Dead Space: Lifeline

For a pony whose special talent was running an orchard, Big MacIntosh could sneak with the best of ninjas. Tiptoeing around with his bulk was no easy feat either, and with every groan and squeak of the kitchen floorboards he paused, then shifted his weight elsewhere while his ears turned to check if there was any sound from the bedrooms.

Satisfied he was still clear, Big MacIntosh navigated the darkness and stowed as much as he could into his saddle bags. He’d grabbed his winter suit from the cupboard, it would come in handy if he was heading into the Frozen North. He even had faithful little Smartypants balanced on his back as the farmer blitzed through the kitchen as silently as he could.

He packed a loaf of bread, as many apples as he could fit, jam and even filled some of the spare jam-jars with water. Satisfied he had some ration packs in case his savings couldn’t carry him the entire journey, Big MacIntosh visited upstairs one last time.

Granny Smith had a frilly sleeping mask on and snored loud enough to mask his movements as he left a letter on her bedside table. It explained everything, what Big Mac was doing, where he was going and couldn’t stress enough that Granny shouldn’t worry.

He promised to be back with Applejack.

He stopped by Apple Bloom’s room too and left the list of his lighter chores on her bedside table. It wasn’t just a list of chores though. It was orders that she listen to Granny Smith while he was away and the reaffirming words that she was all grown up now. She had responsibilities now, and he was counting on her to keep Sweet Apple Acres running tip-top while he was away.

Then he left, stalked out the front door and into the night air.

“Jus’ you ‘n me now, Smartypants,” Big Mac whispered to the head of his rag doll hanging out the saddle bag. “Let’s go find Applejack.”

Without looking back at the farm he’d called home for the entirety of his life, Big MacIntosh took a breath and set off down the road.

Waking with a start, I drew a sharp breath through my nose and lifted my head to look around.

The utility closet was exactly as I’d left it a few hours ago before I caught some shut eye. The shelves were lined with buckets and cleaning supplies. The floor was mostly clear apart from my makeshift bed of rags and saddle bags. Smartypants was sat up on a shelf as if watching over me.

Sitting up I worked a crick out of my neck and flexed my sore joints. Perhaps next time I'd take my armour off before catching a nap… it sounded like a bad idea at the same time and I purged the thought.

“Anything exciting happen while I was sleeping, Smartypants?” I asked the doll.

Smartypants shifted ever so slightly, then lost balance and slumped onto her side as if to answer. Pressing my ear against the door I listened for the tell-tale sounds of crystal ponies on the other side, but heard nothing.

“No, I imagine not,” I said with a relieved sigh.

While packing up my things and storing Smartypants safely in my saddlebags I jammed up a few slices of bread and tended to my growling stomach. Hefting my bags and ensuring the straps were all secure on my armour segments I listened to the door one last time and slid it open.

To my relief the corridor was empty.

Before leaving I gave the closet one last sweep for anything useful. I found a head torch that still worked and secured the strap around my head, then picked up a small first aid-kit from one of the supply shelves. There wasn’t much in it, just a pair of scissors, an unpacked half-used dressing and some bandaids. Was better than nothing through.

Packed up I set out, orienting myself and moving deeper into the Crystal Empire. I hadn’t worked my plan out beyond “keep moving” and “look for signs of survivors” just yet. But it was the best I could do at the moment.

I didn’t have much more information than “Applejack and her friends walked into this hell and the rescue mission sent after them didn’t fare much better.” And I couldn’t shake the terrible feeling in the pit of my stomach that perhaps all I was looking for were a pile of corpses like what had greeted me above on the crater’s edge.

None of that, Big Mac, I scolded myself. That guardspony had survived on his own unarmed all this time. And my sister and her friends were tough and resourceful. They were fine.

I repeated the words in my head as I descended a flight of stairs in some sort of utility corridor and opened a door leading into warehouse of some kind. The space was cavernous, filled with tall stacks of shelves and metal cargo containers. There were a large set of loading bay doors off to one side. But in the centre I found something of particular interest.

A long workbench was scattered with tools, like whoever worked there was either very messy or had to bolt mid-project. I found a plethora of liquid rainbow cartridges, handy little multi-coloured packets that contained liquid rainbow usually developed in Cloudsdale. Clearly the Crystal Empire and Cloudsdale had traded wares once upon a time.

Liquid rainbow was all the rage at parties for putting in party-poppers to give them more zest, or even used as a combustible fuel.

I found a few disassembled cutting torches and some other tools laying about as well and an idea started to form in my head. I could make a rainbow cutter out of this stuff!

