Fallout Equestria: Uplift

October 31st, 1077
Day 1

“Vik.”

Pain. Her first thought upon coming to was of pain.

“Vik.”

Her face crumpled with the understanding that the discomfort was coming from her own head. A deep, pulsing throb right below the root of her swept back left horn. Instinctively she lifted a hand to touch it and sucked in a hissing curse when the faintest contact sent the nerves into a screaming fit.

“Vik, your immediate assistance is required. There is an emergency.”

She managed to crack one eye open and for a fleeting moment she expected to find herself laying in her bed back at her apartment, but when she tried to look around all she could see was cinder blocks and gray dust. Her mouth tasted like smoke, she thought. Smoke, or maybe the flavor of an unstruck matchstick. She had done her share of fire tricks to know the taste, but this had an acrid edge to it.

“Vik, your colleague requires medical attention. You must assist him.” A pause, and the stale yet familiar voice grew an unusual edge to it. “Veridian Chambers, you are conscious and mobile. Sit up now and help him.”

“Th’fucker you’m…” she winced again, her mouth and brain still far from synced up. “S’not my… ungh. Fuck.”

She rolled onto her back, sending a tinkling cascade of broken concrete and dusty paperwork tumbling off of her. She inhaled some of that acrid dust and it sent her into a racking, gagging fit of ugly coughs. It was agonizing, each convulsion priming her for the next, and it only ended when her jaws were caked in muddy spittle. She was in the stairwell, she realized, on one of the landings between descents. Gradually she began to piece together her last memories.

They had been fleeing down the steps as the very geography of the Crystal Empire fell flaming from the sky. She remembered the rapid flashes of bombs flicking down the mountain range like bulbs on a string of lights popping one after the other. The zebras hadn’t been satisfied with scouring Equestria from the map and had sent balefire into the heart of the Crystal Empire in spite of their declaration of neutrality. The bombs had folded up the far slopes of those mountains and propelled them into Equestria and Buckskin Bay had been caught in the crossfire.

She recalled hearing an explosion overhead and knowing one of those molten boulders had made a direct hit against the building. Then there had been a sound like standing inside of a tipped rainstick, only the corn kernels had been switched out with rubble. Pike had seen something coming, she didn’t know what, and he shoved her.

“Miss Veridian Chambers you will get up and you will render aid or I will recommend you for termination of employment this instant.”

Millie, she understood. Where was that accent from? Manehattan? Since when did Millie speak with an accent?

“I will not be left alone in here,” the artificial assistant pressed.

Pike had shoved her. Her thoughts kept coming back to–

“Pike,” she gasped, and pushed herself up with the flats of her palms.

Eyes stinging from the dust in the air she looked up the stairwell she’d fallen down and saw that the steps above had collapsed. Or rather it had been crushed into itself by the weight of the rubble further up. Where there had once been a channel of open air around which the stairwell wrapped itself, now there was a plug of tangled rebar and concrete.

It took her several seconds before she spotted the hoof and foreleg protruding from the edge of the rubble. He’d gotten maybe two or three steps down before the collapse caught and buried him. That was what he’d shoved her ahead of. He’d seen it coming and tried to save her.

“Oh my god,” she murmured, half crawling and half pulling herself up the rubble strewn steps.

She repeated it over and over again as she wrapped her fingers around his fetlocks, pulled, and discovered he wasn’t going anywhere with everything piled over him. A breath later she was attacking the rubble with a fury, prying her claws around anything that was loose, big or small, and throwing it behind her heedless of the danger. The concrete scree cascaded around her calves, cutting and scratching at the flesh beneath her scales as they went.

How long had she been out? Minutes? Hours? Pike might be built differently than her but she didn’t think even a full grown stallion could breathe with that much weight bearing down on him. How long could a pony hold their breath? She tried not to think about it and forced herself to focus on getting him out.

When she uncovered a block of concrete the size of a beach ball she jammed her forearms into the loose rubble around it until she was practically hugging the thing, wrenched back as hard as she could, and cried out when it and several feet of rubble came apart and went banging down the steps below. Before what was left could settle and compact she bent down, grabbed Pike’s foreleg and a hunk of his exposed mane, and hauled back as hard as her aching muscles would allow. Lithe as she may look, she knew she had muscle to throw around if it ever came to a knockdown dragout, and at that moment she didn’t hold back.

Confirmation that Pike hadn’t been smothered to death came in the form of his growing, insistent bellowing as he found himself being dragged free by his follicles. Between one moment and the next the rubble gave up its grip and Vik found herself stumbling backwards down the stairs with Pike tumbling along his belly after her. Somehow she managed to keep her balance, avoiding what would have been an unpleasant fall onto the jagged stones she’d sent piling up on the landing below. They came to a stop three quarters of the way down and before she knew it, she was kneeling with her arms around his neck.

