Chapter 30

“So… where is he?”

That was what Roughshod had said a half hour ago. By that point they had already been waiting for a half hour, and since then, the big brown pony had spent the time tapping his hoof impatiently. Overhead, Hairtrigger hovered in lazy circles, flying top-cover.

Meister had confirmed the time and place that Caballus wanted to rendezvous with the Plutarch’s appointed liaison. At present, the individual was nearly an hour late.

Finally, Hairtrigger swooped down. “White limo comin’ this way. Must be our guy.” Of course, since the Arbitrotter’s augmetic eye had picked up the air-carriage while it was still several kilometers away, it was another few minutes before it arrived.

When it touched down, all three of them were surprised to see a dainty pink hoof step out..

“Miss… Caress?” said Caballus, when he regained his speech. “Are… are you…”

“Your new travelling companion!” she said with enthusiasm. Their dismay must have been apparent, as the speechless seconds dragged on. “Is… something wrong, Captain?”

Caballus saw several things wrong, in fact. “Meister… asked you, his own wife, and an opera singer, to come with us? On a mission that could lead us afoul of dangerous heretics at any moment?”

“Of course,” she said. “There’s nopony he trusts more than me in all of Pferdian. Doubly so, now that most of the ponies he trusted almost as much are all dead. Aside from yourselves, obviously.”

“Obviously,” Caballus repeated, though with considerably less conviction.

“Don’t worry, Captain,” she said. “I served in the Pferdian CDF in my youth, and I like to think I still know my way around a slingshot.” The pegasus unholstered her sidearm, an Elasticide model-36, with an engraved ivory handle.

High overhead, a pair of crows swooped and strafed each other, cawing loudly as they fought midair over the carcass of a rat. In quick succession, Velour loaded, drew, and released two cupcakes at the birds, silencing both.

Hairtrigger whistled. “Two moving targets at 60 meters in 5 seconds. I think I’m in love,” he said. Even Roughshod seemed impressed, if still not convinced. A feeling Caballus shared.

“Oh, and I won’t be coming alone, either,” Velour added. Two members of Ver Kaufer House security stepped out of the limo at her command, a mare and stallion that had an air of battle-hardened discipline. “They have my husband’s every confidence, and mine as well.”

Caballus had to admit, a pair of bodyguards to look after the Plutarch’s wife was a slightly different story. It didn’t assuage all his concerns, but her presence would be much less of a hindrance with Meister including babysitters for her in the deal.

“Very well,” said the Inquisipony. “Miss Caress-“

“Please Captain, call me Velour.”

Caballus cleared his throat. “And you… may call me Swift, if you like. Now, Miss… Velour, we’re running behind schedule, and I’d like to get underway.”

When he turned to go, the pink pegasus hooked a hoof around his arm, pulling herself beside him as he walked. “Of course, my dear Swift. Lead the way.”

The coordinates Snidely supplied led Caballus to a yard of warehouses not far from the aerodrome. In its heyday, Caballus suspected the buildings would have been bustling with activity as millions of tons of goods arrived and departed on ships from all over the sector. The current traffic was seemed much below that, though there were still teams of workers leading heavy-lifting servitors to and fro. None of them paid Caballus and his team any mind, though they did stop and stare at Velour from time to time.

“What are we looking for, my dear Swift,” asked Velour, as though only passingly curious.

“I’ll know when I find it,” was all Caballus could say, checking the markings on each warehouse as they passed by. Finally, they came to the one on Snidely’s card.

Like many of the buildings, this one bore the mark of the Ver Kaufer Trade House, but Caballus also noted the Cog Mequestricum beside it. “Do you know what was kept here, Velour?”

“My guess is,” she replied, “that it held goods from Forge Cloud Zirruswolke before they were distributed, when the Trade House still had an agreement with Uhrwerk. Heavy machinery, vehicles and the like.”

That matched Caballus’s own guess, since Snidely had sent them here on the insinuation that said pact was in some way sinister. If the Plutarch’s wife knew anything about her husband’s alleged illicit dealings, she didn’t show any sign.

“Why wouldn’t they lock the doors,” said Roughshod, as he lifted a smaller loading dock door open at Caballus’s behest.

“Because,” said the Inquisipony, surveying the interior, “there’s nothing here to steal.”

His voice echoed in the warehouse like it might in a disturbed tomb, the reflected words loud and accusing. Light from the open door illuminated only a fraction of the space, but tall window-slits high above provided shafts of illumination that fell in regular intervals along the massive floor, giving the empty building the solemnity of a cathedral.