I’d built a similar device out of scraps back home to help me cut down dead old trees, back before I was a strapping, buff stallion. Contrary to popular belief I wasn’t always musclebound and fit. I’d started out life as a scrawny little colt. And what my poor sister sometimes fails to realise is that I didn’t get my cutie mark until I was older than she was.

I started with the housing, putting together a hard-point that replaced the armour over my right fetlock. The old straps off the armoured plate did the trick holding the holster in place. On top of that I fitted the parts of the disassembled blow torch. I modified the fuel receptacle to take the liquid rainbow packs and fitted the trio of torch nozzles with the pump in the housing of a circular saw. The rectangular box was topped with an ignition rod that would spark with each triggering of the shot.

The principle was simple. The nozzles pumped the liquid rainbow into a shaped projectile that was shot from the slit-shaped muzzle at the front. The electric spark ignited the rainbow and produced a burning blade with an effective range depending on the nozzle strength. I overclocked those to get a maximum range of about twenty metres, then set to work on an aiming mechanism.

It took some calibrating to get the range to blade density ratio right, but eventually I had a working projectile cutting device attached to my foreleg.

I gave it an experimental aim. The bladed guards popped out and slid aside as the cutter perched up on its mount and gave an energetic bweeeeee! As the charging tone hummed past soprano and into supersonic frequencies the laser sights engaged and projected a trio of cool blue pointers across the room, oriented in a wide line to indicate the path and width of the cutting shot. It was about as wide as my own fetlock, which would do for the moment. The power supply wasn’t the most high-tech and I didn’t want to burn it out by trying to make the beam too wide or boosting the range too far.

For now though I had a decent weapon with which to defend myself.

Okay, I thought with a grin, collapsing my rainbow cutter again and giving it a pat. This’ll do some damage.

Packing up the few spare rainbow packs laying about the workshop, I buttoned down the pouches on my saddle bags and set out again. I still had a sister to find and set off to the only other interior door. I wasn’t too eager about heading outside just yet. Crystal ponies could pop out of the snow like they’d done when I first arrived, and that enormous beast that originally chased me into the city was still out there.

As claustrophobic as they were, the corridors of the Crystal Empire habitats were quite comforting at the moment.

Reaching the door that seemed to head into an office complex, probably a shipping and customs office if the warehouse and loading dock was anything to go by, I pressed a hoof to the blue stone in the frame. The gem flickered red and the door didn’t move. There was a lockout in effect; but how many times had Apple Bloom locked herself out of her own diary and asked big brother to come save the day?

Settling down I gripped the panel around the gem and gave it a tug, pulling it clean off the wall. No matter the age or scale, the enchanted gem technology across Equestria was pretty simple.

There were three overall components. The power supply, which in the case of Apple Bloom’s diary lock was a battery gem the size of a button with an average charge life of three to four years. In the case of a city like this there was usually a power plant that used larger battery gems the size of a barn and constantly charged them with either wind-vanes, hydro-dams; or for places where neither solution was practical liquid rainbow combustible generators like on the cable car, but on a larger scale were used

The second part was the mechanism itself. Could be a door. Could be a lift winch. Could be something as simple as a clock.

And finally there was the control gem. The part that told the mechanism whether or not it was allowed to do what it was supposed to do.

All I had to do here, just like on Apple Bloom’s diary, was fuse the power directly into the mechanism, bypassing the control gem entirely; and open-sesame!

Bypassing a gem lock was easy once you got into the guts of it. But of course bypassing a lock on say the Canterlot Treasury would be a pretty tricky affair because there were security spells, failovers, curses and other nasty booby-traps to contend with.

This was a garage door though, so I was relatively safe.

I was pulling the glowing power conduit out of the control gem and finding the port on the door mechanism when a rattle of talons on the concrete floor caught my ears. In an instant I was on my hooves and whipped around.

The glowing crystals running along the high ceiling did a poor job of lighting the place, casting pitch black shadows beside shipping crates and in the corners behind the stacks of shelves. I snapped on my headlamp and aimed my rainbow cutter before moving forward to check the area was clear.

The beam of light scanned one way, laser sights the other.

I was beginning to regret not going outside, suddenly realising it was possible to be surrounded inside as well as out. And unlike in the street where the only crystal pony cover there was were some piles of snow, in that warehouse were shelves and boxes to hide behind and break line of sight.

And it wasn’t my paranoia that had me scanning for targets either. Talons skittered one way and the other, and whipping around I caught the blurry tail end of something dashing through the open behind me. I galloped over and checked around the corner of a cargo box, but it was already gone.

I had the terrible feeling of being stalked by a pack of Timberwolves. That was of course until I turned and faced one of the stalkers head on.

