Fallout Equestria: Uplift

April 12th, 1297
2 Years Later

“...reported another deathclaw attack. Ambushed a supply convoy on the main road around ten miles southeast of Crow’s Grove. Elder Bright wants you to put together a detachment and send them out to patrol the immediate area for the next two weeks. Their primary mission is to be visible on the road. No deviations. Do whatever you need to do to impress upon them that this is not another snipe hunt. Over.”

“Loud and clear, sir. Over.”

“Glad to hear it, paladin. Our situation is already shaky enough with F&F Mercantile no longer policing the eastern routes. The last thing we can afford is for some upstart raider to catch a case of ambition, especially the damned Cinders. An increased presence on the trade roads will kill two birds–”

Vik reached past the virtual work window above her desk, something visible only to her, and switched off the desk radio. It wasn’t necessary. She’d had time enough to learn and integrate most of Millie’s old automated systems, and if she’d wanted the radio off she could have more easily sent a command out to the server responsible for decrypting the handful of active signals being bounced around the wasteland. Yet though Vik had never experienced true sensory deprivation, she had several uninterrupted decades of Millie's old log entries to give her a peek at how quickly an uploaded mind could fracture without physical stimulus.

The radio, with its antique mahogany case and backlit tuning window, still had visible char marks where the firestorm that swept through Buckskin Bay had been able to scorch one of its corners. She’d found it on her first excursion back to town, and though the purpose of the trip had been to see just how far she could maintain a connection to Millie’s repeaters, it had also been a confirmation that the time she’d lost was really gone. She hadn’t known she’d crossed into the town until she noticed the trees growing around depressions in the dirt and realized she was looking at the remains of basements filled in by two centuries of windblown soil.

Even having walked these streets when the fires still smoldered, Vik was hard pressed to recognize what was left of Buckskin Bay now. Here and there were a few standing walls, but only barely. The roads were just suggestions now. A gridwork of paths in the dirt where only a few meager patches of hardy grasses clung. The only real signs there had once been a significant population here were the twin humps near the town center where the CryoLife building and Seaside Hospital’s ruins had long since settled. Nowhere was there evidence that anyone had tried to rebuild, and she’d supposed that only made sense. Buckskin Bay was as deep into the edge of nowhere as it could have been without being built on the ocean.

The radio had been a lucky find, tucked away among the rusting relics of an exposed basement that the town’s electronics shop had fallen into. The internals had been ruined by time and weather, but the lacquered wooden case had held up beneath the two walls that fell onto the shelf it had been displayed on. Fabricating the broken bits had been simple enough. Getting it to look and feel the way it had when it still used vacuum tubes while being able to piggyback off the Stable’s listening equipment had been trickier.

She savored the satisfying click of the knob and watched the glow of the tubes fade behind the tuning bar. Little things like that were what reminded her she wasn’t just a collection of software mimicking life. She was Vik. She was alive, even if this chapter of her life involved a little more code and a lot more machine maintenance than her previous one had. All the boring minutiae she’d taken for granted when she was alive was what kept her grounded now.

Which reminded her.

She turned her attention to the virtual window floating above the overseer’s desk - her desk - and gestured at it with the edge of her hand. The design window, which displayed what she hoped to be the final major update to her artificial body, slid off to her left while a separate diagnostic window appeared where it had been. The software she’d written to run the virtual display still had a tendency to stutter and drop frames when she had too many things running at once, but it had been her one major concession to doing everything with real, tangible tech. The main benefit of running some interfaces in pure sim was that she didn't need to invent new technologies to support it. Let Stable-Tec keep their green on black terminal screens. She had 256 bits of glorious color.

Diagnostic data began to populate the new window under the header ThimbleSimv1.19.2. A quick glance at the values confirmed what Vik already expected to see. Good stability. Minimal degradation. Full immersion tracking above ninety-eight percent and steady as a rock.

Entering Thimble’s simulation required a delicate touch even at the best of times, and so she monitored his stress levels while resuming her work in the other window. Her chair creaked as she settled back into the padded leather, her fingers pinching the air and gesturing to pivot her own virtual representation and zooming in on the region this version was meant to rework. The image changed from a realistic view to a false color map of tissue densities. She frowned thoughtfully at a spot that looked like the muscle analogs would end up making the artificial dermis feel too firm. She made a tweak to the layering, glanced over at Thimble’s readout and saw that his levels were placid and low. Time to check in.

The real world blinked out and Thimble’s simulation bloomed around her. She gave herself a moment to adjust to the equine body - having a dragon in his living room made Thimble uneasy - then took a look around to make sure the carpeted hallway had rendered in before lifting a cream tinted foreleg and knocking her hoof against the door.

“Just a second,” came a voice from the other side, and Vik had to resist the urge to smirk at the door’s peephole when the light behind it briefly darkened. There was a clack and scrape of locks and security chains being undone, then a high squeal from one of the hinges as Former Lieutenant Thimble pulled the door open. “Hi, Vik.”

Without being prompted, he held up a hoof and she gave it an obliging tok with her own. “Hey,” she greeted, and smiled appreciatively as he stepped out of the doorway to let her inside. “I’m going to be stuck in my chair for a while longer and thought I’d drop in… maybe see if you wanted some company for a little while.”

He closed the door behind her as she stepped into the apartment he’d designed for himself, a close approximation of a place he’d lived in as a colt a few years after the bombs fell. Thimble had been luckier than most ponies when it came to surviving the end of the world. The closest balefire detonation to him had been far enough away that it had been just one of many distant green mushrooms blooming all around the family farm. No fire damage, not even a gust of wind. Just an apocalypse punctuated by distant thunder.

Vik had discovered Thimble's inactive software during her long audit of Millie’s logs, and she hadn’t been ready for it when she moved him onto his own server and booted him up. Vik had assumed he would wake up like she had - aware that he’d died and in need of an explanation of why he was alive again, end of problem. But instead of the detached curiosity she’d often fell back on whenever she felt like losing her mind, Thimble opened his eyes and started screaming to be shut back off again. The roots of his panic ran so deep that nothing Vik said or did could interrupt the high, fluting shrieks as his vocal processors peaked out and spat electric gibberish in place of words. Only after she shut him down and installed Millie’s limbic controls did he begin experiencing brief periods of calm before the panic inevitably overwhelmed even those.

It had taken several attempts before Vik had been able to work out that it was the Stable itself that triggered his inescapable whirlpools of wailing panic. His last memories alive were of having his power armor hijacked by spiders, walking through the open maw of Stable 48, and hearing the screams of the two soldiers who were with him as the spiders peeled them out of their suits and hauled them off to Medical. She'd had to boot him inside Millie’s recreation of CryoLife's old lobby and delicately invited him to change the simulation into something he could stay sane in.

“New couch?” she asked, tipping her chin toward the beat up orange sofa sitting where a leather one had been during her last visit.

“The other one was starting to feel old,” Thimble confirmed, and his tone was noncommittal like he was waiting for her to tell him to switch it back. When she plopped down on the end nearest the sliding glass window and let the cushions consume her, he relaxed and took the seat on the opposite end. “You like it?”

She hummed an affirmative chuckle. “You’re getting really good with the software. I could almost fall asleep in this.”

They shared a knowing smile at the joke. Like so many other aspects of their old lives, sleep had become very optional.

“It’s the couch they gave us at the barracks.”

Thimble lit his horn, and Vik watched him pick up the old paperback he’d been reading and dogear the page before setting it back down on the coffee table. His living room was modestly decorated, save for a shelf above the television set where he kept choice keepsakes from his old life and several framed family photos he'd had to reinvent from memory. Today’s adornments were from his time in the Equestrian Army. Simple wooden stands propped up a unit patch, a single bronze medal in the shape of wings folded around an oak tree, and a common Equestrian gold bit with 77 roughly etched across Celestia’s portrait.

Vik only knew the pieces of Thimble’s past that he chose to share, and while he’d shared quite a lot it was far from everything. The medal and coin were mysteries he kept to himself, and she knew he didn’t decorate his living space for the purpose of conversation. So, she didn’t ask.

She nodded at the book. The picture on the cover was of an old wooden ship sailing into a fog bank. “Reading anything good?”

He shrugged. “Nah. It started off as an adventure and now that I’m halfway in, the author’s just hammering on the romance between the captain and the stowaway.”

“That'll happen.”

“Yeah,” he sighed. “You want something to drink?”

“I’ll take anything that isn’t Sparkle-Cola.”

There was a flicker of a smile as he got up and went to the little kitchen nook. While he rummaged through the fridge, Vik stole a look toward the sliding glass door and noticed that the ground floor patio had been changed to a second floor balcony. Thimble had full editorial control of his simulation and she’d made it clear he could be as self-indulgent or spartan in his chosen reality as he wished. If he wanted to live on a sci-fi space station orbiting a distant star, he could do it. It said something that the extent of his willingness to break from the familiar had hit its limit at just one floor.

She consciously hid the concern from her expression as he returned with a pair of dark bottles, accepting hers in the hazy pink analog of her own hand as it might appear if it were cast by a unicorn’s horn. Thimble’s tentative smile faded at the sight of it, but said nothing.

He’d been visiting his aunt and uncle’s farm when the bombs fell, and after his uncle passed away it had been up to his aunt to raise him in the aftermath. Vik suspected his aunt had some deeply held prejudices against dragons, and that Thimble had unconsciously soaked up a few of them unintentionally. He believed dragons by nature were inclined toward extreme violence, and when they officially entered the war on the side of the zebras it had been the dragons who persuaded Vhanna into launching the missiles.

Vik politely, yet firmly, snuffed out any conversation Thimble tried to nudge in that direction. Eventually, though, she knew they would need to have a more earnest discussion about all the happy horseshit his dear old aunt had fed him.

The beer he’d picked was better than she’d expected, and she tipped the bottle back for a second appreciative sip while pretending to not notice that he was watching. It was a good sign that he’d put this much effort into a simple refreshment. It meant he was staying engaged, not stagnating. The beer was a new addition, though whether Blue Moose was a name he’d made up or something real was anyone’s guess. It beat the first drink she'd had when she was growing up. That shit could eat rust off a boat anchor.

“Heard anything new on the radio?”

She looked at him, keeping the bottle close to her lips. “Every day. Only, it’s hard to tell what any of it means half the time. The Steel Rangers are upset over someone sighting a deathclaw, whatever a ‘deathclaw’ is supposed to be, so they’re going to march around for a while and see if being seen calms people down. Some big business called F&F Mercantile closed up shop too, so that’s apparently a thing.”

Thimble frowned down at his bottle and examined the label. The Steel Rangers were what had ultimately become of the Equestrian Army before some hotshot came up with the idea to rebrand the organization, and Thimble always wanted to know what his former brethren were doing whenever Vik dropped in to check on him. Most of what she knew about them came from Millie’s notes, and she had to be careful passing too many of those along at once for fear of kicking off one of his existential panics. She’d given him the summarized version, so he knew the Steel Rangers controlled the majority of what was referred to these days as the wasteland.

