Chapter 5: Metal Boxes and the Ponies Inside

Sulphuric Acid sat in her office… All her previous rage had given way to cold, calculated, hatred… That foal had escaped! The saboteur had escaped, no doubt plotting more disasters to undermine her Hub! Worse, she had a hostage with her, a pony from the record centre that had been operating the airlock she escaped out of... The good news was that she was nowhere to be found inside the Habitable Zone, one of the patrols along the border had seen her fleeing, so at least Sulphuric didn’t need to fear that the pony was going to wreck the newly activated thaumic engine… Now, a proper garrison of Liquidators would need to be assigned to guard the engine, but that only gave her more of an excuse to increase recruitment.

The worrying part was not the mare herself, she didn’t pose an immediate threat to the Hub, rather it was the method in which she escaped… The cell was lined in cold iron, so she couldn’t have used magic to escape, and a single mare without a weapon was no match for a properly trained Liquidator… Even with telekinesis, it wouldn’t have helped her all that much, as everything inside the room was bolted down to prevent that exact scenario.

There was only one conclusion… There was a traitor in her Hub.

Nineteen Hours Earlier

I awoke to find myself inside a room, last night a pony, a liquidator, burst into my house and I found myself a captive of the Minister… Why? The cell was made from some dark metal, I raised my horn, intending to inspect the material, however, the moment my magic made contact with the metal, my horn started to tingle, my head started to ache, and my magic failed.

The guard didn’t even turn to look at me… Although it was hard to tell… This room was only large enough for two ponies to stand side-by-side, and half of that space was taken up by the bed, a squishy block covered in fabric, somehow more comfortable than my bedding back home… I’d pity the pegasus placed inside such a cell, there was hardly enough room to raise one’s wings. The door was the standard bulkhead doors, complete with porthole, the only difference being the dark metal the door seemed coated in, and the metal mesh over the porthole.

Outside, just beyond the porthole, was a guard sitting at a table, playing some game involving little metal figures of ponies. No sound penetrated the cell, and I was left to think. The liquidator had said I was accused of destruction of Hub property… There wasn’t much that I could think of that was important enough to imprison someone for the destruction of… Most of those things were in Life Support, breaking one of the air machines, even unintentionally, was a rather severe crime, and of course, killing the plants in the farms meant fewer rations for everyone… But the real danger was breaking a Thaumic Engine, with how unstable and potentially disastrous a meltdown is.

“Wait!” I whispered to myself… Did they really think I destroyed the engine on purpose! That’s absurd!

Outside, I stared through the porthole to see another Liquidator trot into the room, the two turned to one another and started talking, although I couldn’t hear what they were saying, surprise was evident on the guard’s face.

There came a knock at the shed’s door, and Boron turned his head, surprised to see who was knocking. “Hydroxide?” He questioned, rushing to open the door. “What’s going on?”

The shed was small, a scrap-metal building just behind Hydro and Cat’s home, inside this shed was the sum total of Boron’s worldly possessions. Most of them either gifts from the family who had saved him from a life of homelessness or relics from his life before that. On a makeshift metal ponnequin was a tattered yellow greatcoat with lead helmet and plating, the plating equally old and battered, with several repairs featuring more common metals, such as steel. On a hoof-crafted metal desk was a rubber mask with air filters, one of the glass lenses was broken, but nothing could be done about it, glass was harder to find than lead, and most of it went to making the quartz crystals used in crystal thaumaturgy.

Hydroxide took in the room, it only now occurred to Boron that this was the first time the stallion had seen the shed, “Boron… Sulphuric Acid has gone insane! She’s ordered the execution of a pony!”

Sputtering Boron turned to his former master, “W-What! Who is it, what could they have possibly done to warrant such-”

“Petrochemical.”

Boron’s eyes went wide, realizing that this was partially his own fault, “When!”

“Tomorow-”

“Do something about it!”

“I’ve tried! Celestia damn it! I’ve tried! But she won’t listen, she thinks that the mare was the one who destroyed the thaumic engine!”

“Have you talked to Clockwork or Cogwheel?”

“No-”

“Then I’m going to.”

At that, Boron marched out of the shack, pushing the other stallion out of his way and running out the door. “Wait!” Shouted Hydroxide, “You’ve been a good friend of mine for over a decade, and I know exactly what you’re thinking.”

