Way Back Home

Chapters

Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5

Chapter 1

Way Back Home

Queen Chrysalis awoke with a start as something metal smacked against her horn. She jerked her head back in surprise, and banged it against the ceiling of the very narrow crawlspace she found herself in. The air smelled of burning plastic, and she could hear the far-off crackling of a fire somewhere. An odd cylindrical gizmo of some unknown purpose lay before her, gently spinning around as if gloating over the success of its attack.

Her head was absolutely throbbing, and her entire midsection lay buried under the mass of wires and plastic hoses spilling out of various broken wall panels. All her joints were stiff, and if she had bones she’d have sworn she’d broken some of them. But the worst of her condition was not the pain she could feel, but something she couldn’t.

Her connection to the collective voice of the changeling hive mind, the endless chittering of thousands of individual voices all sharing thoughts and experiences as a single entity, was silent. She could no longer hear them, and they could not hear her. They were leaderless, deafened to the guiding voice of their queen, while she herself was truly alone for the first time in her life.

It made sense that she’d not be able to hear them anymore, after what had happened, but her subjects could very well die if left alone for long enough without their queen. She had to get back to them… but she had to find them first. And there was no sense wasting time here, in the suffocating tightness of a crawlspace that was slowly filling up with smoke.

Chrysalis shoved aside the bits of debris that covered her and reached out to drag herself free, but her chitinous hoof slid uselessly along the slick metal floor without offering any real traction. The walls were just barely larger than her crouching body anyway, offering no room to stand or use her wings, and Chrysalis reluctantly accepted that there was no way an oversized horse-shaped insect was getting out of there.

Before she could shapeshift into something smaller, the floor of the crawlspace collapsed, and Chrysalis fell, limbs flailing in surprise, to land in the dusty soil beneath. She coughed, the impact having knocked the air from her lungs, and tried to pick herself up. Her limbs were already sore enough from… whatever had happened, and any physical effort at all was nothing short of torture.

The ruined underside of the odd saucer-shaped thing that had brought her here loomed directly overhead, its hull marred with harsh black scoring and countless dents and folds clearly visible despite the darkness of the night. Chrysalis merely had to turn around to figure out what had happened—the thing had come in way too hot and crashed into the hillside, obliterating a two-story house and cutting a long, wide trench into the landscape before getting pinned between two huge boulders. Along the way, the crashing hulk had set fire to a few dead trees, and several columns of smoke stretched skywards from them, the pile of sticks that was once a house, and the ugly metal wreck itself. Clearly, things had not gone well.

The battered monarch couldn’t stop herself from smirking a bit, even despite the pain. It hadn’t been that long ago that she’d stood triumphant over Canterlot with Princess Celestia before her on bended knees, and this was where she’d ended up. The humor of the situation wasn’t lost on her, even though the sense of defeat stung nearly as much as her headache.

“What was that?” a voice called from somewhere nearby. Chrysalis froze.

“What was what?” another voice asked. There were two of them, then. Somewhere to her right, above the trench.

Perhaps they were with the pilot, and had come to look for survivors. Or maybe they were the ones who’d shot the saucer down. They could even be simple scavengers, come to pick through the crash for valuables and dash off before either of the other parties showed up. None of those possibilities were the sort of people who’d just leave a wounded changeling queen alone if they found her, and she was in no condition to be fighting them off.

“I heard a crash. Came from down there.”

There was a pause. Chrysalis leaned back into the shadow of the wreck in case they could see underneath it, hoping the moonlight wouldn’t be enough to spot her black body against the dark soil.

“It’s probably nothing. This thing’s coming apart. Piece of the hull fell off, maybe.”

“Yeah…” the first voice agreed, although he didn’t sound convinced. “Probably nothing… let’s head back.”

Chrysalis waited a few seconds, then chanced stepping forward a bit from her place beneath the saucer. The voices had come from the side of the wreck, up above her on the rim of the trench. Nothing was there now but a few rocks and burnt sticks of trees. Some footsteps, heavy-sounding as if weighed down with armor, moved slowly off towards the wreck’s front end. Chrysalis breathed a sigh of relief, and contemplated her next move.

The saucer was a lost cause, and she’d gain nothing by trying to fight off whoever was investigating the wreck. At best, she’d wind up every bit as magically exhausted as she already was physically, and with nothing to show for it except a broken machine she couldn’t hope to get working again even if she knew how to operate it. At worst, she could get herself killed or captured. She couldn’t take that risk. Without her, the hive would die. Changelings would vanish from the world forever. The luxury of brash decision-making was no longer hers, and she had to reluctantly part with the wreck and find somewhere safe to hide.

Her hooves stepped gingerly into the spaces between broken planks and shattered window glass, not wanting to make unnecessary noise on the off chance others were listening. She focused on moving forward, hoping to eventually see whatever pony town this lone house was built on the outskirts of. She could take shelter there and figure out where she was, and then perhaps find some trace of where the changelings were being held. It was a long shot, sure, but she really had no other options.

Chrysalis stepped over the last of the scattered debris and into what used to be the house itself. The refrigerator still stood in the kitchen, surrounded by obliterated wall planks and half of a broken door. Chrysalis studied the appliance curiously; it looked old and rusted, as if it hadn’t seen use in a very long time. And as she looked around more, the rest of the house looked strangely similar. Wood was rotting, grimy dust was everywhere, and the general atmosphere of the place was not like a house that had been occupied at the time the saucer hit it. It had to have sat here for years… which explained why she’d never heard of the place before.

Chrysalis took another step, and saw a body. Four long, slender limbs protruded from a narrow torso, all clothed in a strange haphazard collection of bits of animal hides. Chrysalis stepped closer, examining the creature’s face. A frizzy, tangled black mane surrounded a rich chocolate-brown face, with a much smaller nose than changelings or ponies had. Two brown eyes stared lifelessly at the ceiling, with a thin trail of blood running down between them.

Thin body, no visible muscle mass, long hair, breasts... the creature was almost definitely female, but its species was unknown to her. Then again, so were the little green-skinned servants of Celestia that had acted as dungeon guards and saucer pilots, who had vaguely similar anatomy except for skin color and proportions. This particular woman was still warm and had obviously been killed recently, likely when the saucer came screaming down from the heavens and plowed through her home.

Chrysalis was not without sympathy, but the appearance of this creature only raised hundreds of new questions—now she wasn’t dealing with a remote and long-abandoned pony settlement, but an entirely new and unheard of species. She sighed, exasperated at the incessant complications. As if having total victory snatched out of her grasp right at the last moment wasn’t enough, now she’d lost her entire hive to some secret dungeon Celestia built, and lost herself to whatever unheard of country this place was. There were very few places left on the entire planet she’d not seen, either directly or through the eyes of her subjects, and yet this one defied all her understanding of the world.

“Colonel!” one of the voices from earlier shouted, loud enough to be heard even as far away as Chrysalis was. “He’s waking up!”

Chrysalis looked back towards the crash. She hadn’t really put much thought into the fate of the pilot, as she assumed he would have been killed when his glass-front cockpit slammed into the side of a small mountain, but who else could they be talking about? Surely none of a rescue party’s own would be knocked unconscious while they were searching the area for survivors. And if the pilot was alive, he could be interrogated. He could be forced to explain where he’d been, how to get back to that prison where the rest of her hive were being held. He could save Chrysalis from having to wander around an unfamiliar land for ages in the hopes of learning something useful.

Immediately, she abandoned the ruined house and the body of its inhabitant, and let her wings carry her speedily along the trench. More voices were talking, but she couldn’t make out what they were saying over the twittering of her wings and the breeze rushing past her face. When she stopped right near the elevated backside of the saucer, she heard the too-familiar unintelligible chatter of the alien pilot.

Chrysalis crept up the side of the trench, poking her way along up to where she’d heard the voices from originally, and circled around one of the enormous boulders that the saucer had wedged itself between. She carefully peeked around the side of the boulder to survey the area around the front of the wreck to see what was happening.

The bubble window at the front of the craft had shattered outwards, and the pilot now stood defensively by the ship with a group of taller creatures all around him. Four were huge, bulky monsters weighed down with the heaviest suits of full-body armor Chrysalis could even dream of; one of those suits alone probably weighed more than five changelings. Two others also wore full-body suits, but tight and white in color so as to resemble scientists’ lab coats, and opaque orange helmets. And at the center of the group stood who looked to be their leader, an intimidating figure in a long tan coat.

“Just come back with us, and get in the Vertibird,” he told the pilot. “We’ll make sure you’re comfortable.”

The pilot screeched something even more incomprehensible than usual in reply, and pulled some kind of silver object up from his belt.

“Colonel, he’s got a gun!”

Before any of the others could react, the pilot’s weapon pulsed with bluish magic, and a bolt of light shot through the air into the chestplate of his target. The soldier stumbled backwards, his body lighting up as it was consumed by azure fire. In a matter of seconds, his solid body had apparently evaporated, scattering apart with the wind and dissolving into a small pile of ash. Even Chrysalis was taken aback by the ferocity of the tiny device.

A loud crack split the air, and the pilot toppled over backwards. Green blood spurted out of his forehead as his whole body went limp, and the Colonel pocketed his own handheld weapon.

“God damn it.” An armored soldier slapped one of the scientists in the back. “So much for ‘lower your weapons so he doesn’t feel threatened,’ Anderson. We could’ve easily stopped that from happening.”

“What? You’re blaming me? We were trying to bring him in alive, Major! Sticking weapons in his face wouldn’t have gotten us anywhere!”

“Enough,” the Colonel silenced them. “We’ve still got a job to do. Anderson, get a crate from the Vertibird for the ashes. Ramirez’s family deserves that much.”

The soldiers and scientists slowly moved over to the body, and one gingerly picked up his weapon. They seemed as stunned by its power as Chrysalis was, and a few looked mournfully back at the pile of ash that still crackled with lingering bluish lightning as the breeze began to scatter it apart.

Chrysalis cursed under her breath. That pilot was her only real lead. With him dead, she had to figure out some other way of getting the information she needed, in an unfamiliar country populated by unfamiliar creatures who apparently had some kind of lethal handheld spellcasting technology. She’d have to find their settlement, take the form of one of them, and then slip in and find a niche where she could feed herself and also plug the others for information about—

“Contact, two o’clock! Behind the rocks!”

Part of the boulder exploded, flinging dust into her eyes. Chrysalis threw herself backwards, taking cover behind the rock. Another bolt of bright green magic struck the boulder, blasting away more chips and dust, followed by three more. Sooner or later they’d give up blasting away at her, and storm around the sides. With the pilot dead, she had no reason to stick around and get herself killed. Chrysalis dashed out from behind the boulder and took flight, speeding away down the edge of the trench.

“Colonel, it’s taking off!”

“Then get after it, soldier! I want it taken alive!”

Chrysalis’s wings flittered faster than they’d ever done before, but they weren’t built for speed. Her heart was pounding, but she had to push herself until she got away. She reached the house just as what few beams were still upright were struck with bolts of magic, and dropped down to her hooves. Her powerful legs pounded through the ruins and into the front yard, past a strange pile of rusting metal, and down to the roadway. She looked frantically around, scanning the valley below for any trace of civilization where she could hide.

But there was nothing; no lights, no fires, no indication that there were any buildings down there at all, inhabited or otherwise. That put her at an even greater disadvantage. She looked up the hill instead, and was relieved to see three tall factory chimneys hauntingly silhouetted against the full moon. If nothing else, it was a place to hide for the night and a good vantage point to look from in the morning.

Another bolt of magic struck the pavement near her hooves, and she panicked. Chrysalis leapt over the guardrail and took flight again, hoping they’d lose sight of her against the sky.

She beat her wings as fast as they would go, rushing over to the factory to escape. A quick glance behind her revealed that the soldiers had given up their chase and were looking stupidly all around the sky. She’d evaded them, and was free to head over to the factory for much-needed rest.

Along the way, she couldn’t help but notice the dilapidated state of the roadway, which was completely crumbling apart into gravel in the spots where it hadn’t done so already. A small bridge over a troublesome fold in the topography had collapsed, and the damage looked anything but recent. It made no sense—the paved road and factory indicated that this was, or used to be, a place of some importance. But then why was everything crumbling? The ancient refrigerator, the rusting hulk outside the house, the decaying roadway…ponies didn’t just up and abandon entire cities like this.

As she reached the top of the hill, Chrysalis realized that the factory was, in fact, an abandoned power station of some kind. High-tension cables trailed up from the grounds up over the road to connect with a tower, but then just hung limply at its sides. She could see the silhouette of another tower further on, but even if this facility was producing power—doubtful, with the total lack of noise, lights, or smoke coming from the chimneys—it wasn’t going anywhere.

Chrysalis shrugged. If worst came to worst, she could just follow the old power lines to their destination, in the hopes that some ponies still lived in the city this station used to power. Although, glancing around, she couldn’t see anything more promising than what she’d seen from the hill—for miles around, there was absolutely nothing, save a black and desolate landscape.

That thought brought another, even more depressing thought. If there was nowhere else to go around here besides the (former) house and the power station, those soldier types would probably be able to figure out where she’d gone. Maybe they’d given up the pursuit to make sure she actually stopped here for a rest instead of continuing on, and they were just going to wait her out a bit before kicking the door in and blasting spells all over the place.

Of course that was what they were doing; even the Royal Guard wouldn’t be dense enough to not figure out where she’d buggered off to, given those options. They could probably see the chimneys from the crash site, so all someone had to do was chance a gaze in their direction before something to the effect of “hey, Colonel, maybe she’s over there in the only other habitable structure in the nation” was uttered.

But the trap worked both ways, and an army that wrongly believed it had the element of surprise over its enemies was often even less prepared for surprises than an army that knew it didn’t have the element of surprise at all. She’d go in, check for supplies, move something heavy between her and the door, and then crouch down behind it and warm up the biggest, baddest, most powerful spell she could conjure. Once they came through the door, the look on their faces would be worth the failure at Canterlot and everything else involved with this detour into an unknown world.

Smiling with a bit of devious glee at her plan, Chrysalis grabbed the door with her magic and pulled it open. She stepped inside and immediately stopped—on the far side of the room, rummaging through some crates, was another one of the tall bipedal creatures like the ones that had just tried to kill her. This one had no armor or visible weapons, but wore a baggy blue jumpsuit with yellow trim, and a big gaudy number scrawled across the back, An unexpected development, but one she could still use to her advantage. With another things-turned-out-better-than-expected grin, Chrysalis lit up her horn.

“Oh, please, you’ve got to help me,” a distinctly feminine voice cried out, practically quaking with fear. The man by the crates turned around, and was surprised to see a rather attractive dark-skinned woman in ratty wasteland clothing, collapsed helplessly to her knees in the middle of the room. “There’s these men, and they’re out to kill me, and they’ll be here any second! I need your help fighting them off! Please, I’ll do anything…”

The startled expression on the jumpsuit enthusiast was everything Chrysalis was hoping to see. Even across species, the damsel-in-distress routine never ceased to work wonders. Now, he’d come to her rescue, and either die valiantly taking the first spell to the face when the soldiers kicked in the door, or he’d survive, claim his “reward,” and then point her in the direction of the nearest settlement. Perhaps he’d even follow her, and help her get her hive back together, once tempted with the promise of similar rewards along the way. So long as he didn’t find out he was essentially making love to a dead girl, having a loyal yet expendable lackey following her around could come in handy.

The jumpsuit enthusiast blinked.

“Gary?” he asked.

Chrysalis raised an eyebrow. “What?”

The blue-suited man grabbed a long, serrated knife from the crate he was poking through, and charged straight at her.

“GAAAARYYY!”

Chrysalis sidestepped, immediately abandoning the starving and physically weak body for her much more powerful true form. “Gary” swung at nothing but air, but recovered faster than Chrysalis and attempted another lunging slice. Chrysalis threw up a wall of magical energy, deflecting his charge and sidestepping again. She grabbed the knife with a levitation spell and wrestled it from Gary’s grasp. That left them on opposite ends of the room, a horse-sized, knife-wielding magical insect queen against a skinny man in a jumpsuit…and still he looked about to charge.

It was this moment that the soldiers chose to kick in the power station’s door.

“Get on the ground, now!”

Chrysalis hurled the knife in the direction of the soldiers, but it glanced harmlessly off the heavy armor plating and sailed out into the night. She charged her horn for the best blast she could manage on short notice, but Gary’s clueless bulk broadsided her at a full sprint. Her shoulder hit the floor and her horn discharged upwards, vaporizing a desk but doing no damage whatsoever to the soldiers.

Gary took one of the green spell bolts to the back and went limp, so Chrysalis flung his body towards the door to buy herself enough time to stand. The knife may not have done any damage, but a hundred and fifty pounds of Gary knocked the point soldier over backwards and toppled the spellcasters from the arms of the other two.

Queen Chrysalis stood erect, charged across the room, and swung all her forward momentum into a powerful hindleg buck aimed precisely at the left soldier’s chest. She felt the heavy plate buckle slightly, and the soldier crashed into the wall. His partner tackled her from the side just as Gary had done, but this time she’d been expecting it. She twisted her body with the tackle, flipping over onto her back so all eight hundred pounds of her landed right on the soldier’s midsection.

The shock let her break his grasp and complete the roll to land upright on all four hooves, right as the point soldier finally stood up again and took aim. He went for the trigger, but some supernatural force pushed the barrel of the plasma rifle down at the last second, forcing him to send a bolt of plasma execution-style into the back of the tackling soldier’s neck. Then the gun shot backwards and clocked him in the face, startling him enough for Chrysalis to yank it from his grasp from all the way across the room.

She clubbed him upside the head with the stock for good measure, then turned the weapon on the other surviving soldier. Now that she understood the weapon’s use, it was a simple matter to manipulate the trigger with another levitation spell and fire a bolt into the gap between his helmet and chestplate as well.

Chrysalis noticed the one survivor pointing a sidearm at her face, and twisted the rifle defensively to block his shot. The rifle cracked apart, broken, and she flung the pieces at her attacker to cover a charge. Her foreleg struck him in the shoulder, knocking the secondary weapon from his hands and sending him reeling, and she lowered her stance to charge.

But before her powerful hindlegs could propel her horn-first into the soldier’s abdomen, a thrown rifle hit her in the side of the face. She stumbled, and another figure tackled her to the floor. Cold steel pressed hard against her temple.

“If you so much as think about lightin’ up that horn of yours again, then Ah promise you it will be the last thing you do on this earth.”

The Colonel had joined the fight himself. She hadn’t been expecting that. And now he had her pinned, with the same weapon that he’d used to kill the alien pilot pressed right against her head.

“Do I make myself clear?” his strangely-accented voice was dripping with barely-restrained malice, and every muscle in his body was tensed and ready for the kill. Nothing would have brought him more joy in that moment than to send a ten millimeter slug through the brain of the wretched alien thing that had just taken out two of his men.

Chrysalis considered a last, desperate gamble for freedom, but images of her subjects slowly starving to death in the cold, clinical sterility of Celestia’s dungeon forced her to give up on it. She sighed, closing her eyes and accepting defeat.

Again.

“Good.” The Colonel stood up, but the weapon and his eyes never strayed a millimeter off their target. “Major Fairlight.”

“Yes, sir,” the surviving soldier answered, his voice a mere echo of the authoritative bellow that had started off the encounter.

“Head back to the Vertibird, and have the pilot land out here in the parking lot. I’ll keep watch over our friend until then.”

“Right away, sir.” Major Fairlight jogged out of the power station, his heavy footsteps slowly fading away into silence.

“Bring in rope and a tranquilizer when you get back!”