Millie’s notes were less clear on the Enclave, the other big military player out there, other than they were frequently mentioned in Steel Ranger broadcasts as “the enemy” and haunted a limited territory centered around Canterlot Mountain. They were responsible for the uninterrupted cloud cover Vik had seen during her short excursions outside the Stable, but nothing more was known beyond that. When it came to raw radio traffic, the Steel Rangers accounted for nearly all of it. The Enclave either didn't believe in, or didn't bother with encrypted long range communication. Which sucked, because Millie had all sorts of nifty software for decrypting things.

Thimble took a pull from his bottle and changed the subject. “Make any progress with the spikes?”

The signal spikes had been a recent project Vik had been working on with the goal of broadening her travel range outside the Stable. Her idea had been to load one of Millie’s repeaters and a long life battery into a standalone device she could hammer into the dirt. The prototypes had worked great, right up until they didn’t.

She matched him with a swig of her own, and damned if Thimble’s beer didn’t get better the longer she sat with it. It was almost enough to make her consider installing taste sensors in her physical body.

“Scrapped it,” she said, running the magic hand’s thumb around the mouth of the bottle like she used to do back when there were bars to burn nights in. Thimble grunted his condolences, but she shrugged them away. “It was just what-if work anyway. Between having to use batteries and the amount of power the repeaters need to bounce a constant signal, I was getting worse range than the daisy chain Millie has out to Buckskin Bay.”

“Plus if you lose the signal while you’re outside…” Thimble said, his body going limp on the couch like a marionette with its strings cut.

“Poof,” she said, “I’m back here in the Stable while my body is out in the boonies laying face-first in the dirt. And the annoying part is that none of that would be a problem if I had more of these.”

She gave her chest a frustrated tap only to wince at the unexpected thud of her hoof. The stupid things were heavier than hands, and not for the first time she thought about dropping the pony avatar completely and forcing Thimble to just get used to the fact that he was talking to a dragon. Or at least a computer who used to be a dragon.

Thankfully, Thimble didn’t catch any of her personal interplay, and was looking at the spot she’d whacked where the power core she’d harvested from his old mechanized armor now resided. “Yeah, the Army was pretty good about not leaving those lying around.”

Her lip curled upward into a sneer that had nothing to do with him and everything to do with geography. It didn’t make her feel any better knowing most of the intimidating effect was lost without a sharp set of teeth to go with it. But then she supposed that was why some ponies carried pistols around and hid behind smooth talking assholes.

“This would be so much easier if we were anywhere else than here. I can’t go anywhere without a signal, and I can’t get a signal without repeaters. Oh, and I can’t go anywhere if the first spike in the chain runs out of juice, and the only power source we know of that will work are the cores from your suits which the fabricators can’t make because,” and she paused to wiggle her hooves for maximum sarcasm, “talismans are hard.”

She dropped her forelegs down into her lap with a disgusted sigh and drank. Since the alcohol wasn’t real, and the body that was susceptible to intoxication had been dead for two hundred or so years, she didn’t even get the side benefit of a pleasant buzz. The thought was almost enough to spoil the sim. Almost.

“Bleh,” she muttered, and flicked a hoof at the air to bring up the design window she’d been working on. “You’re slacking, Thimble. You’re supposed to stop me when I get melodramatic.”

He snorted at that, and for the briefest millisecond his chuckle reminded her of the way Pike’s had sounded. She worked her jaw as she fought to keep her smile from faltering, silently cursing how the memories came without warning and at the least appropriate times. If Thimble noticed he showed no sign of it. His attention had shifted to the screen now hovering in his living room, a blend of equal parts interest and quiet reservation. Not long after she helped him build this simulation for himself, he’d misinterpreted the purpose for her visits as something it wasn’t and explained to her that his romantic interests were strictly limited to stallions. It had been an awkward day.

In retrospect, offering up her hand for a high-five while boisterously declaring, “No way, me too!” probably hadn’t been the response he’d been expecting, but it managed to mend the little tear between them as well as establish the tone of their fragile friendship.

Thimble tipped his nose at the open screen. He didn’t mind her getting some work done during her visits as long as he was still included. “Updating your body again? I thought the last one was the last version.”

“They’re all the last version until they’re not,” she said in her behold my sage wisdom voice. Then with a more genuine smirk, she waved her hoof at the panel and watched it zoom in. “Not much point in trying to replicate my old body if I’m not doing the whole job, right?”

His eyes went momentarily wide before the limbic controls and his own sense of propriety kicked in, then he averted them and arched a questioning brow at her. “You’re not actually serious.”

This time it was her turn to chuckle, but she obliged by restricting the window’s visibility to herself. Probably the conversation would flow more smoothly without a texture map of her draconic groin floating in the middle of his apartment.

“Why wouldn’t I be? At some point I want to go out far enough to find other people, and it would be pretty weird if I was completely smooth.”

“Empty night,” he laughed, but there was no mockery in it. “How long did it take you to model that?”

She shot him a pointed look from the corner of her eye. “How long did it take you to model yours?”

He opened his mouth, then wisely closed it.

“I thought so,” she said, and switched the design’s view back to the cross section of tissue densities she’d been working on earlier. “And yes, I’m aware that I’m being a little overly optimistic. I'm not going through all this effort to build a prop. I'd like some functionality back.”

Thimble tipped back his bottle, shrugging in gentle agreement. “A little, but you’ve got a point. No sense in walking out into whatever’s out there with a sign around your neck that says I’m A Robot, Please Don’t Dissect Me For Science.”

That got a more genuine laugh out of her. “I think the word is ‘replicant.’”

“Tomato potato,” and he grinned before draining the last of his beer. “It’s not like I’m going out there any time ever. If you have to plug in a new hole to keep the locals from chasing you off–”

“Holes,” she amended, squinting at the screen out of habit as she arranged a cluster of microscopic pressure sensors behind the artificial tissue of her vaginal wall. She had to resist the urge to mirror the pattern density on the other side. It might cut her work in half, but she knew her sensitivity had always biased to the right.

It took her several milliseconds to notice Thimble wasn’t saying anything, and she glanced away from her work to see if he was still here. He was, and he was staring at her with an expression she was having trouble reading.

“What?”

He did his impersonation of a fish again, opening his mouth and closing it before anything stupid could come tumbling out. Seeing how she wasn’t going to get an explanation out of him, she replayed the last few segments of their conversation and found the problem.

She pressed the back of her skull into the couch and gestured ahead of her with both outstretched forelegs. “Dragons are not chickens.”

“I didn’t–!” he stopped himself before he could say I didn’t know that, which wouldn’t have helped his defense. She chose mercy and gave him the time he needed to course correct into a more reasonable, “No one told me you had an asshole.”

She restored his access to see her window and gestured it toward him, where a helpful red circle started flashing over the requisite anatomy. “I had an asshole.”

“Okay, okay! Stars, I don’t need it tattooed on my retinas. You’re worse than my aunt.”

With a flick of her hoof, she brought the screen back to her side of the couch. “Not gonna read too deep into that last part.”

Glad for any reason to change the topic, Thimble waved his own hoof and the empty bottle vanished. “Nothing to read into. I was a kid and she was taller than me. After the zebras blew up the planet she just sort of stopped caring about, well, decency. She stopped caring about a lot of things toward the end.”

Vik considered nudging him to keep going, but it was clear enough by the weariness in his eyes that he wasn’t suggesting anything had happened between him and his aunt and that he was referring to the eight exhausting years he’d spent as a young stallion being forced to take care of an aging mare who refused to believe there were any reasons left to care for herself. Then when he was fifteen he’d come home to their shack to find two stallions in Equestrian Army uniforms waiting outside, and they told him his aunt had passed.

“Sorry,” he said, shaking his head. “I still tend to overshare.”

He didn’t say the words as much as he recited them, and Vik assumed it was something the Equestrian Army drilled into him after he joined up. “That’s called conversation. It’s fine. Just… next time I start playing too hard, throw a bottle at my head or something, okay?”

A weak smile crossed his lips, and a fresh bottle appeared in his magic where the old one had been dismissed. He held it up in sheepish, mock-threat.

“Or better yet,” she said, holding her hooves up in due surrender, “just tell me.”

He winked at her, a gesture that conveyed all was forgiven, and flicked the cap off the bottle with the edge of his hoof. It landed on the hardwood floor with a bright clink as he pointed the same hoof at her design window. “Is that functional muscle or just placeholder tissue?”

She had a false color cross-section up on the screen and he was indicating the densest tissue layer marked in brick red. Thimble might have only been booted up a little over a year ago, but he was leaps and bounds faster at picking up the design software than she was. He wasn't just creative, he could be truly inspired at times.

“It’s just a placeholder for this version, but it’s resistive enough to keep all the bits sealed that would normally be sealed. I’m not sure how much more graphic you want me to get.”

He waved her worry away. He was getting the gist of it. “Wire tendons don’t work for this?”

She grimaced. “Tensile limits. Ever see a wire cheese slicer?”

“Ah.”

“Yeah. The artificial tendons are great for tugging but they need anchor points and actuators to do it, and space is limited. It’s why I’m still not happy with the way my face looks when I use it.”

“So this isn’t just about restoring your, ah… femininity.”

“Smooth.”

He ignored her. “You need to overhaul the mech’s artificial musculature entirely.”

She lifted a hoof at the screen in a gesture that communicated her broader frustration. A convincing artificial body wasn’t just a matter of dropping a realistic coat of flesh around a featureless gray exoskeleton. It got her ninety-five percent of the way there, sure, but it was that last five percent that was the most frustrating to get right.

“That’s the problem, yeah,” she sighed. “For now, everything looks perfect as long as I keep the expressiveness inside the limits of ‘politely interested.’ Assuming I ever figure out how to maintain a signal far enough to actually encounter another living being, I should be able to hold a conversation without giving anybody lasting nightmares.”

Thimble looked like he was about to offer a suggestion, but whatever he’d been about to say was lost when an alert appeared in the center of Vik’s design window. There was a moment after they both read it where neither of them said anything. Then she reached up toward the alert and tapped the box which read View Message.

Summer of 1145
One Hundred Fifty-Two Years Earlier

Before the mare with the Pip-Buck appeared on Stable 48’s doorstep, there had been three stallions.

The first stallion stood between the others. On his foreleg glowed the screen of a Pip-Buck identical to the ones stacked in boxes inside the Stable. The unicorn on his left dragged on a bent cigarette while the pegasus on his right kept an eye on the charred trees behind them. They wore identical black uniforms beneath identical black tactical vests. None of them spoke. When they communicated, they did so with purposeful gestures Millie couldn’t decipher. They were aware they were being watched.

She returned their silence with her own. Through the sole exterior lens she observed them like a stray pet encountering its first wild predator, unsure if the tools she had could persuade them to leave or if revealing herself would just open her up to a mauling. She noted their identical black rifles, the way the pegasus kept his wing over the top of his as it hung from its shoulder strap, casual yet ready if he needed it.