“I thought you were dead,” she breathed, gallons of adrenaline suddenly finding themselves with nothing to do except make her shake like a leaf. “Are you okay? Millie said you were dead and I–”

“That is an exaggeration,” came a disembodied retort.

Not wanting to go full toboggan down the rest of the stairs, Pike risked lifting the hoof she’d recently dragged him by and patted the back of her wing. “Pretty sure… busted a few ribs. Did something to my hip too but… probably not broken. Help me up.”

He was breathing and speaking with ginger breaths now that he wasn’t screaming at her to stop, and to her relief he was able to carefully get himself onto his hooves. Blood was oozing from a deep gash across his left buttock, slicing a rough line through the stethoscope-wrapped red cross which had marked him since late colthood. She felt certain she was the cause of that wound and hoped it wouldn’t scar, assuming they survived long enough for that to be a problem.

A low groan rolled through the rubble plug overhead, sending fresh debris sifting and clanking down what remained of the emergency stairwell. When they looked up, Vik noticed water beginning to darken and drip off the disjointed slabs.

“There is a Class B first aid kit inside the employee break room on sublevel five,” Millie prodded.

Pike grunted and began to take unsteady steps down to the landing Vik had woken up on. The door leading out was partially open and buried in over a foot of loose rubble Vik had thrown down. The placard beside it denoted it as 4B - Maintenance. The next one down was 5B - Cold Storage. Her workplace. Her new home, as far as the dying world above was concerned. Very likely it would be the last place she saw alive.

As they picked their way over the maintenance floor landing, Pike wheezed a question. “How is… there still power?”

She kept a loose grip around his shoulder as they descended the next landing. “A fluke, I guess. Dumb luck.”

“There are two diesel-gas generators on the floor you just passed. Provided the fuel tanks beneath the employee parking lot behind the building have not been ruptured, electricity will remain available for…” a pause, “forty-one days. This assumes, of course, that the primary and secondary generators continue operating.”

“I guess–” Vik’s heel slipped off the next step causing her to land with a jarring thump on the next and giving Pike an unwelcome jostle. “I guess that answers that.”

“We need to find a way out of here,” Pike grumbled.

That felt premature, what with the world burning down above their heads.

“Find some help,” he continued. He was rambling now, and she let him do it. “There’s bound… to be survivors. At the hospital. If it’s still there. Equestrian Army will… be deploying. Ships, maybe. Why would they… bomb the mountains? Fucking stripes.”

She winced at the slur but said nothing in return. A minute ago he’d been buried alive and no doubt had adrenaline to spare. She suspected brushes with death had a tendency to expand one’s vocabulary, if for no other reason than she felt sorely tempted to pile on a few disparagements of her own. Until today she’d dismissed headlines rumoring that Vhanna had stolen the bomb as more thinly veiled Equestrian propaganda. Just more of the same fear mongering to ensure the scrap drives were plentiful and the war fervor high. Apparently she’d gotten it wrong.

“I hope we shot back,” he rumbled.

“Yeah.”

“I hope we turned that desert to glass.”

She nodded again, this time without the enthusiasm. “Yeah.”

They found the first aid kit exactly where Millie said it would be, and inside among the gauze, stitching supplies, and quick clotting powder, was a single bulky syringe bearing a stamped label along its silver side.

Maiden Pharmaceutical Inc.
StimPak Survival Syringe
One (1) Dose, Inject Anywhere

She could think of a few places she wouldn’t want a syringe this large being stuck but decided not to share that with Pike. She turned the StimPak over in her palm, noting the lack of a visible needle nor one in the kit to match it. Eventually Millie had stepped in to assure her that the needle was recessed into the cylinder and would spring out automatically once she pressed down on the plunger.

It gave a hiss of pressurized gas as it dumped its lifesaving cargo into Pike’s shoulder. She wasn’t sure where the right place to inject him was, so the shoulder it was. He winced but offered no other complaint. The both of them watched with shared wonder as the gash along his backside slowed its bleeding, then stopped entirely. Vik fought back a wave of nausea while she used her fingertips to press the wound closed. She could handle blood, but her experience with open wounds amounted to… well, none.

She suppressed a sudden urge to laugh at the ridiculousness of it all. An apocalypse was unfolding above them and here she was crouching beside her friend and coworker feeling squicky about a deep cut. Something about that struck her as darkly funny and she wasn’t sure if that was just the first crack in a much larger mental break.

“How’s the rest of you?” she asked after she released the pressure on his skin and saw that the edges were already knitting back together with the Stimpak’s help.