The sound of crickets from outside reached Chrysalis’s ears, and a cool breeze blew through the open doorway. The Colonel wiped a sleeve across his brow, his heavy breaths slowly becoming more shallow as heat-of-the-moment rage softened into composed malice.

“Well,” he shrugged, “on behalf of the Enclave, let me be the first to welcome you to Earth.” His brow creased, and he crouched down to stare directly into her eyes.

“As of right now, your ugly ass is officially United States Government property.”

Chapter 2

“Well?”

The middle-aged commanding officer of the base stood expectantly in the doorway, squinting a bit in the comparatively harsh lighting of the exam room.

Dr. Anderson sighed. “I’ve got a few theories, but no solid evidence to back any of it up. I’ve looked her over as best I can, and about all I can do is wildly speculate.” He leaned on his hands against the sterile metal table, absently staring at the unconscious body of their captive.

“Then speculate,” Autumn said. “This thing’s killed people, and I need to know what it’s capable of, and how it might be of use to us.”

“Well,” Anderson started, standing up and taking a breath to collect his thoughts, “the obvious logical starting point is to assume we’re dealing with ‘one of them,’ considering we found this subject right near the alien saucer we shot down and have never encountered anything similar before. But I’m not so sure it’s as simple as that. You see, we’ve captured a large quadruped, roughly the same size and configuration as a horse, with insect-like wings and a total body covering of hard, chitinous armor.” He rapped on Chrysalis’s foreleg with a knuckle, and nervously chuckled at the absurdity of his words.

“I don’t think it could stop bullets, unless you were far away and shooting with a very small caliber, but it certainly makes for formidable defense from punches, kicks, and that sort of thing. That, coupled with a surprisingly light but nonetheless sturdy and highly muscular body means you’re dealing with something that could probably stand up well against a pack of deathclaws, let alone humans. I can’t be sure what the holes in her legs are for, but they seem natural and purposed and not the result of any sort of disease. A pair of ragged but seemingly functional wings means at least limited flight capabilities, and apparently the horn is capable of telekinesis and energy blasts of some kind. She’s also visibly female and has sharp fangs and other teeth.

“Contrast that to the short, bipedal, thin-skinned, and comparatively humanoid aliens we’re used to dealing with, the pilots from this saucer and the one the people at Adams discovered. Those aliens are physically weak and fragile, useless in close combat, and must instead rely extensively on their advanced energy weapons technology. They have no wings, no natural armoring, no telekinetic abilities, no teeth… they couldn’t possibly get any biologically further apart, which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

“Normal aliens—which is an oxymoron I never imagined I’d utter without irony—are genderless, and so I suppose it’s only very extremely unlikely that this thing is some sort of matriarchal ‘queen’ figure to the rest of the race, rather than outright impossible. But apart from that, I can’t imagine this creature here being related in any way to the beings we normally think of when talking about aliens.”

Autumn’s brow creased. “Could she be some sort of mutated creature we’ve just never seen on Earth before? If she looks like a horse…”

Anderson shook his head. “I considered that, but her body is completely free of radiation and she doesn’t have the common symptoms of radiation-induced evolution. If she was an insect, we should have seen massive physical growth over the parent species, and perhaps changes to the biology similar to the adaptation of grappler limbs in mirelurks, but no sweeping anatomical changes like the loss of a pair of limbs and conversion to this equine-looking body structure. If her kind came from horses, they’d lose much of their hair, but they wouldn’t spontaneously grow armored exoskeletons and wings. That horn, and your claim that she seemed to genuinely fear your threats as if she was capable of understanding English, are things that radiation can’t even begin to explain. She couldn’t have developed on Earth.”

“So we’re going in circles and have no idea what she is or where she came from,” Autumn said, folding his arms across his chest and slumping back against the frame of the door. That was what Anderson had said at the start of their conversation, and the exact opposite of what Autumn wanted to hear.

“Not…definitively, no. Thinking about her as an alien makes her look like a mutant, but thinking about her as a mutant makes her look like an alien. If that makes any sense. It’s a bit of a biological Catch-22.” Anderson paused a moment. “But what if she were both? What if we think about her as, say, a deathclaw?”

The colonel shook his head. “Anderson, I’ll listen to your speculations if there’s nothing concrete to go on, but if you’ve got a clear answer, then I need to know about it sooner than later. So can we ditch the rhetorical philosophy?”

“Of course, of course,” Anderson raised his hands defensively. “But, you are familiar with deathclaws, right? Unlike your average wasteland creature, they weren’t modified exclusively by post-war nuclear radiation but by government funded genetic engineering. They did mutate a little bit after the Great War just like everything else, but they were originally Jackson’s Chameleons, genetically modified with DNA taken from various other species in order to create the perfect predator. They were intended to take the place of human soldiers in certain military operations against the Chinese, but were never fully deployed as intended. After the war, they mutated a bit, lost their color-changing abilities, and of course were eventually partially domesticated by the Enclave through the use of mind-control headgear.”

“I assume this is somehow relevant?”

“Absolutely. When they made deathclaws, a large part of the work was in adding the DNA of other animals to give the creatures more desirable traits as a purpose-built hunter-killer. Here we have something similar—the speed, endurance, and physical strength of a horse, but armored like a giant insect and capable of flight. Plus, she’s got that horn, the mechanics of which are completely foreign to all my understanding of science. Perhaps one could even describe it as…alien?”

“So she’s the result of an alien genetic experiment.”

Anderson shrugged. “Like I said, I can’t prove it, but I struggle to think of any scenario that screams ‘alien world domination plot’ as loudly as this juxtaposition of two distinct yet familiar animal archetypes into a single mutant super soldier capable of taking down three Enclave soldiers in power armor while herself remaining completely unarmed and wearing not a shred of clothing whatsoever.”

“Colonel,” a poorly digitized human voice called from a speaker on the wall, preempting Autumn’s response. “Would you join me and Major Fairlight in the war room? Something rather interesting has just come up.”

“Of course, Mr. President. Just give me a moment to—”

“Now, Colonel,” the disembodied voice chided. “This is important.”

“Yes, sir.” Autumn took a step for the door, but hesitated. “Anderson, I’m going to leave this project in your hands. Keep her sedated for now, until we can move her into a cell and post guards to make sure she doesn’t try to escape. Understood?”

“Yes, sir. I’ll get back to work right away.”

“Good. I’ll make the arrangements once I deal with whatever urgent business this is, and get you a capable support staff to work on establishing communication with her. This has top priority.”

With that, the stern-faced colonel disappeared from the exam room and Anderson was alone with his subject.

“Colonel!” Major Fairlight saluted as Autumn came through the door. His brisk stride carried him quickly out of the sickly yellow corridor lighting and into the icy blue haze that surrounded the imaging table. Fairlight and a sentry bot stood opposite, apparently having been discussing the blurry eyebot camera image displayed on the table’s surface.

“Glad you could join us,” the president’s disembodied voice spoke from the robot, as Autumn climbed the few steps up to the pedestal surrounding the table. “There’s been a bit of a development.”

“So you said a minute ago.” Autumn looked at the frozen camera image and recognized the focus as the iconic domed rotunda of the Jefferson Memorial building, with huge metal pipes sticking out of it in all directions. “What’s this?”

“One of our eyebots picked this up a few hours ago,” Fairlight answered. “Take a look.”

He pressed a button on the table’s control panel, and the static-laced image started animating. For several seconds, the eyebot held steady on the monument, until the blurry figure of a man walked in from the side of the frame. He paused briefly at the door beneath the huge marble stairs, apparently hesitant to enter, but eventually followed through with his purpose and pulled the door open. He disappeared inside, the door closed behind him, and the security feed paused again.

“We need to put together a response,” the president urged.

Fairlight nodded his agreements, but Autumn looked incredulous.

“Forgive me, Mr. President, but what exactly is this?”

“This is the Jefferson Memorial water purifier. Scientists from that beached bucket of bolts at the naval yard tried to—”

“I know what the building is; I was there, and you told me back then that it wasn’t worth our time. I don’t understand why one man walking into the place is cause to drop everything we’re working on, including a live alien captive, and stare at it.”

“We didn’t worry about the purifier before because the Brotherhood of Steel had the place fortified, and they greatly outnumbered us,” he explained. “If they’re restarting the project, now that we’ve had time to build up our strength here, we should act before the Brotherhood has a chance to reestablish themselves.”

Autumn shook his head. “The building’s sat abandoned for twenty years, sir. It’s been used as a super mutant stronghold, a raider base, and a haven for chem addicts in that time. What’s to say this guy is any different?”

“Look at his face,” Fairlight chimed in. He rewound the image to just before the door opened, when the figure made a quick check behind him to make sure he wasn’t being followed. The image magnified itself until the blurry cluster of pixels atop the figure’s shoulders dominated the entire surface of the table.

Fairlight continued, “The computer checked the records, and found the same face on Jefferson Memorial eyebot camera feeds as early as 2251, when construction of the purifier originally began.”

“Think of what could be accomplished if this purifier were made operational, Colonel,” the president added before Autumn could retort. “The Enclave could finally purify the wasteland, once and for all.”

Autumn stared into the blurry clusters of pixels, apparently deep in thought. The Brotherhood had aggressively fortified the facility last time, and as much as Autumn disagreed with their order’s activities on both ends of the nation, they weren’t in the habit of throwing people away unnecessarily. They obviously believed it had potential, at some point in its life, and if its head scientists were returning, that made the case even stronger.

Still, Autumn was hesitant. “Assuming everything could be made to work, then yes, it would be worth taking over.”

“I’m glad you agree,” the president practically sang.

“However,” Autumn continued, “we have no idea if that’s the case, and I’m not comfortable tying down a company of men fifty miles away from home, holding onto an empty ruin. If we’re going to do anything with this information, we’re going to start with reconnaissance, and only commit to an occupation when we’re sure the purifier works.”

“I suppose that’s acceptable,” the president grumbled. “As always, I leave the details of the Enclave’s response in your capable hands, but I do expect a response to be made. Understood? This has top priority.”

The sentry bot beeped, then switched back to its regular monotone. “Remote uplink disconnected. Returning to normal operation.” It wheeled away from the table and off down the hallway leading to the president’s office. The door’s two halves pulled shut behind it and were locked in place by the rotating disc section that descended from above. Autumn was slightly confused by the president’s abrupt departure, but it didn’t make any less sense than the way he’d abandoned all interest in the living, breathing, extraterrestrial life form lying unconscious somewhere down below at the first sign of a working water purifier that he showed no interest in capturing two decades ago.

Eden’s current position on the issue was backed by sound logic—whoever brought fresh water to the wasteland would be revered, able to easily rally support for their cause and at the same time hold the water as a hostage if it became necessary. The Enclave could benefit greatly from the purifier if it was operational, and at present the memorial was almost completely uninhabited. Setting up a presence there before the Brotherhood had a chance to establish itself could give them control over a potentially world-changing asset…or a useless block of marble with pipes sticking out of it. The problem Autumn saw was that the probability of Jefferson being a useless block of marble had increased a little bit with each passing day since it was abandoned, and if the president truly had always valued the purifier as a potential asset, even peripherally, why hadn’t he ever expressed interest in capturing it before, when it had been free for the taking?

The whining of the servos in Fairlight’s power armor broke the silence, as the soldier leaned against the imaging table. “What do you think, sir?”

Autumn took a deep breath. “I say put a few more eyebots in the area, and see what happens. We’ve got a video tape of a man walking through a door. This is a little early to be sending in the cavalry.”

“I agree, but you can’t blame the president for getting excited. This could be a big deal.”

Autumn nodded absently. “And when it becomes a big deal, I’ll be the first person pushing towards taking full advantage of it. Until then, rushing in like a bunch of fools won’t get us anywhere.”

“Yes, sir. I’ll relay the orders to—hey! This is a closed briefing!”

The startled lab technician recoiled into the safety of the doorway. “Oh! I’m…I’m sorry! I-I was just looking for Dr. Anderson. H-he told me to come find him, when I—”

“He’s in the Bio Lab,” Colonel Autumn provided. “Exam room two, on the upper level.”

“That’s where he told me to meet him, sir, but he’s…uh…well, he’s not there.”

“What do you mean, he’s not there? I just met with him.”

He shrugged. “The room was empty, sir. He’s nowhere in there.”

“What about the alien?” Major Fairlight asked. “Tell me he just left it unattended.”

“The bug unicorn thing? I didn’t see it in there, sir…”

“God damn it, Anderson!” Fairlight pounded a fist into the imaging table. “I told that fucker to his face that he was not to move that thing beyond the Bio Lab without an armed escort.”

Autumn pressed a call button on the intercom built into the table. “You posted guards outside the lab. Anderson probably asked them to help move the alien into an open cell. Strange they didn’t check in with you first, though.”

The speakers crackled, picking up a response. “Cell block.”

“This is Colonel Autumn. Did Dr. Anderson transfer a detainee over to you from Bio Lab within the last few minutes?”

“No, sir. It’s been quiet here all day.”

Autumn looked up at Major Fairlight, who slowly shook his head. His anger was obvious even through the emotionless face of his helmet.

“Thank you, soldier,” Autumn said before switching off the intercom. “Where else would he take her?”

“Oh, come on, Colonel, you know what happened.”

“The sedatives must have worn off.” He turned back to the intercom panel, and set it to issue a base-wide alert.

“Attention all Raven Rock personnel,” the colonel’s voice resonated from three different far-off locations at once. “This is Colonel Autumn. Base security has been breached in the Bio Lab. Repeat, base security has been breached. Report to Level 1 stations and secure the main entrance. Presidential override only. Stand by for further orders.”

“We need to get down there and see what’s going on,” Fairlight said, taking his rifle from the railing he’d leaned it against and stepping down from the elevated platform at the war room’s center. He made for the door and didn’t slow down as he neared the still-confused lab technician standing there. “This is still a closed briefing, kid. Clear out, go back to your quarters, and stay there.”

The kid muttered a few words of acknowledgement and scurried off, nearly tripping down the tight stairwell. Fairlight and Autumn followed, hurrying down the stairs and into the long corridor to the junction that separated the storage and personnel quarters from the lab complexes. Fairlight turned left and wound his way around the ceiling braces as soldiers rushed past from all directions, scurrying like dutiful insects in the direction of the main base entrance.

“How the hell did we lose containment on this thing?” Fairlight asked nobody in particular as he ducked under some low-hanging wiring and sidestepped a leaky pipe spewing steam. “How is an armored bug horse capable of subtlety? Where the hell was Anderson?” They turned the corner into the storage annex attached to the Tech Lab, and both men immediately halted.

“Right there,” Autumn answered. In the center of the room, apparently studying a map of the base displayed on an eight-foot glass monitor stretched between two of the structural pillars holding up the roof, was none other than Dr. Anderson himself.

“What the hell, Anderson?” Fairlight barked, throwing up his hands. “You get one of my guys killed trying to reason with an alien, and now put the whole base in danger because you’re busy reading a fucking map to watch it?”

“Colonel Autumn told me to wait to move her, so I thought I’d check in with Dr. Forrester and see how his analysis of the pilot’s sidearm was coming. You…does this alert mean she’s woken up? That’s much too early…”

“Such a fucking amateur,” Fairlight muttered.

“Well…let me help you. Tell me your plans and I’ll try to help get her back. We can’t let her escape the base.”

“She won’t,” Autumn said matter-of-factly. “Everyone’s headed up to Level 1 right now; she’d be up against a small army, and the door itself won’t open without a presidential override.”

Anderson’s brow creased. “But…surely there are other ways out of the base, if she’s desperate enough. We can’t overlook those. The ventilation system, perhaps?”

Fairlight shook his head. “No good. I went over that scenario with Engineering last winter. A human couldn’t fit through those ducts, let alone a horse. And assuming she makes it all the way to the end, there’s giant spinning fans sucking air in from the surface. It’d be suicide. The only other way out is the hangar, and Colonel’s alert will have sent a whole bunch of people that way to make sure it’s secure as well.”

Colonel Autumn frowned. “Given what we’ve already seen of her abilities, that may not be enough. I should have ordered a lockdown on the silo doors, as well.”

One of the few soldiers assigned to guard the Tech Lab rushed up, interrupting the conversation. “Colonel? Major? The Bio Lab door guards just called up on the intercom, and they don’t understand why we’re on alert. It’s all situation normal down there; Dr. Anderson and a lab technician are the only ones who’ve been in or out for hours.”

“Something is definitely up,” said Fairlight. “We need to get a team to check the lower level. She’s probably still hiding down there hiding somewhere. How else could she avoid attention for so long?”

“We can’t risk uncovering the entrance. Get these men here together, and we’ll head down and search. Anderson? I need you to do something for me.”

“Anything, sir. I do feel terrible about all this.”

“Ge to an intercom. There’s one outside and down the hall, to the left. Contact the president and tell him we need the hangar silo doors locked down on his override as well as the main entrance. I don’t want to take any chances.”

“Of course. I’ll go right now.” Anderson rushed out of the room, and Autumn followed Fairlight into the Tech Lab. The small squad of soldiers stood in a semicircle around the prototype suit of Hellfire armor being tested in the middle of the room, confused and hoping for instruction.

“Head up the stairs here and take the back way into the lab,” Autumn ordered. “We’ll sweep through the upper level and then check the storage rooms downstairs.” He started up the stairway and a dozen pairs of footsteps followed him up to the catwalks that ringed the Tech Lab.

“We find this bitch, I’m shooting on sight,” Fairlight declared as he reached the door between labs. “I’m not losing half the base to Anderson’s incompetence.”

“That’s not your decision to make, Major,” Autumn reminded him. “We might be able to use her to our advantage, but she’s of a lot less use to us dead. We take her alive, if at all possible.”

Fairlight swung a fist into the door. “Dammit, Colonel, you saw what that thing did at the power station! She’s of even less use to us when she’s murdering our people and burning the whole base down!”

“Major, if there’s no way to subdue her beyond lethal force, then I will shoot her myself. But if we’ve got her under control and you execute the one alien being who might be capable of understanding human speech, I will bust you back to private and put you on a cleaning detail for the rest of your days, understood?”

“Understood,” Fairlight growled, punching the door control. The central lock spun and the two halves of the door slid into the wall, and the assembled few men in power armor charged into the Bio Lab. Autumn ducked to the side to let them pass, knowing that even the alien’s impressive combat abilities would be at least moderately less effective against the soldiers’ power armor than Autumn’s overcoat. He drew his pistol and followed once all five of them had passed, storming through the door into a scene of utter normalcy.

A startled scientist leapt aside as the party rushed in, instinctively going for his sidearm but not even making contact with the weapon before he realized the intruders were friendlies. Autumn surveyed the lab from the door while the soldiers swung their rifles around, stomping about and checking corners. A chorus of “clear”s above a backbeat of footsteps and servomotors sounded in the colonel’s ears as he noticed how many specimen tanks were unbroken, how many stacks of papers hadn’t been cast to the floor, the shockingly low number of fires that had been started, and the curious absence of any murder victims. Deathclaws had breached captivity on more than one occasion, and the result was almost always a rapidly-climbing body count until the sentry bots could blast the thing into submission with Gatling lasers. That a being altogether more deadly had broken free and not even knocked over a wastebasket…that was very much more disturbing.

“All clear, Colonel!” Fairlight’s voice came from below. “She’s not here!”

“Thank you, Major,” he said absently, turning to the surprised-looking scientist. “Did you see anything?”

“No, sir. Tell you the truth, I didn’t even notice the alien was gone until the alert went out.”