The first stallion was careful to obscure her view of the Pip-Buck when he tapped something into its keypad. Half a second after he was done, one of the servers pinged an alert. He was still looking at his Pip-Buck, at what looked to her like a blank terminal menu, and when she checked the alert a primal fear awoke within her.

External Device Authorized
Pip-Buck 3000 v4.2
Stable 1

Panic threaded through her processes as she ratcheted up her framerate and called up the information the outsiders were looking at.

The resident mail system.

At first she didn’t understand. Why would they be interested in a blank queue? Stable 48 was empty. There was nothing on the screen for them to read. And why was the first stallion beginning to smile?

Then she understood. They wanted what she had. Somehow they’d known where to find her Stable and they’d come prepared to verify it was uninhabited. As the first stallion started to grin up at the sealed blast door, Millie scoured the old server logs for anything she might have missed. A clue to whatever had painted a target on her Stable.

It didn’t take long. The stallion had begun a slow, affirmative nod to the black-clad pegasus beside him when she found the log entry for the brief connection that had slipped in silently through the firewall preventing her from seeing what was on the other side of the cables leading out through the server room floor.

The covert connection had occurred eight days ago. It had generated no alerts and tripped no alarms. Nothing that would have taken Millie’s attention away from the stress testing Thimble’s mind was undergoing at the time. Sysadmin_s01 had remained connected to the resident mail system for almost exactly one hour before disconnecting.

And now these outsiders had arrived and were confirming their data.

Millie worked quickly. Before the stallion could complete his nod, she’d populated the Stable’s registry with the employee files from CryoLife. She assigned them compartments, pairing them and singling them out at random as she went. It might already be too late to convince them but if there was a chance then she needed to take it. Otherwise she had her spiders. She could open the door, lure them inside, and swarm them. But that had to remain a last resort. The uniforms inferred organization. They would be missed by someone. Like a housecat spotting a wolf, she didn’t know if there was a larger pack nearby.

The last step was the hardest. She needed to make her fake residents talk to themselves.

She adjusted her framerate back to something approaching her normal as she switched her attention back to watch the three stallions. As she did, the pegasus frowned and gave the first stallion a gentle thump with the back of his wing. When he looked over, the pegasus nodded toward the Pip-Buck without saying anything. The stallion glanced at it, hesitated, then began to glower at the screen as lines of abbreviated conversation began scrolling up the screen in fits and starts.

Millie could feel the strain of the effort building as she not only tracked her multiple conversations, but did her best to give each actor in her puppet show a distinct style of diction and syntax. Their responses needed to be mundane and believable, but without the context of what life inside a Stable might be like for a thriving community of ponies she only had best guesses.

Time passed. Eventually she had enough conversations queued up that she was able to take a break from generating them and focus on the outsiders, mentally willing them to go away.

The first stallion looked disgusted. He’d begun whispering into the cup of the pegasus’s ear, apparently arguing the validity of what the Pip-Buck was showing them versus the hour of silence some other party had observed from inside Stable 1. For a while it seemed like he was making headway with his two partners, but then Millie had a bolt of inspiration and temporarily shut down the server that handled the resident mail system. The Pip-Buck threw a connection lost error, only to reconnect several seconds later when Millie booted the server back up and resumed feeding dead messages into the system.

Once that happened, the first stallion deflated. The pegasus just shrugged and shook his head. Millie waited for them to shoulder their rifles and attempt to cycle the blast door open - a thought that didn’t feel as hypothetical as it had been when it first came to her - and was relieved when the three stallions turned away and left.

She would wait more than a century for the next outsiders to begin making their camp outside her door, and during the time in between Millie had never forgotten how easily those armed stallions had stepped into her network and assessed her defenses. Since then she’d kept the meandering conversations playing through the messaging system in an endless stream, with old names being replaced by new to keep up the illusion of a Stable experiencing lives and deaths enough to convince whoever came after the black stallions.

Millie hadn’t known her own unchecked fear was poison. That she could produce fictions in her mind so thorough that the scenarios she imagined of outsiders breaching the door became truths too strong to stand up to reason. It killed her by inches until the thought of Vik not sharing her terror became unbearable.

And when Vik stormed the server room to end Millie’s life, the automated echoes of her voice continued to chatter to themselves as if nothing at all had happened.

On the evening of April 12th, 1297, three mares and two stallions squeezed into the dead air of Stable 1 on an errand and a mission. The errand, to procure a new impeller for a pump belonging to one of the stallions, would be a success. The mission, to locate an ignition talisman inside the silent behemoth that was the Stable’s generator, would not.

However Stable 1 had been designed with more purposes in mind than just a shelter to wait out the end of the world. Its purpose, unbeknownst to those who once lived within it, had been to die. While the mares split off to complete their goals, the stallions waited for them on the IT level where in spite of the inoperative generator and dark spiraling stairwell, the lights still glowed and the servers ran hot. It was inside Stable 1’s server room where they found the first thread to a mystery they hadn’t known they were unraveling.

They chose a server at random. A bold number 48 adorned its black chassis. Not yet understanding the significance of what they found, one of the stallions connected an administrative terminal to the server and found Millie’s echo.

Taffy T.: Hey Sparks. Might miss dinner. Work again.
Spark R.: Please say you’re joking.
Taffy T.: Running late. Sandy called in sick again. Gotta close up for her. Sorry. I’ll try not to wake you up. Tell the kids goodnight for me. <3
Spark R.: Tell your boss to find someone else this time.
Sysadmin_s01: Hello.
Taffy T.: Um hi. Who is this?
Taffy T.: Hello? I think I sent that to you by mistake. Is this IT?

The resident mail system glowed between them.

Thimble had scooted beside her and was actively reading the messages as they scrolled by. “Are those all real? Those can’t be real, right? Nobody’s here besides us.”

Vik didn’t have an answer for that. The new message alert had been flagged by the Stable, namely the actively spooling conversation between one “Taffy T.” and “Spark R.”, whoever they were. The timestamps embedded in each of the messages were dated today as well. Only it wasn’t the conversation between two seemingly nonexistent ponies which generated the warning. It was the user who had just intruded.

“Who is Sysadmin_s01?” she asked aloud.

Thimble lifted a hoof and tapped the line containing the message in question. Metadata for the user sprang up in a separate window, but it wasn’t as helpful as either of them hoped.

“Says it came from Stable 1. Your guess is as good as mine who sent it. Someone with administrator permissions, or who got onto an admin terminal.” Thimble gestured at a string of digits beneath the timestamp. “There’s the machine number if you want to file a complaint.”

“I want to find out why our mail system is apparently talking to itself, and how someone in a different Stable is talking to it.”

“Assuming it’s not a placeholder name. Stable 1 feels a little on the nose.”

Vik continued to frown. “Can we say something back?”

He shrugged. “You’re the one who took Millie’s overseer permissions. Pretty sure that means you can do anything except walk twenty miles in a straight line.”

She shot him a look and he shot one back that welcomed her to prove him wrong. For a moment it felt like she was back in the creche again, only without the added calculus of figuring out if her future safety was at risk if she didn’t break his nose now. With a reminder to herself that those bad old days were over, Vik opened up a message prompt and sent her response.

Sysadmin_s48: Hello, Sysadmin_01. Who are you?

Seconds passed with no reply. Then minutes. Meanwhile the inane ghost conversation kept filling the message queue, having now devolved into a full blown lover’s spat.

Sysadmin_s48: I am addressing the system administrator of Stable 1. Please respond.

Nothing. Silence.

“Well that’s unnecessarily creepy,” Thimble said, and Vik could only agree. “Peek through the keyhole, whisper hi, and tippytoe out into the night? Fuck that. Time to check for cameras in the shower.”

Vik was already digging through the server logs and had found the three flags which indicated an external user had connected, sent a message, then disconnected from the Stable. No hidden packets had been sent. Nothing to indicate they’d downloaded any data or done anything except interrupt what appeared to be a conversation being generated from a very old program Millie had written.

She deleted the software and ordered a purge of everything on the server it had been running on, but not before she made a copy of the logs that recorded the mystery user’s entry and exit through the system. That was too important to throw away.

She closed down her windows and saved her progress on her design. She couldn’t focus on that right now.

“What?” Thimble asked. “Did you think of something?”

“Thinking. Present tense.”

“If only I had psychic powers. Seriously, I gave you a free beer. Dish.”

A smile crept along her expression as something tentative yet solid formed in her mind. She was making a lot of assumptions, but still…

The mare outside had been using a Pip-Buck.

“If I’m right,” she said, sinking into Thimble’s couch and groaning as she continued, “I’m going to be furious.”

Vik was furious.

“Of all the stupid bullshit she could have…” she felt herself balling up her fist in preparation to punch the chassis of the nearest server rack, and only managed to hesitate long enough for her limbic controls to smooth the most recent wave of anger into a plateau of minor irritation.

That annoyed her even more, especially since she knew she had no reason to put off removing Millie’s emotional leash and yet she still hadn’t done it yet. One of these days she would have to face that locked door and throw it open. Just not right now. Right now wouldn’t be healthy for anyone.

The Mystery Messenger of Stable 1 had yet to follow up their cryptic “hello” with anything meaningful, which in itself could mean literally anything. Fun to have that unresolved knife dangling overhead, but there was nothing she could do aside from write strongly written letters at it. She added “Stable 1 User” to her mental to-do list and turned her focus solely toward the implications receiving that message had shone a spotlight on.

She glared at the servers as if doing so could make them feel ashamed of the secrets they’d quietly kept to themselves. A message from the outside meant there was a network robust enough to send it. It was the same reason the mare with the Pip-Buck had been able to connect to Stable 48 almost four days prior to Millie’s so-called raiders appearing on their doorstep. That was just one of the key pieces of information Millie had chosen not to share with Vik, and the reason why Vik was currently resisting the urge to go punchy on the server that just confirmed her theory.

Because Millie’s repeater system wasn’t broadcasting Stable 48’s network signal. It wasn’t even broadcasting it with the right equipment. She had deliberately built her daisy chain of signal repeaters to put out a dirty and low range custom frequency to limit the amount of attention her spiders would attract as they worked to extricate the CryoLife corpsicles. For all of Millie’s paranoia, it wasn’t a bad idea. Vik could absolutely get on board with not wanting to borrow trouble.

What made her furious was that unknown to her until a few short minutes ago, Millie had blacklisted Vik from accessing Stable 48’s original network signal. The one which had always been there. She’d been practically swimming in it. And because Millie had effectively blinded her to its existence, Vik had wasted nearly two years tinkering away with a secondary signal Millie had designed to be unusable to anyone who wasn't out grave robbing.

When she cleared the blacklist, two available networks appeared. And unlike the one she knew would start sputtering like a kinked garden hose once she stepped outside, the new one remained infuriatingly solid.