“Somepony moved out of here in a hurry,” said Hairtrigger, noticing the scent of stale exhaust fumes.

“When Meister neglected to renew their contract, Uhrwerk was quite upset,” Velour said. “I would imagine he was eager to remove himself from any previous association with the Trade House as quickly as he could.”

Again, Caballus agreed with her logical assessment. “If you could, Velour, I’d be interested in a manifest of exactly what was stored here, and where it went.” In all likelihood, it was a sampling of the myriad mundane products of Zirruswolke’s manufactoria, but it never hurt to check.

“As soon as I can,” she replied.

It wasn't long before it became obvious that their normal searching techniques didn’t apply to this particular situation. The entire building was completely bare, meaning there were no nooks and crannies to look into, no rocks to overturn, no paintings to check behind, none of the usual places where clues were hidden. Even Hairtrigger’s enhanced vision failed to turn up anything out of place at the microscopic level, nor in any non-visible spectrums. They had been fruitlessly scouring the floor and walls for nearly three hours by the time they reconvened in the center of the cavernous storage room.

“Not a Throne-damned thing,” Hairtrigger complained. Caballus had to admit, he was also frustrated by the lack of progress, as was Roughshod. Velour however, seemed unperturbed, and had treated the experience with a sense of amusement, inspecting the upper reaches of the warehouse as her bodyguards shadowed her beneath. She probably thinks all this detective work is terribly exciting compared to crooning for a bunch of airheaded socialites, Caballus thought.

“Whatever Snidely thought we would find here,” Caballus said with an irritated sigh, “it’s clearly not here anymore. I’m going to have to ask him what he was talking about more… pointedly, next time we meet.”

Roughshod gritted his teeth. “I can’t believe that red weasel sent us on a wild heretic chase.” The stallion stomped a hoof on the metal floor paneling.

It rang hollow.

All four of them looked down and stared.

Hairtrigger was the first to speak. “Maybe… we should check that out.”

“Nah, really? You think?” said Roughshod. He dug into his saddlebag, pulling out a Jelltabomb, a jar-like charge similar to those used by the Pony Marines. Derived from the same zap apple fruit as the assassin’s bomb used at the Macsnacht banquet, the concentrated jelly had a much smaller blast radius than a conventional explosive, but burned so hot, it could melt a hole clean through a half-meter of adamanetium. And that is exactly what it did.

When the afterimage of the blinding flash faded from his retinas, Caballus peered into the darkness below. “There’s a tunnel, running underneath this warehouse.”

“Ugh, tunnels,” said Hairtrigger, grimacing. “Always with the tunnels.”

“Next time, I’ll ask the heretics to put their hideout in a bright, sunny meadow for you. I’m sure they’ll be happy to oblige,” Roughshod said.

Before anyone could say another word, Velour dove into the hole. Caballus and Hairtrigger both shouted, but were too slow to stop her. Her guards followed without a moment’s hesitation.

“It’s perfectly alright,” she called back up to them. By the sound of the echo, it was only a short drop to the floor below. “Just a hop, skip and a jump.”

Caballus looked to his friends, shrugged, and jumped in. Moments later, he heard a loud thump, and then a much softer landing, telling him that everyone was now in the tunnel. For a minute, all he could see in the darkness was the red glow of Hairtrigger’s augmetic eye, until everypony managed to find their luminators.

“I can see a door about two hundred meters that-a way,” the Arbitrotter announced. When they reached the door, Roughshod forced it open, revealing an elevator. Unlike the tunnel, the lift still had emergency power, grinding to life when Caballus cranked the control lever into the downward position.

As they waited for the lift to reach wherever it went, the Inquisipony turned to his pink pegasus liaison. “Next time, Velour, let us make sure it’s safe before you jump headlong into a potentially dangerous situation. Please.”

“Oh, don’t be such a worrier, Swift!” Velour’s laugh rang like a merry bell over the din of the elevator. “My husband has full confidence in me, and I have full confidence in you. Besides, I so rarely do anything this exciting. I can’t let you have all the fun.”

“Yeah, Cap,” said Hairtrigger, smiling at Lady Caress, “if anything happens, we can swoop in and save the fine lady, easy as you please.”

“If something happens, I doubt anything about it will be easy,” Caballus said, giving Hairtrigger a hard glare. Though somehow, when he tried the same for Velour, his stern tone came out as concern. “And this isn’t supposed to be fun, either.”

“Of course, Swift,” she said, though Caballus doubted how seriously she was taking this whole excursion. He decided not to press the issue.