“Then where the hell did she go?” Autumn asked nobody in particular as he stepped outside the room and onto the catwalk that led to the exam room she’d been held in. He’d seen a soldier rush through there, sweeping his rifle all around. That soldier had checked behind the exam table, and pushed aside a medical curtain that could have hid a horse. Then he’d popped out the other side and carried on to link up with another man who’d gone clockwise around the lab’s upper level, seeing no sign of the escaped alien along the way.

But something in the room drew Colonel Autumn’s eye—a large medical cabinet, where the scientists kept their cumbersome environment suits and other exam equipment. The ugly thing jutted out a meter from the wall, and had two doors that together were wider than the one leading out of the lab. Three bulky scientific machines Autumn didn’t know the names for lay clumsily stacked on top of one another right next to the cabinet. That wasn’t something Anderson, quirky and disorganized as he tended to be sometimes, would ever do to valuable pre-war instruments.

“Major Fairlight,” Autumn called down to the lower level. “I have need of you.”

“Right away, sir.” A cadence of footsteps and servomotors followed the major up the stairs. He followed Autumn across the catwalk and into the empty exam room. The colonel pointed at the cabinet, taking careful, quiet steps to reach it. Fairlight stepped lightly, but the whining of his armor’s servomotors couldn’t be silenced.

Something shifted in the cabinet, as if it recognized the presence of the soldiers outside. The stomping around and swinging guns everywhere had certainly spooked it, and now every footstep was rightly considered a threat. Autumn must have heard the movement, too, for he grimaced and clenched a fist in frustration. Calling more men up to help would only destroy all doubt as to their intentions.

She knew they were outside, she knew they’d probably come up here to capture her again. But if she was wrong, and they hadn’t figured her out, then breaking out and starting a fight would only be her end. So she’d wait, until they let their guard down or called more men to help. Then she’d attack. The trick was going to be in taking her out first.

Both men waited, listening for movement within the cabinet. Below there was noise and shuffling about, idle chatter between a soldier and a scientist about whether the whole thing was a drill of some kind. Servomotors and footsteps. Idle, muffled, pointless background noise.

Something shifted in the cabinet, leaning against the back wall. She’d relaxed, assuming she’d escaped their notice.

Colonel Autumn held his pistol aloft and silently flattened himself against the cabinet door, laying one hand on the handle. He leaned to the side, mentally rehearsing the move. Fairlight had power armor and a plasma rifle, and Autumn had a trench coat and a handgun. He’d roll off to the side, letting the more combat-equipped of the two of them take the alien down. But that meant letting Fairlight’s trigger-happiness dictate the fate of their prize.

Something shifted inside the cabinet.

Autumn tilted his head in the direction of the door. “Can I trust you?” he whispered, his eyes pleading with the emotionless metal mask of his companion. Of all the orders he’d given Fairlight in the years they’d worked together, this one had to be the one to make the stoic warrior consider insubordination. A court-martial couldn’t resurrect the dead, but trying to take down the alien himself was suicide.

Something tapped against the cabinet’s back wall.

Fairlight nodded. “Yes, sir.” He pointed his plasma rifle at the cabinet and squared his stance.

“Subdue only,” Autumn reminded him one last time. “We want her alive.”

Something banged against the cabinet’s side. Whatever was in there was clearly awake and aware of what was to come.

Fairlight nodded faster, agitated. “Understood, sir.”

Autumn yanked the handle down and pulled open the door. Fairlight charged forward, shoving his rifle emitter right into the cabinet.

“DON’T YOU MOVE YOU FUCKING—wait, Dr. Anderson?”

“What?”

But so it was—the unmoving body of the eccentric biologist lay slumped against the side wall of the cabinet. His head slid sideways and bumped against the wall, making the same sort of noise they’d already heard several times. Colonel Autumn immediately crouched and put a hand to Anderson’s neck, checking for a pulse. “He’s only unconscious.”

“But what’s he doing in the closet? And who the hell were we just talking to five minutes ago?”

Autumn stood up, mind racing with possibilities. He mentally went over everything they’d said, the whole sequence of events from discussing the alien with Anderson to kicking in the door to the Bio Lab. They’d met Dr. Anderson in the storage annex up on the level above, that was certain. Unless he and Fairlight both had somehow shared the same hallucination. The only possibilities were that Autumn was currently asleep in his quarters, dreaming the whole thing, or...

“Major.”

“Colonel?”

“Don’t ask me how, because I haven’t the slightest idea yet, but the Dr. Anderson we talked with earlier was the alien we captured. I’m certain of it.”

“What? How is that even possible?”

“I said don’t ask me how, Major. But think about it—when we found him, he was looking at a map of the base. One of the first things he said was ‘how else could she get out,’ and then he played you for information and got us to admit we’d dropped the ball on locking down the hangar. Then he tried to act all helpful and got me to let him tell the president to do it. How much do you want to bet...”

Autumn went over to the wall and hit the call button on the intercom, attempting to contact the hangar. The speaker remained silent for several seconds with no reply. He hit the other lab call buttons, and was met with silence once more. The president, who never left his office and was always available, wouldn’t pick up. Even the cell block, just outside the door and around the bend, refused to answer the call.

“The whole system.” Fairlight shook his head in dismay. “She knocked out the entire communication system.”

“We need to get down to the hangar, now.”

“Agreed.”

Autumn started for the catwalks, and Fairlight followed close. “Base intercoms are down,” he told the few soldiers below as he walked, “and Dr. Anderson’s unconscious in exam two. Somebody get him medical attention, and then everybody report to the hangar. That’s where our escaped captive has gone.”

The thundering sound of multiple pairs of power armor boots pounding the metal flooring followed the two out of the Bio Lab and back upstairs, through the storage annex where’d they’d met ‘Dr. Anderson’, and down the hallway that led towards the hangar. With all the ambient noise of the base’s ventilation and climate control systems banging and clattering in his ears, it was impossible for Autumn to pick out the whirring of Vertibird blades. They wouldn’t know if they were too late until they reached the hangar itself.

Autumn looked at his watch. “In seventeen minutes,” he started, “she woke up, knocked out Dr. Anderson, locked him in a cabinet, somehow... what, shapeshifted into his body, casually strolled out of the lab, and straight-up asked us how to escape the base. Then she took down the intercom system and hopefully hasn’t already made off with a Vertibird.”

“Still think she’s worth keeping alive?”

Before Autumn had a chance to answer, the small group turned the corner into the cavernous open space that was Raven Rock’s hangar. A small security detail—four power armored soldiers armed with laser rifles, plus their commanding officer and his sidearm—was strewn across the floor in the dimly lit aisle between the rows of parked Vertibirds against the walls. Trails of smoke rose up from a few of the bodies, where their armor had been peeled back and burned. Another’s chestplate had been crushed inwards, and the officer himself had been impaled. A couple score marks from missed energy weapon fire had been burned into the walls and floor opposite the scene, but otherwise there was no sign that the soldiers guarding the hangar had even managed to fight back.

“Where’s the rest of them?” Fairlight asked, the other soldiers fanning out to check the bodies and make sure the alien wasn’t nearby. “There were supposed to be a dozen men here; where’d they go? They could have killed that bitch if they’d been here!”

Autumn believed him. Unless the alien’s armor was somehow capable of absorbing and dissipating energy blasts, one or two hits would have surely been the end of her. She was fast, agile, and incredibly strong, and her dealing with small groups of Enclave soldiers didn’t surprise him any more than the few occasions deathclaws had breached their cages and done the same thing. But there should have been closer to fourteen soldiers guarding the hangar, not four. They wouldn’t have abandoned their post, especially in a state of alert, unless they were directly ordered to by Colonel Autumn himself.

“She took down the intercoms.”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“All she had to do was show up looking like Anderson and tell the men here that I said, or maybe you said, that they were needed elsewhere. They couldn’t question why the order didn’t come over the intercom, because she’d already knocked out the system. They’d have to take her on her word. A few stayed behind, but she could deal with them. All she needed was to clear out the majority of them.”

Fairlight shook his head slowly, unable to comprehend how completely they’d been played for fools. “Forget what I said, Colonel. Death’s too good for her. She pays for this.”

The Vertibird furthest from the door suddenly powered up its rotors, immediately drawing their attention. The double doors at the end of the hangar, which led to a taxiway and the five launch elevators that moved aircraft two and from the surface, rolled open on their tracks. The Vertibird inched forward, slowly turned to pass through them.

“Oh, no fucking way,” Fairlight muttered to himself, launching into a sprint. Autumn and the other soldiers followed, but even taxiing the aircraft was nearly pulling away from them. It completed its turn and set off down the taxiway, with Fairlight nearly catching up to it. They always seemed so much slower from the inside, and Fairlight cursed himself as the tail section stopped getting closer and started pulling away.

His power armor servos whined away, pumping his legs as fast as he could will them, but it wasn’t enough to catch the aircraft. If it turned off and tried leaving from any of the four lifts on the side of the taxiway, he’d have a chance to catch it, but surely the creature that’d systematically outmaneuvered an entire military base wouldn’t make that mistake, and would instead head straight forward to the lift at the end.

Autumn crossed over the threshold into the taxiway right on Fairlight’s heels, half a second before the doors lit up with an otherworldly green aura. The machinery powering them creaked and groaned as if under intense stress, loud enough to be heard despite the spinning blades of the Vertibird, until the doors broke free. Autumn quickly glanced over his shoulder in time to see the rectangle of light from the hangar rapidly narrowing, with a handful of soldiers sprinting to get through in time.

The doors banged together first, followed immediately by another loud sound that had to be a suit of power armor smashing into them. The muffled sounds of clattering metal that came a moment later told Autumn that the whole hydraulic system, only a few steps down from the equipment Vault-Tec used, had been torn apart by the eerie green field.

Up ahead, the aircraft passed the final two turn-offs and entered the farthest lift. Fairlight was barely halfway down the taxiway, and had next to no chance of making it in time. Without breaking stride, he took aim with his rifle, and opened fire. Bolts of plasma zipped off in all directions, hopelessly scorching the walls and ceiling of the taxiway. A few lucky shots hit the Vertibird’s left rotor, burning black scorches into the paint but not damaging the engine itself. The aircraft wheeled itself fully onto the lift and rotated to the side, angling its rotors skyward and preparing to take off. Fairlight blasted away, sending two more bolts of plasma into the rotor and many more into the walls.

The rifle’s microfusion cell ran dry as the lift finally activated, and Fairlight unceremoniously threw it aside before drawing his sidearm. The Vertibird rotor sputtered, as one of its cylinders had very clearly been damaged by the shots. But still the rotor spun, and Fairlight had personally been in ones more damaged than that. His legs were tiring, barely carried on by the assistance of the servomotors, and his shots with the pistol were even less accurate than with the rifle. Tinier bolts of green plasma flew harmlessly into the walls, only occasionally singing the armor on the Vertibird’s damaged rotor.

When he reached the lift, it was already nearing waist height. Fairlight threw himself forward, leaning forwards into a dive. His armored chestplate skidded across the lift’s surface, casting off a few sparks before Fairlight managed to roll himself onto his back. Finally able to aim properly, and only a dozen feet from the Vertibird, Fairlight pointed the emitter of his plasma pistol directly at the rotor hub, and pulled back the trigger as fast as his clumsy gloves would allow.

Autumn grunted, heaving himself up onto the lift and trying to stand upright. His age was working against him, and sprinting down several hundred feet of taxiway after running all over the base essentially non-stop since the alert went out had completely taken the energy out of him. He collapsed to his knees, struggling to get his pistol out of his overcoat.

The lift was less than halfway to the top of the shaft, but the pilot gave up on waiting and threw open the throttle. A harder gust of downdraft rushed through Autumn’s hair, and the damaged rotor belched out a thick cloud of sickly black smoke. The bird was damaged, but still its landing gear lifted gingerly off the pad, and the aircraft was officially flying. Fairlight’s pistol chose that moment to run out of energy, and so he pulled his arm back and hurled the thing at the rotor hub. It struck a blade and exploded into fragments as Fairlight forced himself up to his feet.

From his belt he produced a dull green cylinder with tiny clusters of knobs on the ends. His glove barely fit the safety ring on the end, but when he pulled it free the ends of the device lit up with the same piercing light as the emitters on plasma pistols and rifles. Fairlight hurled the grenade up as the Vertibird ascended further skyward, still aiming for the vulnerable rotor hub at the top. The grenade wedged itself into a gap in the housing, a second before Fairlight’s entire field of vision lit up with green.

The Vertibird leaned hard to its damaged side, the tail section passing inches above Fairlight’s head. Bits of metal showered down as the obliterated rotor slammed into the wall of the lift silo. Its wing broken, the crippled beast fell back onto its landing gear, too hard for them to absorb the impact. The struts exploded under the weight of the craft, and the force of only one operational rotor forced the whole body of the thing to spin.

Fairlight dove to avoid the tail section as it snapped back to the left and nearly took his head off for the second time. The other rotor struck the wall, delicate blades shredding themselves to bits against the unforgiving steel wall of the silo. Tortured screams of ruined metal overpowered the sounds of the dying engine, until the rotor mount cracked and fell away from the body of the aircraft. What was left of the engine seized up and died, crashing sideways into the lift surface and breaking up into several more pieces.

Colonel Autumn covered his head as superheated fragments of the destroyed Vertibird landed on the back of his overcoat. The Vertibird’s intact fuselage spun slightly more, snapping off its tail fins against the silo wall before finally coming to rest facing inwards toward the center. A few more clanks sounded as the last few bits of engine fell back down, then the wrecked fuselage rocked back and almost seemed to sigh.

The lift reached the top of the shaft and halted, leaving the Vertibird and the two Enclave officers standing out in the middle of a mountaintop wilderness. Fairlight raised a hand to block out the blinding sunlight until his power armor’s eyepieces had a chance to polarize, and he strode briskly across the lift to the Vertibird. His hand went on the handle, servomotors whined, and the door of the Vertibird ripped effortlessly away like the lid on a can of beans. Autumn watched him reach inside and haul a stunned body that looked like Dr. Anderson out into the light. He shoved the alien to the ground, then pulled back his leg and delivered a firm kick to her gut.

Autumn stood up and drew his pistol, wary of another magical outburst. The alien was on the ground, stunned, and Fairlight was working off all the rage from seeing fellow soldiers getting killed. He swung half a dozen punches into fake-Dr.-Anderson’s ribs before kicking him over onto his front and pinning his head to the ground with a knee. Any sentient creature would realize that another little push and its neck would snap, and if it valued its life it had better remain still.

Queen Chrysalis sighed deeply, feeling the warmth of the sun and smelling the freshness of the air for a fleeting moment before she was inevitably dragged back into the bowels of the underground base. The one in the overcoat, the one in charge, stood over her as before, smug in victory, weapon drawn and pointed at her yet again. She was disoriented, head spinning from the force of the crash, and hadn’t changed form into something that could fight in time. She’d been beaten again, seconds before victory. The aircraft had been in the air, the pilot she’d kidnapped following obediently along with what she told him to. She’d managed to see the sun again...and it all still managed to find a way to come crashing down.

“That’s a neat little trick you’ve got there,” Colonel Autumn said. “I hope for your sake you decide to explain to us how it works, or else the real Dr. Anderson will be taking guesses based on examining slices of your brain.”

Chrysalis tried to look intimidating, forcing a scowl and struggling a bit against the immovable block of metal that straddled her. But she was broken. She had no other options left. She was magically and physically exhausted, and weapons were pointed at her head. She’d lost. Again.

Colonel Autumn tossed the pistol over to Fairlight, who pressed the familiar and uncomfortable barrel of the thing against her assumed skin’s temple. Autumn himself stepped over to a small control panel sticking up slightly from the ground, and activated the lift. The whole mass of the thing heaved and began to descend. The sound of gears grinding rang in Chrysalis’s ears, and Autumn went back over to the wrecked Vertibird to check on the pilot.

Chrysalis watched the shadow of the rim of the silo grow steadily longer, creeping towards her as the platform dropped down into the abyss. She closed her eyes as it washed over her, and she was in shadow once more.

Chapter 3

Colonel Autumn sighed as he leaned back in his chair, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. He blinked and returned his hand to the warmth of his coffee mug, a comforting contrast to the chill of the climate-controlled office. It was a wonder that a facility with so many people, computers, and machinery generating heat could be so frigid, especially considering the blistering wasteland above.

“Colonel, good morning!” the president practically sang over the intercom. Autumn brought the mug to his lips to excuse himself from replying. That voice was too cheery to be masking anything but criticism.

“Mr. President.” Autumn finally responded. “This is about the purifier?”

“Yes it is. It seems you’re about to get your wish, Colonel—there’s a camp of super mutants near the river, and they’ve been scouting the area around the Jefferson Memorial for the past few days. I think they’re about to make a move for it. When they do, be it in a couple days or a couple hours, we can probably consider the purifier lost for good.”

“That’s exactly why I didn’t want to tie men down there in the first place.” Autumn dismissed. “DC’s too far and too volatile to get involved with at the moment. Besides, you agreed with me about waiting until we had evidence.”

“We may just have that, Colonel. I’m sure you remember the old project leader, who we caught snooping around in a Vault suit the other day? An eyebot just picked him up leaving Rivet City and heading back to the purifier. If you hurry, you should be able to catch him.”

“And do what with him? Bring him back here for questioning?”

“Precisely. Take Forrester with you, and have him look at the purifier while you’re there. It’s not exactly his area of expertise, but he should be able to tell us if the purifier’s worth our time.”

Autumn sipped his coffee. “I’m not taking a whole company of men down there to fortify the purifier based only on a hunch, Mr. President,” he declared. “It’s too great a risk.”

“Of course! Of course!” If Eden had hands, he would have thrown them up in dramatic surrender as he smiled and backed away. “But if the old project lead is going to be at the purifier in another half hour or so, then now’s the best window of opportunity we can possibly expect, especially with the imminent threat of super mutants taking over the memorial again.”

“When do you think that’ll happen?”

“It’s hard to say. It could be days, or it could be hours. They’ve been sniffing around there since Sunday afternoon. The point is, we’ve got to check out the purifier now, and see for ourselves if it has any potential. If it does, then you can decide whether occupying and fortifying it is worthwhile. If not, then you can simply grab the scientist and leave the memorial to the super mutants. It’s entirely up to you.”

Autumn stood up and opened the locker nearest his bed. “If it’ll put this thing to bed for good, then I’m in.” He took his pistol from the locker and slid it into the holster under his overcoat. “So long as you promise not to keep obsessing about it if this thing turns out to be a giant paperweight.”

Eden let out a long sigh. “Colonel… I don’t mind that we disagree on certain things. I’d even say that being forced to defend my position from your objections is downright helpful, some of the time. But please, if we’re going to argue over what is and isn’t a waste of time, you might want to make sure your own projects show promise before coming after mine.”

“Sir, the—”

“We’ve got more important things to do than argue, Colonel,” Eden said with the authoritative, end-of-discussion seriousness he reserved for when he was truly becoming angry. “I’ll tell Major Fairlight and Dr. Forrester to get a team together and meet you in the hangar. I think we’ve still got one or two Vertibirds that your precious alien hasn’t destroyed. So get down there, check out the purifier, and prove me wrong so I can start calling your projects a giant waste of time instead.”

“Yes, sir,” Autumn grumbled, slipping a few spare clips under his overcoat before ducking out of the room.