“No shit? And you’re not seeing any signal loss out that far?”

Vik was pacing back and forth in Thimble’s kitchen nook with her fingers knitted behind her head while he sat on one of the stools on the other side of the counter. In front of him, a bowl of something called lentil soup wafted fragrant steam. When she showed up in her draconic body, he’d done a double-take and then made an admirable effort to mask his discomfort. He had yet to make up a reason for why it might be better for her to swap back to an equine form, which in itself was a surprise to her. Maybe his dear old auntie's prejudices weren't holding up in the face of compassion after all.

She almost asked him to summon up a bowl for her as well, but she was feeling antsy and pacing was helping her work off some of the excess energy. She had range again.

“No shit,” she said in a nervous half-laugh. “Most of the mile marker signs are gone, but the last one I saw put me at seventeen miles out and that was almost an hour ago. If the signal is getting weaker, it’s not enough of a dropoff to be noticeable. Thimble, the radius on this network is huge.”

He sipped at a vibrant red spoonful, and Vik felt the sudden urge to grab him by his shoulders and shake him until he showed the same amount of excitement as she was feeling now. But she didn’t, and he continued to enjoy the simulated meal until whatever nugget of insight he was mulling over was thoroughly mulled.

“Keep an eye on it. Fancy Stable transmitters or not, your range is still subject to the inverse square law.” When he saw the blank look on her face, he clarified. “The signal will weaken faster as you get closer to its maximum range, and that range can go up or down based on the weather. So where’s your body right now, anyway?”

She unknit her fingers and crossed her arms over her chest. “In the woods. I may not know what an inverted square thingy is, but I do know better than to leave myself standing in the middle of the road.”

“Okay, I just wanted to be sure you’re remembering to be careful. Those raiders–”

“That’s a fucking word Millie made up to get me riled up,” she snapped, and the defensiveness in her voice couldn’t have been clearer if it had rung from a struck bell.

Thimble sat up a little straighter and set down his spoon, not accusing her of anything while still making it clear she was getting close to a line. His apartment might only be a convincing simulation, but Vik had given him the virtual space with the understanding that it was his. She wasn’t going to run roughshod over him. Not here.

She shut her eyes, took a breath, and held her palms out in a gesture of supplication. “Sorry.”

“It’s fine,” he said, and resumed stirring his lentils. “Whoever those ponies were, assuming any of them survived, I doubt they’ll have forgotten what Millie did to them.”

“Well…” she said, before settling on a frustrated frown. “I mean, I am watching out for them.”

Thimble nodded. “Still. Points for solving the range issue. How much has your power core drained since you left?”

She leaned across the countertop, dipped her finger into Thimble’s soup and popped the tip in her mouth. It smelled better than it tasted. Not as spicy as she’d hoped, but the texture was like silk. “Something like a tenth of a percent. It’s been so minor that I haven’t been tracking it either.”

“Might want to get in the habit, or install a telltale into your HUD.”

“Like I need more blinking lights floating around everywhere.” She waved a hand in front of her face. “I like being able to see what’s in front of me. If I have everything on, it's like looking into a pinball machine.”

“Sounds like a funny way of saying you’re bad at layouts.”

“Meh meh meh meh, shut up nerd.”

Thimble grinned, and she couldn’t help but smile back. It was nice having someone to talk to again, even if he needled her like a little brother.

Needle. Thimble. Hah. She snorted, and when he raised a questioning eyebrow she just waved it away. “Nothing. So hey, while we’re on the subject, we do have the other two power cores back at the Stable. If you ever feel up to it…”

Thimble shook his head before she finished. “No. I mean, thank you for wanting to make the offer, but no. I-I’m not going outside. I’m… done going outside.”

She reached across the counter and gave his shoulder a reassuring squeeze. He glanced up at her and offered a weak smile in return. Vik hoped he wouldn’t choose to stay holed up in his simulation forever, but she knew if he did it was because he was happier here… and if that was his choice, she'd support it. She’d keep the door open, however, but she wouldn’t push.

She let him go, took the opportunity to muss his mane, and grinned briefly as he went back to his soup. When she felt like she was running up on the limits of a quick check-in, she let out a little cough and tipped her chin toward the door. “I’m going to get back out there, maybe see if I can’t put on another twenty miles before dark.”

“Make sure to start tracking that power core. It’s not like we can make more or recharge them.”

“Yes, dad,” she teased, already heading for the door. “Keep a connection open. Text only?”

He nodded and made a shooing gesture at her. “Go get your priceless mech before the squirrels make a nest in it. I’ll see what I can do about your HUD while you’re gone.”

She waved, shut the door behind her, and blinked out.

“Stop,” the mare hissed, and her young scout apprentice drew up to a halt behind her. She turned her head just barely enough for him to read her lips as she whispered, “Hush up. Douse the magic.”

He swallowed and licked his lips like he was about to ask why when he registered the severity of her expression and darkened his horn. His training rifle, a rusted out pipe gun not worth wasting the time to repair, sagged against the leather armor around his upper foreleg as the creature standing in the trees a dozen or so yards away started moving again.

Deathclaws had never been seen this far north before, and the thought of stumbling across an adolescent made Agricole nervous. Where there were offspring there were adults. And if a matriarch had established a nest in the area, it could mean the entire encampment was inside its territory.

This was bad. They were too established to just pull up stakes and move. Rook was going to order a hunting party once he’d finished losing his shit, and he wouldn't care how many of them were slaughtered as long as he could claim the glory for himself.

The juvenile began stalking away from them back toward the old highway. Agricole felt a knot in her throat as she watched it climb the low embankment and consider which direction to turn. Left, towards the ocean. Right, towards camp. She almost hoped it would turn right so that Rook would realize what a fuckup he was for petitioning to expand their territory for the big boss. Northwest, he'd insisted. Nobody had ever tried rebuilding in the deep woods.

Anyone with two neurons to rub together knew the Steel Rangers were all bark and no bite. And they were distracted more than ever since rumors began trickling in that the Minister Primrose was claiming that the new Stable discovered in the Rangers’ eastern territory belonged to her Enclave. Supposedly she’d enacted measures to aid its defense against Elder Coldbrook’s attempts to crack the thing open. To the Enclave, opening a living Stable was akin to sacrilege. Even they had the decency only to harvest tech from the ones which failed.

More and more it felt like every powerful eye in the wasteland was turning to the rapidly devolving shitshow surrounding Stable 10 and the mare who crawled out of it. Meanwhile, the Rangers out here in the west didn't want to be outdone and had been seen abandoning their patrols at the barest whiff of a Cinder sighting. They didn't even take prisoners anymore. They just killed, and not always did they stop to check if they were sighting in on raiders.

Rook saw an opportunity to flee, but he wouldn’t know an opportunity if it bit him in the ass. Of that much Agricole was dead certain. They’d been in these woods for two years now and his promise of a paradise Stable was just another cruel joke. Thousands of caps spent on that fucking Pip-Buck flushed down the–

“It’s a dragon,” the colt behind her hissed, and it took everything in Agricole’s power not to turn and clout him across the head for disobeying her order to shut up.

Instead, she settled for murmuring, “Shut your hole,” and narrowed her eyes in an attempt to see the distant creature a little more clearly. Its colorations reminded her of a molerat pelt she’d seen for sale at a stall in Crow’s Grove. Its fur had been pale enough for her to see the pink skin beneath its coat, or at least she’d thought so at the time. It could just have easily been blood.

If her young charge had any brains he would know there weren’t any dragons left in the wasteland. Not that she’d ever heard of, and especially not no albino–

The creature turned and flexed one of its wings.

It’s wings.

A rush of cold went through Agricole as the pieces slotted into place. The dragon muttered something to itself, looked up at the darkening evening overcast, and made an irritated groan before walking in the direction of the old seaside ruins. A breeze slid through the sickly pines, making the dim shadows cast by irradiated bits of crystal dance and sway with the limbs.

Agricole watched it until she could no longer make out its shape between the intervening trees. Then she crept after it, signaling for her charge to follow.

April 14th, 1297
Two Days Later

Vik was sitting in the overseer’s office with her design windows open when a dialogue box appeared with a message from Thimble.

We have a problem. Check the external camera.

She hesitated, thinking at first he was trying for some kind of a tasteless joke, but after a few seconds she gave in and connected her primary window to the lens above the outer door.

“Oh,” she said. “Well, hello there.”

A sallow, sickly yellow stallion stood at the edge of the concrete platform with sunken eyes lifted expectantly toward the camera. His mane was an unkempt black mop in bad need of a trim, but if his appearance bothered him it didn’t show in his twitching, confident smile. Dark letters of what Vik hoped was paint had been smeared across the platform, transforming it into a billboard the little lens couldn’t look away from.

COME OUT

“A little dramatic,” Vik grunted.

He’s got the same weird gear on as the ones Millie killed.

Thimble was right. Whoever he was, he had the same strange assortment of straps and leather pads that made the first group look like the end product of a bus full of hoofball players driving head-on through a wagon filled with bondage enthusiasts. Still, as far as she could tell everything the stallion wore served a purpose. Several of the straps bore holsters, most of which held blades while one near his shoulder kept a heavy looking pistol in it.

“Wonder what he wants.”

It’s probably a long shot, but I think he wants us to come out.

“Smartass.”

Beats the alternative.

She laughed. “Fu-u-uck you. How long do you think he’ll stand there before he gets bored?”

Video log says he’s been out there for ten minutes already. Hasn’t moved since his people finished vandalizing our doormat.

“Assuming they’re his people and he’s not just the sap who drew the short straw.”

Or that.

“Obviously, we’re not opening the door.”

Obviously.

“Cool beans. I’ll check the camera later tonight to see if he adds anything actionable.”

Works for me. Oh, hey, I sent you an update for your HUD. Run it whenever and send me any notes on what you need tweaked.

She flicked the exterior feed away and pulled up Thimble’s update. It took half a minute to finish running before she could bring up her HUD, and when it appeared it was like looking through a freshly washed window after getting used to all the smudges. It was organized. All her necessary telltales were tucked away toward the periphery in arrangements of simplified, clear icons that enlarged when she focused on them. It was perfect.

“Already ran it. You're awesome. No notes.” She glanced at a tiny battery icon in the bottom right and as she did, the crisp descending numbers of a digital readout expanded in front of it.

11W:2D:17H:35M.

“This is my power core?”

Yep. Rough estimate. Don’t go running a marathon yet.

She grunted. “You’re really good at this.”

I’ve been accused of being a neat freak once or twice. I’ll set a timer for you to check on tall, dirty, and ugly and put a monitor on our network in case one of them has another Pip-Buck.

“Thanks, Thimble.”

