Fallout Equestria: Uplift

October 31st, 1077
Day Zero

Vik cracked one bleary eye open and squinted against the glare of the cheap clock radio on her equally cheap nightstand. She frowned when the little red numbers came into focus. Two minutes before seven. Two fucking minutes before her alarm was set to go off.

What the hell? She always slept like a stone. It was why she had a second alarm set to go off ten minutes after the first, and tuned to Equestria’s godawful public radio station so she’d be extra motivated to shut the thing off. She lay there for a few more seconds trying to stitch together what little she could remember of the dream she had, suspecting that was the culprit that dragged her up early, and then she heard the unmistakable sound of splashing liquid coming from the ceiling. It clicked and she let out a low groan as the upstairs neighbor subjected her to the barely muffled music of his draining bladder.

The glowing fifty-eight blinked into a fifty-nine. Her neighbor finished his morning victual and she listened to his hooves thudding down the apartment ceiling, cupboards creaking and clapping shut as he started his day. Vik dug a nugget of sleepsand from the corner of her eye with the rounded end of her claw, then flicked it away. One of the joys that came with cheap living was thin walls and even less privacy. You couldn’t blow your nose without the dragon next door hearing snot hit tissue, although since coming to Equestria Vik rarely ever met anyone who didn’t walk on four legs and wear a tattoo on their ass. Some days it felt like–

“...held a press conference on Tuesday during which she expressed optimism that the Ministry of Peace and Ambassador Abyssian may be close to a temporary ceasefire agreement, in spite of protests by many government officials who claim a ceasefire to be tantamount to surrender. Since the beginning of the zebra oil embargos which forced Princess Celestia and Princess Luna to declare war nearly five years ago, more than one hundred and twenty thousand service ponies have been–”

It took Vik three tries before she finally swatted the snooze button. She considered letting herself doze off. Snatch back the sleep she’d been robbed of before the radio clicked on again. Then the stallion upstairs trumpeted a belch whose volume and duration could peel paint, and as she listened to her neighbor’s sleepy chuckle Vik felt suddenly motivated to take a fucking shower.

As she rolled out of bed and dragged a clean towel from the unfolded pile in the laundry basket, her thoughts inevitably turned bitter when she caught sight of her reflection in the mirror. She stared at herself and the cheap bathroom decor behind her. Not her bathroom. Not her home. Just the rented room she could afford in the foreign land she’d been forced to start her life over in. If she closed her eyes she knew she would see the smudged, black letters atop the letter that turned her reality inside out:

Order to Report for Induction

She grimaced and turned the tap to the hottest setting, and watched rusty water sputter from the calcium crusted shower head as the memory gave up its front row seat. Her towel flopped to the floor beside the tub. She stepped into the stream and tried to settle her nerves as the slow build of heat eased some of that habitual tension. That had been four years ago.

You need to let it go, she lectured herself. It wouldn’t work, but she would keep doing it for that fleeting feeling of control over her situation that it gave.

She never needed daily showers back home - one of the perks of scales; hers being a shade of iridescent ivory that edged toward lavender in dim light. But here in the Land of Pony where manes and tails had a tendency to pick up a certain aroma in a very short amount of time, it wasn’t just enough to wash out the day’s dirt. In the civilized world, for that was where she lived now, folks were supposed to smell good. Like flowers, or fruits, or Alpine Timber Rush™ if your tackle game in the pendulous variety. Vik’s concession to assimilation amounted to a bottle of bargain priced shampoo that smelled like the bastard offspring of a lilac bush and a sack of mints. It was the only stuff they sold around here that didn’t make the skin under her scales break out in a rash, plus it was almost always on clearance. She squirted a blob of the green stuff into her palm, rubbed it into a lather, and dragged it over the top of her deep violet crest. Then she mechanically worked her way down her face, shoulders, and elsewhere.

Her lip quirked into a smile as she worked, remembering the care package Pike had given her on the day she moved into this apartment. Among the fruits, spreads, and kitchen essentials had been something called a loofah. The little cardboard tag attached to it explained its purpose and when she finally tried it out, she discovered with abrupt discomfort what the prickly side of velcro felt like when all those tiny loops on the soft side snagged in your hooks. Only in her case the tiny loops were the loofah and the hooks had been her own scales. It hadn’t been her first, nor would it be her last encounter with the millions of inane little incompatibilities between her and this society built with quadrupeds in mind.

She pulled the showerhead from its holster on the wall and rinsed her scales under the pleasantly scalding stream. The drain gurgled as she stepped out onto the cold linoleum and toweled off. Upstairs, her neighbor had begun to sing some tune she didn’t recognize. A pan clanked on his stovetop and she felt a jealous pang for those who could live a cramped existence in these apartments and still find the motivation to cook their own breakfast.

She brushed, flossed, and gargled a minty antiseptic that lit her gums on fire. Then she padded back to her bedroom and pulled open the folding door of her closet. As always, she deflated a little when she saw the rack of mostly empty hangers. She missed having a wardrobe. It hadn’t been every day that she went out wearing something, but having the option to look nice had been… well, nice. She wondered who had ended up with her clothes back home. Maybe charity. Maybe some militia officer’s wife. She’d learned from experience that when you sock a military dragon in the jaw and slam the door in their face, there tends not to be a lot of free time available to pack a bag.

She sighed as she dragged a familiar set of black medical scrubs off the two occupied hangers and pulled them on. The stiff polyester hissed over her scales as she made her way to the kitchenette and fished a granola bar out of the cupboard. She bit off half and chewed absently as she ducked into the rattling fridge and uncapped a square jug adorned with smiling, anthropomorphic oranges. She ignored their manic grins and took several pulls from the carton, barely registering the foul shift in flavor as citrus met with the remnants of wintergreen toothpaste. She capped the OJ, absently scratching at the embroidered CryoLife logo beneath her left collarbone where it always snagged at her scales, and set it back in the fridge.

Her living room wasn’t any bigger than her bedroom, which was saying it was barely large enough to fit a couch in the thing. Chewing the other half of her breakfast bar, Vik retrieved her keys from the coffee table and resigned herself to another ten hours of being paid to be bored. On the plus side, at least, today she shared a shift with Pike. He was always worth his weight in good conversation and, if she was lucky, even better coffee.

With her second alarm still droning the news of the day from her darkened bedroom, she locked her apartment door behind her and padded her way down a hallway festooned with Nightmare Night decorations. She yawned, mindful not to show the sharp points of her teeth despite the empty hall, and shouldered her way out into another sunny morning in Equestria.

Sometimes, when her mood was fouled up, she had a tendency to dismiss Buckskin Bay as a dump. That wasn’t an entirely fair assessment and she knew as much. Buckskin Bay wasn’t a dump. The locals used kinder synonyms. Quiet. Serene. Uncomplicated. Quaint. Buckskin Bay was a town that had tried and failed to brand itself as a resort town. Flanked by the Lunar Sea to the west and picturesque mountains to the north, and home to only a few thousand ponies, it was as picturesque as it was remote. The water was too cold most times of the year for swimming and the beach was more rock than sand, giving it that rugged look that nature photographers loved and beachgoers rarely traveled hundreds of miles to sun themselves on.