Eden’s words still echoed in Autumn’s head as his Vertibird flew low over Arlington. Dr. Forrester and a teenage lab assistant whose name tag read “Charlie” accompanied him, with Fairlight and three other soldiers riding in the second bird on his wing. The Enclave had been stepping up its activities lately, but this was the first daylight operation they’d undertaken in months. More than a few raider bands in the DC area had access to missile launchers and other military hardware that they’d plundered from Army forts and outposts. The idiot savages would shoot at anything that wasn’t one of them, and so it was dangerous to fly too close to ruins and settlements during the day. Today, though, they’d been lucky so far, and the Vertibirds moved fast enough that even if they were fired on they could normally avoid being hit.

Instead, Autumn fixated on Eden’s last remarks—the alien was becoming a waste of time, and had already proven herself incredibly dangerous. Without answers from her, without her cooperation, the wasteful option of killing her and cutting her open became more and more appealing by the day. They then ran the risk of not being able to learn anything about her apparently magical abilities, but at least they could study her chitin and potentially learn some ideas about how to make lighter, more durable power armor. It was better than tying men down on guard duty while she planned her next escape attempt.

As if reading his mind, the wild-haired, bespectacled weapons tech specialist seated beside him spoke up. “You know, I’m surprised to see you pull yourself away from that overgrown insect you’ve got Anderson working on. Have things improved since the weekend?”

“No…” Autumn admitted. “She’s not responded to kindness or threats. Fairlight wants to start beating on her, just for all the damage she caused if not to get her to open up, but Anderson keeps stubbornly insisting against torture.”

“Well, it makes sense,” Forrester contemplated. “Effective torture requires almost as much knowledge of a subject’s anatomy as medicine. You have to know how to inflict pain without causing serious wounds, or at least wounds you can’t easily treat on the spot. If you just go around bludgeoning a subject until they speak, you run the risk of damaging their internal organs and making them bleed to death on the inside. Good torture is subtle, and every bit as psychological as it is physiological. Without a solid knowledge of how her body and mind operate, you can’t effectively torture her. And since a solid knowledge of her body and mind is the intended goal of your interrogation, you’re doomed to go in circles forever.”

Autumn shrugged. “We’re not getting anywhere with her, though. Anderson tried talking gently to her, and she just stared at him until he gave up. Fairlight pointed guns in her face, and she didn’t even blink. We tried starving her in isolation for a day, then offering food only if she was willing to talk… nothing’s worked. The only time any of us have heard her speak was when she was impersonating Anderson.”

“Hmm…” Forrester frowned. He opened his mouth to say something else, but the Vertibird’s pilot waved over his shoulder to get Autumn’s attention. “Colonel, sorry to interrupt. The President just contacted us over the radio. He says it’s urgent.”

“Patch it through the intercom,” Autumn instructed. The pilot mumbled something in the way of affirmation, and Eden’s voice filled the cramped aircraft cabin.

“Colonel, we’ve got a problem,” he said simply. “I’m looking at the image from our eyebot in the area, and the super mutants are rallying in the middle of their camp. They’re going to move on the purifier any minute.”

“We’re still a minute or so out,” Autumn guessed. “What do you want us to do? We don’t have enough men to take them head-on.”

“I can buy you a little bit of time with an eyebot,” Eden suggested, “so we can still proceed as planned. We had three in the Jefferson Memorial area, but a bunch of idiot raiders ambushed one and disabled it. I sent another to drive them off, maybe have you recover the wreckage while you were in the area, but they got that one, too. If you’re willing to go in blind, I can detonate the last one’s suicide charge close to the wall of the super mutant camp, near where they keep the prisoners. When they scatter, the mutants might waste time chasing them around and give you enough time to make an extraction. Just get the scientist out of there, take a quick peek at the purifier, and get out. It’s not ideal, but we can’t just give up on this and let super mutants kill the expert.”

“Do it,” Autumn agreed, ignoring the wide-eyed expression on the teenager sitting opposite him. “Pilot, get the other bird on intercom.” The pilot tapped a few controls on his console, and the speakers crackled with static.

“Fairlight,” came the answer a moment later.

“Major, change of plans. Super mutants are about to move, so we’ve got to make this fast. I still want Forrester to take a look at the purifier if we can, but the priority is extracting the scientist. We can’t let his knowledge die with the super mutants.”

“Understood, Colonel. We’ll hit the memorial as soon as we touch down.”

“Ten seconds!” the pilot announced. Autumn fought to stand as the Vertibird’s floor tilted hard. The familiar groan of hydraulics signaled the deployment of the landing gear and the angling of the rotors as the aircraft swooped in to land. A second later, the Vertibird lurched, and Autumn pushed open the door. His boots hit the dirt, and a hand went instinctively up to shield his eyes from the dust whipped up by the downdraft. The last of the soldiers from the other bird was already out, and with a whine from its rotors it ascended back into the sky.

“Stack up on me!” Fairlight shouted to his squad, his voice barely audible over the roar of the Vertibird engines. “We breach on my mark!”

Autumn heard two more pairs of boots crunch into the soil behind him, and he turned to stop the younger lab tech.

“You, stay out here and keep watch. You see any movement from the other side of that bridge, you stick your head inside and start shouting. Alright?”

“Uh…sure…yes, sir,” he hesitated. Autumn shot him a stern look.

“Kid, we don’t have the luxury of cowardice right now. We’ve got no idea how much time Eden’s bought us with that eyebot, and there’s only one way in and out of this memorial. I need you to step it up here. Can you do that?”

“Yes, sir,” he said with marginally more conviction. He was weak, and it was a miracle he was still alive in an environment as results-oriented as Raven Rock, but he was what Forrester had dragged along, and their only real option.

Fairlight kicked in the memorial’s door, and the four of them stormed inside. “Hallway, clear!” someone shouted, and four pairs of power armored boots thundered into the darkness. Autumn drew his pistol and followed, adrenaline coursing through his veins and Forrester close on his heels. The last traces of Vertibird rotor noise trailed off, and Autumn was left with nothing but the pounding of boots and his own breathing.

The corridor was typical faded Washington splendor; the high ceiling was cracked and filthy, the walls looked badly decayed, and various broken bits of debris littered the floor. Autumn pressed forward down the slope, towards a three-way intersection. The path ahead was almost completely blocked with debris, and the resonant, howling bass note coming from further beyond the piled junk gave the impression of a ventilation tunnel. That left right as the only option, towards the gift shop and small museum built into the base of the memorial.

A boot hit a door further ahead. “Restrooms, clear!”

“All clear! Move up!”

Servomotors whined and boots stomped in cadence, and Autumn followed the noise of the assault squad through what used to be the main lobby area. It’d been fortified with sandbags, and dust-covered shell casings littered the floor. Anywhere else, these signs of battle would have been too commonplace to bother paying attention to, but this was meant to be a scientific installation with unrealized humanitarian goals at heart. Gunfire and cutting edge science went together about as well as twenty years of neglect and cutting age science. As the soldiers swept through the museum ahead, Autumn feared what was to come.

“Come on,” he urged Forrester, and the two of them hurried to catch up with Fairlight’s team. With every shouted “Clear!”, he was growing more and more perplexed. Eden had tagged the project lead heading back to the purifier. They’d arrived no more than twenty minutes after he was predicted to show up, and yet he was apparently not here.

“All clear, Major,” one of the soldiers reported as he stepped back into the museum from the rotunda.

“He’s not here?” Autumn asked, stepping over the remnants of a desk.

Fairlight shook his head. Except for the distant, echoed rumbling of water, the entire facility was silent. “Looks that way, sir.”

“Are we too late, or too early?” Autumn leaned against the desk. “We can’t exactly afford to wait around for him to get here.”

Forrester looked up from a giant, refrigerator-sized computer he was studying. “This all looks like data storage, for project notes and experiment results. Doesn’t look like much of it’s working, either.”

“Can we proceed without the data?”

“Well, yes, but it’ll set us back a long way if we can’t rely on their experience. We should check out the rotunda. No sense worrying about twenty-year-old data if the whole project’s a bust.”

Fairlight led them into the memorial’s central room, and Forrester stifled a gasp. The Rivet City scientists had transformed the rotunda into an enormous water tank, surrounded by all sorts of equipment, computers, and power cables. This was surely the heart of the whole operation, the purifier itself.

Colonel Autumn approached the imposing thing, stepping carefully up the stairs into the glass-encased central ring. The rusted floor creaked under his weight, and an omnipresent far-off rumbling reminded him that the machine’s structure had likely been severely compromised. After two decades of direct contact with water with no maintenance of any kind, it was a wonder the thing was still standing.

Through the sturdy, reinforced glass of the water tank, various chunks of garbage swam in a greenish sea of filthy, stagnant water. A hazy, silhouetted figure stood perfectly still in the center, and Autumn smirked uneasily; one of the nation’s architects and most respected historical figures was symbolically drowning in two decades’ worth of irradiated muck.

“Colonel, this is…creative,” said Forrester, who’d found a crude sketch of the memorial and all its modifications. “It looks like the pumping equipment in the memorial’s lower levels existed well before the war, and they’ve converted it to pump water directly into the rotunda. The actual purifier was erected on-site, and they’ve solved the problem of powering the thing by hooking up a line of things marked ‘fusion cells.’ If they’re talking about the microfusion energy cells used in cars before the war, then they could theoretically run the purifier for years, although I’m surprised they managed to get this many operational. Most car cells haven’t stood up very well to the elements.”

“Hmm.” Most of Forrester’s technical run-down didn’t interest Autumn, but the mention of lower levels did. “Major, the memorial has lower levels beneath the museum basement. It’s possible our man could be hiding down there.”

“Yes sir,” Fairlight’s muffled voice responded. “Some of these doors are blocked with chairs, waste bins, benches, that sort of thing. We’ll look for a way down.”

Autumn frowned. “As far as we know, there’s just the one scientist. If he’s down there, someone barricaded him inside.”

“Maybe there’s another entrance, like a maintenance access to the sewer system,” Forrester suggested. “The sort of flood control equipment they’d need to run a purifier this large… it wouldn’t make sense if it was just built for the memorial. It’s got to be part of a larger system.”

“Let’s see about that basement, then,” said Autumn, impatiently checking his watch, “unless there’s more to see up here.” He took a step towards the airlock.

Forrester quickly glanced around the rotunda again. “No… I don’t think so, not without getting a whole team in here. Except—” he stopped to pick up a holotape someone had left atop a computer. “No dust. This is recent. Might have a clue to our scientist’s current whereabouts.”

“Good work,” Autumn nodded, stepping down from the airlock. “We’ll give that a listen when we get back to Raven Rock. Major! Do we have a basement door yet?”

Autumn came through the museum door in time to see an Enclave soldier kick over a rusted file cabinet with a heavy wooden bench propped atop it. The cabinet coughed up a storm of ancient paperwork that swirled across the floor, and the bench merely crumbled into splinters. Fairlight kicked apart the half of it that survived, and yanked the door open to reveal a flight of stairs. Even from across the room, Autumn could see a welcoming incandescence trickling up from below. It was clear the basement was hardly abandoned.

“Yes, Colonel, we do,” Fairlight answered the earlier question. “We haven’t found any beds, yet, either, so I assume living quarters are downstairs as well.”

“Good work, Major,” Autumn almost smiled. “Have your men search the basement, and—”

“Colonel Autumn!” Hurried footsteps echoed off the hard stone walls as someone frantically sprinted down the memorial’s corridors. “Colonel Autumn!”

“Oh, no.”

The lab assistant he’d put on lookout duty reached the museum, panting heavily. “Colonel Autumn, they’re…” he shrugged and weakly pointed a thumb over his shoulder. “They’re coming over the bridge.”

It was like someone had parked a Vertibird on Autumn’s chest. They were so close to finding what they’d come for, but Eden’s eyebot ruse hadn’t bought quite enough time. They had to abort, and they had to do it fast.

“Alright, everyone out!” he ordered. “Back out through the gift shop, double time! Major, signal the Vertibirds for extraction.”

“Um, Colonel, what about what I said earlier, about a way out through the lower—”

“Even if it exists, it might be caved in. We can’t take that chance. Out.”

“But sir…” it was Fairlight’s turn to object. “What if the scientist’s down there? You want to just leave him for the super mutants?”

Autumn ran a worried hand through his hair. He could practically hear the marching super mutants coming to slaughter them in the close quarters. They had seconds, at best. No time to search the basement, but enough time to warn anyone hiding below. He stuck his head through the door and tried to listen for any hint of movement, but nothing stood out.

“This is Colonel Augustus Autumn of the Enclave,” he announced down the stairs, the echo of his voice filling him with confidence that anyone hiding below would surely hear him. “In a matter of minutes, this facility will be overrun by super mutants. We can protect you if you come with us, but we have to leave now.”

Still there was silence. No voices, no footsteps, no clattering of objects knocked to the floor. The basement seemed to be empty. Fairlight shook his head.

“Suit yourself,” Autumn resigned. “Alright, we’ve wasted enough time. Move!”

Fairlight’s boot blasted open the door to the outside, and the four men in power armor rushed out into the blinding DC sun. Already, the horde of mutants was coming around the side of the memorial. A line of lightly-armored, hammer-toting mutants led the march, followed up by riflemen and heavy gunners. A handful of blackened stumps blocked the mutants’ line of sight, but they didn’t have much time. Fairlight gestured for everyone to crouch, and try to hide up against the side of the memorial stairs.

“Alright, listen up,” he said. “They haven’t seen us yet. Keep low, move fast, and head up the ramp here. We’ll double back around and have the Vertibirds pick us up on the open ground behind the memorial.”

Autumn nodded his agreement, and Fairlight led them forward. His whole body felt tense; he knew he’d hear the shouting of super mutants any minute. A group of seven humans was hardly capable of sneaking through anywhere easily, and he was sure that they’d be seen.

Instead, it was the hum of Vertibird rotors that betrayed them. Just as Fairlight was about to tell their ride out of here to hold off until they’d finished circling the memorial, the distant rumble of engines drew the mutants’ attention. Autumn reached the top of the rusting yellow fortification spanning the memorial steps, and turned to see a few dozen bald orange heads turning in all directions. A shirtless mutant wielding a sledgehammer figured out the sound was coming from across the tidal basin, and when he looked up to the memorial he locked eyes with Colonel Autumn.

He howled, and the whole group turned to see what he’d seen. Seven new prisoners, to replace some of the ones they’d lost. Immediately, without any officer to give the order or leader to take the first step, the whole shrieking mass of them broke into an all-out charge. The Vertibirds were halfway across the basin, seconds away from landing, but Fairlight knew there was no way they’d beat the super mutant charge.

“Grenades,” he ordered. He pulled one of the grenades from his belt, primed the charge, and hurled the thing at the feet of the forward ranks, his men doing the same. The world shook beneath their feet as all four grenades detonated into a blinding neon flash.

Molten plasma sprayed everywhere, and their hellish roars changed instantly into agonized screams. Two of the mutants exploded into goo on the spot, and another stumbled forward to dive face-first into the dirt. Fairlight’s grenade had gone off right beside him, and the burst of plasma had instantly melted his entire leg. Another body slumped backwards, smoke pouring out of its collapsing chest and face. The front line had been obliterated, and all the following mutants paused their charge and backpedaled to regroup.

Fairlight wasted no time in opening fire with his rifle, blindly hurling bolts into the dissipating grenade flash. A few more mutants went down, their toughened skin useless against superheated plasma. A rifle shot pinged harmlessly off his armored pauldron, and Fairlight turned to send a return shot into the sniper’s shooting arm.

Wind gusted down over the group, and the first Vertibird angled itself in to land. The other circled around into a wide arc, sweeping low over the basin again to give its partner time to load up. Autumn shielded his face from the wind and dust and ran over toward the site the bird had chosen to land. More bullets ricocheted off the railings, dangerously close to ending him.

“Whoa, get down!” one of Fairlight’s men shouted behind him, his warning followed immediately by the unmistakable fwoosh of a rocket launcher being fired. The projectile flew right under the Vertibird, narrowly missing its rotor and flying off over the basin. A foot higher, and the Vertibird would have been blown apart.

“It’s too hot! You can’t land!” Fairlight shouted over the radio in his helmet. The pilot complied and pulled up before the mutants could load another shot. Autumn watched it ascend, cursing under his breath. They needed to get out of here, and fast.

“Yaaah!” screamed a super mutant, drawing Autumn’s attention back to the ramp. A mutant wearing car parts and road signs for armor broke through the shooting and charged up the ramp, swinging a sledgehammer wildly in front of him. Plasma bolts struck him all over, melting huge sores into his flesh and armor, but he got in a hard sideways swing at Fairlight before the others brought him down.

Fairlight toppled into the badly decayed railing, nearly going right through it. The mutant fell on top of him, finally done in by the last plasma bolt to the back of his head. The breach threw the other soldiers off balance, and more mutants were storming up the ramp in no time.

“Fall back!” Fairlight kicked the carcass off himself and hurried to his feet. “Jackson, throw a grenade!”

Fairlight rushed back off the line and crouched next to the Colonel and the others. The grenade went off behind him, another blinding flash of molten plasma buying them a bit more breathing room. Jackson and the other two backed up, surrendering the ramp and hoping it would create enough of a bottleneck to hold off the attack for long enough.

“Major, we need out of here, now,” Autumn insisted. “Take out the one with the launcher and we can call the Vertibird back.”

Fairlight shook his head. “Better plan, Colonel. The four of us can fall back to the other ramp, and have the bird pick us up on the grass over there. These guys are running low on ammo, but we’ve got about half a dozen grenades between us. They fall back slower than we run to cover our exit, the mutants bottleneck up the ramp, and our guys hit ‘em again and again with grenades. With any luck, they’ll break on that defense and regroup, and in that window we’ll have the other bird pull them out. Good?”

“We’re making three men stand and fight off a small army so that we can make a run for it?” Forrester objected.

“Yes, so you damn well better appreciate their efforts. Colonel?”

Before Autumn could even answer, one of Fairlight’s men got a lucky hit on the mutant carrying the missile launcher. A plasma bolt took off the side of his neck, and in his stunned confusion he fired the launcher directly into the back of the mutant standing in front of him. Half the horde exploded, flinging various bits of blood and gore and something that looked like a leg into the sky. The mutants just outside the blast radius were knocked over by the shockwave, and the rest of them couldn’t help but look for the source of the carnage in shocked confusion. If ever there was going to be a pause to their attack, it was now.

“Go! Now!” Fairlight ordered, dragging Forrester to his feet and shoving him down the walkway. He took the two grenades from his belt and handed them to Jackson. “Fall back slow, hit ‘em with these. Buy yourself a window to get clear.”

Jackson nodded, and prepared to throw the first of the grenades. Fairlight left them there, and ran to catch up with the others.

“Take point, Major,” Autumn insisted, pushing Fairlight to the head of the group, “in case they’ve gotten smart and tried to flank us.”

They hadn’t. Explosions, gunfire, and the shrieking of wounded super mutants came from behind them, but the east side of the memorial was completely deserted. Fairlight told the pilots the plan over the radio, and the first of the pair was already waiting for them, its downdraft whipping up the dead grass and loose trash and flinging it all over the place.

Another two explosions went off in rapid succession behind them. Jackson’s voice came over the radio.

“Major, we’ve got a window. We’re pulling out once the bird gets here.”

“Understood. We’ve got enough of a lead on them that we should be in the clear.”

Fairlight ran down the ramp and across the broken ground to the Vertibird, checking from side to side for super mutants. He pulled open the door, then crouched down and took aim back up the ramp where they’d come from. They didn’t have long before mutants were on them, but it was long enough for Autumn, Forrester, and Charlie to climb up into the safety of the Vertibird.

Fairlight went in last, closing the door behind him. The rotors spun up faster, hydraulics whined in the wings, and the aircraft rocked back and to the right. They were airborne, home free, able to finally breathe a sigh of relief on the way back to base…

“Uh, Colonel, we’ve got a problem,” the pilot spoke up.