“You won’t be stopping me, if that’s what you’re planning.”

“No… I have something to help, something one of my Liquidators had recovered from last mission.”

Somewhere, kilometres away and thousands of floors up, a room, made from arcane crystals and the finest metals, held an ancient and intricate piece of arcane machinery, older than the city itself. Inside the crystal, hundreds and hundreds of spell matrixes lay dormant, waiting for an activation signal. The machine once ran on its own, it’s purpose was to serve as a defence mechanism, absorbing the magical energies of every living creature and using that power for itself, with that power it would prevent any major disasters from threatening the lives of the magical creatures in the world, as any major decrease in living creatures would result in less energy for the machine… Like a predator scaring away the scavengers from its meal…

However, something had gone wrong, and the machine now lay dormant… Six encrypted signals are required to activate the six primary processing matrixes, each of them controlling a separate function of the machine… Until recently, the neurological sensory mechanisms had not found signals strong enough to initiate the activation sequence for even a single of the processing matrixes, but now, one of the millions of individual signals was starting to grow stronger.

The machine hadn’t been completely dormant, approximately eighty-seven-thousand hours ago the machine had detected a very short increase in one of the background signals… A pulse of magic that had been enough to activate some of the secondary functions of the machine… Now another signal was starting to grow power.

Loyalty had been detected.

Marching down the length of the train known to the ponies of the Hub as the Central Line, was a stallion in an old and battered liquidator uniform, his face covered by a scarf and glasses. He marched toward the armoury, in the fifth wagon, he had talked the liquidator’s captain into letting him have some extra time to train with some of the more advanced weapons the liquidators had at their disposal.

He used the key, old and battered just like his own uniform, to unlock the armoury door. Inside were hundreds of devices that most ponies outside the liquidators had absolutely no knowledge of… He found a hoof-full of devices small enough to hide in a saddlebag, searching among them for the cleanest, least damaged of the bunch.

Continuing down the line, he eventually came to the very back of the train, where he found a series of tiny rooms behind bulkhead doors. A guard was sitting at the desk… With any luck, she’ll be one of the less obedient guards. With a very deep and gravelly voice, he said, “Shift change, I’ll handle the prisoner…”

The mare guarding suddenly stood up… The stallion in the coat tried to suppress any signs of shock as the mare ran toward him, he was sure the mare was about to capture him as an intruder. Even more shocking was the hug the stallion found himself in.

Up close, the stallion could now see that the mare’s coat was a pale white, with a silvery-white mane and pale, nearly white, blue eyes. “Thankyouthankyouthankyou! You have no idea how boring it is to wait here!”

“Umm… Yeah…”

“Well, I’m off… Oh, you should really get that coat repaired, looks like it hasn’t been taken to a workshop in a decade.”

“Umm… Yeah…”

The mare disappeared out the door, and once he was sure he was alone, Boron took his mask and helmet off and turned to the cell. The only ponies who had the key was the Minister and the Secretary, both of whom were at the front of the train, in a place way too secure for him to safely sneak into… He didn’t have a horn, and even if he did, the cells were impervious to unicorn magic. But he didn’t need a horn to perform magic, and while the cell’s interior is lined in the magically resistant metal, the outside certainly isn’t.

Drawing a rudimentary contraption of metal, gemstones, and mythril wire, he stuck the device’s tip into the lock and pulled the trigger.

I raised my head at the sound of the door opening, outside the current guard had left and a new, large, guard, in a rather tattered and old coat had taken her place. He approached the door, and a mixture of concern and hope started to creep into my mind, that turned to worry when a bright yellowish-orange light erupted from the lock, a second later accompanied by a muffled snap-pop. Soon, the door swung open and I found myself standing before the stallion… His hushed voice silenced my worries, “Petrochem, you need-” He started to say, voice as rough and raspy as ever.

I grabbed the stallion and tried valiantly to crush him in a hug, despite the armoured barding and earth pony strength. “Chem!” He loudly whispered, something in his voice made me let go of him, “We need to get out of here…” I looked up at him curriously, “You’re scheduled to be executed tomorrow…”

“W-What, why!”

“Sulphuric Acid, and possibly even the Minister himself, believe that you had destroyed the thaumic engine on purpose, and it appears they aren’t willing to be lenient.”