As far as Vik was concerned, it was as good as she was going to get. Buckskin Bay was as near to the other side of the planet from her homeland as she could reasonably get without living on a boat. As far as the Equestrian government was concerned, the dragonlands were just another backward corner of the globe whose laws were politely acknowledged and officially ignored. So she’d coldcocked a member of the militia. So what? There was an argument to be made in favor of clocking them all in the jaw as far and tossed into the fucking ocean during riptide. If they wanted to call her a fugitive, fine. She wasn’t going to hitch her wagon to some suicidal global war because some psycho with a scepter said so. Fuck every last one of them for not having the spine to call out Ember’s insanity.

She shrugged off that old ghost as she followed the sidewalk from her shady two-floor apartment building to the corner of the aptly named Central Avenue that bisected the town before it became Old Highway 19 once it wove its way inland through the miles of dense pine forests. She turned west, toward the glittering oceanfront at the distant terminus of Central, and listened to the clicking of her claws over freshly swept concrete as she walked the eight blocks to the largest building in Buckskin Bay second only to the hospital directly across the street from it. A few carriages motored through mostly empty intersections, the town still an hour away from waking up, and she lifted her palm in polite greeting when one of the morning folk acknowledged her passage.

Buckskin Bay was one of those towns that looked great on a postcard and not much else. Vik passed the corner store that served as the community’s grocery, a place that was as quaint as it was apt to run out of anything if demand even became moderate. The only thing they never seemed to get enough of was Sparkle-Cola. Vik was pretty sure if a flood washed out the single road into town, the ministries would find a way to bring in that fizzy brown rotgut in by sea even if it meant turning the boat ramp used by local fishers into a port fit for warships. There was a joke she’d heard more than once: the only things that’ll survive the balefire apocalypse are cockroaches and Sparkle-Cola.

Wearing her black scrubs with the CryoLife logo on her chest, it took an effort of will not to feel like a fraud as she came within earshot of the medical staff loitering outside the hospital across the street. The extra floor that Seaside Hospital boasted - five floors to CryoLife’s four - only emphasized the fact that what her employer called medicine was as much of a sham as the branded scrubs they made her wear. On that side of the pavement were the lifesavers and miracle workers. On this side…

Vik shouldered her way through the glass doors and reminded herself, not for the first time, to stop pissing on her own parade.

CryoLife’s main floor wasn’t so much a lobby as it was a glorified shrine to itself. Her talons clicked over polished black marble feathered with white quartz. Decorative square pillars rose up to the ceiling in a neat row that doubled as the lobby’s pathway while also serving as flat surfaces from which to suspend framed artwork, company slogans, and gushing endorsements from customers and investors alike. From a pillar passing by on Vik’s right, a larger than life photo of the company’s founders - a pair of stallions whom she had never met and whose matching candystripe manes and tails made her think of a pair of well dressed carnies - stood on either side of an alabaster mare with a thin smile and a simple blue diamond pinned to the lapel of her black vest. Each time Vik walked past the poster with its unspoken implication of the Ministry of Image’s approval, she thought she could see a faint twist of exasperation in the mare’s eyes.

At the far end of the gaudy lobby sat a large reception desk that dwarfed the young mare behind it. The mare glanced up at Vik, then visibly looked back down at the book she was always reading so Vik wouldn’t think she was staring. It was a look Vik was used to by now, and which she knew she would have to stay used to for many years to come. Even in the huge cities these ponies had built further down the coast, dragons were about as common as winning lottery tickets. Up here in the boonies, Vik was liable to make a two-headed albino phoenix feel average by comparison.

“Good morning, Miss Chambers. Happy Nightmare Night.”

Her eyes flicked up toward the ceiling where CryoLife’s biggest waste of bits watched her from its many hidden electronic eyes. The hospital across the street might be one floor taller, but they didn’t have the world’s most advanced artificial assistant living in their walls.

“Mornin’ Mills,” she mumbled back, brushing off the flash of irritation that came with the AI’s use of her old name. How many bits had the founders paid Robronco for a copy of M.I.L.L.I.E. just to have it serve as a glorified door greeter? More than she would ever see in her lifetime, she guessed.

She passed the reception desk and its young warden, walked past both sets of elevators which had a small gathering of ponies staring up at its floor counter with the weary expressions of non-morning people, and pushed through the solitary door of the emergency stairwell.

By now she was used to the odd glances she earned by taking the stairs. She didn’t mind those either. She’d grown up in an overcrowded gutter, climbed her way into a life that bordered on comfortable, had it stripped away and fled her homeland with nothing but her own wings to carry her across an unforgiving ocean to a continent whose equine inhabitants were deadset on finding new and horrifying ways to redefine the word “warfare”... but watching those gilded metal doors slide shut on an elevator car full of ponies gave her a serious case of the heebie fuckin’ jeebies.

No way. Not even for laughs.

Her footfall echoed on the empty steps as she passed the neatly stenciled markers for each of the building’s five sublevels. She found her cadence as she trotted past the maintenance level where a massive boiler kept them all toasty warm in the winter, past the floor containing a climate controlled room where the company’s electronic archives were backed up onto state-of-the-art Robronco servers, and around the railing again until she reached the bottom landing where a fire extinguisher sat in a red, dust coated box beside a door labeled simply: Cold Storage.

Vik tipped her snout up to the semi translucent black hemisphere mounted above the door and gave it her most sarcastic smile. “Don’t make me late for work, Millie.”

A pause. She never understood why Millie, a supposedly advanced artificial intelligence capable of billions of computations per second, ever needed to pause. Maybe it was being petulant. More likely, it was another overmarketed bit of Robronco kit. They weren’t exactly a company known for their reservedness.

“Welcome back, Miss Chambers,” it finally chimed, and the door emitted a sturdy clunk.

Vik gave the handle a yank and it sighed open with a familiar, invisible cloud of slightly chilled air. She gave an involuntary shudder as she stepped through, the door clicking shut behind her on its pneumatic elbow. The short hall she found herself in felt oddly comforting every time she found herself standing in it, job or no job. Heights, she couldn’t handle. Elevators, which served no purpose in her mind beyond dangling their occupants over a vertical chasm, even less so.

Cold Storage was none of those things. It always felt comfortable to her. Cozy. Safe. No one came down here who wasn’t scheduled to be down here. There were never interruptions. No surprises. Nobody to hammer at the door demanding she don a uniform she didn’t want for a cause she didn’t believe in. Down in the chilled air at the bottom of CryoLife, Vik could truly relax.

