Portmaster

"Pinkie Pie, you're a genius!"

"No, I'm not., I'm a chicken!"

I scowled. I hated that point of the dream. That selfish pink cunt just got praised for her shenanigans. But then, my dream self didn't hate the ringleader. That was the magical land of Equestria in action. The Magic of Friendship. Nowadays, friendship like that would buy you at best a trip down the same incinerator chute as your friend. Magic was picked apart, catalogued, simulated, squeezed into chips and sold as commodity. The mysterious magic of friendship was all dead.

I followed Twilight Sparkle to Zecora, who would help me disguise myself as Nightmare Moon, to the delight of all the foals. The really good part of the dream was about to begin.

Then, Hollow Point walked in. Ignoring Zecora and Twilight, she turned to me with a serious expression.

"Before you say 'Fuck you, Hollow',..."

"Fuck you, Hollow."

She grimaced and continued. "I know it's way early to ask you that, but the stupid fuck seems to want to do something dumber than ever before."

"Even after..."

"Especially. See, Baton, we intended to have some choice words with the Portmaster while we deliver the beating, to make him perfectly aware of where he went wrong. We were late. A group of port workers roughed him up first, while giving him a couple of their own choice word. He managed to convince them he's like all the others. Then they convinced him he's like all the others."

"And?"

"And he's up to something. He visited the data banks of the logistics system, with some large bag slung over his back. Then he went to the castle, and now he's walking over the grounds, giving the staff various stupid orders."

"Like?"

"Grab him some specific beer, specific year, specific brand, something damn obscure. Order recount of disaster recovery equipment. Test-drive some trucks around the countryside. Escort a pony matching a certain description from the spaceport to the hotel. Nopony matching that description boarded any of the arriving crafts."

"Sending replicants away from the castle... Fuck." I jerked myself awake, leaving a confused Twilight Sparkle and an annoyed Zecora behind. I stood up from the couch, then rushed out of the rape victims counseling room, towards the elevators. Triggering emergency mode, I ordered the elevator to bring me to the garages at the top level, then galloping, I reached one of the hoverbikes. The access console of the vehicle granted me clearance, obeying the emergency status given to me by Hollow Point. I gunned the jet engine and with a scream of the jet dashed through the air towards the distant castle. The police siren of the motor howled, forcing all regular traffic out of my way, though I still had to dodge a few stragglers or just assholes who choose to override the controls.

Within a minute I was in the no-fly zone around the castle, my permission being processed by the castle's automatic defenses. It took them another thirty seconds to finally believe I was not an aerial terrorist and that my emergency status would be sufficient. In the meanwhile, I spotted my target. He was sitting at a picnic table set up on the battlements for visiting tourists. He was sipping something through a straw from a box, and observing the city.

The moment permission was granted I dropped the hoverbike onto the battlements, grounding it hard, jumping off the seat and rushing to the Portmaster.

He had most of his limbs in healing casts, his chest and neck in protective hard light fields, a healing shield protecting half of his face.

I stood next to him gasping. Somehow, the usual smile didn't even attempt to appear on my face. I just stood there, angry. So, I reached him. And... now what?

He raised his gaze to me, recognizing me through a haze of whatever he pumped into his system, and suddenly his face began filling with fear. Terror.

"Baton? You are not supposed to be here."

"What are you planning?"

"Baton, you must leave the castle perimeter immediately."

"Not without all the civilians, unless you stop whatever you planned."

He clenched his teeth. He glared at me.

"Officer Baton, service me," he muttered. "At my place."

"No, Snake Stomper. I will not service you, and I will not leave until you tell me what is going on."

He opened his good eye suddenly. "Baton, please! You must run now! It's too late to save them!"

"Then I will go with them."

I felt a mental nudge from Hollow Point. She was observing everything through my eyes, and doing her best to order evacuation of the castle. "Get him to tell how much time we have, then run. That boneheaded Count doesn't want to move his ass until we give him something solid."

Then Portmaster raised his head suddenly. "I can stop it, but we must go now. To my house."

"What are you planning?"

"No time to explain," he hobbled towards the hoverbike. "I won't let you die... and if canceling this whole thing is what it takes, so be it."

I used my magic to place him on the hoverbike, without trying to be gentle. To his credit, he winced only a little. I sat behind him and gunned the engine. Two seconds later, we were in a rapid dive over the Docks and heading to the opposite edge of the harbor, where the hills surrounding the city met the sea, protecting the port bay from storm waves.

I was here rarely. His house was a converted old artillery bunker built into the side of the hill, just above the sea surface, at the end of a narrow strip of beach. The only means of access to the inside through the ridiculously thick concrete were a thick iron door like those found in ship bulkheads, and a porthole, the kind used in ships a few centuries ago, before hard light got ubiquitous and reliable enough. The door swung open to allow the host inside.

I slid off the bike, and he slipped off it, shouting momentarily in pain, as he landed on his injured legs. He hobbled towards the door.

"Come with me, Baton."

"I'll stay here and wait for you."

"I need a replicant's help with that."

"I'll call someone."

"Then you have twenty seconds if you want this to succeed."

I cursed under my breath and trotted after him inside.