“No! That can’t be right, I’m sure if Hydroxide-”

“Hydroxide has already talked with Sulphuric, and if anything, he made it worse.”

“Well… What are you doing here then! Surely you must be following someone’s orders.”

“No, I’m here to get you out regardless what anypony’s commands are.”

“Y-You mean you disobeyed the Minister!”

The stallion gave a long sigh, “Petrochem, I learned a long time ago that you can’t necessarily trust your superiors… I lied about the destruction of the engine to Hydroxide because I wanted to avoid this exact situation… But it appears I had no choice in the matter… This was bound to happen one way or another.”

There was an uncomfortable pause before I replied, “W-Well… What are we supposed to do…”

He gave another sigh and unlatched his saddlebags, passing a few devices that I carefully lifted in my telekinesis. I recognized a spare saddlebag and my utility barding right away, another was a rubber mask with a filter on the muzzle, the same as what I had seen that one liquidator wear, and there was a device I remembered from my mission the previous day.

“Where did you get this?” I asked, raising the horn-tipped boxy medical device and the five glowing red vials.

“That thing is a long-range potion injector, or a potion gun, it’s used to deliver the effects of a loaded potion over a range of a few meters, it also has the side-effect of making the potion’s effect nearly instant… Hydroxide had the device, given to him by Truncheon after he had returned to the Hub yesterday... As for the vials, the clinic has a few in storage, and with Hydoxide’s help I was able to get Caustic Burn to hoof a few of his stock over… Use them sparingly.”

I nodded and turned to a similar device held in my telekinetic grip. A rectangular plastic box, extending from one end was a hoof-width glass tube with a crystal core, leading to a sharp metal spike, this one featuring no grooves, unlike the potion gun. It had a very similar mouth-handle on one side, and on the back was some kind of cable receptacle. What was obviously a crystalline battery extending from the bottom, “And this?”

“Be careful with that!” He nearly yelled, swatting the device out of my magic and carefully holding it in his hooves, “Honestly… I’ve never gotten the chance to hold one before, I’ve only seen some of the more senior liquidators use these, and they’re a well-kept secret outside the liquidators… It’s an energy pistol… From what was explained to me back when I was with the liquidators, these use a thaumaelectric converter to convert electric energy into magical energy, the magic is then used to cast a spell that breaks apart molecular bonds, it leaves the target a pile of atomic dust, kept from reacting with itself by residual magics and causing a fire or explosion that could harm the user… It even works on biological material, unlike most other spells.”

“S-So… I-It’s a w-weapon?”

“Yes…”

“W-Why are you giving it to me?”

“You can’t stay inside the Hub… Hell, I wouldn’t even stay inside the Habitable Zone if I were you, and you saw how dangerous it was outside first-hoof…”

I didn’t want it, especially with how dangerous it was, but the logical part of my mind, still screaming at Boron for his disobedience against the Minister, knew that I would be better off with it. Boron continued, “See the lights on the battery,” He pointed with a hoof, “If it ever turns red, that means that you’re running out of power, and so make sure to recharge it regularly if you can reach a power outlet.”

I nodded, “Now get going,” He finished, “I’ve wasted enough time already, you need to get out of here.”

After a pause, I said, “O-Ok, lead the way.” Boron just shook his head.

“I-I don’t know what to do next… I would suggest just cutting through the walls, but that would take too long and draw way too much attention… I’ve heard rumours of a few secret doors, but I wouldn’t know where to look for them, and it would be ungodly stupid to use one of the main airlocks… If I just had a bit more time I could plan… Something. But I don’t have any more time, so you’ll just be left on your own from now.”

“Y-You’re c-coming too... R-Right?” Any semblance of confidence I had started to develop suddenly shattered.

“No… After hearing what Sulphuric Acid had planned for you, I can’t leave the rest of the ponies here, they could be in just as much danger, and breaking you out certainly won’t help the situation.” I nodded, as much as I needed Boron’s help right now, he had a very good point.

“For that matter, I can’t be seen helping you, if they knew I broke you out I’d either have to take the fall or run and doing that would leave the ponies here without any help… I’m sorry.”