She passed the empty break room, really just a broom closet with a refrigerator and a table to sit at, and made the short walk past the floor-to-ceiling marketing posters covering the wall. They were there not for her, but for the rare instances when an investor might be invited down for a tour. Vik glanced up at a blown up smiling face of an elderly stallion seated in a rocking chair with his family… or possibly his descendants? The background was a generic farmhouse porch, so she assumed it wasn’t supposed to depict the distant future. Another displayed a team of doctors gathered around a steel cylinder, all smiling hopefully as if they were getting ready to break the seal. The majority of the posters were less direct. Pastoral scenes of an Equestrian mountain range. Indistinct ponies silhouetted against an early morning sunrise as they fly fished in the water of a slow moving river. Canterlot Castle after a summer shower.

To the casual observer it was all very reassuring and futuristic. Vik had smiled on as a prospective customer once made the tour, being pushed along in her wheelchair as her hazy eyes marveled at the maze of pipes that snaked their way overhead and the bright silver double doors at the end of the hall. Vik had been glad she hadn’t asked about those silver doors because there was nothing science fictiony or fantastical about them. They opened up to a simple freight elevator large enough for a gurney and a few tenders. It had two stops: here and the weather enclosure tucked away at the back of the building. It was the part nobody really liked to think about, which is why they were trained to divert visitors from the elevator to the more impressive security door on the left.

This time Vik didn’t need to prompt Millie. She swatted a button beside the steel slab and stepped over the threshold after it had lifted clear. As it hissed shut behind her a voice echoed across the field of stainless steel cylinders.

“You’re late, slacker!”

She welcomed the first sincere smile since she woke up. “Fuck you, Pike,” she called back.

In the short time it took her to walk from the stairwell to Cold Storage her body had adjusted to the slightly below comfortable temperature. Her grin widened even more as she spotted Pike, wrapped up in his insulated CryoLife jacket, as he wheeled out onto the central walkway between the rows of cylinders. One of the casters under his office chair squeaked indignant protest at being treated as a conveyance, but Vik knew Pike would sooner stop kicking himself along the polished concrete than he would shave off his meticulously tended mohawk.

“Dare to dream, dare to dream,” he mock lamented, “but you are a dragon and I but a mere stallion, and oh, what would our parents think?”

She smirked at that as he rolled to her, and grabbed the back of his chair with a grunt of effort. Mere stallion my pale ass, she thought as she proceeded to wheel him past the storage rows and toward their shared office, I’d be willing to bet there’s a rock golem somewhere in your family tree.

Pike held up his hind hooves as she ferried him along, though he stopped short of yelling, “Whee!” The big oaf was the type of person who could enjoy his existence even if he were forced to pick up trash every morning, and it was infectious. If there were a part of her that had any attraction toward ponies, and if she didn’t harbor a little unspoken discomfort for all he’d sacrificed to get her back on her feet when she arrived here, she might have taken a pass at him by now.

“You know you don’t get paid more for coming in early,” she lectured, less out of concern and more out of tradition. This was how most days started for them. His unabashed positivity, her heatless remonstration. It was so ingrained between them that she was already mouthing the words to his response when he spoke.

“You get paid?” He followed that with an upturned grin, the bristles of his mohawk brushing her chest as he did so. She glanced down at him with an arched brow, and she could tell by his expression he would eyeball her all day until she said her line.

She sighed, smiling. “A handsome salary.”

He didn’t miss a beat. “They give you celery? I get paid–”

“Peanuts,” they finished together, and the shit eating grin he wore made the pun worth enduring.

It was stupid and corny, yes, but all their little rituals were stupid and corny. It was part of why she hadn’t been able to brush Pike off when he first made his offer to help her out years ago, back when she was being treated at the hospital across the street for exhaustion and he’d been a nursing student with his heart set on becoming a doctor. He’d heard about her story, understood better than Vik that nobody was going to stick their necks out for a refugee dragon for the time it would take for her to truly get back on her feet, and made his case to her when it came time to change out her IV bag.

Charity was a dirty word where Vik came from, and she’d been sorely tempted to throw his offer back in his face… but she hadn’t. Of course she hadn’t. Pike had an almost childlike optimism that had nothing to do with naivety, and he hadn’t been pushy about it either. Just a place to stay until she got settled and found work, no strings attached, no obligations, as long as she followed some basic house rules.

She’d accepted, not without some rules of her own. Two days later, she was sleeping on the couch of his apartment. Two weeks later, the hospital found out their living arrangement and booted Pike from the nursing program.

The office chair squeaked into the office with the pair of them grinning at their shared joke. The admins at Seaside Hospital could kick rocks. She gave Pike’s chair a final push, sending him lazily spinning toward the wall of green filing cabinets containing the patient records of CryoLife’s current stock of eighty-one extremely wealthy, extremely dead corpsicles. A single bench-style desk ran the length of the office beneath an unbroken window that looked out onto the range of gleaming cylinders. Vik pulled out the remaining empty seat at the desk just as Pike rebounded across the office, rolling up beside her with a cylinder of his own presented to her.

“Freshly brewed this morning,” he intoned importantly as she took the battered green thermos from where it hovered within the gold haze of his magic, “from beans harvested in the high mountains of Whoknowsthefuckwhere, known only by connoisseurs and adventures until…”

“...you bought it from the coffee aisle of the Dash n’ Go and dumped a scoop in that ancient coffee maker that you refuse to wash,” she finished.

It earned her a reproachful look from Pike even as she uncapped the thermos and took a long, lavish sniff of the steam that rose from within. “Heathen,” he said.

She winked at him and brought the thermos to her lips, watching him wince a little as she took a generous swig. She may not have a horn with which to cast magic and her wings may only be good for brief, terrifying flights… but she had yet to meet a pony who could spit literal fire, and the physiology that made that possible also happened to make her species that much less bothered by little things like extreme heat.

She held the scalding coffee in her mouth for several wonderful seconds before finally swallowing. The chilled air served to turn her breath into a roiling plume of steam that flowed over her snout and stole a genuine chuckle out of Pike, who took the thermos back for a delicate sip of his own.

For several minutes they sat together, enjoying each other’s company while they dosed up on caffeine and stared out toward the sterile rows of intricately plumbed cylinders. There were five hundred of them in total, twenty rows of twenty-five, and less than a fifth of them were in use. CryoLife promised that as they found more customers and filled more of those coffins there would be salary increases on the horizon, and possibly more vacation pay. It was something to look forward to, Vik thought as she took her turn at the thermos, but nothing she would bet her future on. Things were stable right now, and that was good, but seeing the defeat on Pike’s face when he came to the apartment after finding out he’d been fired had taught her not to spend bits she didn’t have. Landing these jobs at CryoLife had been dumb luck and little else. Had the company chosen not to expand when it had, they might both be out on their asses looking for handouts instead of just Vik.

“Anything on the docket for today beyond the same-old?” she asked once her belly felt just warm enough to warrant cutting back on the coffee, lest she regret it.