The dialogue window winked out, and Vik turned back to her design window. Suspended in the 3D space was a strip of the analog tissue she’d been using to build her body’s artificial skin and scales. She hadn’t been able to shake off Thimble’s suggestion to try wire tendons. On paper they were the obvious route to go. Anchor hair-thin wires just beneath the skin and run them to some kind of rotor or piston actuator to affect the same action as natural muscle. Easy peasy, if it weren’t for the fact that she couldn’t fabricate actuators small enough to achieve the density of wire she would need, and even if she could make wires that thin would fatigue and break so quickly it wouldn’t be worth the time.

She slowly twirled her finger and the modeled bundle of tissue strands rotated in the design space. It looked like every medical diagram of a natural muscle that the Stable’s library of medical texts had on offer, but it was still just medical resin. No amount of wishful thinking was going to make it move.

It needed something more.

Frog’s legs.

“Oh, fuck off.”

Hear me out. When I was in boot, my sergeant was this deep south Appaloosan who liked to tell everybody how he grew up poor in the marshlands in a family that ate anything big enough to fry. He would talk about cooking up frog’s legs and said the only way to know if they were fresh was to sprinkle salt on them to see which ones danced.

Vik barked a laugh. “Fuck off!”

It’s a real thing, he showed us! He’d make us go out and find a few, butcher them up, and toss some table salt in the pan. They wouldn’t dance, exactly, but something about the chemical interaction made the muscle fibers go nuts.

She shook her head and laughed again. “I think I’m going to stick with my idea, thank you.”

I don’t know, Vik. You can’t solve every problem with hammers and ribbits.

“You're terrible and you should feel ashamed of yourself.”

Already on the to-do. Vik could tell he was grinning when he sent it. I like your idea with the stent material, by the by. Great find.

“You don’t want to know how many textbooks I had to read before I did. The fabricators already have references on file, so really all I have to do now is figure out where to embed them and in which configurations work best.”

ETA?

“End of day, at the rate I’m going. I have a couple dozen samples being fabricated. Should be cured and ready for the poke n’ shock test in an hour.”

What about our grim little visitor outside?

Vik pulled up the external feed and glanced at it. It had been more than a day since they first noticed him, and he’d vanished every so often presumably to eat something or water the grass. It was close to sunrise according to the timestamp and the pale low light setting gave the stallion’s eyes an eerie green glow that reminded her of the stray cats that roamed the island.

“Still giving me the stink eye. I can see a couple of his buddies sleeping on the dirt. They both have guns on them.”

What type?

“Damned if I know. Big ones, long ones, some as big as your head. You were in the army, you tell me.”

There was a brief pause as he checked. Hunting shotguns. 12 or 16 gauge.

“Is that good?”

Never a good thing to have anything that goes boom pointed at you.

“Yeah,” she said. “I’ve been there. It’s a little annoying that I can’t go outside right after I just figured out how to go outside. I’m trying hard not to take that personally.”

They’ll get bored eventually.

She glanced at the readout for her power core. The clock had actually gained six hours after all this time spent inside.

“I’ll check on them tomorrow. I’m getting sick of that idiot grinning at me.”

Fair. Tell me how the new muscles work out.

She leaned back in her chair, gave the mysterious stranger on the camera an irritated look, and closed the feed.

On a workbench down in Fabrication, an assortment of samples lay arrayed in an orderly row. Vik had pulled them off the fabricator’s build plate one by one, not trusting the spiders to wash off the excess resin let alone risk tangling the wires threading out of each of them. At first glance it looked like the product of a surgically accurate butcher with a reptile kink, but each piece did have a purpose.

She reminded herself how perfectly normal this all was even as she set a functional replica of her own ass down beside an equally functional duplicate of her head. The rest of the bench was occupied by sample biceps, triceps, hands, feet, and several sections of torso. Already she could see an issue. The nickel-titanium mesh was visible through the tissue as faint dark patches where her scales were thinner, making her face, groin, and the inside of her arms and legs look varicosed and bruised. She frowned, put in a general search in the Stable’s library for ways to color titanium alloy, and found an engineering guide on metal anodization. She tagged the entry and added it to the to-do for the next run.

Testing the samples was straightforward. Each of the trailing wires ended in connections she could plug into a breadboard on the bench, and then it was just a matter of modulating the power output and watching how the mesh responded. She connected up the wisps of silver mane coming out of her duplicate skull and pulled up the slider interface Thimble cobbled together in her HUD.

The results were so indistinguishable to natural movement that Vik felt a momentary mix of euphoria and visceral discomfort as she tested each muscle group. The browline rose and fell, the cheeks dimpled and relaxed. She moved a pair of sliders together and the lips and jaw worked into the simulacrum of a grimace that inflicted a full on case of heebie-jeebies before she threw the settings back to neutral.

“Holy shit.” She shuddered and quickly spun the head to look away from her. “Weird. Weird weird weird.”

The rest of the samples were much less distressing to work with, and each of them functioned with a smoothness and fidelity that she had a hard time believing wasn’t real muscle. The surgical mesh didn’t slip out of place or tear the surrounding tissue, thanks to the voltage limiters Thimble had suggested, and as she gripped her own disembodied bicep to feel the new muscle flex it felt everything like she hoped it would.

She was in the middle of examining the quality of more delicately designed cavities when the timer she’d set emitted its gentle chime. With a groan she called up the feed.

She blinked at the screen.

Then she dropped everything and ran.

“Vik, it’s bait!”

“It’s a kid!”

Thimble was in her ear now, something he never did when she wasn’t in his simulated apartment, but he'd known she wouldn't slow down to read text. She could hear the anxiety straining his voice from that little direct contact with the real world, but this wasn’t the time to worry about it. If he started having a panic attack the limbics would snuff it out and they could talk through it later. Right now the creepy fucker outside was getting ready to execute a child.

Her feet pounded up the steps and carried her through the passages of Level One. She could feel her own limbics trying to compensate for the storm surge of fear rolling through her as she bolted across the Atrium, already calling up the controls for the outer door. In the corner of her vision the same sickly stallion was where he always stood, only now he had his pistol out of its holster and floating an inch from the back of a young earth pony’s skull. His gaze seemed to penetrate through the feed as he stared at the camera, his posture exuding cold malice.

The young colt sat in the middle of the painted message, his eyes shining with fear.

She stifled a shout of rage when Thimble blocked off the door controls. “Absolutely not. Vik, I am watching the feed and they’re waiting for you. Stop and think about what happened the last time you went running out after these guys!”

“This isn’t one of Millie’s simulations.” The Atrium stairs trembled beneath her as she launched herself up the treads and through Security. “Just give me the controls. Let me crack the door so I can talk to him.”

“I’ve dealt with people like them, Vik. They’re bandits. They want the Stable and opening that door tells them they can manipulate us!”

She caught her shoulder on one of the decontamination arches and nearly spun around hard enough to fall. She threw a hand out to the antechamber’s door frame to catch herself while the cracked arch rattled madly on its remaining support. “Then tell me what I’m supposed to do!”

Her voice cracked on the last word, but she didn’t stop. The back of Stable 48’s massive cog loomed on the far side of the antechamber, and beyond it the vibrating potential of a mindless killing. She tried to call up the controls again and they blinked out as soon as they appeared.

“Thimble.” Her tone was a warning.

“I know, but… this isn’t the right call, Vik. They’re trying to scare us into–”

She didn’t hear the shot, but she saw the flicker of fire in the corner of her eye. The colt sprawled, and the stallion began shouting something up to the camera. Vik felt her balance teeter as the limbics staggered against the onslaught of horrified rage. She wished she’d gotten around to installing proper eye ducts. Not being able to form tears in that moment felt like a violation.

She jacked up her framerate before the pressure vessel trying to contain her outrage ruptured. When she spoke, her voice buzzed. “Thimble. You give me those door controls right now or you and I are going to have words.”

Thimble’s response was too calm for her liking, and she almost cut him off before the meaning sank in. “The kid’s still moving, Vik. I told you. It's a bluff.”

Vik looked to the window containing the external feed and watched the glacier movements of the colt rolling over, his expression pulled into a rictus of indignant fury as both hooves crawled through the air to cover his pinned ears. Not dead. Not even grazed. Just surprised the gun had even gone off.

She was about to ask how that was possible when Thimble spoke again. “Gun barrel was pointed through the kid’s mane. Trick of perspective. I know it’s been a while since I served, but this kind of extortion shit isn’t new.”

Her bare feet slowed over the last few steps to the door until, after resetting her framerate to normal, she rested both palms against the tungsten’s cool surface and bent forward in the universal posture of adrenaline overload. She didn’t have to breathe hard, but it was what her brain expected her to do and it felt better to be doing it. It took her limbics several agonizing seconds to corral her gibbering emotions and induce an artificial sense of calm. When she felt steady again, she straightened and let her hands whisper across the barrier’s machined surface.

“Are you okay?”

She flinched a little. “Yeah. Just a little spooked.”

“I’m sorry.”

She gave her head a dismissing shake, knowing he would see it through one of Millie’s disused cameras. “Not your fault. Gimme a second.”

The stallion with the gun was laughing at the colt who had clearly lost control of his bladder during the scare. He used the same weapon to wave him away - his card was useless now that it’d been spent - and appeared to call to someone off screen.

“So what do we do about Chuckles?”

“Keep ignoring him.” Thimble didn’t sound as confident as he’d been moments earlier. Despite having revealed his own bluff, the gun wielding raider didn’t appear bothered in the least. “As long as we don’t react, he won’t know if anyone is even watching the camera. If things out there are as bad as they were back when I was doing road patrols, they’re going to hit a point where they can’t afford to waste time performing for a closed door. They'll leave.”

Vik took a step back from the vertical cliff of the great cog and pursed her lips in uneasy assent. “I still want to go out there and break his nose. That stunt he pulled crossed a damned line.”

“I can guarantee you they have runners ready to make a break for the door.”

On the feed, the lead stallion watched a pair of ponies lug something up the platform steps and set it down where the colt pretended to await execution. Vik recognized it as the same type of gas bottle she and Pike once used to free themselves from the ruins of CryoLife, only this one bore the chipped and faded warning labels of something hazardous. One of the carriers remained with it to keep it upright while the gun wielding stallion theatrically gestured to the valve stem, made a ridiculous twisting motion with his hoof, then crossed the same hoof across his throat in an unmistakable pantomime of dying.

Thimble’s confidence recovered a little as he stifled a derisive laugh. “Hard to gas us out when we don’t have lungs.”

“Speak for yourself,” Vik murmured, though her mind was very firmly elsewhere. “Mine are just synthetic.”

“Why…?”

“Feels more normal. Might try making a set of vocal cords next so I can ditch the speaker. I feel like a drive-through kiosk with lips. Why did Chuckles mime twisting a valve?”

Thimble took an extra mil to adjust to the sudden non-sequitur. “Isn’t that how they work?”

Vik shook her head, more sure of herself now that the question had been asked. “That gesture would make sense for a pegasus, maybe, but he’s a unicorn. Grab and twist wouldn’t be his go-to. No way to do it with a hoof. He would just use his horn. He made it look like he was twisting it with fingers.”

A pause. “Vik, we don’t have fingers.”

