Fallout Equestria: Dead Hive

Just a little more pressure...Just a little more.

...

Just pull the trigger.

...

Pull.

...

Pull, you stupid bug! PULL!

*click!*

...Damnit.

The Changeling Queen sighed, dropping the large revolver onto the table beside her throne once again, head in her hands.

Taller than any average pony, given her status as queen, her lithe-yet-full frame stood somewhere between 8 or 9 feet tall had she not been sitting. She was a few inches more than that if one were to count the gnarled horn that stuck upward from the top of her forehead.

Her body was covered by a long, silken dress, coloured in a seemingly oscillating pattern of oranges and light browns that seemed to endlessly melt with the badlands' ever-shifting desert sands, the edges lined with a black hue similar to the colour of her chitinous skin and the thin layer of fur that covered it from head to hoof.

A split in the fabric at one hip down to her hooves allowed the dress to flow without risk of injury should the wearer have to run and had, at times, allowed her to show a little bit of leg to political visitors whom she was trying to manipulate. What a far-gone era, those times were.

The dress was quite the fancy little piece of attire, sewn for her by a former suitor long ago as a gift, made from the finest silks he had managed to attain which certainly wasn't cheap. Her tall form had made finding long-lasting clothing that she could wear prove a challenging endeavour, so she had loved it, wearing it as often as possible. Asking her about how it lasted well over two centuries would leave inconsistent responses varying from taking good care of it to it apparently being magic silk, but to be entirely honest, she’d likely tell you she didn’t know.

It certainly lasted longer than he had... It was all she had to remember him by, even his name had faded into memory long ago, and it was always a joy when she remembered him again.

The holed hooves at the end of her legs kicked into the base of her throne, adding another fraction
of an inch into the dents in the base, long worn into the chitinous material that fused it to the floor.
Her long sandy orange hair had holes similar to that of her legs, and her bloodshot, tear-stricken eyes
were a thicker but similar shade.

Her eyes of course, were tear-stricken because she had just tried to kill herself. 'Tried' being the operative word.

The gun had been loaded, barrel pressed firmly against her temple, but the lone round inside had been old, the powder losing it’s potency and the blast cap a partially active dud, so it hadn't fired.

It was a wonder the damn thing worked at all, having somehow survived what would’ve been natural decaying of the metals.

The ornate firearm had sat in a wooden box for the better part of 200 years, only being used on one other occasion decades previously.

"My Queen?"

She looked up at the remains of her hive's throne room; to say it had seen better days was an understatement.
The corpses of both giant mutant scorpion and changeling alike were strewn about, the former greatly outnumbering
the latter, the sword and halberd-bearing defenders had fought bravely and aggressively to defend their home.
In the end however, the enormous arachnids had won, their seemingly suicidal siege of the changeling hive had
left all but two dead, the hive's queen, and a single drone, a record keeper who was currently standing at attention in the middle of the room, facing her.

The drone in question stood patiently in front of his ruler as she looked at him, his somewhat scrawny form and luck
having been all that'd saved him from joining his brothers and sisters in the forever after with their ancestors. That,
and the Queen's high-calibre revolver having narrowly spared him from the same fate as the rest of the hive by the giant pincers of a scorpion. His chitin torso remained uncovered when inside the hive, and when outside he, like the now-late members of the hive, wore a thin, loose-flowing shirt, with chitin-based plates sewn into sections around his shoulders and back to act as armour, save for his wings, and keep the sun off. His lower body was covered in a thick, skirt-like cloth covered in segmented plates from the waist-down, a split in the fabric on the front and back allowed his tail to hang free and allow him to run, if need be.

"Queen Deciduous, are you alright?"
He was polite... If not a little insensitive.
"Alright? Alright?! I just lost all but one of a hive of several hundred thousand to a horde of giant scorpions! Of
course I'm not alright!" she slammed a fist into the wooden side table, the surface of the meek little piece of furniture shattered under the force, and little but splinters remained of the top as the unattached legs and the revolver clattered to the ground. The shock from the impact managed to set off the dud blasting cap, the high-powered round throwing the pistol into the air from the recoil, shooting off and tearing through the bodies that cluttered the ground beyond the throne. One of the scorpions, evidently not quite dead, gave a shriek as the round tore one of its pincers from its body. It flailed violently for a moment, and then went still. The two of them winced as their ears rang, the heavy-duty bullets were loud, enough to wake the dead even.

Well, almost.

"The fact that you saved one should still be worth something, should it not, my Queen?" He received a glare in response.

