Outer Perimeter of the Firebase
22:17 hours
Five (5) days after recorded First Contact

"Well, would you look at that..."

Sergeant Williams of the British Army looked through a dismounted AN/PVS-22 Gen-III night vision scope, scanning the distant tree line. Being in charge of this sector of the nighttime watch was tiring on him, seeing as he had not adjusted to a nocturnal sleep cycle just yet, having only arrived around two days ago. His duties included scanning across the distant plains, watching the trees for activity. As of the past two nights, he had not see anything other than the occasional animal.

Until tonight.

What was unmistakably the signature of one of the ponies was at the edge of the trees. It could very well have been another strange creature, if much of its body had not been clearly covered in armor in the green tint of the night vision scope. He had originally asked the armorer for a Thermal Imaging scope, perhaps the new Russian SVZ-N2, a very recent invention by the electronics company Sozvezdie that amplified the normal power of a thermal imaging scope by a factor of three.

Several more appeared from behind the trees, totaling up to somewhere around thirty. As one, they began to walk forward, coming across the field.

"Are you seeing this, laddy?" Williams asked the soldier next to him.

"Sergeant, how many bloody times do I have to ask you to stop talking like that?" The younger man said. "You may have been in the Falklands, but that does not give you the universal right to insult my brother-in-law's homeland with that attempt at Scottish."

"So what?" Williams said. "I need to call this in right now anyway."

With that, Williams opened up a connection with the 'Net' gear. Training in the gear usually took half of month of effort, and now that the Russian soldiers had been issued spares from the reserves, every element of the task force was connected to the highly integrated system.

"Lieutenant Brownfield?" He said once he had established a connection to his commanding officer.

"Go on, Sergeant." The voice said in reply.

"There's a group of around thirty ponies headed across the field, in armor, and I'd wager they're not coming for lunch."

"Then you'd bloody well stop them. I'll call this in, wake up part of the garrison."

High above the camp, the single MQ-4C Triton still in the air panned its camera towards the open field beneath the forest, looking for the guards spotted by the soldiers.

"Switch on the thermal cam." One of the men next to the technician suggested.

"Getting to it." The tired technician said, struggling to keep himself awake this late at night. Even though it was only ten at night, he had been operating the Triton for the past eight hours.

The camera suddenly switched from a green-tinted night-vision camera to a thermal imaging camera. Thirty-two bright spots showed up on it, halfway across the field and moving slowly, with dark blue spots on their bright orange bodies representing the areas that were covered in armor.

"Well, there they are." The technician whispered. "Somebody pass this along. It's confirmed."

Suddenly, the bright spots representing the ponies flared brighter for a moment, and then disappeared.

"Technician Moore, ground forces have reported that they have disappeared. What do you see?" The second of the two men manning the station next to him asked.

"Confirmed, they have disappeared off of my scopes." The technician replied. "Switching to other cameras now."

With a turn of a knob, the camera started to cycle through various modes on the enhanced night-capable Triton, before finally stopping on Ultra-violet.

"There we go..." The technician said. "Alert the infantry, I have a theory. The ponies have probably switched all visible light they emit to the far-Ultraviolet range. Levels are minimal, but still detectable."

Indeed, on his screen, a mass of Ultraviolet light was visible. While far Ultraviolet was not visible, except with rare conditions, to humans, it would still be close enough that the presumed energy to shift light to it would be minimal in comparison to bending all light around it.

"Sergeant, Overwatch reports that the ponies have stopped emitting visible light, and instead the light emitted is in the far-Ultraviolet spectrum, or something like that." The corporal next to Sergeant Williams said.

"Wonderful." Williams muttered. "Not like that little tidbit of information will help us. We don't have anything capable of detecting that, as far as I know."

"Do we have any UV lights?" One suggested. "They can be used to see it, in a way. So if we rig some up, they'll be visible!"

A short pause, before the Sergeant spoke up.

"That might work." Williams said. "Send a request to the field hospital to send a UV filter up. We attach it to a bright light, like that useless, miniature searchlight that we were issued, and bang! We have a way of seeing them."

"I'll hurry to it. We only have five minutes until they reach us, by the pilot's count." One private said, jumping out of the trench and hurrying into the camp.

In the meantime, Sergeant Williams and three other soldiers hastily unpacked and assembled a small, cylindrical searchlight that they had been issued for night duty. It was mounted on a low tripod and designed to reach up to 1.5 kilometers, with a width of half a kilometer at the end.

Two minutes later, as they had finished assembling it and setting the tripod up just outside of the trench, several dozen Americans and Russians jumped into the trenches, rifles at the ready. They had all been warned via their 'Net' units what was going on, and so their arrival announced the reinforcement of the line.

Thirty second after the last of them arrived, the Private came running back, clutching a circular object one foot in diameter. He ran up to Williams, both of them quickly working to fit the UV filter onto the miniature searchlight. Finally, with a final clamp secured, it was ready.

Sergeant Williams flipped the switch to turn it on, the light going through the filter, with only a dark purple band of visible light reaching through it, aside from the invisible UV light. Williams moved the searchlight down, the light reaching across the field...

... And illuminating a mass of armored ponies just twenty feet away.

The invisibility dropped half a second later as the ponies surged forward, and infantrymen on the line opened fire. To the Sergeant's left, an American opened up with a HK416, blasting out rounds as fast as the bolt cycled. Many of them seemed to strike invisible barriers of various colors, but even more found their marks, dropping half of the force before they could reach the trench.

The rest of the ponies, a little under twenty, jumped down into the trench. To his left, a unicorn jumped down into the trench, horn glowing a bright red. A bolt launched from it, striking the Private next to Williams before he had finished turning. Williams brought up his L128A1, the British version of the Benelli M4, before unloading four 12-gauge Flechette rounds into the unicorn, breaking the barrier and shattering the guard's skull.

Williams ducked down, continuing to shoot rounds whenever he saw a guard. To his right, the American he had seen earlier ran up, wielding a M32 Milkor MGL. The American fired a 40mm grenade down the trench at two ponies that were launching bolts at them from a corner in the trench, blowing the first one apart and riddling the second with shrapnel.

On his sixth shot, Williams realized he was out of ammo. He quickly pulled out his standard-issue Browning Hi-Power and squeezed the trigger, the round impacting - and deflecting off of - a unicorn's shield. The second and third, however, punched through, wounding the guard.

The firing along the line slowly died down, replaced by groaning and occasional yells. Not for the last time, Sergeant Williams cursed the fact that the British contingent had not been supplies with 'Net' units at the time of their arrival at the camp, or, following that line of though, when the politicians had sent his damn unit to fight in Africa against the SRN.

Williams flipped the safety on his pistol, quickly stowing it away and picking up his shotgun. He quickly looked around, taking in the sights. They had beaten off the attack, but had sustained their first casualties.

And, in his opinion, they would not be the last.

Author's Note

Something that surprised me was that somebody predicted the first part of this chapter, almost to the very detail. It was kinda funny, and it made me double-check to see if I had published it too soon by mistake.

Note that I am not a scientist. I did all the research I could on UV light, and thus this is as close to reality as a guy like me who didn't take a college course (and whom has not finished High School yet) can get.

Anyway, here is the new chapter.