Captain Volkov had faced many frustrating times in his career. He had been on the distant frontiers of Russia, and battled the Russian Federation Navy at the start of the war, almost losing his ship to a Kilo-class submarine during the middle of battle.

However, dealing with the current situation was trying his patience more than seemed humanly possible.

Twenty minutes earlier, a single pony - from what Volkov had gathered, one of their guards, and a pegasus one at that - had flown to the apparent entrance of the large base still under intense construction and had demanded one thing: Their surrender. With the first units of the American and Russian forces half an hour from arriving, Volkov had thought it would be amusing to try with the pony guard. To accomplish that, he had stepped into the ship's Ka-60K helicopter and flown to one of the helicopter pads inside of the base, and proceeded to quickly walk to the main entrance of the base.

He was currently regretting his decision.

Volkov stood twenty feet away from the entrance, itself surrounded by sandbag emplacements (a temporary measure before more permanent earth and concrete ones took their place), with two Russian Marines flanking him. In front of him stood a white pony covered in ridiculously decorated gold armor, sporting a deadpan stare which the pony had leveled at Volkov the moment he appeared.

"No, I shall not surrender. I have told you this before." Volkov stated, his tone never wavering. The trick of using a calm voice he had learned to deal with the political situation in some coastal Russian towns was now coming in handy. Added to this was the minor stress of translating all of his words into English to speak with the pony, and in reverse when the pony talked.

"Princess Celestia, Ruler of the Equestria, and Keeper of the Sun demands it." The guard repeated, the capital letters very obvious in its speech. The voice was male, but Volkov had long ago learned to keep his assumptions to the minimum. "You are on Her sovereign territory, and She who controls the Sun itself had ordered you to relinquish your arms and come into royal custody to face your crimes."

Volkov narrowed his gaze at the pony, who began to waver slightly, seeing as he was being denied, possibly for the first time in his life. "I care not that you believe that this 'Princess Celestia' controls the sun. You were the first to attack us, and it had happened several time within the past day alone. We will not give in."

"Then your deaths will be the least of your worries, evil beast, when She banishes you for your crimes." The pony said in contempt, before turning around and lifting off of the ground, quickly flying away at speeds that Volkov felt only a helicopter would have difficulty matching.

"Good riddance." Volkov muttered audibly, resulting in some short chuckles from behind him. With that being said, Volkov welcomed the attempt (or lack thereof) at negotiations. It let him know for sure what the ponies thought of the Human presence on their land. Predictably, the answer was 'not at all'.

With that, Volkov pulled a small radio out of his pocket. He pressed the touch screen, turning it on, before quickly selecting the correct frequency and speaking into it in English.

"Captain Henderson, this is Captain 1st Rank Volkov. We have a problem."

Several technicians stood over a large computer, with half a dozen minors above it, all showing fragments of code. They discussed their situation in muted tones, trying to find out the best solution to their problem.

"I tell you, it'll never work." One of them said. "Because we don't have GPS anymore, almost all of our rocket-based systems are useless, and many of our fire-control systems are down. We can't replace that by launching our own satellites because we don't have the facilities to build the facilities to launch a rocket."

"We could always repurpose one of the missiles." Another one suggested hopefully.

"Don't be ridiculous." The first one chided. "Any missile we have wouldn't be designed to carry a satellite, or carry one high enough."

"How about linking them to the radar images of the terrain?" A third one said. "If we use the launch vehicle location on the radar maps we have as the central location, and use radar guidance from the SPI radars, or a Hawkeye if necessary, we could guide a missile to a target with the same accuracy as a GPS."

There was a short pause, before the first one spoke out. "That might work. Get to work programming the sims, people, and program it into the computers and missiles if it's feasible."

With that, the throng of people broke apart, each rushing to do their tasks wit eagerness. If it worked out, the vessels in the multinational fleet would be able to use GPS-reliant systems such as missiles again. With that accomplished, they would once again be able to unleash death upon any who attacked them.

Lieutenant Robert Johnson looked at the makeshift base in the distance, the site of the largest multinational military gathering he had ever seen. Over the past three hours since the beginnings of the column had finally left the small town (with the last formations having cleared it around two hours ago), the column had gone as fast as they could together (around 40kph, having to slow down because of some of the slower armored vehicles).

Johnson looked over the defenses as they approached the entrance, located on a small rise of a few feet. He could see several sandbag bunkers at it, with several Russian Marines (he recognized the colors and uniform at this distance, and matched it with the readings from his 'Net' unit interface) working to surround them with earth and wood. They stopped working as his Stryker approached, with the men at the crew-served weapons in the emplacements shooting them large grins.

"You can go on in." One of them at the entrance said when the driver of his Stryker, a kid whose name he had forgotten, opened the driver's hatch. "You're not likely to be a spy."

"No kidding." The driver said as he kept it open, the better to see where he was going.

Slowly, and then growing louder, a cheer started to come from various areas of the camp as Lieutenant Johnson's vehicle passed the entrance. Dozens came out of various tents and prefabricated buildings to yell out in near-triumph as his vehicle was directed towards an empty motor pool (or what passed for one). As the Stryker ground to a halt in a marked space, Johnson hopped down, with the back door opening to let the men inside come out.

They had reached safety.

Author's Note

Chapter one of two. Writing is hard when you're facing a gigantic distraction, in the form of Grand Theft Auto V.

Which is much too addictive. Rockstar should be sued for making the game good enough to draw me away from writing for this long, and for managing to make two 10/10 GTA games in a row.