Pike rested the thermos in his lap, a gesture Vik sometimes had to pull her eyes away from, and offered a one-shouldered shrug in response. “Nothing major. Cylinder 19 was throwing a code this morning.”

“Ms. Birchwood? She’s always throwing a code,” she demurred. “Engineering needs to come down here and fix that valve. Every time I have to force it I feel like it’s going to break off.”

“The work order says they have a replacement coming in soon,” he offered with a so there’s that grunt. “It wasn’t the valve this morning, though. Just a temperature fluctuation. Probably a seal going bad.”

“Work order?”

“Work order,” he agreed.

Neither of them were engineers. Somewhere in their employee files there was a pleasantly neutral corporate job title beneath their names, though it hadn’t been important enough for either of them to commit to memory. Something-something-liason? Vik couldn’t dredge it up, but if she had to make up a title she supposed she would go with Executive Freezer Attendant or Corpsicle Monitoring Associate. Their job amounted to keeping an eye on the terminals on the desk in front of them and verifying any problems reported by the software built into the cylinders. Technically their job could be done by Millie, but leaving a stockpile of wealthy, frozen corpses to the whims of a Robronco product - especially when several of those corpses had invested heavily in Robronco’s direct competitors - hadn’t passed the smell test during market testing. Cheaper to pay a couple people to mind the graveyard than risk scaring away potential new clients.

She watched Pike reach a hoof out to his terminal, which currently displayed an empty queue of complaints from the cylinders, and carefully tap the keys with its wide edge. His fetlocks, much like the rest of his coat, were a shade of straw she thought was interesting. Most ponies were more colorful, literally, bearing colors from midnight blue to painfully pink. Pike’s coloration was much more subdued. Hues of dry soil and dust, and a singular stripe of deep brown that ran through the center of his mane and tail. He enjoyed trimming the lighter edges of his short mohawk into patterns which that chocolate stripe could stand within. It was strangely charming even if little of it had been a choice he’d made. Just a roll of the genetic dice, and Vik couldn’t help but think he’d gotten a better roll than most.

And yet he insisted on mashing keys with his hooves.

“Don’t judge me,” he said, catching her glance as he henpecked buttons intended for a pegasus’s feathers. “I’m getting pretty good at this.”

She chose not to pick on him - he really was getting better - and watched the screen flip from the notification scroll to the slightly shaky footage of something flaming through the early morning sky. At the bottom of the screen the headline read, “JSA ROCKET CARRIES CREW TO ORBIT.”

Vik glanced at her own terminal to verify the notification queue was still visible. CryoLife didn’t care if they watched a little TV on the job, provided they at least gave the impression they were still doing a job.

“Did you watch the launch?” he asked, leaning forward to fiddle with the volume. Tinny speakers built into the terminal’s chassis whispered with the conversation of two off-camera news anchors.

“Somehow I slept right through it.” She feigned a look of regret that was as genuine as a penguin nesting in a volcano, then pointed a claw at the replay of the launch. “I’m guessing it didn’t blow up.”

He sat back in his chair, eliciting a creak from somewhere in its base. “I don’t see an EASA logo on the side, do you?”

“Ouch.” She always felt a tiny thrill whenever Pike threw barbs at the Equestrian government’s attempt at competing with JetStream Aerospace. There were certain things one didn’t say, even as it was becoming increasingly evident that Equestria was going to win the war against their zebra enemy. After a pause, she added, “So, they’re actually up there right now?”

Pike glanced at her with a touch of pride in his eyes. “Yeah. First ponies in space. JSA says the solar collector they’ve been building should be done with this launch. You see the pictures of the mirror array they built in the Badlands?”

Vik had seen enough pictures of that gaudy construction to fill a scrapbook. Apparently it had been all over the newspapers in the year Vik arrived in Equestria, but she’d been so overwhelmed with culture shock that it blended in with the rest of the noise. Now it was back on magazine covers and topping articles with the launches of JSA’s wild venture into solar harvesting, which promised to open the relief valve on the resource shortage that caused the war in the first place.

Her personal feelings were that JSA was promising a parade and would disappoint its diehard fans with a few under-decorated floats. But she’d always had a touch of cynicism in her and knew this wasn’t the time to shake it out of its cage.

“Hard to believe so much has changed since I was a hatchling,” she murmured.

“Yeah,” he agreed. “When I was growing up I thought my best prospects would be pulling lumber wagons with the earth ponies. That, or pulling out my mane trying to keep the family store afloat. My grandma would lay an egg if the nurses ever took her outside for a walk.”

The family business, Pike once told her, had been a small dry goods store situated near the docks where barge workers would sometimes spend their bits on staple goods and a few novelty carvings made by his father. It had closed its doors long before Pike ever had a chance to be badgered into inheriting it, something he admitted had come as a huge relief.

As for his grandmother, she’d apparently come down with a case of what dragons back home called “the forgetting” and what the modern pony called dementia. The topic was something of a sore spot for Pike and one which Vik had learned never to pry into when he sometimes mentioned his elder’s decline out of hand. Her decision not to take Uplift, the flowers and sunshine brand name of Maiden Pharmaceutical’s wonder drug which supposedly halted and sometimes reversed the progression of dementia, had driven a wedge between him and much of his own family. Pike wanted his grandma, the mare who essentially raised him, to remember who he was. The rest of his clan wanted him to honor her decision. It was tricky territory, and not the kind Vik knew how to navigate.

They settled into a comfortable silence as the news cycled through the morning headlines. Updates from the war trickled through in snippets. An Equestrian soldier died trying to defend a comrade whose power armor malfunctioned during a firefight. The Vhannan ambassador read an unconvincingly hopeful statement summarizing progress made between himself and the Equestrian Minister of Peace. As usual, there was nothing in the news about the hundred thousand or more dragons who had been sent to reinforce the Vhannan rearguard. She wondered if the story would be different if they could tune into a zebra-run channel, but she knew better than to seek out bad news. Odds were good she’d find more than she wanted.

Eventually the anchors would turn back to the developing story above all their heads. Cloudbreaker and its crew were making steady progress toward the incomplete solar station with the final pieces it required. What those components were remained a mystery to everyone who wasn’t intimately involved with the SOLUS project, but most of the big newspapers openly suspected the satellite was going to be powered by the same revolutionary mass arcane storage talismans, or M.A.S.T.s, which had become the keystone to the Equestrian war machine.

It was that same technology that warmed the cores of Equestrian’s new balefire bombs, and the ministries were making no effort to disassociate those frighteningly destructive weapons from their energy producing cousins. If there had ever been public support behind utilizing talismans to solve the developed world’s energy crisis, it died away the moment the first bomb turned several acres of Equestrian desert to radioactive glass. Harnessing free energy from the latent magic that permeated the globe sounded great right up until people started talking about building a talisman power plant in their backyard.

“...short hours, we will begin seeing live footage of Cloudbreaker docking to the outer hull of SOLUS. Once the shuttle is secure, JSA CEO Jet Stream will watch with the rest of Equestria as his daughter, Mission Specialist Apogee Stream…”

Pike groaned. “It’s just Apogee. Fuck’s sake.”