"Don't call me that, drone! I do not deserve such a title after such losses. A hive with only one living changeling is
scarcely more than nothing at all."

"But what of yourself, my queen?"

"You saw me trying to end my life just then, did you not?" she spat. The drone nodded "the only thing that spared me from joining all those I failed is that the round in this old gift of mine failed to do its own job, much like I did. What good is a queen if she cannot defend her subjects, and is left with all but one to lead?"

The drone stared silently for a moment, his queen's eyes met with his, and then narrowed, and her fangs bared. "You know something that I don't? Explain yourself."

The drone stared yet longer, before opening his muzzle again. "Well, the drone teams you had sent around to gather info on various nearby locations hardly ever returned, but we had been receiving various, though somewhat vague, messages of their status for the last two-hundred years, remember? Given their tendency to operate outside of our hivemind's reach, it's only natural that we've had no communication with them. The first groups since the war brought news of survivors, the vast majority of which had hidden in massive numbered underground shelters...Their descendants, in the years since, have started keeping physical copies, as memorizing the all of them got tedious after a while.

“Some told of mutant infestations, the ones who went to the Flutter Valley area sent news of a pony-changeling settlement, and something about Queen Chrysalis was mentioned, but their message was worn and hard to make out, the messenger sending it had come through a sandstorm, not
much else made it through that was readable."

The somewhat less angry expression he received prompted him to continue "We were planning to show you once I had everything put together, I wasn't waiting on any further reports, but that's when the attack happened."

Queen Deciduous dared to let herself feel a little relieved at the news, she had forgotten about the number of love-collecting and recon parties she'd sent out over the years, some would send back groups to trade stations with others in a schedule of sorts, some would return entirely, usually to report limited success or complete failure, some would send messages, and some just never returned.

But so many had come and gone, and it had been months since she last had one of these compiled reports delivered to her, she had assumed all had died to the horrors of the wasteland or chosen to stay away, the badlands in which her hive was based were bad enough, but ever since the bombs fell two centuries ago, only horrors awaited outside their hive's borders, nothing pony-like had made their way to their hive's borders in a long time even before the war,
the last visitor, a mare seeking shelter from a sandstorm going by the moniker Daring Do, had given the Queen quite a number of things to talk about, and had left her the ornate pistol that was now sitting on the floor. A gift from her father, she had said, as she gave the monarch the decorated pistol, along with the wooden box it was held in, as well as a half-dozen of the oversized rounds that it fired.

She had claimed she wouldn't need it.The badlands were obviously still considered a threat to even those monstrous mutants, however, as only the scorpions dared venture into them in large numbers. Deciduous wondered if the mare had ever regretted giving the changling the old handgun. 'I guess I'll never know' she thought to herself.

"There is also some other news, your majesty" the drone piped in, interrupting her musing, and she focused on him again.

"Yes, drone?"

"I took the liberty of investigating the hatchery while you were contemplating killing yourself, given that the communication reports are also kept within' the same stretch of the hive."

Deciduous winced, her ears folding back. "To the point as always with you, and what did you find?"

"I found the reports, as they were what I was seeking, but I believe I sensed some weak movement in the hivemind as I passed the hatchery. I believe some of the unborn young may have remained buried and un-eaten by the scorpions."
The Queen's eyes widened, immediately standing from her throne. "What?! You didn't tell me this sooner?! Hurry, you fool! They won't last on their own!" With that, her horn was surrounded in the greenish-yellow hue of her magic as she teleported herself straight to the hatchery, and leaving her subject to sigh in annoyance before making his way down by hoof.

The Queen rematerialized in the hive's hatchery, her stomach wrenching at the sight of it.

Like her throne room, bodies littered the floor, changeling and arachnid alike. However, the mess here was added
to by the shattered remains of eggshells and fallen changeling nymphs, most of the bodies of which were missing
limbs. Tempering her anguish at the loss, Deciduous walked over to the pit in the centre of the chamber, where
the eggs closest to hatching were kept, which was filled with cool sand to keep the heat of the badlands from them.
Most of the many hundreds of eggs that the hive would incubate sat in specialised honeycomb-like recesses in the walls, where they would be fed a steady stream of the love energy they would need until they could be hatched from the pit. It had been found their bodies tend to adjust to the desert heat better when their first experiences of life were that of sand.

All the visible eggs on the surface of the sand pit had been smashed as the many stored within' the hatchery's walls, their insides lay spattered along the undisturbed sand...

...undisturbed sand...

Wait a moment! It looked exactly the same as the last time she had been there! That could possibly mean...