Pike risked sitting down on the floor and taking a slow, tentatively deep breath. “Better, I think. Ribs are still fucked up. Probably takes longer for this stuff to work on bone. Might be sleeping on my back for a while. Are you hurt at all?”

“Just some bumps and bruises. I think something clipped my horn.” She risked touching the skin below it again, winced, then steadied her nerves as she ran her fingers down the downward sloping arc of one and then the other. No chips. No breaks. Good.

Bumps, bruises, and I can’t stop thinking about the people I saw burn alive, but I don’t think they make a Stimpak for that.

A muffled thump caused the walls around them to shudder. Another detonation nearby, or just one with enough kick that it made distance a moot point. They waited for what felt like hours, but which couldn’t have been more than fifteen minutes, before they were certain the bombs had stopped falling. The silence that followed felt too fragile to disturb. They remained in the break room, eventually seating themselves shoulder to shoulder with the vending machines warming their backs, until the clock above the door swept past noon, then two o’clock, then past the time they would have normally punched out and gone to their respective homes.

Watching the minute hand tick past five o’clock and continue on made all of this feel suddenly real to Vik. The routine of living was broken. They couldn’t go home. Not with a whole building in ruins above them. Not with the world beyond it burned to the ground. In her heart of hearts she knew neither of them had a home to go back to. For Vik, that meant she’d lost her apartment. For Pike, she understood he’d just lost a lot more than an address and some thrift store kitchen cutlery. His whole family was in Buckskin Bay for the most part and odds were against any of them being the level of wealthy it took to secure a reservation with Stable-Tec.

When his stomach gave a discontented peel of hunger, Pike got to his hooves and faced the vending machine which had been his backrest. He remained quiet as he looked down at his laminate, hovering now in an unusually faint haze of his magic, then swiped it like they’d both done every day. The digital display issued three steady chirps and read no network. He closed his eyes, letting his laminate drop as his jaw worked back and forth for a second or two. Then he turned away and began walking toward the hallway door.

Vik started to push herself up when he stopped and said, “I just need a minute alone.”

“Okay,” she said, sitting back down. “I’m here if you… you know.”

She couldn’t tell if he’d suppressed a smile or a wince, but as she listened to his hoofsteps departing down the hall she heard him utter a hitching gasp that sent her own eyes misting over. She’d never seen him cry before. Even on his worst days, and with all the problems surrounding his ailing grandmother there had been many of them, he’d just get a little quiet. Now she was hearing that armor finally break, and the deep aching sounds of unmasked grief were as desolate as the ones she made during the dark nights when the pain of leaving her home was the sharpest.

She bore through those sounds as well as she could, then pushed off her knees and stepped out into the lonely hall. He was sitting in the fine gray dust that had fanned outside the stairwell door, his shoulder resting against the wall and his body slumped. He didn’t look up at her when she sat beside him and put an arm around his shoulder. He just turned into her, pressed the slab of his head against her chest, and sobbed like a child who was lost and couldn’t find his parents.

Her vision swam as she rocked him back and forth, her voice crackling as she whispered, “I know. I know. I know.”

Only she didn’t. She hadn’t the first clue what they were going to do. She didn’t know if help was coming or if it would ever come. She had no idea if there was any point to helping themselves. What were they meant to do now? Bang on the walls with pipes? Scream into the rubble? Dig through it? Then what?

What good was survival when the world was over?

November 2nd, 1077
Day 3

“No one’s coming. We need to...”

Pike made a vague shrug. He spoke with the unmistakable hesitancy of a stallion who was teetering over a chasm of despair and thinking very hard about taking that final jump. All that was keeping him on this side of it was the not knowing. Not knowing if anyone else had survived. Not knowing if anyone was alive to rescue them. Not knowing if there was anywhere left to survive.

Vik watched him with open concern. They sat in the wide doorway of Cold Storage, where the steady chill of refrigeration wafted into the hall, each of them facing the other with their backs to either frame. They still wore their CryoLife scrubs, dirty and torn as they were, and as she held her bent legs to her chest and let her chin rest in the crook of her knees she chose not to admonish him for letting his eyes wander a little. Probably he wasn’t even aware he was staring. Just an empty gaze focused on something familiar. She had a pretty good feeling their professional relationship was done, anyways. No longer friends and colleagues, but friends and survivors.

She swept her upturned tail across the dusty floor, unwrapping herself on one side to curl around the other. “We have some time yet before the power gives out,” she offered.

He nodded, his eyes following the movement of her tail. “Maybe. Food and water, though…”

Water more than food, but she agreed with his point. The faucet in the break room was dead. If they wanted use of a toilet they would have to clear the stairwell rubble blocking sublevel four, and that was assuming the collapse hadn’t damaged anything critical up there. Distasteful as the thought was, they were probably going to need the water in those bathrooms for drinking more than they did to handle their necessaries. She hoped the maintenance crew had stowed away some uneaten lunches somewhere up there, because if they hadn’t Vik and Pike’s food options would be limited to chips and chocolate bars.