The lift ground to a sudden halt, and the doors parted to a new room, one that the elevator’s weak light couldn’t penetrate. Hairtrigger stiffened.

“What is it?” Caballus asked.

“My eye is fuzzin’ up again,” the Arbitrotter said, readying his slingshot. “Like it does when… well, you know.”

Caballus did know: Deep-Grabbers. He and Roughshod also drew pies.

Suddenly a mechanical clang rang out, and the hum of electrical power filled the room. The dim glow of emergency lights overhead illuminated the area, revealing some kind of mad laboratory. Caballus had visited the workshops of the Adeptus Mequestricus before, and while this place had all the right pieces, it had none of the efficient organization. Equipment was placed haphazardly, with cogitator banks gathered in clusters in the middle of floor, dead generators leaning against heavy metalworking machinery, and tables covered in empty beakers stood in every corner. The floor itself was a messy maze of power cables, data transmission cords and chem-tubing. If there was any sort of pattern to it, it was the kind that only a madpony could make sense of.

Beside the lift, Velour had her hoof on what was obviously a huge power breaker. “I found the lights,” she said helpfully.

They had also found the Grabbers. In fact, the ponies were surrounded by them.

A half-dozen glass cylinders each held the remains of a Diamond Dog, suspended and preserved in some kind of clear liquid. Their faces were frozen in grotesque expressions; mouths open in silent screams and milky eyes staring into nothing.

“My, what dreadful creatures,” said Velour, though rather than shrink from them, she approached the nearest tank. “Have you ever seen anything like them, Swift?”

“Velour!” Caballus shouted, dashing to her side. But when it became clear there wasn’t anything jumping out at her, he immediately felt foolish. “I… no, nothing like them,” he lied, “but they look dangerous. Please, be careful.”

The Plutarch’s wife said nothing, but smiled, nodded and batted her eye.

“Over here,” Hairtrigger called out. “I found where the static’s comin’ from.”

On a table nearby, the Arbitrotter was looking over a boxy apparatus plugged onto a large cogitator. In the center of the device lay a large octagonal gemstone, black as jet. When Caballus peered into the facets, he saw a liquid shadows beneath, swirling just like those that the Deep-Grabbers cloaked themselves in, like a dark storm trapped in a bottle. He also noticed several cracks on the stone’s surface, through which tiny wisps of shadow were leaking into the air and dissipating with a fait hiss.

“Zoono tech-sorcery.” It seemed Snidely had been right about Uhrwerk. Only by order of an Inquisipony could anypony, even a Magosus, study or experiment on technology that wasn’t crafted by pony hooves. To do so in secret was a grave heresy. “It looks damaged.”

Hairtrigger nodded. “Think our Ad-Meq buddy tinkered it to bits?”

“No, I think it was broken when they recovered it. I can’t imagine they,” the Inquisipony said, gesturing to the Grabbers, “would let any of their key technology be captured intact.”

“Rogue Trader and an expert on Zoonos besides,” said an impressed Velour. “You’re a stallion of many talents, dear Swift.”

Caballus was glad that the lighting was so dim, because he felt a slight blush creep into his cheeks. He shook his head, chiding himself for being affected by simple flattery. “You… learn a thing or two trading on the frontier. Let’s spread out.”

It relieved Caballus more than he expected when Velour trotted off into the lab with her guards. It… concerned him that Hairtrigger’s path seemed to shadow hers, at a plausibly deniable distance. Or is that just my imagination? He snorted, and picked a different direction.

The Inquisipony quietly cursed as he tripped again over a power cable. He had walked through swamps that were easier to navigate than this lab. There were no end to obstacles in his path, from towering devices of unknown function to chem-tanks that gave off nauseating fumes, and trying to circumvent them often led him right into some dead-end alcove, or an impassable tangle of piping.

He heard a crash nearby, on the other side of a data-loom, where he had last seen Roughshod. “Report?” he said.

“Horseapples!” his friend called back. “This place is Throne-damned maze!”

Caballus agreed. In frustration he kicked a wooden crate beside him. It rocked, and the top came off. The Inquisipony’s nostrils were filled with the scent of apple and spice. Except… not exactly any spice he knew, but more like the apple itself was a spice. It made his nose tingle, and an instant later he recognized it. Throwing the top off, he saw the crate was filled with pies.

Zap apple pies.

He carefully lifted one, inspecting the tin. As best he could tell, it was identical to the fragments he had recovered Macsnacht. He put it into his saddlebag, for Fyzzix to analyze later. Bowing and squinting in the gloom, he studied the crate.