“What is it?”

“Take a look out the side door, 10 o’clock.”

Fairlight stood up and crossed the Vertibird’s cramped interior, pushing open the other door. “Oh, shit.”

“What is it?” Autumn leaned over to see outside. The other Vertibird had apparently already made its pickup, but a gigantic super mutant had reached it before it could fly away. He stood head and shoulders above the others and wore the hood of a car as a chestplate. His huge hands had the tail of the Vertibird in a death grip, the muscles in his arms bulging with the strain of holding the bird down. Both rotors were locked forward, straining hard against him as he desperately pulled backwards to bring the Vertibird in. Already weighed down by three soldiers in heavy power armor, there was no way the thing was getting free on its own.

Hydraulics whined as the landing gear went down. “I’ll set you down on the other side of that structure, and—”

“No,” Fairlight stopped him. “There’s no time. Hold steady here, and I’ll take the shot.”

“I’ll do what I can.” The bird leveled out, maybe two hundred feet above the tidal basin. For the most part, the pilot held the bird steady, but there was only so much he could do. The vibration from the engines and the wind rushing by were impossible to fully compensate for.

“Rifle,” Fairlight demanded, pointing to the plasma rifle beside his seat. “Now.”

Two regular mutants grabbed the larger one’s torso and added their strength to his. Another was busy clearing the jam in his hunting rifle so he could fire it again, at which point he would presumably try to shoot out the engines.

Good luck with that, buddy, Fairlight nervously smirked under his helmet. Charlie handed him the rifle, and he brought it to his shoulder. He took aim, placing the oversized super mutant’s upper chest right in line with his sights. Plasma rifles were more accurate than most energy weapons, but they were designed for medium-range stopping power over long-range precision.

Fairlight’s finger tensed on the trigger.

Then a mutant with a minigun put a whole bunch of rounds into the Vertibird’s side, and the pilot yanked the stick hard to the right. Fairlight went over backwards, losing grip on the rifle and slamming hard into the bench he’d been seated at previously. Then the Vertibird rolled back left, and Fairlight’s mind was filled with images of the only rifle they had sliding right out the side of the aircraft and into the tidal basin.

He jumped for it, catching the stock and wrapping his free hand around the back of the pilot’s chair. The landing knocked the spare microfusion cells from his belt, and he had no free hands to stop them from rolling away. Something else slid across the floor, too, but Fairlight’s face was pressed into the back of the pilot’s chair and he couldn’t see what it was. Then the scraping stopped, and that something went out the door.

“Charlie!” Forrester yelled, practically leaping across the Vertibird to the door. Fairlight picked himself up and took a single sideways glance out the door. Charlie had gone out, but somehow he’d managed to grab onto the extended landing gear. Forrester reached out for him, but it was too far. He’d gone down below the bottom of the hull itself, and just barely snagged the tire with both hands. He was panicking, understandably terrified by the idea of dangling out the side of a Vertibird, and obviously letting the fear get the better of. Rather than calm down and attempt to climb back inside, which felt risky as it meant temporarily taking a hand away from the relative safety of the landing gear, he was going to do what everyone else unfit for military service did—shriek and wail and kick his legs around until someone more capable stepped in to help.

“Take us lower,” Fairlight told the pilot, as Autumn joined Forrester at the left side. “And turn us around. Quick, before that idiot starts shooting again.”

The Vertibird spun, and Charlie’s panicked cries from below grew more intense. Forrester was saying something to try and calm him down, but Fairlight was singularly focused on his task and didn’t fully hear it. He pushed open the other door, shouldered his rifle, took aim, and fired. The bolt hit the super mutant right in the forearm, melting through the toughened skin and boiling away the blood. The pain was too unbearable for him to endure, and the Vertibird tail slipped from his grasp.

It flew up, rocketing away from the Jefferson Memorial and back into the safety of the sky. Fairlight turned and fired again, this time aiming at the minigun-toting mutant standing further down along the scaffold. The plasma bolt strayed further off course this time, hitting the mutant in the side of the calf. Even from high up, it was obviously no more than a graze, as the mutant merely fell to his knee for a moment before recovering. Fairlight took aim at his upper torso and pulled the trigger one more time, but the rifle did nothing; its microfusion cell had run dry.

“I’m slipping!” Fairlight heard the kid cry.

“Hold on, we’re gonna get you back up here,” Forrester promised.

Grumbling under his breath, Fairlight set the rifle back against the inside wall, pulling the door closed behind him. He took the 10-millimeter SMG off the wall beside the pilot’s chair—a personal defense weapon in case the Vertibird went down—and took one huge step across the width of the Vertibird’s interior. The clomp of his boot and the accompanying hiss of its servos made Forrester look up, probably hoping he’d turn over his rifle so they could dangle it over the side of the Vertibird for an hour trying to pull Charlie up with it.

Instead, he brought up the SMG and took aim. He fired once, and a spurt of blood flew from Charlie’s forearm. The kid yelped and let go, falling away from the Vertibird and down towards the greenish waters of the tidal basin. He fell down, flailing all his limbs about in a panic, and hit the water on his back. The splash exploded out in all directions, and he disappeared beneath the foam.

“What the fuck did you do that for?!” Forrester yelled, holding back a punch when he realized he’d only hurt himself by punching power armor. “You shot him!”

“Pilot, come about and buzz the shoreline, fast and low,” Fairlight ordered, ignoring Forrester completely. Perhaps out of fear of being shot next, or perhaps out of genuine loyalty, the pilot complied. Fairlight pushed Forrester aside and took aim out the open door as the Vertibird swayed and rocked into its run. Gunfire peppered the Vertibird’s hull once more, two rounds from the minigun finding the open door and pinging off Fairlight’s armor. He took aim on the ugly orange bastard and let loose with the SMG. The SMG ate through its banana clip in seconds, flinging a torrent of shell casings all over the aircraft’s interior. Thick, red spurts erupted from the mutant’s neck, shoulder, and abdomen, and he went howling down to the floor. Potshots from the other mutants struck the Vertibird at odd intervals, but none of the other mutants carried anything as dangerous as the minigun.

“Major, what the hell were you thinking?” Autumn growled.

Fairlight straightened up immediately. “Sir, the—”

“Sit down, Major,” he ordered; in full armor, Fairlight was taller, and it was exceptionally difficult to convincingly berate someone taller than oneself, even for an imposing presence like Colonel Autumn. Fairlight understood that, and so he sat.

“Sir, the Vertibird was under heavy fire. I had no choice.”

“You had ‘no choice’ but to shoot one of our own men?”

“Sir, I wasn’t trying to hit him. I was aiming for the landing strut, and I missed. You know how inaccurate 10-mil—”

“You could have shot him in the head!” Forrester yelled.

Autumn raised a hand, silencing him. Forrester clenched his fists, frustrated rage spreading across his face. But he understood that Major Fairlight actually outranked him, if they were to get technical about things, and so it was Autumn’s place to do the talking. He forced a long, exasperated sigh, and threw up his hands.

“He makes a point, Major.”

“Yes, sir. I was only trying to get him to let go, sir. Frighten him.”

“Why?”

“We were low over the water, the deepest part of the basin. The other Vertibird was clear, but we had a heavy gunner standing and my first shot only clipped him in the leg. My rifle was empty, and I lost the rest of my ammo when Charlie fell out. We had to get in closer to the shore for the SMG to be effective, and if he’d fallen into shallower water he’d be dead for sure. He made it, right?”

Autumn looked back out the door, following Forrester’s gaze to the patch of water behind them. Charlie was splashing around, treading water as the second Vertibird flew in low to retrieve him. A volley of plasma bolts flew off at the mutants while a power armor glove reached down towards the water. The belly of the Vertibird nearly dipped into the water, but the soldier finally managed to grab Charlie’s arm and hoist him into the Vertibird. The doors closed, and the aircraft tilted its rotors to fly back northwest.

The pilot looked over his shoulder. “Colonel! Other bird just called on the radio, said the kid’s shaken but otherwise fine. Bullet only grazed him, and the water was more than deep enough to break his fall.”

“But he has an open wound,” Forrester reminded them. “He just got it rinsed out with irradiated, polluted basin water!”

“Like I said, sir, I wasn’t aiming for him. I just wanted him to drop off there so he wouldn’t be dangling off the side of the bird for the gun run. Even if he managed to hold on, he’d have been an easy target for the mutants. We didn’t have time to explain that all to him, so I took a shot to scare him into letting go.”

Autumn shook his head. “You’re still responsible for shooting another member of the Enclave in the arm, deliberately, and dropping him into irradiated water. You think that’s justified?”

Fairlight hesitated for a minute, smirking nervously under his helmet. “Sir, permission to speak freely?”

“When has that ever stopped you before?” Autumn shrugged.

Fairlight leaned forward, putting his hands on his knees. “Sir, if I hadn’t shot Charlie in the arm, we’d all be dead right now. We can give the kid some RadAway and antibiotics can’t we?”

“What if you’d hit him in the head?” Autumn dodged the question. “With that model gun and those conditions, it wouldn’t be unheard of.”

“Sir, I’d tell you the same thing. Better to shoot the kid dead and get away than try and save him and lose the whole Vertibird. When you’re in a bad situation like that, you sometimes have to make sacrifices to save the whole. You told me that, sir, I thought for sure you’d understand.”

“Oh, I understand, Major.” Autumn took a seat directly opposite. “But the Enclave has no use for soldiers it can’t trust, and I can’t have you shooting everything on sight and claiming it was a ‘sacrifice.’”

Fairlight stared at him for a moment. The way he’d said it, that immediate mention of broad absolutes, Fairlight could tell he wasn’t just talking about the one event. He probably even agreed with the decision, and would likely have done the same himself if their positions were swapped, but the colonel was out for any bit of leverage he could get. Fairlight sighed.

“Do you want to have another conversation about that alien thing, Colonel?”

“No, I think I’ve made my point. We’ll deal with all this later. For now, I’m more interested in talking with Dr. Forrester about the purifier.”

Forrester looked incredulous. “What? You’re just gonna… after he—”

“I know what he did, and we’ll handle it. Please, take a seat.”

“Fine.” Forrester reluctantly complied. “What do you want me to say?”

“Do you think it’ll work?”

He shrugged. “I… I suppose it shows some promise.”

“Go on.”

Forrester took a deep breath, forcing the unpleasantness with Charlie from his mind so he could focus on the science of the purifier. “Well,” he began, “in theory it seems pretty simple, but right away I can see a few problems. Obviously that holding tank in the rotunda isn’t big enough to hold and purify all the water in the basin at once, so they’ll have to pump water in, purify, it, and let it back out. The problem with that is you’ll run into a law of diminishing returns pretty fast. Assuming you mix the basin up and distribute the water evenly, and the purifier itself can handle, say, 1% of the total volume of the basin at any given time, then the second batch of water you pump through will only be about 99% irradiated. With every run, you’re drawing some of what you just purified right back into the tank, and wasting time re-purifying it. Ironically, the cleaner the basin is, the less clean water the purifier is able to put out.

“Then that’s made even worse by the intakes and outlets being located directly next to each other. Without something to distribute water around the basin better, you’ll have pockets of radiation clustering together on the far side, never even going near the purifier, while it sits there wasting power and running the same water through over and over again. Totally speculating based on numbers I’m pretty much inventing on the spot… I’d say it’ll be six months of operation before the basin is drinkable, and several years before radiation is down to trace levels.

“And at that rate, you’ll be losing quite a bit of water to evaporation. You two know the weather around here; we live in a blasted desert, where seasons don’t really mean much. August, October, February… that sun never really goes away, and it’ll be stealing a lot of water away from the basin every single day. The only way to get it back is to open the inlet gates and draw water in from the Potomac, which is heavily irradiated just like the basin itself. It’s… I see why they never got it working, Colonel. Even a brief glance at the thing with super mutants breathing down my neck, and I’m wondering what the hell they were thinking.

“Still, though,” he shrugged, “I think it’s got promise.”

“After all that, you’re going to say it’s got promise?” Fairlight scoffed. “Maybe strategically, if we wanted to go to war with the Brotherhood, but as a purifier?”

“No, no, no,” Forrester waved a hand, “The purifier’s fine, there’s nothing wrong with it. Or, well, I’m sure there’s been some damage in the past two decades, but the concept is absolutely solid. You take me back there, clear out the mutants, I can have it making clean water for you in a week, tops. The problem is that it’s meant to purify the Tidal Basin, the whole thing, which just isn’t possible with a facility as small—and yes, I’m calling the Jefferson Memorial ‘small’—as what they’ve got. The pipes, the sunlight, the flow of radiation from the Potomac, the law of diminishing returns. It’s a distribution problem more than a manufacturing problem, if that makes any sense. Unless you can make the water magic, and cure radiation in all the other water it touches once it leaves the purifier, clean surface drinking water just isn’t something that purifier is capable of producing in any reasonable length of time.

“Instead, we can bottle it. I didn’t take a good enough look at their outlet pipes, admittedly, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s already outfitted with the equipment we’d need. If it’s not, we can build it. Rig the purifier to funnel clean water into barrels, then cart those around where they’re needed. We’ve got a whole fleet of Vertibirds that basically just sit around underground for most of the time, and every one of those could hold a lot of water. If we trade the fantastical pipe dream—literally—of purifying the whole basin, we can get a much more practical result.”

“I’m all for practicality, Doctor.” Autumn nodded, already running through the logistics in his mind. “Getting enough intact barrels might be difficult, but we could set up distribution centers in all the major towns. The people of the Capital Wasteland would see their government taking action; they’d have to come to us for clean water.”

“That sure beats sitting on our asses in Raven Rock,” said Fairlight.

“Right now, all the wasteland knows of the Enclave is Eden’s voice on the radio. We don’t have the presence or the manpower to impose law upon them, if we can bring them water…”

“This is all getting ahead of ourselves, Colonel,” Forrester reminded him. “The purifier’s just been occupied by a couple dozen super mutants, and they’re not going to be leaving anytime soon. I should be able to get it working again, provided they don’t trash the place while they’re in there. But I can’t guarantee anything, even if you cleared the place out.”

“So what should I tell the president?”

“If you ask me—which you just did—I say we sit on this. Tell Eden it might be a viable option, or that it at least looks good on paper. But, we never found the scientist from the original team, so it’s possible the Brotherhood or Rivet City are still working on it. You know the Brotherhood will be quick to jump on it if they think it’ll help the poor, defenseless wastelanders, so I say we just sit and watch them. Let them clear out the mutants for us, then swoop in and take the place over.”

Autumn couldn’t argue with that. “That sounds like the best plan we’ve got, given the circumstances. I’ll let Eden know, and remind him that it’s his turn to humor me for once.” He turned to the pilot. “Are we on course for Raven Rock?”

“Yes, sir. ETA eleven minutes.”

Autumn leaned back in the uncomfortable seat. Eden’s hunch had been right, more or less. That meant the potential for good things, far down the road, and a lot of told-you-so chiding in the short term. As he sat back and listened to the droning hum of the Vertibird rotors outside, Autumn decided that it was even more crucial to get that alien prisoner talking. The purifier was, best case scenario, some weeks and months from viable. The alien, however, would become immediately useful the instant she broke her silence. If the science behind her telekinetic powers or shape-shifting capability could be understood, they’d have plenty of time to adapt them into their own technology and further stack the odds for their inevitable scrap with the Brotherhood over the purifier. At the very least, it might give them some sort of edge over the aliens themselves, if they ever took a more violent interest in humanity. All she had to do was talk, and surely she couldn’t hold out in silence much longer.

As soon as they landed, he decided, it was time to get back to work.

Chapter 4

Dr. Anderson cautiously advanced into the middle of Queen Chrysalis’s cell, pushing a squeaky-wheeled food cart with the same mismatched jumble of choices they’d offered yesterday. The creature before him may as well have been a lifeless statue, the way she sat so impossibly still and only occasionally turned her head to track whatever her visitors were doing. Even seated, her eyes were level with Anderson’s, and they stared unblinking into his, somehow managing to be simultaneously curious and apathetic as he announced his purpose.

“We’ve got, uh… got some food for you,” he struggled to say. He paused, hoping for a reply but knowing full well he’d get none. The eerie green eyes shifted downward a few degrees, noting the various food items being offered but making no further movements. Still she remained rooted in place, a static object that bore no similarities to the ruthless and savvy shapeshifter that’d flawlessly impersonated him and nearly escaped the base within hours of being hauled in.

“You know, this would be a lot easier if you told us what things on the cart you liked and didn’t like.” He picked up a withered bit of pre-war snack food that may have once resembled cake. “For instance, I’ve never been much of a chocolate guy. If it was me in the cell, I’d be asking for a bit less Fancy Lads and a bit more potato chips. So far it seems like you’re alright with everything, but… you know. Any little information we can get to know you better, we’d love to have.” He tried to twist his lips into a friendly smile, but the whole exchange seemed silly even to him.

Chrysalis looked down at what had been offered to her—some fruit common to most Equestrian climates, a kind of soup she’d never seen outside the Gryphon Kingdom, barely-edible miniature cakes and other junk food that looked to have been sitting around for ages—and wondered how Raven Rock’s food stores could be so high in variety yet low in quality. Still, she said nothing, and merely shifted her eyes back up to meet his.

Anderson smiled genuinely, shaking his head. He was actually starting to wonder if her “natural” form was even capable of speech at all, or if she could only communicate verbally in the voices of other people.

“Sure, go ahead,” he answered her unspoken request to begin, pushing the cart further ahead until it was right in front of her. “I’ll be back for it in an hour.” He turned to leave, but her horn spontaneously erupted in a flash of green light, startling him. He took a big step back, and the guard at the door scrambled to get his rifle trained on her head.

“Hey!” the guard shouted. “Whatever you’re doing… knock it off!”

Chrysalis raised a mocking eyebrow as an apple, surrounded in a glowing green aura, levitated off the table and towards her face. She bit noisily into it, closing her eyes as if savoring the taste, and then the apple levitated away as she chewed. The soldier’s finger stayed tensed on the trigger, until she reopened her eyes to shoot an inquisitive “what?” look in his direction. After all, she didn’t exactly have hands, so how else was she expected to manipulate the contents of the tray?

“Alright… carry on…” he took his finger off the trigger and slightly lowered the rifle. “Just, no sudden moves like that, okay?”

She quickly lifted a hoof, and the rifle shot reflexively back to attention. Its overly-nervous owner was about to shout more, but all she was doing was wiping the juice from her chin. Again, the rifle lowered, and she continued her meal without ever flinching even once.

“Ugh…” Forrester sighed, turning away from the camera feed to absently rub his temples. “This is hard to watch.”

“Agreed,” said Colonel Autumn. “That’s all she ever does, no matter what we do to her.”

“She’s playing with them. She’s in control of that cell, and she knows it. You’re never going to be able to get her to talk with normal methods, whether it’s Anderson giving out milk and cookies or Fairlight punching her in the gut. She’s smart, she knows she’s important to us, she’s tough, and she’s patient. This isn’t going to be easy.”

Autumn watched as the power-armored, plasma-rifle-toting soldier posted at the door all but cowered in fear of the prisoner he was supposed to be guarding. She spent so much time sitting perfectly still that every movement seemed like she was readying an attack, or trying to escape the base again. She’d made such a spectacle of it the first time that, even in failure, she still had everyone spooked. Their own clumsy handling of the situation, confusedly alternating between violence and threats and kindness, hadn’t helped things along, but they were used to dealing with idiot raiders who would sell each other down the river for a can of beans.

“Suggestions?”