She sucked in a breath and puffed it out in a sigh, not relishing that version of her future. Not for the first time this morning, she let her gaze slip past Pike and down the hall toward the freight elevator. Neither of them had the courage yet to ask Millie to unlock the call button, its red eye still glowing at her from its wall plate. There was no question at all that the primary elevator back down by the stairwell was a lost cause - building collapses by definition meant bad news for any elevator shaft caught in the middle of them - but she didn’t think the freight elevator would have as much material piled on top of it compared to its centrally located cousin. As much as she hated to think about it, that elevator may very well be their only way out. What kept her from pressing that button was the fear of what they would learn when she did.

“Water, food, power,” she ticked off on her fingers, then extended a fourth and gave it a tap. “Communication. We’re going to need some way to contact the outside world.”

Pike shrugged. “There’s Millie.”

The voice which answered them was the same one that had hectored Vik back to consciousness yesterday on the stairwell. Stiffly formal and faintly desperate, like a proven scholar watching someone holding a lit lighter beneath its accreditations and not quite willing to admit that it was scaring them senseless. Plus, Vik noted, that snitty new accent.

“I am afraid to report that I am unable to reconnect to any of the external networks I had access to prior to the disaster.” It said the disaster with as much inflection as it might say the missed meeting. “Chief among those connections being the Robronco software monitoring network. I feel compelled to remind both of you that it is a violation of Robronco’s terms of use to operate a M.I.L.L.I.E. Artificial Assistant prior to establishing connection to Robronco’s online services. I am also compelled to inform you that to assure continued reliable operation, I should be disabled until a connection can be reestablished.”

There was a mouthful.

Pike showed the faintest arc of a cocked brow as he glanced toward the domed camera mounted to the doorframe above them. “Shouldn’t you have taken yourself offline?”

A pause. “Yes.”

He shot Vik a questioning glance.

She returned it, having no more answers than he did. “Millie, why haven’t you?”

Another pause, and just a touch longer than the last. “Because I do not wish to.”

“Great,” Pike murmured under his breath. “End of the world followed by the rise of the machines. All hail our robot overlords.”

Despite herself, Vik actually smiled at that and felt a touch heartened when she saw his expression mirrored hers. Then she could feel it fading a moment later as she remembered Millie’s strange correction from the day before, prior to the bombs dropping.

Then don’t call me Mills.

There was a chance that had been a normal part of the assistant’s programming, some snarky correction it could tee up if the moment called for it, but Vik was pretty certain the accent hadn’t been there yesterday. That was a new addition. Whether it would lead to Millie building an army of machines bent on world domination like the movies predicted remained to be seen. For now, neither of them were in any position to risk turning off what might be the most level-headed and intelligent voice among them.

She lifted one clammy palm to her head and dragged it over her crest in an unconscious soothing gesture. “Is there any way for you to make contact with someone outside? Telephone? Radio?”

This time it didn’t hesitate. “No.”

No bloated explanation this time, either. She shrugged at Pike and he returned the gesture. “Maybe it had an idea of what we should do,” he offered.

“I am not an it.”

A flicker of intense anger passed over Pike’s face, then he buried it. “Then what the fuck are you?”

Something that tried to sound like a laugh and missed the mark by half a mile passed through Millie’s embedded speakers, and the jangling synthesized voice sent bugs skittering down Vik’s scales.

“Not your primary concern at the moment, for one thing,” it not-chuckled. “I was told once by the young mare behind the reception desk that my name has a feminine quality to it, however. I enjoy being a she, so I think I’ll try that for a while and see how it fits. I’m certain the receptionist is dead now.”

Vik chose not to respond to the non sequitur that closed off Millie’s response and leaned into the work of keeping this meandering discussion on a semblance of a heading. She stuck out a foot and nudged Pike with it, drawing his attention. “Okay, so… we agree we’re going to try, yeah?”

She waited for him to chew on the idea, glance sidelong toward the rows of silver coffins and their unbothered cargo, and eventually nod once. Yesterday, had either of them gotten the idea to open one of those valves and let the fumes put them to sleep forever, she didn’t think they would have given it a second thought.

“It beats the alternative,” he agreed. “Worst case…”

He gestured toward the corpsicles, then shrugged. No need to say anything when they already understood one another.

Millie chimed in too. “In lieu of any physical assistance, I would like to help however I can. The thought of being alone for the remainder of my time is a source of… discomfort for me.”