“Ver Kaufer Premium Arms,” he mumbled to himself, knowing enough of the Pferdian dialect of Low Equestrian to translate the stenciled label. That branch of the Ver Kaufer Trade House was under Waffen’s administration. Perhaps Snidely’s tip had been referring to the wrong Ver Kaufer.

Just as he was lifting his head, a shout caught his attention. “Swift! I’ve found something!” said Velour, somewhere in the distance. He was about to despair ever finding her in the labyrinthine laboratory, when Hairtrigger landed on the stack of ammo crates. Particularly volatile ammo crates, at that. Caballus winced.

“Need a lift?” the Arbitrotter said, blithely unaware of how close he might have been to blowing up the whole building.

Exhaling, Caballus nodded. “Just be careful,” he said. The pegasus, a little confused, lifted the Inquisipony by his forelegs and carried him above much of the workshop’s clutter. Not all of it, as they had to avoid webs of hanging wires and cables, but the journey across the lab that would have taken him half an hour of stumbling, took only a few minutes of diving and weaving.

Setting down outside a pair of vaunted double doors, Caballus took a moment to let his nausea subside, before he stepped through the door that was open. Velour was already inside.

Refraining from telling her to be careful again, he instead took stock of the room she had discovered. Caballus was struck by how orderly it was, especially compared the rest of the lab. It seemed more like a medicae ward, with no trace of dust or debris, and a host of sharp and sterile tools arrayed on the tables. In the center of the room stood several of the same specimen tubes that had contained the Grabbers, only these were covered in cylindrical steel blast shielding. Each had a console, with a blinking red sign reading “lockdown.”

Velour beamed with pride at her find. “What do you make of them, Swift?”

“These ones are special somehow,” he replied, stating the obvious, “and Uhrwerk went to great lengths to keep them contained. Let’s open them up.” Approaching the lone cogitator bank in the room, he found it unpowered. “Care to put your switch-finding skills to use again?”

She rolled her eye playfully, but nodded and trotted away, guards in tow. Hairtrigger almost offered to come along, but Caballus stopped him. “I need you to cover those,” he said, gesturing to the tubes. “We don’t know what’s in there.”

The orange pegasus looked at Caballus askance. “You expect somethin’ to jump outta there? Those Grabbers’d been dead quite a while, I reckon. Be better to help the fine lady find the juice, don’tcha think?”

Caballus glanced over toward Velour, and then back to the tubes. “As far as we know, Uhrwerk has only abandoned this place for a few days, since his deal with Meister fell through. Some of the specimens could still be alive.”

Before Hairtrigger had time to object, the white lights of the lab activated, nearly blinding the two with the sudden light. A holo-projector came to life as well. A flickering, fuzzy green bust of Meister Ver Kaufer appeared before them, like a scowling ghost.

“… greed to this arrangement,” holo-Meister said, mid sentence, “you assured me progress would be rapid. I shouldn’t need to remind you of the risk, not to mention the expense, I’ve assumed to build and furnish your project, and after all this time, I’ve yet to see a single viable product. Only prototypes and promises. If you can’t provide something that can be passed off as an innovation, and be mass produced by your Forge Cloud, I’ve no reason to continue my investment.”

As the recording ended and the hologram vanished into nothing, Caballus’s jaw clenched, and his stomach turned. Snidely was right.

The revelation left the Inquisipony feeling more betrayed than he had felt in a long time. Everypony is guilty, Lord Banehoof had once told him, and the Friendquisition’s task was merely to determine the severity of the crime. But Caballus had been beginning to regard the Plutarch with respect, and something even approaching admiration, for his pragmatism and drive.

Meister was also ambitious and ruthless, two traits that had served well many of the Princess’s enemies, even as they served well Her servants. He may be in league with heretics, but the real question is… is he in league with the Children?

“What was that, Swift?” Caballus hadn’t even noticed that Velour had returned.

For a moment, hesitation seized him. He couldn’t very well tell her that her husband was the one secretly funding the highly illegal research all around them. On one hoof, she might already know. Although, if that were the case, he would have expected her to be less... helpful. So far she’d been nothing but cooperative, even enthusiastic; if she were hiding something, she was either doing a very good job at it, or very bad one.

The other case was that Meister was keeping this secret from her as well, and he had no way of knowing how Velour would handle the news. In the worst case, she would go straight to her husband, either to confront him or join him, and the Plutarch would know that Caballus knew the truth. Either way, Caballus would lose an ally and gain an enemy. Also, though he wouldn’t admit it, even to himself, he didn’t want to see Velour hurt if he could help it.