It screamed as loud as I did as it burst from cover and cleared the space between us in a heartbeat. I reflexively raised a foreleg to protect myself and took the brunt of the charge to my torso armour. The already dented and scratched Royal Guard armour screeched and clanged loudly as I was thrown on my back and the crystal pony landed on top of me.

The “stalker” was even more horrific than the other permutations of crystal pony I’d seen so far.

The creature had been a unicorn once upon a time. What remained of the bony horn had broken forward to lay parallel with the long tusks of bone jutting out of the crystal pony’s neck, turning their face into a trident-like ram. I couldn’t see any eyes, but the fleshy nostrils flared as if drinking in the scent of my fear.

Somehow the creature remained balanced on rear hooves as it moved around, balancing with elongated forelegs with the hooves that ended in four long spidery talons. Even the ribcage of the stalker had been repurposed into a deadly weapon, the ribs opening up to reveal the soft innards of the crystal pony had long fallen out, with each rib ending in a vicious point.

The toothy bird-like beak of the monster opened to unleash a high pitched cry before it pecked at me like a chicken. One of the tusks nicked my cheek, but thankfully I dodged just as the headbutt came down, ramming the stalker’s face into the floor.

Not only was my rainbow cutter a decent ranged weapon, it made a fair good club too. I swung the weighty weapon around and caught the stalker in the side of the head, cracking its glassy skin and causing some of the hardened skull to buckle. The creature retaliated, swiping a claw across my chest, but the talons only raked armour.

The cutter on my foreleg hummed to life and let out a splash of energy. Superheated rainbow essence seared through glass and flesh and bone, lobbing the offending limb clean off with a scream from the stalker.

I whacked it again, this time succeeding in rolling the monster off me and pinned the stalker down. While I was stomping off the other arm I heard an imitation of the stalker’s wail and turned my head at the same time as my weapon.

Time slowed to a crawl as I caught it in my sights. The second stalker broke cover, skidding almost clumsily around the corner and straightened up to charge head first. It was smart, folding its arms behind its back to hide the limbs from my weapon. But the stalker still needed to run…

I snapped my aim down and twisted my leg, orienting the cutter horizontally and fired.

BOOM! BOOM!

The recoil kicked like a mule, throwing my aim between shots, but the double-tap hit true. Two multi-coloured blades of burning energy sliced through the stalker’s legs, and smouldering at the knee joints the crystal pony went down, face first.

I put another shot into the neck of the stalker I was holding down, decapitating it before stomping off the remaining claw and looked back at the legless monster. It didn’t give up easy, clawing forward on its arms to get a piece of me.

Two more shots put it down for good.

Smartypants, I love ya’, but this rainbow cutter is my new best friend. I even managed a smile.

But the thought and the smile choked and died when the stalker cries and the sound of talons scraping about doubled. Several more crystal pony stalkers leapt into view, peeking their grotesque heads around shelves and jumped atop boxes to get a bird’s eye view of me.

My cutter humming, I backed towards the door I’d been bypassing. Every time my laser sights crossed a stalker they smartly recognised the danger and backed away, or ducked into cover. This was complicating things a little.

Then as if things weren’t horrible enough, a very familiar mighty howl rang out, muffled by the docking bay doors. The sheet metal rattled and dented as something smashed into it.

Knocked once… twice… then a pointed, chitinous leg pierced through the metal. My eyes widened at the sight of my old tormentor tearing slowly through the door. Another leg pierced the metal and raked a long gash in the garage door, then an enormous fist made of multiple fleshy corpses burst through.

The stalkers wailed a challenge, but scattered all the same to seek out cover, as if knowing what would happen if they stood in the beast’s path. I followed their example.

Whipping around I reached into the door panel I’d torn open and desperately finished my bypass. It was just as I found the mechanism port to plug the main power supply into when I heard a stalker chirp over the groan of the buckling metal garage doors.

Looking right I saw a stalker leap around the corner and try its luck running me through before that colossal beast outside got a piece.

Quickly jumping back, I managed to duck under a swipe of a claw as the stalker soared past me and slammed headlong into a solid wall. Given the time I would have kept shooting ‘till it was deader than a door nail, but I merely put a few rainbow shots into squirming body before diving into the door panel again.

I jammed the conduit into the mechanism port and with a shower of brightly coloured sparks the door jolted to life. And not a moment too soon either.

The spidery beast finished ripping through the loading bay door and belted it into the warehouse. Shelves collapsed as they were ploughed through and boxes were thrown into the air as the beast clawed its way towards me.

I slipped through the door and ran as fast as I could. At the same time the beast lunged out with one of its long arms, sliding across the floor and reaching down the corridor towards me.