She nodded. “But I do. And I was walking around outside a couple nights before these guys showed up at our doorstep.”

“Okay, so… they know you’re a dragon. So what?”

The stallion was well into another one of his animated speeches, complete with threatening gestures and punctuated by pantomimed regret as he tried to communicate something akin to, “I’ll do this, but only because you gave me no other choice.” It wasn’t as convincing an act as the staged execution had been, and seeing how poor of an actor he was only made Vik’s blood run hotter for having nearly fallen for it at all.

And Thimble made a good point. Did it matter if they knew what she was? She decided probably not, even though the knowledge appeared to be important enough to the stallion to inflect his silent performance.

But still.

She turned and leaned her back against the door and identified the active camera Thimble was viewing her through. “Maybe the dragon bit isn’t as important as the bit where he or one of his people saw a Stable resident exploring the area before heading back in. That’s got to be strange behavior for a Stable, right?”

Thimble’s tone turned thoughtful. “I guess, sure. But again, so what?”

She crossed her arms, drumming her fingers against the scales of a firm yet pliable bicep. “So, those people might be survivors from the group that had Millie running around in tight little circles two years back. Some of them at least. And Chuckles there is obviously in charge, or else someone would have done something when he pulled the trigger and blew out that kid’s eardrums. That’s two years of actively deciding not to come back here, only for them to show up in force after one of them catches me taking my body out for a joyride.”

She held out an upturned hand and waited for Thimble to get it.

“I don’t get it,” he said.

Sigh. He might have logged several years in the Equestrian Army, but Vik had spent an entire childhood navigating the slums of an island that adopted rapid modernization without much thought for social security. If Chuckles was the leader of this outfit, and she was sure he was, then it was evident by his sickly pallor and determined performance that charisma was his weapon of choice. Like so many other would-be gang kings back on the home island, he was a talker. Simple as that.

Briefly, she considered sharing that nugget of her youth with Thimble, then squashed it on reflex. Even Pike hadn’t been privy to that chapter of her life. Some things were better off buried.

“He sold them the idea that coming back here was worth the risk. It probably wasn't even that hard. Dragons weren't exactly held in high regard during the war. I doubt we'll be seen much better after the way it ended.” She jerked a thumb toward the door, and toward the raiders gathered just beyond it. “The cryptic come out message, and that whole staredown thing? He's performing for an audience. That's legend-building. Guys like him don’t dust off their tophats and start the magic act unless they’re sure they can pull off some kind of a trick by the end.”

“You think he wants to kill you?”

Her tail curled around her feet. It was an old habit. Something she unconsciously did whenever she felt vulnerable. “Probably not,” she admitted. “I mean, he can't know it's just us here. A full Stable would probably have committees or general votes. Ways to keep anyone from nibbling his bait. But I’ll bet you a week's dinner he has something planned if we decide to ignore him and do nothing. It might be that they have another Pip-Buck. Could be they just sell the location of our Stable to someone with the tools to cut it open.”

“They’d need something on the order of a balefire bomb to do that,” Thimble murmured.

“Or maybe Chuckles has someone out there he’s ready to blame his failure on, and we’ll have to watch him murder someone anyway.” She let that sit a while before continuing. “Whatever it ends up being, I don’t think we’ll like it. And I really don’t like the idea of pretending to be working while he runs out of material.”

“We’re not opening the door for them.”

“I’m not saying we do that, but at the very least I want some way to talk to that guy before he decides it's time for his big finale.”

Thimble was quiet for almost a full second. Meanwhile, Chuckles’ sunken eyes were leveled squarely at the camera while he talkatively gestured his pistol from the gas bottle to the sealed door in front of him. He probably assumed there were intake vents hidden somewhere nearby and didn’t know about the stockpile of chemical scrubbers Stable-Tec had designed to constantly recycle the same air for centuries on end. Of course if he actually did send his people to search for them, he would just end up lumping the blame on their backs when they turned up empty.

“I will crack the door,” Thimble finally said. “Just a little. Enough for you to talk through the gap, and no farther.”

Vik pretended not to be angry at him for keeping her locked out of the controls, mostly because he was probably right to be doing it. One of them needed to have their head on straight, and between the two of them Vik had run headlong into her limbics enough times to leave a vaguely dragon-shaped dent.

“Do it,” she said, and was relieved to hear the heavy clunks and thuds of the massive actuator being released from its cavity in the antechamber ceiling.

Vik stepped back until she was out of the black and yellow painted trough meant to guide the cog laterally once it was pulled out of its plug, then stood by to watch the show. It was hard not to be in awe of just how massive each moving piece of hardware was once they were in motion. Now that she’d seen this mechanical dance play out before, she could admire just how precise it all still managed to be. The actuator arm, really just a gargantuan motor mounted beneath a hydraulic hinge, sparked and filled the air with the scent of heated metal as it swung out and mated into the notched socket inset to the center of the tungsten cog with a thundering hammerblow.

Chuckles stopped his speechmaking long enough for Vik to know he’d heard the sound, and now he was making rapid gestures toward several individuals off screen. Probably ordering them to find cover and be ready for another attack like the one Millie had almost tricked her into carrying out. Meanwhile the actuator had shifted gears and had begun rotating the socket at the door’s center, driving the embedded worm gears that slowly disengaged the locking pistons set radially around its edges. Then it wound down, went momentarily silent, and the world seemed to vibrate as the door was physically dragged from its plug.

“Slow,” Vik murmured, though she knew Thimble wouldn’t need reminding. They couldn’t afford to give the raiders enough of a gap to squeeze through, even though she didn’t think they would rush the entrance if they could. Not as long as they believed there were hundreds of Stable dwellers willing to fight back.

Overhead, the electric whine of the actuator prematurely dropped in a rapidly descending moan. The door slowed in its backward slide until friction overcame momentum. It jerked to a halt with a protesting metallic honk, and a thin gap wider than Vik’s closed fist rimmed the door with a diffuse ring of dirty gray daylight.

In her ear, Thimble congratulated himself with a self-satisfied, “Nailed it.”

She cracked a grin as she made her way toward the gap. “Be ready to shove this fucker shut if they try anything.”

“Way ahead of you. Now go see what the neighbors want.”

She watched the stallion approach the gap with an eyebrow raised to mask the shock she felt at just how wasted away he really was. He was all corners and divots, really just bones wearing a dirty yellow coat three sizes too small. And yet he seemed in no particular hurry as he sidled up to the line where the concrete platform met the inverse tungsten ring left by the partially retracted cog. He stopped to consider the scraped black and yellow lines demarking the walkway that doubled as the resting place for the door’s centermost bottom tooth, then over to the open slit where Vik waited.

With a shrug, he stepped halfway into the six foot long cavity and leaned his husk of a frame against the shelf of the adjacent tooth between them. For several seconds neither of them spoke. The young stallion, for he couldn’t be much more than twenty years old, took a moment to look up and around at the other gargantuan teeth in the socket he was in. Then he found Vik’s gaze and tipped his head in greeting.

“Hello,” he said, and his voice was an unsettling rasp of dry wheat chaff. “I’m Rook. The people behind me are my Cinders. I believe you owe us a measure of reparation for the ones of us you killed.”

Vik lifted her chin half a degree. She was expecting something more along the lines of, “Open the door and let us pillage your Stable,” and she wasn’t entirely convinced that wasn’t something this Rook character was working up to.

“If I recall, your people were working hard at hacking the controls to this big door here,” she said, giving the exposed tooth beside her an affable pat. “The fact that we owe you anything for defending our territory is news to me.”

Rook’s expression didn’t change. He simply watched her with a vague, disinterested look of someone going about a familiar chore. “Consider yourselves informed. You slaughtered seventeen Cinders and two of our sparks in cold blood. For that, we are owed a debt.”

The faintest lines of a frown touched her brow as she tried to reconcile this calm-spoken, almost starved stallion barely past his coltish years to the seemingly boisterous performer she and Thimble had just seen using the doorstep of their Stable as a stage. The gap between them was barely wider than her clenched fist which limited her field of view beyond the young raider, but she could clearly see half a dozen other ponies occupying the ramshackle structures that the last group had left behind when Millie tore through them with precision cannonfire. Even now, she was pretty sure the outhouse just past Rook’s right shoulder was in use. If his fellow raiders - his Cinders - were in any way concerned about the outcome of this meeting, not a single one of them showed it.

Rook’s own brow began to furrow ever so faintly, and she realized it bothered him that he was being ignored for the moment. More than that, Vik was pretty damned sure a leader of any caliber would have at least one other person nearby to make sure he didn’t catch the wrong end of a knife. That was how the little gangs of gutter toughs had operated where she grew up, anyway.

“I think waiting two years to call in that debt might have soured some opinions toward you,” she noted, tipping her nose toward a pair of armed earth ponies currently wandering toward a blackened fire ring with twin loads of kindling. “Maybe all of them.”

She saw him take note of the bait, then offer a sample of his own. “Priorities changed when my scouts reported seeing a dragon leaving and entering your Stable. There has yet to be a Stable known to harbor a mixed species community. Color me intrigued.”

It was obvious he wanted her to ask why that was worth mentioning, so she obliged with an impatient go on twirl of her finger.

He lit his horn and dragged an unkempt clump of black mane away from his muzzle with a dim aura, probably stalling for time as he deciphered the gesture. “Information. Miss… I didn’t get your name.”

“Didn’t give one.”

“Ah.” He clearly didn’t mind. Just checking another box on his chore list. “I find that information is one of the most overlooked currencies of the world. For example, did you know dragons went extinct in the wasteland within a single generation after the bombs fell? Wiped out, every last one of them. Something about choosing the wrong side during an old war.”

Vik felt herself go very still. “Wasn’t aware of that.”

Rook just nodded. “It seems to me that some people might be persuaded to part with a nominal amount of caps in exchange for information leading to a Stable protecting the descendants of those old enemies. Maybe not the Enclave or the Rangers - the only ancient history they care about is their own - but I wonder if the ghouls in Kiln would be interested to know about you and yours.”

A text window appeared in the corner of Vik’s vision. Did you make heads or tails of any of that?

She had to resist the urge to shake her head no, then sent her reply. Not sure what caps are. Enclave and Steel Rangers come up over the radio often enough. Opposing governments or nations, I’m guessing. Ghoul sounds like a slur. Almost wish I could reach this guy. Kinda want to break his nose on their behalf.

Thimble must have ramped up his framerate. His reply came the instant she sent hers. Meanwhile the silence between Rook and her had yet to reach the awkward stage.

Caps = currency or commodity? Wouldn’t put any value in the extinction claim. Trying to rile you up.

Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if he was telling the truth. Let me see what he wants.

She closed the window and looked past Rook’s shoulder to mask the lapse in attention. “You can sell what you think you know to whoever you like. This door won’t give a shit who comes knocking once we close it, so how about we skip the back alley shakedown and get to the part where you tell me what it is you want.”