“Nothing,” he said, averting his eyes by working on the cogitator. “Just a malfunction. Let’s get these tubes open.”

Despite decades of instruction from Fyzzix on how to subdue a variety of security spirits, it took Caballus almost an hour to access the controls for specimen containment. Throughout that time, he found Hairtrigger’s playful attempts at conversation with Velour a constant distraction. Luckily, Roughshod joined them again, and his presence seemed to stifle further flirtation. One by one, the red-lit consoles turned green, and the Inquisipony approached the first, studying the readout.

“Adult basiliscus poultrii,” he read, “tissue harvesting complete. Subject expired.” With the proper command, the shield rose away, and revealed the strangest creature Caballus had ever seen.

It was about two meters long, but most of that was its thick tail. The body was serpentine and scaly, sporting a row of spines along its back. A leathery wing floated limply in the tank’s liquid, which Caballus would have guessed would be too small to support such a creature in flight. Then again, he though as he glanced at Hairtrigger, pegasi seemed to manage. But as fearsome as all these features were, the creature was rather absurd, because its legs and head were those of a chicken.

“It’s a cockatrice,” said Caballus. Though he didn’t know what one looked like, Chief Corpus’s description covered all the important points he needed to identify it, right down to the red eye.

To her credit, Velour didn’t recoil, though she did wrinkle her nose in disgust. “What a horrid, ugly creature.”

“To be fair, Ma’am,” Hairtrigger said, “I reckon it’s missing half its face.”

The Arbitrotter was right. It appeared as though large chunks of the monster had been removed with surgical precision. This included the skin and muscle from half its head, separating face and bare skull right down the middle. There were other incisions as well, some large enough to see that entire organs had been removed.

Intellectually, Caballus knew that the cockatrice was an evil creature, if for no other reason than it was a horrifying, mutant monster born from the unnatural womb of the Everfree Forest. He was repulsed by it viscerally as well. And yet… he found himself hoping it had not been conscious while Uhrwerk had been vivisecting it.

“Adult female pegasus,” Caballus said, reading aloud the readout for the second specimen tube. His brow furrowed. “It says… it says ‘tissue graft partially successful. Splice rejection rate: 63%. Massive systemic failure. Subject expired.’ But… what does it…”

This time when the shield retracted, everypony took a step back.

“Sweet, merciful Celestia,” said Hairtrigger in unreserved disgust, “what in the wide, wide world of Equestria is that.”

“An abomination,” Caballus replied through gritted teeth.

The shape of the thing in the tube was that of a pony, but even a glance was enough to notice it was not just a pony. For every part that had been missing on the cockatrice, that flesh could be found on the unfortunate mare. One hoof had been replaced by a sickly chicken’s talon, large patches of her skin now bore scales, and in place of an entire feathery wing, a bat-like appendage now protruded from her back.

“How… how dreadful,” Velour managed to say. If she had still been under any illusions that this was some kind of amusing field trip, they had just been brutally dispelled.

“This… thing must be destroyed,” said Caballus, to unanimous agreement. The Heliarchy preached that the threefold bodily form of Ponykind—earth pony, pegasus and unicorn—was a pure reflection of the Princess’s own perfection. It was for this reason that mutant ponies and lesser ungulates were rightly abhorred and sometimes exterminated, for their sin was apparent in their flesh. But to mutilate a healthy pony, and intentionally pollute it with the twisted features of a vile, mutant zoonobreed... it was among the most heinous of heresies.

One by one, Caballus opened the rest of the cylinders, and he found the same thing: dissected cockatrices and ponies with zoono parts fatally grafted onto them. By the time he came to the last one, Caballus had vowed that Urhwerk would suffer for his perverse experiments. The last one had a note that took him out of his thoughts of righteous vengeance.

“Basiliscus poultrii ovum. Three specimens. One deceased. Maturation cycle completed. Specimens suspended…”

As the shield lifted away, Caballus noticed that there were three eggs, similar to a chicken’s but much larger, all enveloped by a shimmering stasis field. One was cracked and partially caved in, but the others were fine.

An alarm suddenly blared. “Unauthorized access detected!” cried an automated voice. “Disengaging safety measures!”

The Inquisipony and his friends all looked at one another, then at the eggs, where the stasis field instantly evaporated. Six pairs of eyes fixed on those white, oblong shapes, nopony daring to breath.

The eggs twitched.