents crisscrossed by evenly spaced paths. Hundreds of ponies in black uniforms and heavy helmets milled around, breaking down tents and extinguishing cooking fires. Ponies in camouflage-painted power armor watched them work. Near the center of the camp, a knot of bronze and gold armored ponies talked to a large, naked white unicorn with a scar on his cheek.

“Oh, Celestia frig me with a weedwacker,” muttered Lyra. “I cannot deal with this right now.” She wriggled back through the snow to Bon Bon, moving as fast as she could without standing up.

“What is happening?” said Bon Bon. “What did you see?”

“We’re going through the woods. Follow me, and try to stay quiet. Easy Money’s already here.”

Level Up
New perk: Do Bi Mares Dream of Electric Friends?If Bon Bon is in your party, once a day the you can heal 100 hit points if their current total is below 10%.

Next Chapter: Chapter 23: Ponies Benefit from a Stable Environment Estimated time remaining: 1 Hour, 51 Minutes