I nodded… It was all I could do, my throat had gone dry and my mouth had closed up… There was nothing I could say, even if I wanted to. Boron looked sickened as he marched up to the back door of the Central Line, stuck a device I recognized as my magical cutter into the door, and bit down on the handle, eliciting a snapping-popping noise from the door before throwing it open.

Boron galloped through the open door and disappeared from sight. I paused for a moment as I wondered where Boron had gone, and how I could escape from the Hub, then there came a muffled noise from somewhere behind me, “Lithium, it’s shift change... “ Came a mare’s voice, as the door further into the Central Line started opening.

The mare on the other side had only moments to process what she was seeing before I lept out the back door and slammed it with a reverberating metal clang. Immediately I realized my mistake as I heard the mare gallop forward and a magical pressure start pushing against my own telekinesis. Damn, she was a unicorn too.

I couldn’t hold the door forever, and pushing against this other mare was a constant drain on my magic… I started pumping more and more power into my magic and switched the spell matrix, suddenly there was a flash of light. The overpowered welding spell was directed only by the shadow of the telekinesis I had just dispelled, thus when I opened my eyes, I saw that the entire door was fused to itself and the doorframe.

There came a loud knock, and a shout from behind the door, and I turned to run down the length of the track. In the distance was the massive wall of the Hub, a giant cap that closed the ends of the cylinder, apparently they could act as doors, and be opened into massive tunnels that moved all throughout the city, but were sealed shut… Whatever the case, I certainly wasn’t going to be escaping through them.

I was further confused at where Boron had gone when I noticed that there was no bridge from the Central Line’s tracks to the Hub’s platforms. The hooves pounding on the door grew alarmingly louder and I stared out to see the central platform, far enough away that I wasn’t going to try jumping any time soon…

There came a loud reverberating boom and the door behind me buckled in, another few hits, particularly by an earth pony, and the door would break free… I had heard stories about some unicorns trying to levitate themselves, I had tried once before and found that it was a really good way of draining one’s magical energy, but there are a few who have done it, even if it was only for a few moments before the spell broke… There came another loud boom and one of the door’s hinges broke free.

But, what about levitating something else to use as a platform, it certainly isn’t as hard as moving a living creature, who, even when trying not to, makes all kinds of little unintended movements that make holding a telekinetic grip much harder, but there’s still the issue of weight… Another bang and the door broke free.

A unicorn and a pair of earth ponies came marching out of the waggon, drawing knives from their pockets. I caught the door as it fell in my telekinesis and levitated it over the edge of the rail. The unicorn hurled her knife at me in a streak of cyan, I applied a little telekinetic pressure, not so much as to break my concentration on holding the door still, but enough to change the knife’s trajectory just enough to miss me. I started running toward the group who stood still and waited for me to run into them… As if I was dumb enough to run into a herd of knife-wielding ponies.

At the last moment I swerved right and lept out over the edge of the rail, landing on my door turned floating platform. Suddenly there was an incredible weight on my magic and a sharp stabbing pain at the base of my horn, the spell broke and the door and I was sent tumbling down. Reacting with all the speed of thermite I kicked forward and reached my hooves out to grab the railing of the central platform… And I missed by a millimetre.

Thoughts raced through my head as I fell, and a sudden pain in my side, accompanied by a sickening crunch, broke them from my mind… This wasn’t the same burning feeling as I would have expected from falling into the acid pool.

I flopped around and saw that I had landed on the lower platform of the Hub, nearly missing breaking my back on the railing. The door made an impressive splash when it impacted the acid pool, and that, of all things, was the thing to restore my lucidity. Realizing that the crack earlier was most likely a broken leg or rib, and that I certainly wasn’t going to be moving with such injury, I drew from my bag, with what little strength I could muster, my potion gun and loaded it with a healing potion, remembering the way it had worked when last I had nearly died from falling.

I slid the potion vial into the back of the gun, pulled the trigger, waited for what felt like a painful eternity as the gun charged, and felt the cool energy wash over me as the gun administered the potion… Four left, best not get too injured in my escape attempt… Better than dying though.

As I unsteadily got to my hooves, feeling a numbness in my right foreleg that was slowly transforming back into a deep aching pain, I heard some shouts from above and saw the liquidator ponies go marching out of the Central Line over to the central platform, heading for the stairs. “Shit!” I muttered, and looked around for anywhere to go.