Vik murmured sympathetically. The young mare had been cursed with her parents’ love for scientific terminology, and Equestrian media had chosen to buffer the confusing nonword of a name by tacking on her father’s surname. It was one of those hamfisted attempts to solve a problem by creating a new one, but Vik suspected it bothered Pike and space enthusiasts like him more than it annoyed the mare grinning in the mission photo currently on the screen.

She glanced up at the wall clock and grunted. “Did you finish the morning checklist?”

Pike only just managed to suppress a wince. Now that he was engrossed with the JSA launch, the very obviously incomplete sheet clipped to the board on the desk between them loomed like an accusation.

“I got it.” She scooped up the clipboard, bopped it against Pike’s mohawk as she stood from her chair, and tipped him a knowing expression when he looked up at her with a mixture of apology and thanks. “Let me know if they spot a flying saucer up there. Be back in a minute.”

A minute turned into thirty a little faster than she’d expected, but such were the sacrifices made in the holy name of The Checklist. Or, in Vik’s case, checklists plural.

Normally they would split the drudgery between them and knock it out over the course of conversation, but with Pike’s attention cemented to the terminal there wasn’t much chance of that happening today. It wasn’t much of a chore to shrug off the faint irritation she felt at that because today just wasn’t an ordinary day. There were ponies in space, and though Vik would be lying if she said she shared the sense of national pride currently saturating Equestria right now she would be hard pressed to admit she wasn’t a little excited. After all, it was space travel… or at least space hitchhiking. Either way, it was nothing to sniff at.

She tongued the eraser of the pencil held gingerly between her teeth as she toggled through Cylinder 63’s diagnostic display. She mumbled to herself as she did this, a habit that always helped keep her mind on task as the work threatened to numb the thinking parts of her anatomy.

“Patient… Foggy Fleece. Temp minus three seventy five. Water-ice at…” she squinted at the readout, “zero point zero nine percent. Storage time, nine hundred and two days. Today’s date, October 31st, 1077. You get all that, Mills?”

A pause. “Yes, Miss Chambers. Data is verified.”

She plucked the pencil from her mouth and ticked the box. “I told you to stop calling me that.”

“Then don’t call me Mills.”

Vik blinked and searched the maze of conduits and plumbing overhead until she spotted the nearest of Millie’s hemispheric black eyes. Ever since she started working at CryoLife, Millie stubbornly insisted on addressing her as Miss Chambers or, if a subtle introduction was needed for someone accompanying her, the more dreaded Veridian Chambers. She was pretty sure the dragon in charge of assigning names on the day her egg got dumped on the government’s doorstep had been pointing to random crap in their office when her turn had come. To this day she had no clue who that dragon was, but if she ever found out she’d take the first boat back home to blacken their eye. Vik had several “chambers” and not a damn one of them was green.

She’d taken it upon herself to pare that ungainly mouthful first down to Vik the moment she realized nobody was going to stop her. Only, she never got around to changing it legally.

That, she decided, wasn’t important. What was important was that Millie had just backsassed her.

“I always call you Mills,” she protested warily.

“Yes,” Millie confirmed, and said nothing more.

She frowned at the unblinking lens, half expecting the artificial assistant to prompt her to finish the checklist so they could pretend this momentary awkwardness hadn’t happened, but it continued to regard her in silence.

“Hey, Pike?” she called loud enough where she was sure he’d hear from the office.

After a beat, he called back. “What’s up?”

She tapped the pencil thoughtfully against the checklist, and decided she wasn’t about to gift wrap and deliver a reason for him to harp on her for the next month. “How’re the space cadets doing? Anything new?”

“They completed the last major rendezvous maneuver a few minutes ago.” Then he added a quick, “And no, nothing exploded.”

She smirked and stepped over to the next cylinder. He knew her too well. “How long until they get there?”

Barely any hesitation. Pike had been tracking anything to do with JSA since they were blowing up prototype rockets on the launchpad. He would have the flight plan memorized, if not a printed copy open on their desk. “ETA one hour, twelve minutes. How’re the checklists coming? Need me to help?”

She would sooner be the reason he missed televised history than she’d kick a puppy. He’d owe her, sure, but he could owe her tomorrow. “I’ve got the population report mostly done and that’s it, so sit your butt down.”

With a final glance toward Millie’s camera, she started scrolling through the diagnostics for Cylinder 64. Seventeen supercooled coffins and a little more than half an hour later she checked the empty box for Cylinder 81 and put the occupied block of Cold Storage behind her. As she stepped out into the walkway connecting their shared office to the over engineered slab leading to the hallway, she considered the four hundred and nineteen room temperature cylinders. She sketched a quick V beside the line for Cylinder 65 and proceeded to draw a line from it down the page, continuing it onto the next sheet as she started for the hallway.

“I’m going to grab something from the vending machines,” she called over her shoulder. “Want anything?”

An enthusiastic ooh emanated from the office behind her and she tried not to roll her eyes when he requested Sparkle-Cola. Backtracking down the single hallway, she dragged her fingertips across the framed company ads and listened to the rhythmic thump-thump, thump-thump of their passage. The silver elevator doors she habitually avoided gleamed at her with ominous invitation, and once again she suspected there was something fundamentally defective with the brains of people who willingly shuffled into those confined little public coffins.

Probably the same defect that gets people into the frozen ones you stare at every day, a voice in her head offered.

She grunted at that, then let the errant thought fade as she dipped into the walk-in closet that CryoLife called a break room. On the far wall, which wasn’t very far at all, a pair of vending machines stood shoulder to shoulder beside the same strip of countertop and cabinetry that appeared in low budget apartments across the planet. A round wooden table and a pair of plastic chairs took up the rest of the space. As far as Vik knew, nobody she worked with actually used the break room beyond snack runs. The windowed office back in Cold Storage was easily twice as large, plus who could relax in a room where the walls were decorated with corkboard and corporate policy reminders?

The beverage machine chirped when she swiped her laminate over the reader and she punched the button for Pike’s alicorn-branded soda. She considered the options more closely after plucking up the glass bottle, her thumb idly sliding over the chilled glass as she thought. The choices hadn’t changed since she started working here and if she was being honest with herself, the sweet tea she’d grown accustomed to was starting to feel a little boring. She remembered there was a gas station down the road that sold coffee, but with flavors in it, and they were supposedly–

She snapped herself out of dreamland, thumped a button at random, and grimaced at the result as she carried the second bottle to the snack machine. A minute later she was padding back down to Cold Storage with drinks and a pair of chocolate snack cakes in tow.

“Apogee, Control. O2 flow check.”

“Control, I see O2 flow showing nominal.”