Forrester thought for a moment, watching Anderson finally turn to leave the cell empty-handed as always. “She’s outsmarting us, biding her time and gathering all sorts of information on how to exploit us while divulging none of her own secrets. She’s probably been planning another escape attempt since the instant her first one failed. Whatever kind of treatment we throw at her is meaningless, because she thinks she’s too good for us to truly outsmart her in the end. I’d call it arrogance, but she seems capable enough to back it up. We wouldn’t be so interested in studying her otherwise.

“I think the only way you’re going to get her to talk is if you break her spirit, and that’s not going to happen unless she’s beaten at her own game. She obviously has a great deal of physical ability, and yet she didn’t simply start blasting her way out of the base when she decided she’d been here long enough. She prides herself on trickery and deceit—which makes sense, given her shapeshifting ability, and the fact that aliens have always acted in shadow despite possessing far superior firepower—and until we prove our superiority there, I don’t think she’ll be talking much.”

On the monitor, the fuzzy image of their captive sat casually in the corner of the cell, muzzle buried in a box of over-sweetened prewar breakfast cereal.

“I imagine this business of offering her good food is only making it worse.”

Forrester clicked his tongue. “Well, technically, it could work, if she was actually speaking to us. I think Anderson wants to use her favorite foods as an incentive to cooperate, and what she hates as negative reinforcement, which… isn’t an inherently terrible idea, I suppose. But with the way she’s been acting so far, I bet you could serve her a plate of raw mole rat and she’d down it without complaint to avoid giving us any ounce of leverage over her.”

Autumn watched her pause for a moment before levitating the glass of water to her lips to take a drink. “I tire of this. I’m going to shut this whole… whatever this is down, before it wastes any more time and resources. We need her to crack so we can figure out what makes her tick, and then have Anderson’s people get to work on reverse-engineering her, or something.”

“Colonel, if you want to use her as a weapon, you don’t necessarily need to make her agree to it,” Forrester objected. Autumn shot him a look. “Err… not in the sense you mean, anyway. You need her cooperation, but that can be got without her ever uttering a syllable. Mankind didn’t harness the atom by locking it in a cell and interrogating it, and even if it somehow spoke it’d be poor science to take it at its word without confirming the results in a controlled environment.”

Autumn frowned. “So you’re suggesting I have Anderson go ahead with the autopsy?”

“No, no, no,” Forrester rejected, waving his hands, “what is it with you two about autopsies? No, I mean setting her into a situation we control, and observing how she responds. Goading her into action to test her capabilities and limits. I can take care of the whole thing, and it won’t interfere with any of the other projects my department is working on, I assure you. If it goes nowhere, we can always come back to… this.”

Autumn looked back at the monitor. The current plan, if it could even be called such, was going nowhere in a hurry, and Forrester was probably the most qualified of any of the Enclave’s officers when it came to such matters – though he was the Enclave’s chief weapons and technology engineer at the moment, he’d started out studying interrogation back west, and gradually transitioned from there to designing torture devices and techniques before the Oil Rig was destroyed. His move to mechanical and weapons engineering was a matter of practicality, as he just happened to be a competent scientist who survived the rig’s destruction and had engineering experience. All this time, he’d been sitting on years of impassioned study into the science of making other living things spill their secrets to the world.

Autumn shrugged. It couldn’t make things any worse.

“Alright.”

A few days passed, though it could have just as easily been a few weeks and Queen Chrysalis would have hardly known the difference. At regular intervals, which she assumed to be around lunchtime of every day, the one she’d impersonated would bring her food on a cart, and try to strike up a conversation. She always ignored him, as she did with the omnipresent armed guard at the door. She marked the passing of morning and night with the times a new guard entered to relieve the old, and silently stood her ground the rest of the time.

Her thoughts were often with Canterlot, reliving the whole experience from the capture of Princess Cadance to the final defeat of the hive. Nowhere in there did it make any sense how she and the whole changeling horde had wound up in that steel-walled dungeon. Not the current one, but the other one, with the sterile walls not covered in grime and the little green men she couldn't understand and the ventilation system that didn't constantly sound like it was about to sputter and die. She also couldn’t work out who her current captors truly were, or what they were hoping to accomplish. If they were looking for a ransom, then they already knew who she was and had no cause to interrogate her further. If they were hoping to turn her, to make her a weapon against Celestia, then they need only ask – she’d play along, use their resources to free the changelings and take Canterlot, then backstab them and take Equestria for her own. The only satisfactory explanation was that they didn’t know who or what they were dealing with, and were trying to find a potential use for her. With that being the case, then they were on equal footing, and that was unacceptable.

A part of her was worried, concerned that the pitiful attempts at interrogation would drag on forever, but these people were clearly not used to dealing with a prisoner such as her. Initially, they’d wavered back and forth between Anderson’s calm and friendly talking approach and Fairlight’s punching and kicking, a textbook good cop/bad cop act played completely unironically and without any apparent sense of self-awareness. Pathetic. Now, they were rolling with this food cart charity, attempting to buy her cooperation with almost-spoiled food, or something equally nonsensical.

But sooner or later, they’d give her an opening. They’d slip up, leave themselves exposed somehow, and that was when she’d strike.

The next day, Anderson’s standard food cart greeting was replaced by a quartet of soldiers with their handheld spellcasters and bulky metal armor. Chrysalis straightened her back, holding her ground, waiting for one of the men to reveal himself as Fairlight and start punching her in the ribs again. She almost smiled at the impatience.

Instead, two of the soldiers immediately shouldered weapons and took aim at her head, while the other two set aside their weapons and took out bundles of rope. The door guard joined the covering pair, and Chrysalis decided against making the move she'd been planning. She’d tested several soldiers for their reaction times with out-of-nowhere levitation spells, and they always had their rifles up and ready to go in tiny fractions of a second. The regular day-guard, who she liked to toy with during meals, was especially excitable, but all the guards she’d seen had been far too jumpy to make it worth the risk. If they saw her horn start glowing now, she was as good as dead.

The rope went around her forelegs, and then she was forcibly pushed over onto her side. With no way to break the fall, her head smacked painfully against the hard floor. The spellcasters got poked into her face, and the door guard even warned her not to move. Her hind legs were bound just like the others, and then her captors tied a final strip of rope around all four hooves to completely immobilize her. The other two soldiers then lowered their weapons so the four of them could carry her.

The room rotated further as she was turned onto her back, and four pairs of armored gloves each grabbed a corner of her torso and heaved. She went up, the door guard’s weapon still trained on her face, and the whole group moved swiftly out into the corridor. She expected them to go right, around the corner to their bio lab, maybe hook her up to some kind of a machine to run direct tests. Oh, how exciting it would be to break out of there, leaving loads of expensive damage in her wake. But instead, they went left, shifting her up to their shoulders so they could walk closer together in the tight space. She looked around, scanning her surroundings for any sign of their destination, but the map she'd seen had only showed more holding cells forming a giant ring. The one ahead on the right was open, and another soldier stood guard at the door.

They squeezed through the door and went in, and suddenly all the support under her vanished. She fell, flailing her limbs only to have them restrained by the rope. Her vision flashed white with pain as her whole weight cracked hard into the unforgiving steel floor. She cursed silently to herself—that had very nearly been a dislocated shoulder, or worse.

The metallic sound of a knife being unsheathed registered somewhere in her mind, and then the ropes were being slashed away the next second. Disoriented, she tried to turn her head in the direction of her captors, but they’d already cut her loose and were heading out of the cell. The door closed loudly, leaving her alone. She twisted herself to stand upright, and the cell was instantly cut almost in half by a shimmering blue aura.

She jumped to her hooves and ran up to it, but pressing a hoof into its surface revealed it as solid. She sat, ears folding back. Perhaps as much as ten feet into the cell, leaving just enough room for their own people to enter and observe or speak with her, her captors had erected a magical forcefield similar in appearance and function to the one deployed over Canterlot. It simply couldn’t be a coincidence.

Someone had tipped Celestia off to the changeling threat; she’d initially planned to use the Princess Cadance cover to assassinate Celestia, and Luna if it was possible, and then call for an invasion once the nation’s most powerful defender was out of the picture. That had all gone south almost immediately, however, when the mostly-ceremonial Royal Guard was fully mobilized overnight, and its captain was suddenly and mysteriously able to project a city-encompassing forcefield spell. Compared to the wanton cavalcade of failure that followed, it was a minor hiccup that she’d expertly adapted to on the fly. But it still left the question—where had that spell come from?

The door to her cell opened before she could come up with an answer. A new face, tall and narrow like the body it belonged to, greeted her with a cold stare. His hair was greying in places, and the way he sort of squinted from behind his horn-rimmed glasses made him very nearly intimidating. Colonel Autumn appeared behind him, but the newcomer drew all of Chrysalis’s attention. She studied him cautiously as he and Autumn entered the cell, walking right up to the forcefield.

Anderson always had a somewhat cagey look at first, as if unnerved by the idea of standing so close to her. She always sat with her back perfectly straight, ensuring her eye level was at least an inch or so above his despite her seated posture. These creatures were taller than ponies, but her natural form still held enough of a size advantage that she could look down upon them and intimidate their weaker-willed members. It usually worked, too; Anderson was essentially spineless, Autumn and Fairlight betrayed their fears by taking security so seriously, and even the soldiers themselves tended to be a bit jumpy in her presence.

But this new one was different. He didn’t flinch, didn’t tense up as he approached, didn’t reveal his feelings at all. He stood up to her, stared her straight in the eye, and frowned a bit as if to say he was not impressed with her. Maybe it was false confidence, since the forcefield was between them, but they had to know she was capable of breaking down such barriers when she set her mind to it. Otherwise, this was going to be an easier escape than she thought.

“She’s all yours, Forrester,” said Autumn. “I’ll stay with Fairlight’s team in the hall until you’re done here.”

If anything, Forrester frowned a little more. “Thank you, Colonel,” he said, still keeping his eyes locked on her. “I’ll get to it, then.”

Autumn nodded and turned to leave, but stopped himself right away. “Oh, I nearly forgot. She seems to be more cooperative lately, and the barrier seems to be working fine, but just in case…” He reached under his coat and drew his pistol, flipping it so the back end faced Forrester. “Remember, she’s expendable, and you're not.”

Forrester took the pistol, almost reluctantly. “Thank you, Colonel. Although it shouldn’t come to that.”

Autumn shrugged. “I hope not, but the option exists.” Without waiting for Forrester to say anything further, Autumn made for the exit at a brisk, purposed stride. The door’s obnoxious center wheel slid down behind him, locking the sides of the door in place.

“My name is Clayton Forrester,” he introduced, “and unlike dear Dr. Anderson, I am not incompetent.” He paused for a second, as if waiting for a reply. He got none within the first few seconds, and continued on. “I understand why Colonel saw fit to hand you over to him, considering his department is biology, but I think he underestimated just how bad Anderson is at dealing with living things.”

Again he paused, this time taking a step closer to the wall so he could lean against it comfortably. He set down Autumn’s pistol on top of a control panel of some sort jutting out the wall—given that this cell had a forcefield and a control panel and her old one had neither, Chrysalis had to assume the two were connected.

Forrester continued, “I’ll be honest with you, I’ve got a lot to do today and so I’d prefer to keep this brief. I don’t care if you talk to me, or explain yourself, or whatever. I don’t want to have to check on you every day, and sit through the same stupid staring contest that Anderson did, waiting for you to say something. I’ve got a saucer full of alien hardware that needs reverse-engineering, Grant's new armor project out of Adams AFB that I need to supervise, whatever the hell Whitley is doing to our eyebots out there, and half a dozen other projects that are way more important than standing here getting looked at for twenty minutes a day.

“If Anderson kept you, then he’d just keep wasting food on you for another few weeks, hoping you’d talk but getting nowhere in a hurry. Then Autumn would lose his patience and order Anderson to kill you and perform an autopsy, or Fairlight would lose his patience and beat you to death with your own spine for all the stuff you’ve done, or maybe they’d both lose patience at the same time and Autumn would order Fairlight to beat you to death while he watched. Either way, you’d end up dead and we’d have nothing to show for it that we couldn’t have gained by simply snapping your neck on day one and being done with it.

“So… now that you’re my project, I’m going to make a few changes to the way things are run.” He stood up straight and took a step away from the wall, leaving the pistol behind. Chrysalis readied herself to grab it. “The guard from your old cell? He was one of Anderson’s security detail, a rotating shift he had moved from the Bio Lab. But I don't hate my security people enough to make them babysit you, so we’ll just rely on the forcefield. You can’t get through it, can you?”

She blinked, not sure what he was trying to accomplish. Of course her magic was powerful enough to pass through a simple barrier spell. Maybe advanced spells would be disrupted by it, and combat magic would have to forcibly break through the barrier in order to hit things on the other side, but all she needed here was a levitation spell to shut down the barrier from the console in her cell. Her captors were idiots if they didn’t realize this.

Still, Forrester was half-smiling at her, giving her a few more seconds to answer him. If they truly didn’t realize how easily she could escape, she wasn’t going to be the one to tell them. She focused on a pen in Forrester’s breast pocket—messing with the controls or the pistol atop them might make them change their approach—and slowly cast the weakest levitation spell she could muster. A few sparks whirled around the pen, and Forrester looked down at it curiously. Then the barrier began to shimmer, and she felt a hint of resistance disrupting the spell. Rather than push, channeling more energy into the spell to overpower the barrier, she held it, squinted her eyes and gritted her teeth with feigned exertion, then released the spell. The barrier returned to normal, the sparks dissipated, and Forrester’s pen settled back into his pocket, having barely been made to twitch.

“Excellent. I’ll send someone through with a food cart a couple of times a week or so, whenever one of us feels like it. That’ll be your chance to communicate, as well—if you cooperate with us, I can and will reward you for it. It’s a similar deal to what Anderson was trying to offer you, I admit, although I differ from him in that I believe a prisoner who’s given nothing should get nothing in return.”

He was about to leave, and Chrysalis decided that now was her best chance. In his overconfidence, he’d left the pistol Autumn gave him on the opposite side of the room, too far to do anything about it in the short time it’d take her to fire a stronger levitation spell through the barrier and grab it. The men outside would hear the shot and come running, of course, but that was fine by her. It stood to reason that the barrier would block or at least substantially weaken their spellcaster fire, so they couldn’t do anything to her until it was down. One shot from the pistol would take out Autumn, whose big overcoat didn’t seem to be armored, and she’d still have two or three seconds, minimum, before one of the soldiers got to the controls. Plenty of time to disarm them with another set of levitation spells, at which point she could turn their weapons on them or merely destroy them and deal with the soldiers in close quarters once the barrier went down.

The whole thing would be over in perhaps as much as ten seconds, and her captors would have lost their Colonel, Major, some number of lower-ranked soldiers, and an important member of their science team all at the same time. Once she was out in the hallway, she’d be home free; they wouldn’t have prepared another “just in case” squad, and she already knew how to escape and could do so before anyone on the base realized the extent of what was happening. A chorus of frantic running footsteps would play her off, the sound of dozens of soldiers and medical personnel rushing to the cell block to check on the wounded. Anderson may have been incompetent, but it would be Forrester who took the blame—posthumously, of course—for allowing their prized captive to escape.

Chrysalis focused on the pistol and reached out for it, pushing up against the weak resistance offered by the barrier and—

It didn’t give. A swirling blue distortion appeared between caster and target, but the barrier had halted her efforts to reach through. Two feeble green sparks danced in circles around the pistol, and the handgrip trembled a little, but that was all. Chrysalis pushed harder, channeling more energy into the spell, but she couldn’t beat it. The barrier warped and distorted, its tortured bluish shimmer pulsating erratically, but it held.

Chrysalis's strength was draining fast—Anderson’s generous food offerings had kept her physical strength up, but it’d been so long since she’d last fed on emotions that she didn’t have the energy to sustain the spell for long. She pushed one last time, as if she was levitating an entire house off its foundation, but her horn gave out and she collapsed to her knees. Forrester chuckled a bit as he picked up the pistol.

“Well, that’s a relief. For a minute there, I thought you were just pulling my leg with that pen gag.” Chrysalis looked up at him, seeing an intact and seamless barrier spell between them, as if nothing had happened at all. “It’s good to know we really can trust these things to contain you.”

The door opened, and Colonel Autumn entered the cell pushing one of Anderson’s food carts. This one only had a single bowl of something on it, not the wide variety of options that Anderson always prepared. He set it against the wall, then accepted his pistol back from Forrester.

“Works perfectly, Colonel,” Forrester said. An odd thing to say about a pistol that hadn't been fired, Chrysalis thought, until Autumn reached into his overcoat and pulled out a metal stick of some kind. He stuck it into the handgrip of the pistol, then yanked back the top part until it clicked. Then he put the pistol away, and congratulated Dr. Forrester. Chrysalis’s heart sank with the realization.

He was in on it. He’d disabled the pistol and left it as bait. They didn’t know if the barrier was going to work, and they were testing it. They’d anticipated a fake-out, and they'd played her.

“So, what’s the next step?” Autumn inquired.

“Well, I suppose we’ve learned all we can, for the time being.” Forrester shrugged. “No sense wasting a perfectly good forcefield, though, so we might as well follow through what I said about starving her alone in the dark until she cooperates. If it’s all right with you, sir.” The glance he sent in her direction as he finished his sentence confirmed her suspicions that they’d already decided this hours or perhaps days earlier, and were deliberately having the conversation again where she could hear it.

“Very well. Just make sure the kitchen staff knows to stop preparing food for her every day, and get one of your own people to do this from now on. I don’t plan on coming down here more than is absolutely necessary.”

“Neither do I, Colonel, believe me.”

Autumn gestured to the forcefield control, signaling Forrester to get ready to power it down. He put both hands back on the cart he’d brought, and looked Chrysalis straight in the eye.

“I don’t suppose we’ve convinced you to cooperate with us now, have we?” Autumn asked, his drawling voice actually showing signs of short-tempered frustration. “Otherwise, this’ll be your last meal for a while.” She said nothing. “Well alright then.”

Forrester pressed a control on the wall, and the shimmering barrier spell vanished before her eyes. Immediately, Chrysalis fired up her horn again, visualizing the pistol inside Autumn’s coat and wrapping a levitation spell around its handgrip. Immediately, Autumn saw the glow of her horn and felt the tugging inside his coat, and grabbed the pistol with both hands. Chrysalis fired a second spell at the controls, locking them so Forrester couldn’t activate the field and disrupt her magic.

The gun went off. The crack of its report stung her ears, and a hole exploded out the side of Autumn’s overcoat. Little bits of the fabric and smoke from the blast floated in the air for a second, before she wrenched the pistol hard to the side to dislodge it from its holster. Thinking quickly, she fired a third spell at the door, sealing it shut before the kill-squad could storm through in response to the shot. She was weakening, though, desperately low on magical energy after such magical exertion and starvation. Three simultaneous spells were too much to sustain, and her horn failed her. The power of her spells faded, and Autumn regained control of the weapon. He drew it from his coat, turned it on her, and fired.

Chrysalis fell. He’d shot her in the leg, the round going right through her chitin armor as if it wasn’t even there. Footsteps and the whine of servomotors followed Fairlight’s team through the door, and Chrysalis soon had half a dozen weapons pointed at her head. Autumn waved an arm to make them stop, before anyone could open fire, and the cell became almost quiet. A faint, pained whimper escaped Chrysalis’s lips.