Rook’s black eyes fixed her with a look of such intense lack of concern that it nearly masked the deep well of rage hiding just behind it. Vik hadn’t seen a look like that since she fled the archipelago. More than anything in that moment, Rook wanted to murder her.

“I want a place in your Stable,” he said quietly.

Vik crossed her arms over her chest and made a show of sizing him up. “Yeah, I don’t think I’m going to be able to sell that one to the head honcho.”

Let it be known that I, Thimble, am the head honcho of Stable 48.

Nobody likes a comedian, she sent back.

Heckler.

Dork.

She closed the connection again before Rook could interject. “You’ve got what looks like Baby’s First Militia out there armed with household plumbing for firearms. We’re not just going to throw open the door and welcome that hot mess inside.”

Rook didn’t so much as blink at her answer. “I didn’t ask for a place for them. I'm asking for one for me.”

She stared at him. He stared back.

“You’re serious.”

“Did I give the impression I wasn’t?” When she didn’t respond, he just shrugged and said, “I take it your answer, again, is no.”

“Whodathunk.”

He twitched a black brow at that, then looked up toward the faded 48 emblazoned at the center of the door. “You know they’re experimenting on you, yes?”

She snorted. How’s your bullshit meter reading?

Thimble was quick as ever. Fifty-fifty chance he knows something. Millie has a log entry from her early years in the Stable. Some kind of aerosolized biological compound got released into the air supply. Sources were canisters embedded in the concrete between levels, which means they were there when the cement was being poured. Definitely a high mark on the fucky scale, but no way this guy knows about it.

By now she was getting tired of toggling the connection, so she left it up. “Experimenting how?”

“Every Stable’s different,” he said. “Famine. Factionalism. Mutations. Who knows what yours might be.”

“If you’re aiming for leverage, you’re not doing a great job.”

He hummed. “Like I said, information is currency. People who make a habit of charity out here usually end up the ones begging for it later on.”

Pot, meet kettle, Thimble mused.

Vik couldn’t help but agree. Rook was obviously the type of person who learned he could get the things he wanted by playing the right role, and that had obviously begun to wear thin with the Cinders he seemed to think followed him. She wondered how much good will he’d lost when he’d nearly blown the head off that colt less than a half hour earlier. The kid no doubt belonged to someone.

As she looked him over, she thought she could see that part of him that knew he’d burned too many bridges with his people. It would make sense then that he’d spent his last chips at a chance to ask for asylum.

For a brief moment she considered how she might explain that Stable 48 wasn’t the oasis he hoped, and that if she did let him in he would find himself sharing an empty shelter with the artificial minds of a murdered dragon and a lieutenant of a defunct military. Oh, and the two-hundred or so maintenance spiders, and the empty plots of dirt in Agriculture that nobody had seen much point in planting crops in. Hope you like living off plain water and vitamin supplements until your organs spasm and die, she thought to herself. Welcome to Stable 48.

“Sorry, Rook,” she said, trying for sympathy and coming off as less than convincing, “the powers that be are deciding against. You understand.”

Rook swallowed, the first real sign of emotion he’d shown outside his performances on camera. “They haven’t forgiven me for the people you killed. I need to go inside.”

She sighed. “The answer’s still no.”

Something cold and metallic slid against the small of her throat, and she realized that his horn had remained lit since he moved that tangle of mane from his face. In the shelter created by the retracted cog, the external camera didn’t have a clear line of sight. Vik tipped her chin away from the pistol's cold muzzle. Unsurprisingly, it followed inside the dim haze of Rook’s magic.

His voice took on a hint of an edge. “Open. The door.”

Well fuck me, she sent to Thimble. Any chance you can get some power armor up here?

Didn’t you just finish the design on a new body?

I’m promoting you from a dork to a dick. I don’t feel like getting shot. I have a whole thing about not wanting to get shot.

Turn your pain receptors off.

You. Are. A. Dick.

She pursed her lips as a queasy sense of numbness rushed through her body like the world’s least fun version of full body paralysis, minus the paralysis. If it weren’t for the suite of sensors that kept track of the position of all the bits and bobs that made up her body, she would have probably fallen over like a sack of potatoes. As it was, she was forced to trust some of Millie’s outdated systems to keep her upright while she adjusted to the sudden lack of sensation. Better to shut off all her receptors than to risk them disagreeing on what part of a headshot should qualify as painful.

“Can’t say you’re improving your resume, friendo,” she said, and was happy she hadn’t been able to finish the task labeled Vocal Chords? on the to-do list. One of these days she’d like to speak without needing a speaker lodged in her throat, but she had a feeling that numbing her vocal chords would make for a less than compelling dialogue. Funnier though.

Something else for the to-do. Yippee.

“I don’t know,” he rasped. “Rook the Dragonslayer has a ring to it.”

Thimble was way ahead of her: Nerrrrrd.

She groaned in sympathy. Now that the kid’s script had run out, he was clutching at cliches. “Thimble, I’m done listening to this guy jerk himself off. Cycle the door.”

On cue, the actuator motor emitted a labored groan as its main rotor rolled into motion. Rook’s eyes went wide as it drove into the back of the cog like a hammer striking a tremendous gong. Before Vik could try snatching at his pistol, he jerked it back through the opening and spat a shrill, “Fuck!”

So much for the unflappable leader.

She breathed a sigh of relief as he stared daggers at her through the narrowing gap. Her body felt alive again as she toggled her receptors back on, and then, in a moment of childish inspiration, she hoisted a middle finger at the shrinking stallion. “No soliciting, you little goblin.”

With a speed and accuracy she wouldn't have guessed him capable of, Rook snapped the pistol toward her outstretched finger and shot it clean off at the second joint. The pain was exquisite, and unlike her original body, the mechanical one didn’t waste time with things like processing delays or shock.

And it felt just like the real thing.

In a mirror of his own petulant rage, Vik clutched her mangled hand and bellowed an indignant, “Asshole!” as the door crashed shut between them.

April 23rd, 1297
One Week Later

Hey, Vik. Problem. Cinders are up to something.

She was breathing hard, working herself steadily toward the edge of bliss and trying really fucking hard to ignore the text window blinking at the corner of her vision. She’d disabled the camera in this compartment for a reason and Thimble could damn well read between the lines for why that was.

“C’mon,” she coaxed herself, swirling the pads of two fingers a little deeper and momentarily losing herself again in the electric shudder of fine-tuned nerve endings responding exactly how she remembered. “Okay. Oh, gods, y–”

Vik, whatever you’re doing can wait. Something’s got them freaking out. Pretty sure that’s welding gear they're hauling up.

She pressed her eyes shut and toggled off her HUD. Whatever they were doing could fucking wait. She clenched her jaw, rocking her hips against the rhythm of her fingers as she tried to reform the fantasy of Pike spread out on top of her, his breath on her neck as he thrusted into her, filling her until…

The shrill wail of an unfamiliar alarm shattered the illusion as she sat bolt upright, her fingers still firmly buried inside her shiny new functional nethers and no longer up for the task she’d set them on. With a snarl she extricated her hand from her lap and sent a connection request to Thimble’s sim. It was immediately accepted and she found herself not in the perfunctory hallway where she always appeared, but seated across from him on his living room couch.

Thimble was crouched toward the coffee table on the edge of what had recently become his new favorite chair, a tattered green monster of a recliner of inscrutable origin. A status screen lay flat on the table, its border flashing red and emitting a less deafening version of the alarm that planted itself between Vik and a vital biological need.

“Are you fucking serious?” She’d meant it to be an accusation, but seeing his worried eyes on the flashing screen made it clear he hadn’t been the one to trigger the alarm. So she made it a statement, and one that lacked any real heat.

He shook his head and shrugged. On the screen, a feed from the external camera had been moved to the margin while he focused on the stream of data coming in from… somewhere. The servers, maybe? Did something inside their Stable finally give out?

“Sorry,” he said distractedly, “I know you were busy, but… but this is a detonation alarm. It's a few minutes old. And the Cinders are welding… what’s on your hand?”

Vik blinked and looked down at the slick of synthetic lubricant still coating most of her fingers, then belatedly recalled Thimble having developed a subsystem he’d dubbed “continuity mode.” It ran in the background of both of their systems, though he never left the sim which made his a redundancy, and it took regular snapshots of their physical status to render into the sim whenever they came and went. It was intended to make the transition more seamless than it already was, only Vik hadn’t been thinking about that when she connected.

“Like you said,” she growled, then waved a hand and the sim rolled her appearance back to a snapshot taken before she’d begun, well, testing. “I was busy. And what do you mean by detonation alarm? Did something blow up?”

Thimble puffed out his cheeks and gestured a hoof toward the screen. “A balefire bomb, apparently. That’s what Stable-Tec’s hardened network is screaming about. There was a huge radiation spike detected by Stable 10, Stable 6, and Stable 12 just a few seconds ago, and there’s at least a dozen more detections from Stables further out. No seismic warnings, so maybe it was an airburst? It’s way out east, but still…”

Vik felt a chill go through her. “How many others?”

He looked up at her, confused. “Detonations? Just the one so far. No new ones that the network is reporting, but I think the Cinders know something is happening because a bunch of them just rushed the door with that welding gear.”

She wrapped her tail around her feet as she called up her own status screen. On it she pulled up a feed from the external camera as well as a copy of the detonation warning Stable-Tec’s systems had sent screaming across the network. On the feed, a group of Cinders was working to hook up what appeared to be rusty TIG welding equipment, including what had to be the same gas bottle Rook had ordered his people to lug around as a vague threat when he wanted his meeting. Only the camera wasn’t showing anyone who looked like Rook now, and when she tried squinting at the figures gathered around the door the screen bloomed with a flash of high contrast black and white as the electrode touched the tungsten door.

“That’s two yards of cast tungsten,” she commented, trying to make sense of what she was seeing. “All they’re going to do is make a mess.”

Thimble’s expression was pinched. “I’m more worried about how they reacted this fast. I think they’re still connected to the Stable’s network somewhere.”

“But Millie killed the mare with that Pip-Buck.”

He shrugged and picked up a silver stylus off the coffee table, using his horn to flick it across the status screen and bring up a long column of active connections to the network. “Did you take it off her before you buried the bodies? Because I sure didn’t.”

She closed her eyes. “Shit.”

“It’s fine,” he said, already scrolling through the list at lightning speed. “There it is. Got it. Looks like they didn’t replace their hacker because they never got past the registration prompt. It still picked up the alarm, though. I guess Stable-Tec gives that out for free.”

“Yeah,” she murmured, still disliking that both of them had committed such a glaring oversight. “No new detonations so far.”

“Could be a one-off. Maybe some wackjob found a warhead that didn’t go boom when it was supposed to and chucked a hammer at it.”

“That or an Enclave-ite or Steel Ranger had one squirreled away from the bad old days and decided to push the big red button,” she countered.