Pike fumbled toward the desk with his magic until he felt it flowing over the half-empty bottle of Sparkle-Cola. He brought it to his lips and took an absent pull of the sweet yet sharply flavored soda, easily his favorite of the six varieties the ministers were marketing, without once letting his eyes leave the nine by nine inch terminal display.

“That was my bottle,” Vik began to protest, but he shushed her with a hurried wave of his hoof. He didn’t notice the arch expression she shot him, nor did he notice when she leaned over and snatched what had been his bottle from the desk and drained it in a long, defiant pull. The drama that was playing out live on televisions across Equestria was too important - too historic - to be interrupted.

On the terminal, grainy black and white footage showed Apogee’s suited hoof reach for the valve wheel in front of her. This was happening in space right now, he reminded himself, and the thought sent a triumphant shiver through him. Jet Stream’s daughter, the mission specialist many dismissed as a publicity stunt or a flagrant case of nepotism, twitched her foreleg and took a static-muffled breath as the articulating digits built into her EVA suit’s hoof extended to grip the textured wheel. His chair creaked as he leaned forward even more. He’d seen diagrams of JSA’s flight suits in the engineering magazines he had subscriptions for and yet it still amazed him to see those jointed metal fingers close around and begin to turn that airlock valve. Somewhere behind the camera, Apogee was using the feathers enclosed in her suit to manipulate the controls for those fingers, and not for the first time Pike marveled at the imagination it had taken to develop such an elegant solution to a seemingly insurmountable barrier.

“Seals look good. I have you down to eight point one psi, Apogee.”

The mission commander’s voice, Spearhead. If he’d ever been jealous of Apogee’s fame outshining his chance at the spotlight, he’d never shown it. The stallion was up there for the mission and the mission alone.

Beside him, Vik set her heels up on the desk and picked the chocolate icing off the snack cake in her lap. Despite himself, Pike couldn’t stop his eyes from flicking down to the spot where the girth of Vik’s tail met the cleft of her buttocks. It wasn’t a completely unpleasant view despite their difference in species, which was admitting a lot for a stallion who up until just a year ago harbored no interest in her beyond casual friendship. Odds were he was thinking with his dick, and when he told himself so his brain cut off the unwanted hormone dump and allowed the glimpse of Vik’s slightly upturned rump to fade from his thoughts.

“...mobility is nominal. Pressure reads zero poi–”

Static fogged the terminal and Pike sat bolt upright in dismay. Mercifully, it cleared a moment later.

“...onfirm go to disengage outside airlock.”

“Apogee, Control. You are go for EVA.”

The soft rush of a sigh across her helmet microphone. “Here goes.”

The pair of them watched as Apogee pulled down on a handle inside a silent airlock save for the sound of her own breathing, then turned toward the outer door and pushed. The titanium lid swung into the void and Pike sucked in a sharp breath as the camera floated out after it.

As Apogee moved beyond the confines of her lifeboat, the haze of static which plagued the footage cleared.

Vik reached down for the last crumbs of her snack cake and found she’d already eaten them. Part of her wanted to steal Pike’s unopened dessert but she was too enraptured by what she was seeing to give it any real thought. This wasn’t just idle talk or launchpad test footage anymore, this was actually happening! At some point she’d given up trying to suppress her grin and now they were both leaning toward the tiny screen, nearly shoulder to shoulder as they marveled over what they were watching.

The spacemare was currently walking across the skin of SOLUS, pausing occasionally to check on her tethers or untangle her oxygen line. It was like watching someone clomp along the seafloor in a diving suit, except for the fact that every few minutes an entire planet would roll into view. This, more than anything, Vik wished Apogee would stop to look up at more often. All of everything, the entirety of all known life in the universe, was right there above that spacefarer’s head. Seeing it there gave her a sense of profound wonder that she understood would take her days to even begin to articulate, and yet what must it be like to the ponies up there right now seeing it with their own eyes?

The terminal’s speaker crackled with idle conversation being broadcast the world over. Apogee was talking to her commander about his family. Vik didn’t catch much of it. Apparently he had gryphons roosting in his family tree, someone named Tawny. They were about as awestruck at the globe turning over their heads as Vik was about their mission. Well maybe that wasn’t strictly fair. Apogee had been gushing about being out there in the vacuum barely five minutes ago, but it had felt like she’d hardly given the people watching her helmet footage any time to admire the view!

Currently, Apogee was standing over a squarish panel with the aid of the magnets built into the hooves of her EVA suit. Three of her legs were secure to the satellite while she used her notably dragonlike mechanical fingers to open the panel. She had done this five times before and yet Vik wasn’t quite sure what exactly she was doing. Whoever was anchoring the live broadcast wasn’t narrating and there were no headline banners to explain. Once the panel was open, Apogee’s fingered hoof dipped from view and reappeared with a familiar, faceted piece of hexagonal obsidian but which she assumed was one of the M.A.S.T. talismans Pike said they were up there to install.

“Do us proud, little star,” Apogee murmured, and the six inward-pointing tines which the hatch shielded seemed to reach out and snatch the talisman away with invisible force like they had the others. “Unit 6 in place. How’s it looking?”

“All units are online and nominal. Return to the shuttle and standby.”

“Copy. Making my way back now.”

They watched Apogee secure the hatch and turn in the direction she’d come, following the stiff trail of her oxygen line around the satellite’s cylindrical form. It seemed like that was it. Seeing Pike relaxing a little in his chair seemed to confirm it. The show was over. Nothing left now except the closing credits and commercials. He met her eyes for a moment, then offered a smile that bordered on exhaustion. For once, she knew how that felt.

Never known for her speechcraft, she said, “That actually happened.”

“Ponykind is officially a spacefaring civilization,” he said with a touch more gravitas, then glanced at their empty cola bottles with amused disappointment. “What’s the alcohol policy here again? I feel the need to toast.”

She leaned forward and picked up her empty, then tilted it toward him to be clinked. His magic lifted his own off the desk, a tiny puddle of caramel liquid still swirling at the bottom. Then he just held it there. Vik blinked, then decided he was waiting for her to do the honors and reached out to tap his bottle with hers. The office echoed with the soft tink of glass and the unmistakable tone of worry in the voice coming from the terminal. Pike was staring at the screen, his expression a mask of concern, their toast forgotten almost as soon as it had been proposed. Vik had to think back to the last thing she remembered Apogee saying while the two of them were talking.

“Control, Apogee,” the mare had said, her voice tight. “I’m feeling a vibration.”

There had been no immediate response, and that ominous silence was what had pulled Pike back to the broadcast. Now Apogee was sounding truly ill at ease.

“Control, Apogee. Please copy.”

More silence, and Vik thought she heard real pleading in that please copy. Seconds passed. The world slowly descended back into the mare’s field of view.

Then, from the planet overhead, not the Cloudbreaker, a voice spoke. “Apogee, Control. We have a situation.”

It wasn’t difficult to make out the background noise of mission control or the raised voices calling for calm. Pike murmured a curse that was probably only meant for his ears.