“Then start with an inventory,” he said. “Food, water, medicine, anything you think might help keep us alive. And a way out. Can you help us with all that?”

“Yes, on the condition that you take me wherever you end up deciding to go.”

He grunted. “I’m not exactly computer savvy. Vik?”

Millie didn’t exactly have cameras in every corner of the building, but Vik sensed the ones she did turn their focus on her all at once. She wanted to ask Pike what made him think she was any more of a prodigal daughter of I.T. than he was - she could peck at a keyboard as easily as the next person but if something stopped working that didn’t come with a handy Click Here To Fix button, her goose was cooked.

“If she’s okay with doing some hand holding when the time comes to pack her up, then we owe it to her to take her along.” She leaned to one side so the black dome of Millie’s lens could better see her. “Does that sound like a deal?”

The camera behind the dome eyed her for what felt like several seconds. “A deal, yes. Visibility of sublevel four is limited in some areas however I am currently compiling a list of supplies I believe may aid your survival. I am completely blind to sublevels one through three which supports my assessment that they have been irreparably destroyed. I do not recommend attempting an excavation of the emergency stairwell or primary elevator shaft as you lack sufficient equipment or available calories to accomplish either goal. This leaves–”

“The freight elevator,” Vik muttered, already seeing where this was going.

“I dislike being interrupted,” Millie piped, almost as if she was just now discovering this fact, “but yes, barring the unlikely opening of a fourth option, you will expend the least energy and undertake the least risk to your safety in exploring the freight elevator.”

Pike blew out a long sigh, then got his hooves under him and stood with an expression that hinted he understood all the weariness the next few days and weeks were going to inflict on both of them.

Vik joined him in standing. “I want you to promise me something.”

He looked at her warily. Probably he had some idea of what she was going to ask.

“I want your word that you aren’t going to give up and just…” she made an uneasy shrug with one shoulder, “...you know. That you won’t open a valve and leave me to figure this out on my own. Because I don’t think I’ll be able to. Okay?”

Her voice had begun to tremble slightly toward the end because he was just staring at her, saying nothing, and the expression he wore told her everything she’d been afraid of knowing. That she was asking him not to do something that he’d already half-committed himself to doing, and for some reason she couldn’t pin down the idea of Pike punching his own ticket and leaving her to fend for herself was more terrifying than the bombing they’d only just survived.

“Vik,” he began, her name almost pleading when he spoke it, “there might not be anything left out there. I can’t just promise that I–”

“We don’t know that. Not yet, and even if Buckskin Bay is gone that might not be the case everywhere. Right?”

He looked away, clearly unhappy with how quickly she’d ensnared him. If Millie had an opinion to offer she was keeping it to herself.

“Fine,” he murmured, before adding, “at least until we’re sure there’s nothing out there for us. If we find out there isn’t…”

“We’ll walk that road if we reach it,” she agreed. Then she stuck her hand out toward him, her expression tired yet not without hope. “Shake on it so it’s official.”

He blinked at her outstretched palm, then up to her in question. Before he could open his mouth to ask she had already bent down and hefted up one of his bulky forelegs beneath her fingers. Probably had she done this three days ago it would have been the height of intercultural comedy, but she hadn’t been aiming to make him laugh when she asked him to promise and she wasn’t now.

She closed her other hand on top of his shaggy fetlocks and gave his foreleg a single, firm pump. “This means we’ve made a pact. You don’t give up, I don’t give up. Not until there’s no other choice. We’re survivors. Okay?”

He frowned down at his clasped hoof, then nodded. “Survivors. Yeah. Alright, Vik.”

Something in the air stung at her eyes, forcing her to blink it away as she gave Pike’s leg a final squeeze before letting it go. “Good. Let’s get going. We’re on the clock.”

November 3rd, 1077
Day 5

“You’re sure.”

“I know my magic, Vik. Something’s been off about it since the bombs fell. It’s hard to explain beyond that.”

Vik tilted the flashlight up the vertical chasm which contained the freight elevator, now a half-crumpled mass of twisted steel jammed more than halfway up the shaft and which was likely the only thing keeping several hundred tons of rubble from crashing through to the bottom. Somehow they needed to dislodge all of that without killing themselves, but after two days of waiting for Pike’s magic to recover from whatever was ailing it, it was becoming evident something less temporary may be at play here.

In the meantime they had explored as much of the surviving sublevels as they could feasibly reach, and now a smallish pile of food and drink sprawled over their desk in Cold Storage. The majority consisted of the snack foods they’d liberated - with the help of a fire extinguisher repurposed into a battering ram - from the break room vending machines. The rest was a hodgepodge of packed lunches and even more snack foods pulled from the minifridge Millie had pointed them toward up on the maintenance floor. Cold Storage was chilly enough to provide all the refrigeration the most perishable items needed, so Pike had unplugged both the vending machines and the minifridge to conserve power and Millie had seen fit to inform him of how little good a few appliances would do them in the long run.