The Queen sent a simple ping through her hive-mind, one that only the living could respond to, hoping against hope that she would receive more than the one response the drone on his way down would inevitably give.
Her optimism was rewarded, right below her hooves, three weak signals were received by the ping! Deciduous immediately dropped to her knees, ignoring the still-damp moisture of the smashed egg innards as she scraped away the sand with as much combined speed and care as she could muster.

The first egg was found just below the surface, a brilliantly smooth translucent sphere little bigger than a kickball, a dark, bottle-green hue to the outter-most parts of the shell, and a dark blue-and-black core-like centre. If one were to put a light beneath the egg, they could possibly make out the faint shape of the unhatched changeling within, provided it had developed enough.

Levitating the egg into the air in front of her, the autumn-haired changeling steadily sent a stream from her large stores of love energy to the egg, feeding the unattended nymph untill she felt it give a suitably strong response for an egg so far into its incubation period, all the while keeping a close eye on the pit, and the other two eggs still beneath the sand. Keeping the first egg floating over her head, she returned to digging.

It took a few minutes of careful scraping away of the sand and gently moving those she hadn't been quick enough to save before the last two were found, both nestled closely to one-another. A motherly smile worked its way onto her face as she scooped up the two spheres in her arms, holding them close as she fed them the love energy they needed, much like she did the first.

The three eggs fed to her satisfaction, Queen Deciduous allowed herself a sigh of relief as she sat back on the hatchery floor, lowering the first egg to join the two in her arms, pressing close to her body as she could manage without risk of damaging them. Her teary eyes stung as she watched the unborn changelings, fearing that one would suddenly die right then and there. But she held her composure as best as she could, watching the nymphs within, her slit eyes taking in even the slightest movements the embryo in each one made.

Five. All that had survived out of so many thousands, was five, not two.

"Ahem, My Queen?"

She turned, spotting the drone, a folder in his hand and an assortment of supplies now hanging from his shoulders; canteens, pots, pans, small bags of crystals containing trace amounts of love energy that most scouting parties used for rations. He was packing for a journey across the badlands.

"Y-yes drone?" she half-blubbered back, trying to maintain as much of her composure as she could. She'd be lucky if she could get a hive going again with such small numbers. She'd have to start from scratch, perhaps try to find another hive or-

"Given the nature of the drone teams having likely found places to survive, if not thrive, outside the hive for the sake of love-collecting, I propose that we head to the nearest-possible team, and re-link them to the hive-mind, and from there move to each group's last-known locations. If we're lucky, we might even be within' range of some of the other groups once we find the first one."

Queen Deciduous steadily got to her hooves, the eggs remaining in her arms. Walking towards the drone, and floating the eggs to him, his own magic taking them. He stared at them a moment, seeming somewhat curious at the faintly moving forms inside them, before hovering them above his head.

"Then we shall pack supplies for the journey and then some, but leave some behind should any of the groups return here first in the meantime while we are gone. A message, as well, informing them to stay or seek us out at their own leisure,”

Opening the folder in one hand, the drone looked inside for a moment before closing it again and handing it to his Queen. She opened it, staring at the files inside, collections of messages, some old and some new. A very out of date map of Equestria covered in scribbles and markings to indicate what had changed, as well as a tally of known infiltrator groups and their encounters with the factions of the wasteland.

She looked back at the eggs, their position above the drone’s head leaving them near eye-level to her. A small smile appeared on her muzzle as she stared at them, glad for each little movement the inside of each made. “Just a few more days, at the least.”

She reached out and stroked the surface of the egg closest to her “Just a few more days, “ She trailed off, and her smile disappeared again. She crouched down to bring herself to eye level with the drone “So, what is our first destination, drone?”

"The nearest group was not far from a small village near Saddle Arabia."

“I see. Prepare one of our heat-resisting containers for carrying the eggs, and then make ready to leave by noon.” The drone nodded, turning and walking out the entrance from which he entered, the eggs floating gently behind him as he disappeared.

Watching him leave, Deciduous straightened up, taking one more look around the hatchery. “I can only hope that someday this image, this horrible and distressing image, will become no more than a bad memory... ” With that, she turned and walked out, heading for her bedchambers to prepare for her departure, and to think on the morning’s events.

Author's Note

Third Time's the charm,right?

Editing done by Echo_Off

Special thanks to KKat for creating fallout equestria.

Apologies to those who don't approve of my use of anthro in this story, humanoid anatomy is easier for me to remember, so i'm rolling with it. :3

EDIT: Made the ending a little less awkward to read.