Thimble grimaced. “Kind of prefer not to think about that, but we do really need to figure out what the deal is with those two. I’m getting sick of hearing names over the radio and not having any idea who they are or which one's the bad guy.”

“Maybe both are. I should’ve asked Rook.”

“Pretty sure those people ate Rook. Ah, jeez, look at that mess.”

Vik looked back to the camera feed and saw the sloppy, glowing line of fresh slag piled into the seam between the door and its matching socket. Soon as they checked it over, the torch lit again and the camera washed out in a flare of sensory overload.

A thought occurred to her as she watched. “You can’t weld tungsten, right?”

Thimble looked up. “Sure you can, but why…?”

Then he was looking down at his status screen. They both were as realization dawned on them.

“It’s too big,” she said, hoping Thimble might add something to affirm her doubt. “I mean, the door is way too big to give a shit about a few ugly welds.”

He licked his lips. “Probably. They’d just break off when the actuator pulls it back.”

“So they’re wasting their time.”

Thimble was quiet for a moment. “Maybe Rook didn't get eaten and this is his way of being a vindictive little prick. The door is effectively airtight when it closes. It’s a metal on metal seal.”

The Cinders doused the torch and wheeled the rig over to the next tooth. The camera went blind.

“But if they foul up the interface with enough loose material,” he continued, his frown deepening as he worked through the logic, “pulling the door back will break those welds, but it’s going to deposit a lot of crud into the seam.”

“It could seize if we pushed it onto that debris,” she finished for him. “Do you think they know that?”

He just shook his head, already calling the door controls and a feed from the antechamber up on his screen. Once they could see the actuator arm descending toward its interface with the behemoth door, he finally said, “I don’t think I want to give them the chance to figure it out.”

On the exterior camera, the meandering lines of crusty welds popped away and seemed to fall harmlessly around the hooves of the bewildered Cinders. A moment later Thimble reversed the cycle and the door resealed itself. For almost five minutes the group of raiders seemed to slosh between shouting at the door and shouting at each other. Finally one of them had the bright idea to unholster his crude pipe weapon, aim it up at the concrete overhang where the camera hid, and fired until the feed flashed and died.

“Oh,” Thimble murmured into the back of his hoof. “Well, shit. I hope they’re smart enough not to stick their legs into the threshold while the door is moving.”

And with that, he cycled the door back and forth another time. Then he waited a few agonizing minutes and did it again, each time hoping he was breaking whatever new welds they were laying and wasting what they had to assume was a precious supply of bottled argon. Only, Vik could see his frown growing deeper each time he ran the short cycle.

“What’s wrong?”

He grimaced. “Hydraulic pressure’s rising each time I shut the door. They’re definitely adding new welds. It’s getting caught on the crap I’m breaking off.”

“Then leave it closed and let them use up what they have.”

“Be nice to know what they still have. Fine, I’m leaving it. How long do we give them?”

She shrugged, still keeping half an eye on the radiation alarms coming in from fewer and fewer Stables. How many thousands of ponies were watching the same stream they were and wondering what the hell was happening out there?

“Thirty minutes?”

Thimble lit his horn and floated over a decorative egg timer from the kitchen counter. The top half was a cartoon baby chick wearing a hat made of broken eggshell. Its feet stuck out from holes in the bottom half, and little hash marks counted off the minutes around the seam. It was exactly the kind of adorable kitsch she’d begun to associate with Thimble. Former military or not, he liked what he liked and she respected the hell out of it.

He twisted the timer and set it on the coffee table. Sure, its timekeeping was dictated by the internal clock of the server running the simulation, but saying so would just spoil the illusion. They occupied themselves by monitoring Stable-Tec’s expiring alarms and listening for what few broadband radio channels were active this far out. The little yellow chick was rounding the halfway mark on the timer before the known Steel Ranger band went momentarily silent, then abruptly changed its encryption and began broadcasting junk noise. A few minutes later, a frequency that had only broadcast an endless roll of orchestral music since Vik discovered it broke format and a thin, unsure voice spoke into the silence.

“Um, hello there, listeners. I, ah, apologize for the interruption. We appear to, uh… we appear to have word from the eastern wastes of, ah, well, a mushroom cloud near the vicinity of Blinder’s Bluff.” There was a long pause, and the audible sound of someone drinking loudly from a canteen. “To be clear, Blinder’s Bluff was not… well, not the target, per se, but it appears Hightower Radio was knocked off the air by the explosion. I, well, we don’t have much more information than that. We here at West Coast Classical will try our best to keep you updated as we know more. And to our colleague, Flipswitch, we hope to hear from you soonest. B-be well. Thank you.”

They listened to the crackling playback of long-dead symphonies as the same voice interrupted twice more to relay the same information, his stammer growing less and less pronounced as he digested the news he’d found himself responsible for reporting. No new detonations had been reported, and by the time the little egg timer began ringing the Stable-Tec network had gone silent of further warnings. Whatever had caused the explosion, it seemed more plausible than before that it was a one-off. It didn’t bring either of them much in the way of relief.

“Cycling the door,” Thimble said, and they watched the actuator arm descend once more from the antechamber’s clear feed.

The armature swung into place, spun out each of the locking pistons, and lurched as it began pulling back the great cog. Vik leaned a little closer to the screen as the door began sliding from its socket. Everything was fine as the first foot of tungsten emerged from the wall. The second foot came a little slower, though, and there was a resonant groan as the third resisted even more.

Then all progress came to a shrieking halt as friction, gravity, and hydraulic pressure conspired in an abrupt spray of black fluid from inside the armature and a flash of orange-yellow flames as the flammable liquid touched the sparks within its madly spinning rotor. Thimble shouted profanity as oily smoke boiled across the ceiling and triggered the fire suppression system. It all happened in the space of a few seconds, and there was nothing either of them could do.

Foam jetted from nozzles around the antechamber, coating everything regardless of value or sensitivity. The actuator arm emitted a long arc of ugly lightning before finally tripping its own breaker and stopping it from further damage. The great cog, now sheeting with bluish white layers of froth, rested where it had seized in place. Halfway out, but still presenting a full yard of solid tungsten as a barrier to anyone who might try to force entry. Without a fleet of prewar construction machines, and likely even with them, there would be nothing the Cinders could hope to do to move it.

Trouble was, Vik and Thimble couldn't either. Vik leaned back into the couch and let the cushions consume her.

“Well, shit,” she sighed. “That’s going to be a problem.”

A few lingering flames still smoldered overhead, evidenced by the steady black pattering of burned insulation still leaking from the ruined actuator arm. Thimble maneuvered his featureless gray mech around it, his expression trying to reflect his deep discomfort at being out here in the real world and being limited by Millie’s original design so that he just looked vaguely constipated.

Vik made sure to stay beside him at all times, one hand on the base of his neck as they came to examine the extent of the damage. It was understood between them that this was one of the rare exceptions he was willing to make to his personal rule of never leaving his simulation. Viewing the damage through one of the overhead cameras or by opening up a feed to Vik’s point of view wasn’t going to cut it for something this crucial, and the idea of piloting one of Millie’s old maintenance spiders had floated about as well as a lead balloon shot full of holes.

“What a mess,” he murmured as they came to the behemoth cog.

She just nodded. There wasn’t really much she could add to that.

They stopped near the bottom of the ramp, not being able to go much further with the door protruding nearly a full yard from the skin of the Stable. Overhead, the actuator’s piston was still engaged in the door’s center socket. It gave the scene a false sense that the door might fall over without its support, but with more than half of it jammed tight inside the threshold there was no chance of it coming loose barring the ill-timed detonation of another balefire bomb.

Thimble spread his forelegs wide until he could clearly assess the gap between the door and the track it had stopped short of sliding onto. Vik’s lip twitched into a tiny smile. It always struck her as funny how some ponies would bend at the knee to get low to the ground while others would just splay their legs out like they were slipping around on an icy pond. She pointedly didn’t think about how she tended to reach for humor during times of stress.

“What’s the verdict?” she asked.

“Misaligned.” He straightened himself and tipped a composite nose toward the door’s left side. “It got bound up on something there and rotated in the socket. It’s less than a tenth of a tenth of a degree, but it still didn’t help anything.”

“But we can still fix it, right?”

“Sure, but it’s not going to happen anytime this year or the next. We don’t have the equipment to rebuild the actuator arm, so we’re going to have to manufacture it here. Plus there’s the whole problem of getting that thing disconnected from the door without dropping it through the ceiling of Level Two, cutting it into enough pieces to fit into the recycler. Oh, and there’s not a single doorway in this Stable large enough for that thing’s motor assembly to pass through, so we’re going to need to demolish and remodel a clear path between here and Mechanical.” He looked up at her with his mech’s glassy black lenses and shrugged. “But yeah, it’s fixable.”

Vik felt an urge to find the nearest stack of blankets, curl up under them, and hibernate for the next century or three. “And what about the door?”

He frowned up at the cog. “Twenty feet in diameter, two yards thick… you’re looking at 454,285 pounds of tungsten. Plus it’s stuck.”

“You pulled up a calculator for that.”

He scoffed. “We’re living computers, Vik. We’re made of math.”

She couldn’t stop herself from grinning at that, and she was heartened to see that he was trying his best to smile too despite the visible tremor in his jaw. Even this brief excursion back to the real world was burning through his reserves. “Appreciate the second pair of eyes, Thimble. You can head back to sim if you want.”

“Thank Celestia,” he whispered, and an instant later the mech stiffened and turned to walk back toward the nearest charging pad. There was a fifty-fifty chance she’d find it trying to walk through a corridor wall somewhere between here and there, but Thimble was making good progress with the pathing software and it beat having to walk the things there herself.

“So, give me an estimate,” she prompted once her HUD indicated that Thimble had connected to her via audio. “How much time are we looking at?”

“Best I can give you is an extremely rough number and you don’t want to know what it is.”

“Sucks to be me, then. What’s the timeframe?”

“Twenty-five years.”

She started chewing at the inside of her cheek, then remembered she didn’t have sensation there in this version of her body and stopped before she bit through it.

“Vik? You okay?”

“I need a favor from you.”

He hesitated. “Ohhkay?”

“If Rook is still alive by the time we get out of here, I’m going to need you to hold his tail up so I can punch him square in the turdcutter. Deal?”

Relieved laughter was his answer. “Deal.”

She found one of the overhead cameras and shot him a feral grin, laughing with him so he wouldn’t see into her darker thoughts. Because if it turned out Rook hadn’t been fatally dethroned by the Cinders, and he was still alive when they got that door open, he would count himself lucky if he still had the use of his own legs by the time their second meeting was done.

“So,” she said, turning her back on the jammed door and heading back to the Atrium, “twenty-five years.”

“More or less,” Thimble said in her ear. “Hopefully less.”

“Might be fun.”

The dubious smile was audible in his voice. “Oh?”

“Sure. Haven’t you ever busted out of prison before?”

A pause. “Um, no.”

She grinned. “You’ll have to trust me, then. You never forget your first time.”