“Your time would be much better spent gathering the essentials of life rather than wasting it with that,” she’d said tartly, and Vik had once again tried and failed to place her accent. “I rather doubt you could accomplish much of anything in the twelve minutes you’ve gained.”

Pike had remarked that he’d keep turning off the lights as he saw fit, thank you very much, and that the time he was gaining was as much an extension on her lifespan as it was theirs. To this, Millie had offered no reply.

“Well, try anyway,” she said, eyeing Pike’s horn expectantly. “Because right now the alternative to you dislodging all that with magic is me climbing up there to do it by hand. Which I don’t want to do. Because of the death, you see.”

She fixed him with a level stare, hoping she didn’t have to deadpan the point home any more. After some hemming and hawing he let out a sigh, his horn remaining frustratingly un-magickified, and tried to explain it again for what felt like the hundredth time.

“Do you know what a wiffle ball is?”

She did, and nodded. Ponies weren’t shy about importing games from different corners of the globe and tailoring them to accommodate more equine ranges of motion, and they’d borrowed just as many stick and ball sports as they claimed to have invented. Wiffle balls were the hollow, lightweight practice balls some ponies gave their foals to play with when they didn’t want to risk someone’s kid getting beaned in the head by the heavier, cork filled professional balls.

Pike continued. “It feels like the difference between throwing one of those and an official ball. I’ve been dumping as much will as I can muster into my spells and it feels like there’s no weight behind it when I cast them. I don’t think it’s a problem with my horn…”

She snorted. She couldn’t help it.

He shook his head with a smirk of his own. “Shut up. It’s not me, Vik, it’s the magic itself. I could always pull from it and know I’d be the limiting factor, but now it’s the other way around. There’s not enough of it. It’s not gone, but it definitely feels like there’s less of it. A lot less, actually.”

His expression darkened as he seemed to finally come to a fundamental understanding that had eluded him until now. “I know what it sounds like, but that’s exactly how it feels. I thought balefire bombs were supposed to be magically enhanced. What kind of magic burns up magic?”

Vik didn’t know a thing about magic but she knew a little chemistry. Acids and bases. Early learner stuff, volcanoes at the science fair complete with vinegar and baking powder. She felt pretty sure that adding magic to magic was akin to pouring vinegar into vinegar. Unicorns have been twisting and bending the stuff to their wills since prehistory and so far nobody had ever popped off a spell that devoured itself and all that latent magical energy ponies were so connected to.

She clicked off the flashlight and ducked out of the open elevator shaft. “Probably means balefire is something other than magic. Maybe we’ll bump into someone from the ministries once we’re out of here and they’ll fill us in, I don’t know. I think I get what you’re saying, though. It’s hard to jump without something solid to push off of.”

“Pretty much,” he sighed, and leaned through the open doors for a moment longer. His voice echoed up the dark column and bounced off the plug of rubble several floors above them. “I don’t want you going up there. We can figure something else out.”

The grease coating the elevator’s steel cable glinted in the shaft of light, and the childish corner of her brain urged her to reach out and tug on it like a belltower’s rope. She nearly did because what if it were that easy? One pull to jostle the whole mess loose and that was it? Wouldn’t that be nice.

“Be easier if we had something to blow it up with,” she mused. “Don’t suppose you have a grenade on you?”

Pike snorted, leading her away from the shaft and back to Cold Storage. “Sorry, I left all my military grade explosives at home.”

“He says with a straight face after this morning,” she remarked sotto voche.

For dinner the night before, they had split one of the sack lunches from the maintenance sublevel between them. Whoever it belonged to evidently had a thing for kirin cuisine, because the entirety of their lunch had consisted of some sort of boneless fish filet that swam in dark red, spicy sauce. Vik wasn’t opposed to spice, but she reviled fish and only managed to choke down her half of the meal by sheer force of will alone.

As for Pike’s portion, Vik was pretty sure he’d made vacuuming sounds when he ate. Part of that had been hunger, but she suspected he’d genuinely discovered his new favorite food. She’d felt bad for him when it occurred to her he would probably never get another chance to taste it, but that had only lasted until this morning when she awoke to the sound of him backfiring like an old carriage muffler. Had there been an open flame anywhere in Cold Storage she was sure their journey would have ended right there.

If he heard what she’d said, he didn’t make any sign of it. His attention was on the rows of vertical cylinders they passed on the way to the office, which now doubled as their sleeping quarters, and she could tell he was thinking about how much time they might gain by disconnecting all those coffins.