“Apogee, Control. We need…” A pause, then a wet noise like someone swallowing to clear a dry throat. “Can you see Cloudsdale from your position?”

There was a stretch of time when nothing happened. Apogee was still walking, she’d never stopped making her way back to the shuttle, but it was as if the rest of her body had stopped working. The request from ground control was just too much of a non sequitur for anyone experiencing the marvel of space for the first time to latch onto, at least not immediately. Then the camera swiveled around as if the mare had momentarily lost her bearings before panning up to the vast expanse of planet dangling above her.

Equestria’s eastern coastline of Equestria hadn’t yet crested the planet’s horizon, but enough of the continent had for a casual observer to identify familiar landmarks. Buckskin Bay was too small to make out but the dense evergreen forest that dominated the country’s northwest corner was impossible to miss. There was the jagged mountain range which drew the border between Equestria and the Crystal Empire, a nation so rich in natural quartz formations that the name became unavoidable. There was Las Pegasus on the west coast and Manehattan and Fillydelpha on the east, the geography around each so irreversibly changed by industry that they resembled gravel piles in a field of grass.

In the center of Equestria stood Canterlot Mountain, a geographical anomaly atop which the nation’s capital had been carved into the side of. And there, always northwest of that lone mountain, was the perpetual bank of clouds which formed the foundation for Equestria’s largest and oldest community of pegasi: Cloudsdale.

Only where that city should have been, there was an expanding dome of sickly green light.

Apogee’s mic captured a breathless, “Oh no.”

The dome grew, dimming to black as the light within it went out. As soon as it did, a second flash appeared.

Las Pegasus, she thought. That was Las Pegasus.

A third. Apogee’s breathing ratcheted up. She was saying something to ground control and the response was garbled, cutting in and out with bursts of static. Like listening to the radio in a lightning storm.

“Vik.” Pike’s voice, urgent.

A pulse of white farther north of Las Pegasus, almost halfway between it and Buckskin Bay, resolved into its own pale green mushroom cloud. The dark ring that expanded beneath it rolled inland while seemingly leaving the ocean untouched. Because there is nothing on the water to burn, that little voice in her head whispered.

Pike was shaking her shoulders now. Someone was yelling at Apogee to get to the airlock but before she could respond the video feed cut out. The TV station’s newsdesk was on camera now but the anchors were nowhere to be seen. One of them must have still been wearing their mic because Vik could hear the muffled breathing and heavy hoofbeat of someone running. An instant later the screen jerked, emitted an abortive shriek, and the snow of a lost signal hissed out from the terminal.

She spoke as if in a dream. “What was that? What were those–”

Pike wrenched her around in her chair until their eyes met. He’d gone pale despite the buckwheat shade of his coat. “Bombs!” he shouted loud enough to wrench her back to reality. “We need to go! Get up! Run!”

Go where? she wanted to ask, but he shoved her out of her chair and toward the office door before she could put it to words. Her first steps were sluggish and unsure, and clearly infuriating to a stallion who was accepting the reality of what was happening topside more quickly than she was. He was ahead of her now, his magic yanking at her arm as she stumbled past the rows of corpsicles in their silver coffins.

She could hear thunder, she realized. Five floors underground and she could hear thunder. And she realized, with dawning horror, that it was resonating through the floor beneath her feet. A deep, visceral vibration as if she were standing on the surface of a bell the size of a continent and something titanic had set to hammering.

Somewhere in the building someone pulled a fire alarm. Along with the deafening peel of overhead sirens, Millie’s voice boomed overhead. “A FIRE HAS BEEN DETECTED IN THE BUILDING. PLEASE EVACUATE THROUGH THE LOBBY. A FIRE HAS BEEN DETECTED IN THE BUILDING. PLEASE EVACUATE THROUGH THE LOBBY.”

She was following Pike now and when he came to a faltering stop in the hallway she nearly crashed into him. His eyes were wide, his mouth gaping as he took deep gulps of chilled air, his entire body resonating a primal fear Vik had never seen in him before.

This is what people look like when they’re sure they’re about to die, that unwelcome voice said. If you had a mirror, you’d see it on your face too.

He was looking at the freight elevator, its illuminated button glowing a foreboding red. Out of service. Millie had disabled them when the fire alarm was pulled, and Vik felt an inappropriate sense of gratefulness to whomever had set it off. She’d rather die on the stairs than in that elevator.

Their momentary pause lasted all of two seconds before Pike was dragging her down the hall to the stairwell door. Thunder clapped overhead again and this time it didn’t resemble natural thunder at all. It thudded in their chests, heavy and hard, like the bomb it was. Before she could begin to ask herself what Buckskin Bay - a nowhere town hundreds of miles away from anything close to a major city - had to offer as a bombing target, she was being hauled up the first flight of stairs toward a downward rushing stampede of shouting, screaming office workers. Vik could see them pouring around the railing through the open shaft running through the stairwell and felt a combined sense of dread and relief to see most of the flood pressing out through the lobby exit.

Still, there were at least two dozen or more ponies making their way down past the sublevel landings toward Vik and Pike. They milled along the railing, watching the spectacle of the evacuation overhead with numb wonder, obviously torn between heading further down the steps or joining the main crowd fleeing the building.

Vik understood why they were unsure. When it came to evacuation policies, CryoLife never minced words in its regular reminders of the slim chance that if the building were ever damaged, any one of the lines carrying refrigerant to Cold Storage could break and a power cut could disrupt Millie’s atmospheric sensors. Liquid nitrogen was only one of several coolants the company kept stored on site, and those which rose would asphyxiate just as readily as those which settled into the sublevels. CryoLife might be an eccentric company to work for, but their corporate lawyers were not about to let a minor earthquake turn a cracked foundation into a heap of wrongful death suits.

“Go up!” Pike hollared as they passed the first lingerer on the stairs. “Get out! Get out!”

Soon they were both shouting, Pike wrenching at the shoulders of stunned workers and Vik hooking her hand around the foreleg of a wide-eyed mare and yanking her around to face up the steps they were climbing. As they did, the stragglers began to follow in a worried trail behind them.

What felt like an instant later, Vik and Pike were shoving themselves into the crush of bodies on the lobby landing, the breath stolen from their lungs as they were vomited out onto a marbled floor which less than two hours ago had been the picture of professional tranquility. She found Pike in the stumbling mass of stampeding hooves, grabbed a fistful of mane at the base of his neck, and kept hold of him as they jostled and pushed their way to the row of glass doors across the lobby. She could hear the lonely wail of klaxons outside, their howls crisp and mournful beyond doors which had been thrown open with such force that their panes lay in glittering confetti on the sidewalk.

The sound of sirens and cracking thunder reminded her of the storms which sometimes rolled over her home island. They had been black, churning monstrosities that came out of the horizon like a living thing bent on drowning them all. In the morning they would find palm trees shattered and still smoking, the embers of lightning strikes still glowing deep within their trunks. This was just like one of those storms, only there was no lightning and the sky was still a painfully vibrant blue.