But it snatched at only air, a hair’s breadth from my tail as its shoulder got stuck in the doorframe.

I knew it was stuck, that it was blocking the doorway and preventing stalkers from pursuing and getting me; but I didn’t stop running until I was several rooms and a number of locked doors away from the beast’s anguished cries.

Closing and sealing the fourth door between me and the loading dock I leaned against a wall and caught my breath. My heart was hammering so hard against my chest I feared I might break a rib. Collapsing the rainbow cutter I took a look around.

A sizeable office space stretched out before me, desks broken up by cubicles tall enough that I had to rear up on hind legs just to look over them. The window blinds were drawn and the glass on the other side seemed to be snowed over blacking them out entirely.

I swept the shadows as I gingerly moved between the cubicles, but found myself alone with the rogue splashes of blood marring the cubicles and carpets. It looked like a slaughterhouse, streaks of red running along the walls like the monsters had been flamboyantly flicking the gore about like one of those nu-age artists.

It was through the soft tap of my hooves on the ground that I heard a hiss.

My eyes widened and I stepped back just in time. Through the delicate cork of a cubicle divide to my side came a long blade of serrated bone. It jabbed clean through and missed my nose by a pegasus feather.

A second blade followed as I scrambled back in seconds the slasher ambushing me tore through the divider, grinning at me like a dog eating hornets. The crystal pony lunged as I was deploying my rainbow cutter.

One of the scythed into my foreleg, cutting through fabric and flesh, drawing blood and making me cry out with pain. Thankfully the other bounced off my armour. But the grip the crystal pony had on me drew me dangerously close to that bubbling maw looking eager to sink its teeth in my neck.

With a cry I managed to push off the slasher and lashed upwards with my cutter. The device cracked into the glass skin on the left-side scythe, knocking the blade off me. Following through with another swipe I caught the slasher in the side of the head and knocked it away.

As I lined up my aim to start dissecting the stumbling beast another slasher, and then a third showed up. One tore through another one of the dividers, while the other slasher leapt clean over and bore down.

I rolled aside as the leaping crystal pony landed with a thud, but I came to my hooves dangerously close to the other as it finished tearing through the cubicle. It grabbed me and hugged close just like the first one, only this time I had a shot prepped.

Two splashes of energy roared out the rainbow cutter and lopped a leg clean off. At the same time the leaping slasher righted itself and rushed my back.

With a yell of effort I steadied my stance and lifted the slasher holding on to me into the air before chucking him like a hay-bale. The thrashing monster crashed into the rushing slasher and they dropped to the ground, confused and scrambling over each other. It gave me enough time to aim and fire.

Six shots roared out of the rainbow cutter and blew the two crystal ponies apart before I turned to the last one. It charged me with a guttural roar, swinging those scythes wildly, one of which still glistened with my blood.

I fired, but the cutter only clicked, and the housing popped open to reveal the liquid rainbow pack was no longer a swirling array of various colours. It was a dull grey colour. Completely empty.

I threw myself back and collided with a wall as the slasher came at me. One scythe darted forward and I ducked just in time. The blade of bone thudded into the wall and stuck there, giving me time to rise up and heavily uppercut the crystal pony. The head came clean off with a spray of mucus and a cloud of glistening, broken crystal.

My leg then swept down and grabbed the spare scythe arm. I twisted hard, unconcerned for whatever pain I might be inflicting the animal. There was no whimper or howl out of the headless crystal pony however as the glass skin shattered and the sickening pop of bone and joint cartilage rang out. Flesh tore like wet tissue paper and the slasher’s swinging weapon came free.

I finished up by circling into a ball and unloading a heavy buck into the creature’s chest. The blade still lodged in the wall stayed put and the force of my kick tore the arm clean from the torso, launching the harmless corpse onto the pile of severed limbs I had reduced the other two to.

Picking myself up I checked my surrounds to make sure there were no more contenders and pulled the empty rainbow pack from my cutter. Replacing it with a full one from my pack, I gave the weapon a single test shot into the pile of fleshy remains – just in case – and moved on into a stairwell.

That was when I heard another sound echoing down the stairs to meet my ears. Though it was not the grating, fear inducing wail of crystal ponies.

There was crashing of energy that sounded distinctly like unicorn magic and battle cries. Screams of regular, living pony vocal chords. Not the decayed, horrible animalistic roars and gargles of the crystal ponies.

It was definitely the sounds of a fight, and I questioned my sanity of mind when the sound actually brought me some relief. But it made sense. Sounds of fighting meant ponies other than myself still fighting for survival.

The Big MacIntosh of yesterday would have balked at the sound of conflict; but I scoped out its direction and ran headlong towards it.