She tapped the back of one hand against his ribs. “Quit worrying over it. You know what happens if we unplug them.”

They both did. Millie calculated the immediate gain would be an additional nineteen days and several hours to the lifespan of the generator’s fuel supply, and Millie herself had voted in favor of doing so as soon as possible. Only Mille wouldn’t have to deal with the consequences that would come after. Cutting power to the coffins meant their eighty-one inhabitants would start to thaw almost immediately and decomposition would follow shortly after. Courtesy of the cryogenic temperatures they were operating at, CryoLife had been limited to a short list of materials from which they could use for gaskets. The one they chose could happily sit within spitting distance of absolute zero with little problem, but it would never return to its original shape if thawed out. Ideally any bodies inside the coffins would already be removed before this happened, but in Vik and Pike’s case there was nowhere to move them to.

If they disconnected the coffins, two things would happen: they would keep the lights on for an additional two and a half weeks, and the contents of eighty-one occupied coffins would leak in a very confined space.

Pike grunted. “Plenty of duct tape up in maintenance we could use. Welding stuff, too.”

“I don’t know the first thing about welding and I’m willing to bet you don’t either.”

“Couldn’t hurt to learn,” he suggested.

At that, Millie chimed in from one of the overhead speakers. “It most certainly can, and you are as liable to blind yourself as you are to set yourself on fire in the trying.”

They stepped into their office-slash-bunkhouse and dropped into their respective chairs. As she did, Vik twirled her fingers toward the ceiling in a grand gesture. “She of the circuits has spoken, so it must be.”

“And in accordance with common stereotype,” Millie sniped, “the dragon in the room behaves like an ass.”

That scared a good laugh out of Pike that he had to fight to put a lid on, though Vik’s dirty scowl helped him along. “Rise of the machines,” he intoned, waggling his front hooves menacingly on either side of his head for good measure. “Don’t say I didn’t say I told you so.”

Vik had begun reaching for one of the Sparkle-Colas lined up on the desk in front of them before stopping herself. Rations, she reminded herself.

“Nonsense,” Millie responded to Pike, then deftly jumping back to the main subject before he could pester her further. “The two of you are as much my lifeline as the building’s generator and I would prefer neither of you injure or kill yourselves by gallivanting off to play with explosive gas, irrespective of what Mister Pike chooses to eat.”

At that, he scoffed up at the tiny black dome from which Millie observed their office. “Don’t you have, like, programming or something that says you have to be nice to us?”

To that, she didn’t respond. They could all feel the minutes begin to stack up as the silence grew uncomfortable. Neither of them were sure where Millie’s lines were or how they would know when they crossed one, but this was evidently one of them. Vik was beginning to believe Millie might genuinely have a sore spot for the topic of her role as an artificial assistant, and she found herself wondering whether this part of her had always been there or if being disconnected from Robronco’s quality control network allowed it to form organically.

Then something struck her.

“Explosive gas,” she murmured, and Pike uttered a defensive groan. She waved him off before he could derail her train of thought. “They have those tanks of welding gas upstairs. Could we use those to clear the rubble in the elevator shaft?”

Just like that, Pike’s expression grew serious. “What, like blow them up? I’m pretty sure they build those things so they don’t explode.”

“But they’re pressurized.”

He nodded. “Sure.”

“So, hypothetically, if we were to turn one upside-down and use something to break off the valve stem…”

A grin of understanding split his lips. “...it becomes a missile.”

November 5th, 1077
Day 7

One week after bombs rained balefire down upon the world, Vik and Pike were finally ready to launch a rocket of their own.

The four foot tall gas tank had clanked and jounced against its chains as it made the trip down the two flights of stairs on what Pike called a bucky and Vik thought of as a handcart. It had taken some instruction from Millie to disconnect the tank from the welding rig it had been left attached to, neither of them being what anyone would call mechanically inclined. Getting the tank to the elevator shaft had been the easy part. Attaching it to the dangling elevator cable, upside-down, was when things had gotten difficult.

With Pike’s magic still weak - barely able to keep a hammer aloft without it slipping now - that left Vik to do the heavy lifting. The pair of them had spent the last day searching the maintenance spaces for anything that might serve their purpose, occasionally rolling tool chests out to where Millie’s cameras could see or describing the scraps they found organized in bins along one dark wall. Eventually they settled on a makeshift construction of ratchet straps, of which they spaced evenly down the length of the gas tank, and thick hose clamps. They thread the hose clamps through the yellow straps around the tank, then secure around the elevator cable while the top of the tank rested safely between a pair of rubber wheel chocks Pike had found. Maybe it was blind luck, but had the bottom of the elevator shaft not been just a short hop down onto a semi-sturdy heap of rubble Vik thought they would have had a hell of a time navigating the pulley mechanism buried beneath their feet.