Colonel Autumn put his boot against the cart and shoved it into the cell directly at her. She couldn’t dodge in time, and the heavy metal cart clocked her right across the side of her face. Something hot splashed against her neck, and she heard the bowl it had been served in shatter on contact with the ground just before the barrier spell was recast. Six pairs of footsteps filed out of the cell, fading into the silence beneath the barrier’s hum after the door rolled shut behind them. Then the lights went out completely, and Chrysalis was left alone with nothing but the eerie blue glow of the barrier to help her see.

Tears were already accumulating, but she forced herself not to cry. She twisted her foreleg to look at the wound in the dim glow of the barrier, and winced at the sight of it. The chitin around the wounds on both sides was cracked and caved in, and the muscle had obviously been torn up a fair bit. She was bleeding pretty badly, but it wasn’t life-threatening. She forced a smile as she reminded herself that she’d been through much worse before.

Chrysalis sniffed the air, catching the scent of whatever had splashed onto her neck. She poked at it with her good foreleg, then tasted the wetness on her hoof. Her captors had served her chicken soup, another meat-based dish inconsistent with her rapidly-deteriorating theories about Princess Celestia organizing the whole thing. She shuffled painfully over to where the bowl—and most of the soup—had hit the floor, and stooped low beside it. As she licked the soup from the floor, she couldn’t help but smile. Even in defeat and humiliation, she’d gone down swinging, and nearly turned the tables even after playing right into their hands. Maybe she hadn’t killed everyone and escaped the base, but she’d put a hole in Autumn’s coat that hadn’t been there an hour ago, and that was cause for some celebration in itself. She only wished she’d been able to get through the barrier, and that she’d had the presence of mind to ignore the disabled trap pistol and opt for directly snapping Forrester’s neck, instead. It would have been worth it just to see the look on his face.

Chrysalis finished the majority of the soup that she could reach, which probably amounted to a few spoonfuls at best, and leaned back against the wall of the cell. They’d be back for her, at some point. They had more plans, and she was to be involved. They’d try and force her cooperation, somehow, and considering how pitifully she’d taken the bait this time, she couldn’t rule out the possibility that they’d best her again. Forrester was right when he said he wasn’t like Anderson—he was the first person on the base she genuinely had to be wary of.

Unless she found a way to escape beforehand, of course. Perhaps there was some way of casting a different type of spell through the barrier, or getting around it in some fashion. She had just enough energy for one good transformation, maybe two, and she could muster up some other spells if she really needed to. If what Forrester said was true, and they’d be waiting days or perhaps a week before returning to check on her, she definitely needed to act sooner rather than later. That long of a time and she’d be too weak, physically and magically, to stand a chance at escape.

No, it had to be soon, preferably the same day, while the memory of nearly being shot point blank in the chest with his own gun was still fresh in Autumn’s mind. Chrysalis decided that she’d sleep on it a bit, wait for the bleeding to stop while she came up with a plan, and make a go of it in a few hours once most of the base’s staff were asleep. It was as good a plan as any, and so Chrysalis curled up in the corner as best she could, and closed her eyes.

Chapter 5

A particularly loud bang from the ventilation system startled Chrysalis awake. Some hours had passed, she was sure, but it was impossible to measure time in this place. The blue glow of the forcefield reflected off the puddle of oily liquid beside her, but at least her wound looked to have largely stopped contributing to it. Her head ached and she was weakening fast, but she could manage to keep going a little longer. She had no other choice.

Chrysalis fought to stand, but her wounded leg collapsed instantly when she put weight on it. She stumbled, slamming her other foreleg down to recover, and accidentally planted it right in the spilled soup. Instantly she lost traction and slipped, and after the briefest moment of weightlessness her shoulder hit the ground hard.

Her wet, ragged mane stuck to her face as she lifted her head to look at the dimly-lit ceiling. Just as she’d hoped, the air vent was on her side of the cell, and it wouldn’t take much to reach it. She struggled to think back to her earlier escape attempt, and the information she’d gathered while guised as Anderson—if the base lost main power, then the ventilation system became a viable means of escape. The thing said to be blocking her way, a giant fan that would chop anything it contacted to bits, was located near the exit; therefore, it should be possible to use the ventilation system to travel distances around the base interior even while the power was on. At the very least, she could cross over into another cell. None of the other cells were likely to have this sort of elaborate forcefield set up, and she could kick a regular door down pretty easily.

She wasn’t fitting through the vents in her current condition, though. Her wounded leg was almost useless, and she was far too big to get through the opening even if she could move around properly. She needed to shapeshift into a different form, but she was weak. Whatever form she chose had to be small enough to get through the vent, but still capable of figuring out how to shut down base power and carry it out. She briefly considered Colonel Autumn, but his shoulders would probably be too wide to get through the vent easily, and any of the other males on the base would have the same problem.

Her thoughts went back to the first form she’d taken in this place, the dead woman whose house her saucer had taken out. She was thin and agile enough to get through the vents, and yet still capable of operating her captors’ technology. She wouldn’t blend in, but the soldiers wore full-body armor and she’d seen similarly identity-obliterating bodysuits worn by the science types at the crash site. If she could find their barracks or equipment storage, she could go unnoticed even in this form.

She pictured the woman in her mind, and channeled what little strength remained within her into the transformation. Her horn sparked brightly. Green flames erupted out of thin air all around her, and quickly consumed her whole body. Her legs tingled as the holes filled in, her chitin softened into skin, and the flat hooves morphed into hands and feet. Her torso narrowed, and her wings folded in and dissolved into her back. Her neck shortened, and her ragged mane twisted and curled into a tangled mess. Finally, her horn retreated into her head, and a ragged outfit made of leather and cloth materialized all around her.

The magical fire dissipated, and she picked herself up into a standing position. She wobbled a bit, nearly losing her balance. The unsteady stance of two-legged creatures always required a bit of getting used to, and her headache only made it worse. Her forearm was sore, a residual effect of Autumn’s bullet, and she was dangerously lightheaded, but she was still breathing and standing upright and therefore capable of continuing her plan.

Her stubborn confidence was immediately challenged, however, when she looked back up at the ceiling. She’d shapeshifted both her horn and her strong changeling limbs away before removing the grate covering the ventilation duct that was to be her escape. Not only that, but she was far too short to jump and catch the duct even if it was open. Changing back wasn’t an option, not in her condition. She had to think of something else.

The food cart Autumn had hurled at her was still on her side of the cell, so she pushed it over to line it up directly beneath the vent. That took care of the height problem, but she still had four screws to deal with that her current form wasn’t nearly strong enough to break. She had no tools on her, and she’d lost the sharp edges of her hooves.

She glanced around for something she could use as a tool, knowing it was probably pointless, but the edge of a broken piece of soup bowl caught the light of the barrier spell just in front of her. That might do. She picked it up and turned it over in her hands, examining it. The roughly triangular fragment’s shortest side had come from the rim of the bowl, which was curved and rounded and of no use to her, but the clean corner break opposite formed a sharp enough edge to fit into the groove on the screws. It wasn’t perfect, but it came close.

Satisfied with her choice, she stepped back to the cart. Two legs were shaky enough standing on level ground, though, let alone a wheeled platform that was top heavy by itself. As soon as she tried to climb onto it, it would roll, and she’d be sent tumbling. She had to stop the wheels from rolling somehow, and the best solution to that was to chock them with more fragments of the bowl. They were easy to find, scattered all over the floor as they were, and a few of them were near enough to the barrier to catch some of its light. In seconds, she had rounded up four of the largest fragments, including one which was roughly half the bowl all by itself. These pieces she kicked up against the tiny caster wheels of the cart, wedging them in as much as possible.

That was as good as it was going to get. She steadied herself as best she could, then heaved one foot up onto the cart. It wobbled and rocked in place, barely affected by the chocks, but she had no choice but to continue. She leaned forward, then kicked off with her grounded leg. The cart slid its makeshift chocks a few inches sideways as soon as she put her weight on it, but she quickly brought her other leg up and onto its surface, and stood as still and centered as she could manage. The cart settled, and Chrysalis let out a breath she didn’t even realize she’d been holding.

With the easy part out of the way, Chrysalis set herself to the task of getting the grate off. She slowly raised the hand in which she held the fragment, lining it up with the furthest screw to reach—figuring it was best to get the hardest part out of the way first—as best she could in the low light. Changeling eyes were optimized for low-light conditions, and weren’t nearly as hard to see through as her current ones. Still, she managed to make out the faint shadow of the screw’s center groove despite the darkness, and with her arm fully extended and the fragment wedged between her middle and ring fingers to truly maximize her reach, the narrow tip of her improvised screwdriver barely clicked into place.

She rotated her hand, struggling to apply enough torque with just the one far-outstretched hand to overcome the screw’s stubborn resistance to motion. She twisted hard, until the fragment was about to slip from her grasp entirely, but then the screw finally gave. The fragment then rotated freely until the screw dropped down from its mounting and clattered around on the floor for a moment before settling down somewhere out of sight.

One down, three to go.

The cart wobbled a bit, but held against its chocks as she set her sights on the next screw. The fragment went into its groove much easier this time, and she was spinning it freely counterclockwise in no time. The other screws were even closer to her, on the side of the duct she’d have to try and jump and catch once the grate was out of the way, so it was smooth sailing from here.

The screw dropped out of the grate and bounced off her wrist, making her flinch in surprise and throw the cart hard against its rear chocks. She panicked, throwing her weight forward to regain her balance, but she overcompensated horribly and the wheels hit their forward chocks hard enough to break the half-bowl fragment in two and shove the other one aside. The cart rolled freely forward, and as Chrysalis realized she was about to fall she tucked the bowl fragment into her pocket and jumped for the grate. Her thin fingers slipped into the gaps in the metal, and her bodyweight pulled the grate down like a lever, breaking the heads off both the remaining screws and sending Chrysalis herself tumbling.

Her shoulder hit the ground first, followed by the rest of her as she slid a foot or so across the still-wet floor. She heard the cart bump weakly against the opposite cell wall, and as she began to pick herself up she realized that she was holding the grate in her hands. Chrysalis allowed herself a smile, as she’d at least saved herself from having to undo two more screws.

Chrysalis tossed aside the cover and went to reset the cart for the actual escape. It rolled smoothly back into place beneath the opening, and the defeated chocks were easily replaced. She was getting the hang of two-legged balancing acts now, and her second climb went much more smoothly than the first. She put one leg on the cart, steadied it, then heaved the rest of herself up after it and held perfectly still until the rocking settled. Then she turned to face the closest edge of the duct, reached up with both her arms, and bent her legs into a bit of a crouch. The cart wobbled a bit more, and so she waited for it to steady itself. Then she kicked off hard, leaping up and grabbing the edge of the opening.

Her current form was barely strong enough to lift her own weight, but she grunted and struggled against the burn and forced herself up enough that she could slide her forearms into the vent, and then her whole arms. With the better leverage, she could pull her torso in easy, and drag her legs in behind her. Then she was there, in the duct. It was an uncomfortably tight space with a cold wind blowing in her face and suffocatingly close walls, but getting here was the crucial first step towards escaping the base.

She had barely enough room to extend an arm to drag herself forward in the direction of the cell door. It got traction, and so she pulled the arm back at the same time she kicked forward with her feet to shove herself along the line a few inches. It’d be slow going to actually get anywhere, but she was moving.

Up ahead, yellow-orange light shone up into the duct from another grate, in the middle of what appeared to be a four-way intersection. She knew there was only one grate in the cell, and the distance seemed too short to correspond to another cell on the opposite side of the corridor. Besides, she hadn’t seen any cells over there in the brief moment she was being carried to the cell with the barrier spell, and she had only seen a blank wall through the door whenever it was opened by a visitor. That grate probably was the corridor, then, and if Dr. Forrester’s threats of leaving her completely alone were true, it was probably a very lightly guarded corridor.

Quite a bit more struggling brought her up to the intersection, and she breathed a sigh of relief. She was indeed above the corridor, and no guard had been posted immediately outside her cell. The grate here was in much worse repair than the one in her cell. One screw was missing and another was loose, and a few exploratory prods made it wobble flimsily on what little support it had. If she put her full weight on it, she was nearly certain it would give.

This was too easy. Chrysalis looked left and right, but the duct carried on indefinitely, until the warm orange glow from the grate dissipated completely. Ahead, the duct went up a slight incline, and she couldn’t see beyond the first few feet of it before her line of sight was blocked by the ceiling. If she wasn’t mistaken, there was a laboratory there, the same laboratory she woke up in. None of those options were particularly appealing, since the lab would likely be fully staffed and operational, and she could hear the rattling of a worn-out fan coming from somewhere; meaning one of the paths was likely blocked. Apart from guessing blindly, she really had no options but down into the corridor.

The dilapidated state of the grate and the relative ease with which she’d escaped her cell made her wary, but the more she studied her surroundings the less strange it seemed. The fan she was hearing sounded like it was well beyond its last legs, and the duct walls all around her had the slight dusting of rust common to truly ancient metalwork that had been carefully maintained but was nevertheless wearing out. This, in a military base where the soldiers wore giant suits of powered battle armor far superior to the wildest dreams of gryphon armorers. Ironic, then, that a people so confident in the strength of their advanced technologies could be foiled due to their stubborn refusal to replace basic infrastructure components when they wore out.

Chrysalis carefully fished the triangular bowl fragment out of her pocket and slid it halfway through the gap in the grate. She did her best to tune out the rattle of the ventilation system and listen for any sounds coming from below. If she was lucky, anyone who heard the sound would come wandering over to investigate, and give her a clean window to break through the grate and attack. But even if they were smarter than that, surely she’d be able to hear the telltale whine of the soldier’s armor as he instinctively turned towards the sound, and at least she’d know what to anticipate. She released her grip and the fragment slipped through the grate, speeding silently through the air for a second before exploding loudly into shrapnel on contact with the floor.

Five long seconds ticked by, and still she heard nothing but the rattling of the ventilation system. If anyone hadn’t made their presence known by now, it wasn’t going to happen. She crawled forward a bit more so her torso was over the grate, then arched her back as far as she could in the tight space. With just a couple of inches to work with, Chrysalis twisted her hip into the strike and hit the grate hard. An explosive bang destroyed the silence, and Chrysalis followed the grate down into the corridor. It hit the ground and broke apart into its separate rusty components an instant before she rolled herself upright to land on her hands and knees.

Silence returned to the corridor as if nothing had happened. No alarm sirens sounded to alert the base of her escape. No hurried footsteps signaled the approach of nearby soldiers who’d heard the crash. The muffled rattle from above persisted, but otherwise she was clear.

Nothing on the map she’d found earlier had made any mention of where she might find how to shut down the base’s power. She remembered a room on the upper level, farther away from her position than any other room in the base, labeled “Control Room,” and certainly she might find what she needed there, but the map had curiously omitted mentioning the actual source of the base’s power. Surely it wasn’t routing in power from the outside, with some giant power plant above ground supplying all of the base’s demands. Building underground bases like this was hard, costly work—Chrysalis knew this from experience—and was only something to be considered when discretion and survivability were key concerns. Seeing into a mountain was no easy task, nor was blowing one up, but all that natural defense was for nothing if the base relied on a ventilation system powered by an external generator. Even casual passersby would notice the thing, alerting them to the presence of something consuming that power, and any attackers could simply blow it up and wait for the base to suffocate.

No, they had to have a power plant deeper down, below the cells and below the hangars. There had to be some way of shutting down power at the source itself, rather than risking the trip up to what was most likely the most heavily guarded area in the base. Bumbling around without knowing exactly where she was going wasn’t perfect, either, but she was more prepared than last time. She knew that following the corridor left out of her cell would take her through the tech lab and eventually to the hangars, so she set off cautiously to the right.

The hallway hooked left ahead of her, then jogged right to avoid the Bio Lab storage closets and exam rooms. One of the ceiling tiles here was missing, and the rattle of ventilation fans grew louder as she passed under it. Bundles of hoses drooped down from the gap like jungle vines, and one of the things had cracked and was spewing a jet of steam at the wall. Chrysalis ducked underneath, dodged a hanging work light, and carried on. She made it another dozen or so steps before she heard a voice and froze.

“Almost got it, Major. Just one more minute.”

The source was a small room up ahead on the right. Its door was open, and just beyond that was a window. It looked like a security office of some kind, certainly not another cell. Chrysalis flattened herself against the wall and looked up, scanning for ducts and finding none in the immediate area. It was pointless anyway; she had nothing to boost her up to their height, and no way of loosening the screws once she got up there. She could backtrack, loop around the entire cell block and cut across the other side of the Bio Lab, but her odds of remaining hidden were going to plummet if she did. Someone had clearly been working on the exposed hoses recently, and they had to come back eventually. Certainly the Bio Lab had guards posted by the doors, and scientists would be moving in and out. A skinny female with dark skin and tattered clothing was hardly going to be a good enough disguise.

Chrysalis stuck her right foot out sideways, then inched the rest of her body sideways to catch it up. She carried on, moving inches at a time, until she was right beside the entrance. She could hear someone inside rustling around. Metallic clinking, like the sound of fiddling with machinery. A fainter clink when a wrench or something was set down on the floor and traded for another tool. Whoever was in there was working, and probably not paying attention to the door, meaning now was a perfect time to dart across the opening and carry on. If he was looking, then she’d charge inside instead of passing by, hoping the element of surprise would compensate for whatever physical disadvantage she certainly had. She could grab the wrench he’d set down and beat him with it, maybe. Either way, she had to go fast.

Her chest swelled visibly as she sucked in what she hoped wouldn’t be her last breath. Then she sprang, jumping sideways in front of the doorway and snapping her head to look inside. His back was turned. She cleared the doorway and pitched forward, catching herself with her hands as she came to rest below the windows. Only then did the rest of what she’d seen really register—inside the room was a soldier, in black cargo pants and a grey sleeveless top, kneeling down before a removed access panel in a wall otherwise full of little rectangular screens. From the fading snapshot her eyes were able to take in that tiny snippet of time, she knew she’d seen images of several jail cells on some screens, the main room in the Bio Lab on another, and a room with a bunch of what looked like hospital beds on another still.

Chrysalis chanced another look through the door. Sure enough, she’d seen correctly. This base had all manner of odd technology, and she felt confident in the assumption that a room with apparently base-wide monitoring technology might also have more specific information about the place’s layout than the crude map she was currently operating from. The soldier inside was unarmed and unarmored, and a heavy metal wrench lay just behind him and to the side. He was buried in his work, his whole upper torso inside the wall and oblivious to the world around him.

Cautious feet crept inside, careful of making any noise. Chrysalis sneaked right up on him, kneeling down behind his unsuspecting body. She was grateful for the slender, long-fingered hands at the ends of her arms; even if she had the energy to start beating people to death with her magic, unicorn horns made a faint magical twinkling sound that would have compromised her instantly. With this body, she was able to simply pick the wrench up, carefully lifting it straight vertically so it didn’t clink or make noise.

The soldier grunted as he twisted whatever tool he was working with one final, difficult time. All the screens flickered over with static, then returned to their normal picture. The tiny red buttons next to each monitor all lit in unison as a horrible cacophony filled the room, the din of multiple layers of vent fan rattling and hissing pipes and mangled bits of conversation all mixed together and amplified over hidden speakers. It only lasted for a second before the lights all blinked once and extinguished themselves. Chrysalis herself froze perfectly still, her hand on the wrench right in front of her. The soldier reached up and hit a control on the intercom panel right above where he was working.

“That did it, Major,” he said, pulling up his shirt and mopping his forehead with it. “Presidential uplink’s offline, Eden is blind. You’re on, sir.”