For just a moment, as she and Pike clambered through the lobby doors and crunched over the glass pebbled sidewalk, she convinced herself that this was all just a big mistake. And she could tell, as she looked around at the townspeople standing dumbly in the middle of the road with them that they were all hoping the same thing. There were no mushroom clouds rising into the sky. No fire sweeping out of the forest to burn them up. The noise could just as easily be something else. A gas explosion. A demolition nobody had told them about. Wasn’t there such a thing as meteors which fell from space and exploded high up in the atmosphere? She’d read something about that once. There had been a forest found flattened in Yakistan that–

Vik and all the others gathered in the street turned to the north where the sky beyond the Crystal Mountains began to frantically pulse. It reminded her of the flashbulbs at a ministry press conference. First there was a beautiful blue sky, then a patch of it flickered, then blue again. It happened again and again along the line of mountains, seemingly at random, sometimes in pairs or trios. It rippled west to east like a line of unseen firecrackers, and Vik thought she saw something silver dart down behind one of those snow capped peaks right where one of those faintly emerald flickers bloomed.

Then she saw them. They all saw them.

Not the mushroom clouds they were all trained to fear. Not the boiling pillars of green fire the ministries recorded during the balefire bomb tests in the badlands. The citizens of Buckskin Bay watched in bewilderment as the very crystalline formations which gave the Crystal Empire its name, arced skyward from behind the mountains like a molten wave slamming against breakers stretching to the horizon.

They realized with stunned horror that those glowing projectiles were separating from one another, spreading out like a fan of tumbling magma that stood no chance of missing their town. Globules the size of houses seemed to float suspended overhead as they reached their apex. Then they began to fall.

None of them understood what they were seeing. Not enough to run. Not enough to take cover. They stood, staring and confused, until a drop of liquefied crystal the size of a gold bit splashed against the back of a mare several blocks away and set her to screaming as it seared her flesh. Then came another shriek of pain nearer by. And another. And more.

“Back inside,” she murmured.

The crowd in the streets was beginning to scatter, but Pike stood stone still. “What’s happening?”

Something heavy and liquid slammed into the hood of a carriage down the road, crushing the engine and sending a fan of sparks spraying into the ponies around it. Suddenly someone was screaming for everyone to get into the hospital building, and the harried milling of unguided panic began to take on a singular direction toward the white building across the road.

Vik jerked on Pike’s mane, hard enough to make him cry out in protest. She didn’t let up. “Get the fuck back inside,” she urged, pulling him back the way they came.

As he turned to follow a half-melted slab of crystal the size of a full grown pony detonated against the pavement hard enough to collapse the sewer line beneath it. Searing, stinking steam erupted from the fissure and Vik tried not to watch as several ponies tumbled into the scalding miasma.

“GO!” she screamed.

But by then, Pike needed no convincing. A pelting rain of superheated crystal was beginning to fall now and the stampede to the hospital had swept up all but a few stragglers out on the road. Vik had no intention of crossing the road and the hospital parking lot under that burning hailstorm when they were less than ten yards from the door they’d just come through. They scraped over the broken glass and back into the lobby where a trio from CryoLife’s accounting department, at least according to their laminates, stood in a huddle like rabbits cowering from a predator.

“Come on!” Pike shouted after them, but none of them moved.

“Everyone’s going to the hospital,” the mare among them said. “It’s safer there, right? A hospital?”

As if to answer their question, a block of smoking stone the size of a carriage slammed through the roof of the emergency room where earlier that morning Vik had avoided eye contact with its nursing staff. She realized, with stupid embarrassment, that she and Pike were still wearing their Cold Storage medical scrubs.

“We need to get…” Pike had slowed his run to a hurried walk, and Vik could see his expression shift as he understood he was saying exactly the wrong thing, “...downstairs. It’ll be safer belowground.”

The accountants didn’t move.

“Pike,” she insisted, pulling at him, “come on.”

He pulled back. “It’s not safe!”

And she saw the instant those words made up the accountants’ minds. It wasn’t safe downstairs. It wasn’t safe where the pipes might burst and invisible gas could rise or fall to suffocate them no matter where they were. They’d been trained not to shelter in the sublevels, and yet that was before they knew the bombs could scoop up the Crystal Empire and pour its molten slag on their heads.

Muffled thuds were hammering the sides of the building now. The debris was getting larger. Sparks and licks of flame were sheeting across the open lobby doorways as if a team of welders were hard at work outside. The rumbles of those distant detonations were finally reaching them now and even as dulled by the mountains as they were, they sent a bolt of primal fear through Vik’s spine.

“We can make it,” the mare said.

“You won’t,” Pike countered, but they both knew the words had fallen on deaf ears.

Something on one of the floors above them crashed across the ceiling. More smoking stones were clattering into the lobby.

The accountants met their eyes, silently inviting Vik and Pike to follow them to safety. Hospitals saved lives, after all. Then they were moving, galloping out into that burning hailstorm beneath a shield of magic cast by the unicorn among them. They regretted their decision before they’d crossed the road’s centerline. Vik couldn’t suppress a sick, mewling sound from rising in her throat as she saw the falling crystals pierce the shield as if it weren’t there at all and set fire to the bodies they touched. Their charge toward the hospital turned into a chaos of tumbling, spinning limbs as flames chased across their coats like lit tinder. One by one they fell, shrieking and kicking, until they were still.

“Vik,” a voice said. Pike’s voice.

He turned her chin away from the scene unfolding outside, and when she looked down at him she saw tears in his eyes. Tears that told her they weren’t going to survive this. That they might have bought themselves a little time, but not much. Not really. The sound of raining debris had become almost deafening now, loud enough to drown out even the thunder of the falling bombs.

The words were out of her mouth before she could stop them. “We’re going to die.”

Pike glanced toward the open doors where, to their shared dismay, the asphalt itself was beginning to burn. Most likely the CryoLife building was on fire. They could see smoke pouring through the windows of the hospital, where it wasn’t obscured by nearer flames. Finally, he nodded. No sense in denying the obvious.

“Yeah,” he said, his voice thick. “Yeah, I guess so. But maybe we don’t have to do it like…”

He gestured to the flames. Toward where they could still see the accountants burning, if either of them chose to look. They didn’t look.

“We should go back down,” he continued. “At least there we’ll have options.”

It made a kind of terrible sense. They might burn no matter what they do, but that didn’t have to happen while they were alive. She didn’t object. She just allowed herself to be led back to the stairwell, through a building which had emptied out into the path of a firestorm, and as the world outside blackened and burned they began an unhurried descent back to Cold Storage.

They had turned down the second landing when a piece of the Crystal Empire larger than Vik’s apartment crashed through the first floor and snapped two of the north supports like twigs. The building lurched, struck through its spinework of critical supports and deeper still.

It groaned in agony as rigid iron shifted, bent, then started to collapse.