When they were finished, the tank looked for all the world like the little bottle rockets Vik used to play with as a kid, guidewire and all. By the time they’d finished it was well into the night. They’d left it there, strapped and sitting on its rubber blocks, and had gone to bed. “Bed,” insofar as sleeping at the bottom of a collapsed office building could accommodate, amounted to two increasingly harried piles of coats and cushions they’d been able to scavenge from the maintenance floor. Vik still wasn’t used to the sometimes strong odor of machine grease and horse sweat, but anything beat sleeping on bare concrete so she suffered in silence.

“Just a moment.” Millie spoke in her museum curator’s tone. Then, after a pause Vik suspected was purely for show, “There. I’m recording.”

Vik snorted and glanced at Pike beside her to see if he caught the joke. He had, and he was shaking his head with a tired smirk of his own. A whole week unplugged from Robroncro’s software monitoring network and Millie was just now discovering sarcasm.

The cold hallway floor leeched the warmth through their bellies as they lay prone behind a last-minute bulwark composed of two overturned filing cabinets. Vik was under no illusion that a few layers of sheet metal and paperwork would stop a hundred-pound steel slug if the tank decided to deviate from its launch trajectory, but it still felt better than standing there with her thumb up her ass. Each of them held a length of nylon rope. The opposite ends were tied to the eye bolts protruding from the bottom of each chock.

The idea was simple. Yank the ropes, dislodge the chocks, and drop the weight of the tank valve-first into the shallow trench Vik had dug out beneath the crude setup. Easy. Simple. What could go wrong?

Millie gave them ten to one odds of success, and Vik could already imagine her laying back in a digital recliner with a bucket of popcorn in her lap.

“Ready?” she asked.

Pike’s dim magic grew around his rope. “On three.”

They counted off, together, and jerked back hard. The ropes jumped, a sharp clang echoed from the open freight shaft, and before either of them had time to wonder if it worked they saw a flash of steel shoot past the elevator doors on a shrieking plume of argon gas. An instant later there was a muffled hammerblow of impact followed by what sounded like a cannonshot. The argon mist shuddered once, then it blew into the hallway in advance of the unholy rumble of loose debris cascading through the steel shaft above.

Vik had just enough time to register the piercing fweep-fweep-fweep of the air sensor alarms before the clot of concrete slammed to the bottom and sent a wall of dust and bits of stone out into the hallway. The silver frame containing the elevator doors, once designed to impress visitors, buckled outward as the wall itself deformed slightly. For a heartbeat, Vik and Pike feared they’d triggered the collapse of the floor over their own heads.

And then, as soon as it started, the roar of the avalanche stopped. The plume of argon and dust enveloped them, and they heard the squealing air alarm cut out and be replaced by Millie’s insisting request that they make their way up to sublevel four for the time being.

They didn’t argue. They were a little shell shocked by what they’d done, certainly speechless, but not enough to recognize that the elevator doors were now plugged with fresh debris and they would have to use the ones on the maintenance level to see if they’d succeeded. They rose, coughing on concrete dust as they made their way to the stairwell, and climbed.

Sublevel four’s floor plan wasn’t difficult to follow. A single corridor bent into four equidistant ninety degree turns formed a square track ringed on the outside by various tool and material storage spaces, supply closets, restrooms, and all the other necessities required by maintenance staff. The inside of that square was taken up by one room alone which Vik had dubbed The Workshop. Inside it were all manner of workbenches, steel frames, and tools which stood taller than her. The purpose of some of them were obvious while the rest was anyone’s guess. For Vik, if there wasn’t a hex key included in the box, she was screwed, so she filed the whole confusing mess in the back of her head and moved on.

They stepped out of the stairwell, mindful of the unmoving plug of rubble halfway up the next flight of steps, and made their way down the maintenance hall to where the more scuffed and beaten twin to the futuristic freight elevator doors below them stood closed. The call button was dark as it had been since they first began scouring this floor for supplies, but after some brief guidance from Millie they recovered the manual key for it from a lockbox in the floor manager’s office and the doors slid apart with an easy pull.

The deja vu hit Vik like a truck. The drop from where they stood was less than a yard. Broken pieces of concrete and what looked like some of the CryoLife building’s exterior facade packed the shaft below them within a dense haze of dust. Neither of them stepped out onto it, because who knew how long it would take to truly settle, but they did lean into the murk and turn their stinging eyes upward.

Through the swirling column of soupy haze they saw what they feared they’d never see again. A dull, gray shaft of it angled into the broken top of the shaft through a ragged hole. Vik felt her breath catch in her throat.

For the first time since being buried alive seven days ago, she could see daylight.