A tiny vestibule with hanging storm coats and warm anoraks led into a small room, with barely enough space for a bed, a desk, a few shelves filled with various knick-knacks. The door next to the vestibule led to a tiny bathroom. That was all. I knew Portmaster was not a poor pony. Once he stopped a megafreighter from leaving the port to allow some replicants in a boat to vacate its route. The losses caused by the delay exceeded the market value of the replicants a thousandfold - with any other portmaster they'd be ran over by the ship without a second thought. Snake Stomper choose to cover the losses from his own pocket, paying several million bits without a blink of an eye.

No time to think about that now. I shuddered when the door and the viewport slammed shut, then the outer wall began pretending to be invisible, covered with three-dimensional image of the outside. The castle hill was on the opposite side of the bay.

"I'm sorry, Baton. I lied," he said. "They can't be saved."

"No! No! You promised!" I shouted and shook him.

He turned to a small holoprojector on the desk. It showed the 3D map of about five hundred kilometers surrounding Hayburg. There was a bunch of lines from above, aiming into the ocean, then following a line to the port, to the solar furnace, then through pipelines, to various nodes, and then away, into Equestria, along the pipelines.

There was one that didn't follow that pattern. It aimed directly into a pipeline node at the foot of the castle hill.

"There's a bug in the delivery routing. If a line to a node of given cargo route can't be established, the software directs the cargo to the next node on the route directly. These old core memories go bad all by themselves; I was replacing a module roughly two times a month. It was easy to insert a faulty core module that fails to locate the barge splashdown location in the ocean. The next point accessible from the orbit is the pipeline core. Currently, a bullet-shaped load of two thousand tons of tungsten is descending on a ballistic trajectory from the orbit towards its new destination. Its fuel is exhausted and there's nothing strong enough to change its route."

I heard Hollow through my link. "Put me through to Empress Celestia immediately! National emergency!"

There were some words. I could sense Hollow scowling there.

Then a star appeared in the sky. Seconds later, the star became as bright as the sun, descending rapidly. And then the sun became a trail of fire that ended with a blinding blast at the foot of the castle hill.

A sudden earthquake threw us back at the wall. The projector wall flickered for a moment, then went back on again.

An enormous tidal wave was approaching us. It rolled through the Docks, flipping megafreighters like small toys. I saw the hoverbike engage a self-protection mechanism, launching vertically into the air. Then the wave rolled over us.

This time the hit wasn't even perceptible, just the door and the porthole groaned a little.

The view switched to a camera on top of the hill, overlooking the port and the bay.

More than half of the castle hill was gone. There was just a huge crater filling with water rapidly under a rising mushroom cloud. The tsunami wave rolling through the Docks subsided quickly.

The hill protected most of the city from the blast wave. A big part of the port was razed, but we, replicants are a tough kind, we'd recover. But the castle was gone, blown up, sent flying somewhere inland, likely raining stones all over the city.

Whoever didn't evacuate on time from the castle was dead.

"Empress Celestia will hear you now," I heard Hollow's comms.

"Too late," she muttered.

"Too late for what?" I heard the ruler's voice.

"The Castle Hayburg doesn't exist, hit by orbital barge. Count Hayburg and his whole family were inside, preparing for evacuation. Everypony within the castle is currently presumed dead."

"Then what are you waiting for?" I heard our ruler snarl in a way I'd never suspect her being capable of. "Begin disaster relief effort immediately. Catch the culprit, dead or alive, a bounty of ten million bits to whoever catches them. Now."

"Yes, Your Majesty," Hollow said. "At least the latter should be simple enough," she muttered as the connection died.

I turned to the Portmaster. He stood, gazing at me softly. "You have me. And ten million bits, which can easily buy you freedom." He smiled weakly.

I couldn't hide my rage. "You shitheaded halfwit. You brainless dipshit. Do you realize what you've done?"

"I killed them all. I gave you all a chance. No master I know of is worse than Count Hayburg."

"No, you fucking dickhead! Don't you realize? I don't give a shit about the Count or your fucking fight or all the assholes you just murdered!" I shook him, yelling at him. "Fucking Empress Celestia just put ten million bits of bounty on your fucking empty head! They want you dead! How the fuck am I supposed to save your retarded ass now?"

"You're not. Just turn me in."

"NO, you shitbrained dimwit!" I screamed my rage. "I love you, you fucking asshole, and I am not fucking letting them take you!"

I felt Hollow Point facehoof over the comms link. "Did he infect you with his stupidity, Baton?"

"Fuck you, Hollow."

The Portmaster pleaded. "Baton, don't do it! Turn me in! There's no way you can save me now. You'll get ears deep in shit if you even think of saving me!"

I used my magic to pull the gun out of my holster. I levitated it to my head, and rested the barrel against my skull just in front of my ear. "You want this mare dead? No? Then do what I say."

"Don't! Baton!"

"Do as I say or I drop dead this second."

"Okay, okay! Just tell me what to do."

"Get outside and on the hoverbike now."

The bulkhead-style door groaned as the hydraulics pushed it against the damage caused by the blast. Meanwhile, I linked up to the hoverbike and told it to return to previous position. The sea had receded, momentarily exposing a huge swath of its bottom before next wave would roll in.

I felt an encrypted link open up deeper in my system. Just a system message, the kind we used when we wanted to communicate off-record. "You have a three minute head start."

"Love you, Hollow," I whispered. I ran outside, literally threw that dumb prick over the seat, jumped after him, gunned the engine, then sped away into the open sea.