I hadn’t landed far from an airlock… It was dumb, there was a record centre pony in there who was probably going to record all my information, take up all the time I had, and more than likely try to stop me if she had any idea why I needed to go outside this late… But it was the only path I had left. I reached the airlock as the unicorn and her liquidator friends got to the bottom of the stairs. “I need to get out! It’s an emergency!” I shouted as I pounded on the airlock door.

“P-Petrochem?! Is that you!” Came a colt’s voice from the other side.

“Open up damn it!”

“R-Right away!”

The airlock door began to cycle as another knife was thrown in my direction by the blue-magic unicorn. I focused all my telekinetic strength on the point of the blade, shock and dumbfoundedness mixing in my mind as I stared at the knife, now held in a golden-yellow field, mere centimetres from my eye.

Still holding the knife in my telekinesis, the door opened and I rushed into the airlock room. The little red and white stallion stared at me in shock, “Chem? What’s going on!”

“You there! Colt! Apprehend the mare! She is a prisoner of the Minister and scheduled for execution tomorrow!” Shouted the unicorn mare.

“C-Chem?” Photon said, worry evident in his voice.

Shit, the Liquidators had already caught up with me. Behind me I saw the mare and her little team galloping up to meet me. My mind raced to come up with a way out of this situation, I stared at the colt, clearly confused… “Photon, I might need to hurt you, but just play along,” I whispered to him.

He just stared at me confused as I drew my recently stolen knife from my saddlebag and pointed it at his throat. “Stop, or the kid gets his throat sliced!” I yelled, trying my best to sound confident, the adrenaline giving my voice the much needed boost.

The liquidators halted in their tracks. Good. I reached out with my magic and grabbed the switch, a dozen emotions battled for supremacy on the unicorn mare’s face as I pulled the switch and started the airlock’s cycle. Eventually, anger won, and she growled before yelling, “Come back here! Hand the kid over-”

I drew back the knife and launched it with all my telekinetic force at the mare, aiming between her breast and foreleg. She gave a pained gasp as the knife punctured her coat, moving right between the lead pauldron and breastplate, eliciting a blotch of deep red. She growled again, this time with some obvious pain as she stopped to pull the knife from her coat, winning just enough time for the door to finish closing. There came a blood-chilling yell of rage from the other side, and something striking the airlock door, but I didn’t wait around any longer, pausing just long enough to use the welding and cutting spells to thoroughly ruin the airlock’s controls, promising to myself that when this all got sorted out I’d help in the repair effort.

Meanwhile from his perch on the catwalk just below the Central Line, Boron muttered to himself, observing the herd of liquidators running off to other airlocks, “Wow… That was pretty damn ballsy.”

Deep, dark, in a place far below the industrial sectors of the city, near the automated underbelly, an abomination roamed. Electric blue eyes glowed, illuminating a silvery creature of fur and scales, electric sparks flying from razor teeth. This creature was hunting for sustenance… Nothing as simple as physical food, but rather the magical energies that keep such magical entities alive

This creature too was being hunted. In the large atrium that formed this particular room, there stood another beast, while it bore some obvious marks of femininity, this creature was far from pony standards, a muscular body adorned by aquiline wings bearing all the markings of a predator. This was no ordinary feral animal, as it held in its grasp a machine, a weapon.

With a pull of a trigger, there was a flash of multicolored light, and the abomination had ceased. The death of this beast brought hope to the she-creature’s tribe, with luck, they would persist another week. With her duty complete, the she-creature dropped to the floor of the atrium and, with claws like meat-hooks, started flaying her kill.

Once I had explained the situation to Photon, we continued on through the Habitable zone, with a goal of getting as far from the Hub as possible. “So, what exactly are we going to do?” Photon said.

“We! You should be trying to get back to the Hub, not following me around!”

“Well, I can’t just leave you here on your own! I want to help, and from how it sounds, I doubt Sulphuric Acid would just let me back into the Hub, if you were locked up just on a rumour that you had broken the T-engine, then I doubt I’ll be any better off if I somehow ‘escaped my capture and wandered back on my own’”

“You have a point, but none the less, I think it would be safer if you stayed in the Habitable Zone, I’m more experienced being outside the Hub, and as you are now, you’ll only be a liability.”