Chrysalis hesitated for a second; if the Major replied with a question or something the soldier would be expected to respond to, knocking him unconscious first wasn’t the best idea. But instead, Chrysalis noticed a figure on one of the screens nod upon apparently hearing this information, then start off down the hall he was standing in. if that was Fairlight, he wasn’t wearing his armor, and had instead opted for a similar light-colored casual uniform like the soldier in front of her. Unfortunately, the image quality was too poor to tell what he looked like beyond the darkish color of his hair. At least he wasn’t talking, though, which meant now was the perfect time to beat the soldier unconscious. Chrysalis raised the wrench and prepared to swing, but the intercom warbled out a weird sort of ringing tone before she could attack.

“Security desk,” the soldier answered.

“Corporal, I just lost my connection to over half the base cameras,” a new voice stated, its tone mixed with equal measures of surprise and annoyance. “All I’m seeing is static, for cell blocks, medical, laboratories…”

“Sorry about that, Mr. President, that’s my mistake. My monitor for camera 6 has been acting up, and I was just checking the connection myself before I called engineering. I must have disconnected something by accident.”

“Can you fix it, Corporal?” the voice had shifted fully into annoyance.

“That shouldn’t be a problem, sir, I just need to dig around in this mess and find out what I broke. I’ll get on it right away.”

“See that you do,” said the president, and his voice went silent over the intercom.

The soldier put his hand on the floor as if he was about to stand up, but Chrysalis stopped that with a stiff whack to the side of his head. He crumpled, and Chrysalis was alone with the monitors as well as her own questions about the nature of what she’d just witnessed.

Chrysalis quickly scanned the screens for where Fairlight had gone. All the cells were empty. A few soldiers in heavy armor stood guard outside of various doors on other screens. A scrawny kid clutching his arm was the sole occupant of the medical room. Then she saw Fairlight, striding up to an office of some kind. The camera showing the interior was right next to it, and despite the blurry image quality she could clearly identify Dr. Forrester sitting inside. The whole office was tidy and organized, a definite contrast to the cluttered, hoses-spilling-out-of-the-walls look of the rest of the place; the only clutter visible in the whole office was an open folder from which Forrester was reading.

The door opened, but Chrysalis couldn’t hear it. Even if the video quality was good enough to read lips, only Forrester would be facing the camera if Fairlight took the seat on the opposite side of the table from him. One side of the conversation wouldn’t be ideal, but she was prepared to try and squint through the fuzzy picture all the same when she remembered the buttons next to each monitor, and the awful noise they made when every one of them was lit. Of course they’d be manually activated; listening to conversations was less important than being able to see all the base activity at a glance, and it would be important to pick and choose what rooms to listen to at what time. Chrysalis pressed the button next to Forrester’s office, and the speakers added a layer of ventilation rattle to the real one already in Chrysalis’s ears.

Forrester looked up from his paperwork. “Major?”

The half of him visible on screen hesitated in the doorway for a moment, scanning the hallway as if to make sure no one saw him enter. “Forrester,” he said at last, shutting the door behind him. “Got a minute?”

Forrester tried to bury his nose back into the paperwork. “Not really, Major, I’m right in the middle of—don’t sit down…”

Fairlight was already seated, leaning in on his elbows like he was about to share a secret. “You know Colonel’s plan for this alien thing, right?”

Forrester looked flatly over the rims of his glasses. “Seeing as I’m the one he put in charge of executing it, yes.”

“He wants her to fight for us,” Fairlight continued as if he didn’t even hear. “He wants her to join us.”

A weary frown flashed across Forrester’s face. He took a deep breath, and set aside the papers he’d been reading.

“Major, I get the feeling this isn’t the last time I’m going to hear these asinine objections raised by the various forward-thinking intellectuals around this base, so please let me be completely one hundred percent frank with you: this alien is exactly two things as far as I’m concerned, and neither of them is an Enclave soldier. First and very much foremost, she’s a blunt instrument with which to bludgeon super mutants into submission. Maybe we can learn something about how her horn or her disguising works and duplicate the ability ourselves, but that’s not immediately likely and therefore a secondary goal. It’s also Anderson’s department, so the likelihood of it ever seeing fruition is effectively null.

“Either way, I see her as a weapon, and you should too—did your plasma rifle ‘join’ the Enclave? Did it swear any oaths? Does it have a rank? No, Major. It’s a tool, and using tools does not make us less human—in fact, that’s what defines us as human. ‘But she’s dangerous,’ I hear you say. ‘She killed a bunch of people!’ And that’s certainly fair, but if it’s possible to take something as awesomely dangerous and destructive as a nuclear fission chain reaction and harness it, stick it in a bottle, and use it to power a toaster oven, then certainly there’s risk-justifying potential in that alien.”

Fairlight remained motionless for several seconds. Clearly, he hadn’t intended the conversation to take this route. Forrester broke eye contact almost immediately, picking up the papers again to continue reading where he’d left off.

“And so you’re going to starve her to death until she fights for us,” Fairlight said at length.

Forrester looked up with a knowing smile. “It’s not quite that simple, Major, but let’s preserve some element of professional courtesy here. I’m the engineer; you and Colonel Autumn are the soldiers. I make the weapons, but it’s up to you to decide where to point them. Let’s leave it at that, shall we?” Up went the paper again.

Fairlight was obviously struggling for what to say next. Even Chrysalis, who only had vague speculations to go on, knew this wasn’t what he’d intended when he orchestrated the uplink sabotage.

“You know, I risked a lot by setting up this meeting,” he said.

“Oh?” Forrester didn’t look up.

“My man in the camera monitoring room, by the holding cells, cut the uplink to Eden’s office just before I stepped in here, and he’s waiting on me to leave before he repairs it. Since all the logs are stored on his computer, there won’t be any record of it anywhere, either. As far as anyone outside this room is concerned, this conversation isn’t happening. You can speak freely, without putting on any act. Now, Colonel Autumn’s decisions with this alien thing—”

“Major, you’re not suggesting what I think you’re suggesting.” It was a statement more than a question; before, Forrester had been mostly dismissive and irritated, but the mention of subterfuge had really made him attentive. “Please tell me you’re not staging some kind of idiotic mutiny because you disagree with something your superior did…”

Fairlight leaned in a bit closer. “We’re not doing anything like that yet. This is me and a few other men who disagree with some of the colonel’s decisions lately. It’s a problem, and if it continues then we’ll have to do something about it. But for now, we’re just spreading the word to people we want on our side.”

“And you thought I would support this endeavor, even after everything I just said that directly contradicts its goals and ideals.”

He shrugged. “I hoped. It would help to have you on board, since you’re the best scientist on the East Coast. If and when this gets big enough for us to have to act, I don’t want you to do something stupid, like, take a bullet for the colonel or something.”

“Major, you can’t be serious.” Forrester’s expression shifted into genuine anger. Even through the fuzzy monitor image, Chrysalis could tell that comment had touched a nerve. “Augustus and I grew up together, Major. On the Oil Rig, back in California. We went through schooling together, we swore into the Enclave together, and the whole time we were there we ate this same idealistic ‘pure humanity’ melodrama right out of President Richardson’s hands. When we were twenty years old, an uneducated tribal walked into our home and blew it up. Just like that. Richardson and most of Congress bought it, our entire presence in the region was wiped out, and those of us that were left had to flee before that New California Republic pipe dream killed us.

“The two of us followed General Autumn across the full breadth of the nation, two kids whose prospects of a career spent rebuilding the West Coast to its former glory had been quite literally sunk to the bottom of the Pacific by an idiot wastelander in a Vault-Tec jumpsuit. You weren’t even born until a few months later, as we passed through western Utah and Mormon territory, and you went the rest of the way as an infant. By the time you could walk, we’d already crossed half the continent, and I’ll call you a liar if you say you remember anything west of Virginia. For you and the other children we carried with us, Raven Rock has been your entire concept of what the Enclave is.”

Fairlight leaned back and crossed his arms. “What’s your point?”

“You lack perspective, Major. You grew up hearing Eden’s speeches, this idealistic ‘purity’ dream that, if you’d seen the nation as the generation before you did, I can guarantee you wouldn’t be clinging to so dogmatically. I know this because I was you once, Major, but I’ve since grown older and wiser. Don’t get me wrong, we need presidents who believe in the cause that severely and are willing to fill our soldiers up with patriotic bluster, but a bit of worldly awareness and pragmatism—Colonel Autumn—is an equally necessary foil.

“You’re running with this dogma to the same sort of extremes we did when we were young, and that’s a good ideal to strive for, but now you’re asking me to choose between a man I’ve respected my entire life, a man I’ve been across the nation with, a man willing to sacrifice a percentage of his idealism if it means achieving his goal, and another man who can’t see such a decision as anything but high treason. Plus, you shot Charlie in the arm.”

“Oh, come on, you can’t seriously hold that against me!” Fairlight threw up his arms defensively. “I told you, I wasn’t aiming for him, and I had to get him out of the way before the super mutant—”

“I know, Major, you thought it was necessary to save our lives and on paper I agree with you, but my point is we’ve all done things another person disagrees with, and we’ve got too few people left for that to justify sabotaging each other. I had to watch you shoot my lab assistant—a fellow member of the Enclave—in the arm in order to drop him out of a Vertibird. I’m probably never going to be able to fully trust you after that, and you’re just going to have to live with that.

“Besides, I’m with Colonel Autumn on this one, and I’ve got no interest in joining your little mutiny operation,” he finished, picking up his papers again. “In the interest of minimizing drama, I won’t tell anyone about your plans, but I highly advise you to abandon them immediately. I don’t want to see internal politics and power struggles added to the list of things this base has to deal with. We’ve got our hands full with aliens and water purifiers, and my silence will be broken if I hear any further talk of mutiny.”

Fairlight stared at him for a full ten seconds, as if waiting for him to suddenly go back on everything he’d said, like it was all some elaborate practical joke or something. When he didn’t, Fairlight stood up and stepped back from the table. He left his chair angled and pulled out, the only disordered object in the entire office, and started to leave without a word. Forrester abruptly slapped his papers back down on the desk.

“Push your fucking chair in, Major, don’t bullshit me with this passive-aggressive behavior because I didn’t immediately take your side.”

“As you wish,” he said, returning just long enough to slide the chair back against the desk. Then he was out the door.

Chrysalis was stunned. Passive intelligence gathering while wearing a disguise was often a part of her work, but it was rare to stumble into exchanges like this one. The top two leaders of the Enclave not seeing eye to eye? Autumn’s right hand man secretly planning to overthrow him? Canterlot politics were never this interesting, and Chrysalis was almost sad to have to leave. She switched off the audio for Forrester’s office and turned her attention to the screen in the exact middle of the wall. In all the excitement, she’d nearly forgotten what she came to this room for in the first place.

Everything on the wall of monitors had been constructed around the central screen, which displayed no room at all. Instead, it merely contained a bunch of light green words against a dark green background.

ROBCO INDUSTRIES UNIFIED OPERATING SYSTEM

COPYRIGHT 2075-2077 ROBCO INDUSTRIES

— RAVEN ROCK MOUNTAIN COMPLEX / SITE R —

Sector 3A Security Terminal Operations:

Cell Door Control

Remote Monitoring Station Functions

Security Logs

September ’77 Duty Roster

UOS Local Settings

_main

The entry for door control was highlighted, as if indicating what choice it expected her to make. That didn’t interest her, though, now that she’d escaped her cell. The others seemed mostly useless, too, except the one at the bottom. Vague wording? An underscore? Inconsistent capitalization? “Main” being listed last on a list that otherwise seemed to go in descending order of importance? Changelings lacked experience with technology of this sort, but deception was all about detecting patterns, and that last entry stood out a mile.

Chrysalis looked at the keyboard, which seemed similar to that of a gryphon-built typewriter. Apart from the intercom and its dedicated controls, the keyboard appeared to be the machine’s only input device. As strange as the whole setup seemed to her, rapidly adapting to foreign technologies was part and parcel of being an effective changeling. She wasted no time questioning the system or wondering at its mysteries, and instead focused on the goal—figure out what “_main” was, and if it could give her any useful information.

Typing in the word didn’t accomplish anything—she decided the letter keys probably existed for creating data, not browsing it—but the arrow keys in the lower right seemed relevant. She pressed the down arrow several times, sending the bar of highlighting down the options menu with each press until the “_main” entry was selected. A press of the next most obvious key, marked “Enter,” and a new screen’s worth of text rapidly scribbled itself across the glass.

ROBCO INDUSTRIES UNIFIED OPERATING SYSTEM

COPYRIGHT 2075-2077 ROBCO INDUSTRIES

— RAVEN ROCK MOUNTAIN COMPLEX / SITE R —

----------------------#SECURITY OVERRIDE#----------------------

Security Door (unimplemented)

Hangar/Launch Bays (unimplemented)

Ventilation

Power

(null)

Back

This was obviously not something a console meant to govern a bank of camera monitors should have; the menu wasn’t even finished, but it was as if a back door into an area governing the entire base had been built in to greatly expand the console’s functionality beyond its initial purpose. Fairlight’s budding mutiny plot provided a reasonable explanation; if they only managed to get a few people to follow them, and this security office was one of the few places they could operate without oversight, then perhaps they were in the process of modifying the terminal to give themselves more control over the base.

Odd that they had left it so casually exposed—why not name their backdoor access the August ’77 Duty Roster, or something most people wouldn’t even challenge? Bury it in the local settings menu, maybe, or stick it in some ancient security log from the most boring day of ’76? Although, perhaps it shouldn’t be so surprising that her captors could make such a simple blunder. A scrawny girl had just broken out of a high-security area with nothing but a hand cart and a soup bowl, and they hadn’t adequately prepared to stop that from happening. Assuming it was possible to hide their backdoor access better than they had, they were probably too cocky to think of it.

Chrysalis rifled through the menus, looking into the Ventilation subsection, but the submenu was obviously incomplete. Its only contents were “Status Diagnostic,” “System Diagram,” another “(null)” error, and “Back.” Chrysalis opened the Status entry.

ROBCO INDUSTRIES UNIFIED OPERATING SYSTEM

COPYRIGHT 2075-2077 ROBCO INDUSTRIES

— RAVEN ROCK MOUNTAIN COMPLEX / SITE R —

----------------------#SECURITY OVERRIDE#----------------------

Functional.

Back

A pitying smirk flashed across her lips. Either the whole backdoor access idea was in its absolute infancy, or there were more limits to their abilities to monitor and control the base than she realized.

The System Diagram entry was much more helpful—a monochromatic three-dimensional rendering of the entire base, set on an angle so all the floors could be seen clearly, filled up the screen. Bright green lines snaked their way above the darker green corridors and rooms, all converging on a central shaft that led out away from the base to the south, where it presumably connected to the outside. She followed the shaft’s branches to their ends, looking for the security office and the best route out.

Eventually, she located the four-way intersection outside her cell. If she went straight from there, she’d pass over the Bio Lab before being forced to make a left turn. A fan was marked as blocking the way there, but she’d bring along the soldier’s weapon and any other tools she could find to help her break it down. From there, the duct went straight ahead until it dumped directly into the main shaft, which was completely free of obstacles until the very end. That fan was big enough to squeeze through, when it wasn’t spinning, so as long as she killed the power before making her run, there was nothing standing in her way that she couldn’t get through relatively easily.

Chrysalis backed out of the Ventilation menu and went into Power. Predictably, the menu looked very much under construction, with a null error at the bottom and a grab-bag of random features that didn’t seem particularly helpful in the event of a mutiny. She could check the system status—another “Functional” page—or she could send a shutdown command to the main base reactor.

Reading the included instruction text—odd that they’d waste time to detail the mechanics of a system they presumably understood already, when the rest of their menu was still in shambles—only increased her confidence. Whatever “reactor” the base was drawing power from, the technology was such that its “reaction” couldn’t be toggled on and off on a whim. When given a shutdown command, it would continue generating power all through its hours-long shutdown process, during which it could not be restarted. Only after it had fully powered down could it be told to start up again, and that process also lasted several hours before the reactor would reach full power. Further, the instructions explained that the base would continue to draw power from the reactor during the shutdown sequence, except ventilation, which was designed to switch over to its internal oxygen tanks immediately upon reactor shutdown in order to conserve power. The internal fans would all keep moving the air around as normal, but the power-hungry fan leading outside would shut down.

In plain Equish, that meant that giving the reactor a shutdown command from this terminal might not cause any alarm right away. The lights would stay on, the computers and intercoms would keep working, and even the rattling in the walls would carry on uninterrupted. It might not lead to a panic right away, and they’d be unable to do anything about it for almost a whole day. She’d be dozens of miles away by then, back on track towards rescuing her hive from their technologically superior captors instead of this unfortunate diversion spent rescuing herself. She set up the power down command and hit Enter again, bringing her to a screen with a final confirmation prompt to make absolutely certain the shutdown command was not given accidentally. Below the standard RobCo header, a highlighted NO sat atop a non-highlighted YES. Chrysalis hit the down arrow, and the selection bar traded places.

Something caught her eye, though, and she turned back to the other monitors. In the room that appeared to be an infirmary, a scrawny kid was sitting on one of the beds. He clutched his arm, as he had been since she first noticed him. A white coat hunt from the rack beside the bed, and the kid certainly looked more like a lab assistant than a fighter. Certainly this was the “Charlie” that Forrester had mentioned earlier, the one Fairlight had shot in the arm.

He looked loyal enough to follow orders without question, and naïve enough to not think too deeply into what might be motivating them. Queen Chrysalis turned on audio for the infirmary and keyed the intercom.

“Charlie, are you in medical?” she asked in a perfect Dr. Forrester voice.

“Uh, yes, Dr. Forrester!” he called out to the ceiling. “I am!”

“Great. You’re feeling better, I hope? The arm is healing?”

“Yes, sir! The infection’s mostly gone, now, and it’s just really sore.”

“Great. I need to see you for something. Could you stop by my office in about, say, 45 minutes?”

“Sure thing, Doctor. I’ll meet you there.”

If all went according to plan, the kid would wander into his superior’s office, and they’d share a moment of confusion together before realizing the boundless folly of leaving a changeling prisoner unguarded. Otherwise, if the terminal’s instruction text was wrong and there was a way to get ventilation back online before she could reach the exit, or if other unforeseen complications arose, she at least had one predictable data point around which she could construct a contingency plan.

But that was thinking too far ahead, down an unlikely scenario she didn’t want to treat as a fully real possibility yet. She had to shut down the reactor, then get back to the vents to make her escape as quickly as possible. There was still the chance they’d figure out what she was doing if they had people monitoring the reactor from elsewhere, and Colonel Autumn could send soldiers to secure the outlet shaft before Chrysalis could get there. The terrain around the base had to be rough and hard to navigate, being a mountain and everything, so she probably had time, but it was better to treat every second as precious once her plan was set in motion.

A handheld spellcaster sat on the desk near the door, and a metal box full of paperwork had been tucked underneath. Chrysalis turned over the box and spilled its contents all over the floor, making it light enough for her current body to move around easily. The weapon tucked easily into the waistband of her pants, and she could hold the empty box one-handed thanks to the handles on its sides. With both of these items in hand, she could boost herself back into the ducts outside her cell, crawl through the suffocating tunnel system towards freedom, melt the one obstacle in her path along the way, and slip out into the countryside through the powered-down main intake fan. Then she was back to looking for a settlement that could be infiltrated, information that could be gathered, and other beings that could be manipulated into lending their aid. It all started with one press of a key on a keyboard, while the highlighting held steady on YES.

The unconscious soldier on the ground beside her moaned, reinforcing the urgency of acting sooner than later. She’d wasted enough time. Queen Chrysalis looked back at the center screen and its final confirmation prompt one last time, and firmly pressed the Enter key.