“Then teach me… Or something… Thanks to you, I can’t go back to the Hub, and I’m safer with you than without, I can help Celestia damn it!”

“Help? You’re a unicorn colt, barely a stallion, you spend all your time among metal plates doing nothing but talking!”

“I can read and write! Unlike you, and that could help!”

“How is that going to help, we’re surviving, not record-keeping.”

At that, photon lifted his hoof and pointed to a plate of metal bolted to the wall, a series of symbols and an arrow painted on it, “That says: Industrial District Railway Hub, 500-meters…” If we were stuck out here and lost, that can point you right back home.

“But I can’t go back home.”

“So, use the sign and go in the opposite direction… What would happen if you saw a sign above a door that said something like ‘Warning: Unstable Thaumic Explosives, don’t touch’, for all you know it would be an invitation to a warehouse of fresh sugarcane!”

“There would be a pictogram on the door!”

“Good luck finding those outside the Habitable Zone, we don’t do much exploring out there.”

I rolled my eyes, he had a point, “Fine, but it won’t be my fault if you trip and fall down a pit.”

The two of us continued, all the while I lamented my luck, getting abducted by the Liquidators, getting chased out of the Hub, and getting stuck with a frail little stallion…. Celestia, couldn’t you have at least given me a pretty mare instead!

We eventually arrived at a doorway that had been sealed shut with thick metal plates. My horn lit up with the cutting spell and started slicing my way through, “What are you doing?” Asked Photon Ray.

“I think we've reached the edge of the Habitable Zone, keep an eye out, don’t want any liquidators to see us.”

He nodded and I continued cutting... Failing to spot a pony hiding just around the corner of a corridor. Soon I had removed enough metal to climb through, Photon following right behind. We found ourselves in a surprisingly comfortable room, on one wall was a series of massive boxy machine with hundreds of wires extending from the boxes, there were a few devices covered in dials and glass screens and plenty of thaumic crystals… Even if I couldn’t see them, as they were buried inside the machinery, I could feel the magical energies they emitted, luckily this place wasn’t too saturated in magic.

I set my saddlebag down and started getting out my barding, with all the running I had yet to find time to put it on. It was a little bit of a painful experience, with a recently mended broken leg, but I had hastily put on both the jacket and pants before I flopped to the floor, using my now empty saddlebag as a pillow, and tried to sleep.

“Chem, what are you doing now?” Asked Photon.

“Used a lot of magic, ran a lot, now I just want to sleep.”

“Sleep, here? We’re only barely outside the Habitable Zone, the Liquidators will find us.”

“I welded up the door again, plus it’s a big city, and the liquidators are too scared to go outside the Habitable Zone, they won’t find us.”

“Room full of magical explosives… Chem.”

“What does that have to do with anything…”

“I was pointing out how your judgment seems a little flawed by referencing our previous argument.”

“Keep your references to yourself, I’m sleeping now.”

Despite having closed my eyes, I could feel Photon rolling his. He was just being paranoid, why couldn't he see that… I curled up into a ball, wincing a bit at the pain in my foreleg, and let my exhaustion claim me.

Sulphuric Acid sat in her office, thinking… The mare, at the very least, wasn’t dumb enough to stay anywhere near the habitable zone… The further you went outside, the more dangerous it got. Sulphuric Acid started to smile as thoughts passed through her mind… This could serve as another excuse to recruit more liquidators, since, with a dangerous vandal and colt-kidnapper on the loose, there will need to be more protection around the borders of the Habitable Zone… Plus, there was no way a mare like her could survive a day outside, Acid was considering just letting the mare get chewed up by the city itself.

But that wouldn’t look good to the citizens, they will want justice for the kidnapped colt… Luckily, there were a few potential troublemakers that needed to be dealt with, preferably sooner rather than later… Send some less than trustworthy liquidators out there, best case scenario, most of them die, but one or two return with the colt to show the ponies of the Hub how brave and strong their liquidators, and by extension, their minister is… Worst case scenario, they all die and she could use it as an excuse to increase the recruitment of liquidators again.

Smiling, Sulphuric Acid stood and said to the guard outside her office, “Bring me Lithium Lance, Xenon Glow, and Truncheon Trauma.”

Author's Note

For reference, the Energy Pistol is essentially a cross between a Fallout Plasma Pistol and Warhammer Laspistol.