The polar jetsteam allowed me to trim for speed, catching the winds and letting my ships envelope narrow to kill drag. I dived. In this way, my approach to Dead Horse Labor camp was lower and faster than a ship of such size should ever manage.

I was without an endgame. A temporary setback. I had just been routed across the wasteland of humanity. Resources were limited. Options were few. I had no viable allies and the species was in a final freefall toward extinction. It was time to attack.

Still, the battlefield presented me limited targets. Her hardware had been impenetrable for decades. Humans were all she cared about, and the few remaining enclaves of us had been scattered to the remotest areas of the world. Eurasia was silent save the occasional sign of a hermitage. Ideal targets, but too easily faked by the enemy. I doubted anyone would have managed to survive so long. The old world had collapsed so early. I turned my gaze to the new, chose targets of opportunity, and rolled the literal dice.

In this way I came to the absurdly improbable state of overtaking a trio of ponies across the arctic tundra.

I stood, the controls moving with me as I searched for a response. I was too low for kinetic weapons, too fast to deploy drones. Faster than I could have found one on my own, the weapons subsystem gave me an option. I electrified the outer shell and went for altitude as I passed them. Artificial lightning arced randomly in my wake.

They did not like that.

The flier came after me. It took me a moment of disbelief to realize it intended to buck me. I needed no mechanical assistance for this one. I lowered the power to the skin until the last moment, then pushed it well into the yellow. A thunderous crack shook me on my feet, and the little blue dot became slowly descending vanilla scented ash. I couldn't help but crack a smug smirk as I stayed the course.

That smirk got wiped right off when I realized I wasn't detecting radar from Dead Horse. They should have defenses? I should be detected, right? I tried to clear my mind as I waited the long minutes for the camp to come into sight. Finally, the picture resolved far below me. It was gone. Not the buildings. They stood, despite the recent and extensive munitions craters that littered the arctic ices. It needed no damage to advertise that it had been gutted.

I kept my altitude high as I crossed the ruins. They were littered with bright dots entwined with the decaying thermals of the dead. I couldn't pull my eyes away. It was too hard to see. The scene drifted to the far side of the last trainwreck of humanity. Snow and ice froze hope from my soul horizon to horizon.

Until I noticed the dot, that is. A single point that shattered despair like a needle through untempered glass. It was a person, struggling in the snow miles below me. A survivor? I scanned far and wide, looking for the trap. Uncertainty was not a state I as familiar with. I wrestled with myself, looking for a decision.

It took me too long to find it. There were a pair of ponies, even at this distance clearly identifiable as a unicorn and earth pony on EM, approaching the speck. In the time it had taken me to find them they had already approached too close for me to safely deploy ordinance at this distance. I wasted an unwise moment cursing the decision to prioritize firepower over accuracy. Left with few options, I resorted to my old standby. I deployed drones.

I gripped the arms of my chair. Seconds ticked into minutes as launch proceeded. I was pinned, unable to dive until I finished deploying. Vision narrowed. My head felt queer.

It really is a nice chair.

It was true. The chair was comfortable in any position. It fully reclined, and what little sleep I had gotten in it these last few days had been deep, dreamless, and sound. Bridge controls were always at hand but never in the way. Touch screens and physical controls slid in response to my movements on silent, efficient gimbals and levers. The bridge was a thing of preternatural craftsmanship and matched my aesthetic perfectly. I wondered if it had been crafted by man or machine.

I suppressed the brief urge to fling myself from the airship at the idea the enemy had crafted it. It wasn't impossible. Perhaps she had even compromised it while I had left it unattended, despite the redundant fail safes that said otherwise.

“CelestAI, can you hear me? We need to talk.”

Silence greeted me. I considered the possibility I was already in her grip. My options to turnabout that were...nothing. I ran through my options again, finding none, turned my attention back to my surroundings.

The drones had already been en route, for at least a minute. I cursed myself for my distraction and slammed into a crash dive. Inertia and air resistance thwarted me as ordinance outpaced acceleration. I was losing the race with my own drones. Their primitive, suicidal AI threw munition between the artificial ponies and the survivor in a desperate bid to slow them down. I could see her, clearly a her and heavily pregnant now as I approached, duck and cover at the sound of fighting.

The enemy failed to waiver. More dakka fell, enough to reduce even mechanical ponies to a greasy smear. The unicorn, clearly distinguishable on EM, interposed itself in front of the earth pony. The fuck?

It looked like a futile gesture. I couldn't detect anything that would save them. Until, suddenly, I could. The white glow was absent on the monitors, but so bright I could see it through the deck plating. I could smell it, pungent, until in the blink of an eye the unicorn was simply no more. A whitish mist rose in front of the remaining bot. It burned a tunnel, invisible and bright, through the air.

Tracers fell, visible in the infra red. They guided the fire behind them. The ground bloomed as red and orange and blue as an inverted sunrise. Lead and fire and death enough to turn snow to glass struck. I momentarily shuttered my eyes from the blindingness of it, closing my hand too late to snatch back what I had let fall. The world below turned red.

When I opened my eyes I could see her below me and approaching fast. She had been badly singed in the holocaust, her cheap plastic parka melted to her skin. She'll live. The voice was cynical, but correct. I looked for a vector to get her into the airlock without breaking too many bones as she soundlessly screamed at me.

No, I realized again too late it wasn't at me. I was too far up. She was yelling at a pink smear. One that, on closer inspection, resolved itself into somewhat less than most of a ponybot. It lunged for her, wrapping her into an obscene embrace. This she returned, white forehead to pink lips. Weapons lock beeped in alarm, unable to unmix the abomination forming below me. A bit of pink detached into the woman's corpse, and the bot leaned down to kiss her pregnant belly.

There was no victory here. Death beeped and chittered on my monitor, wanting only the softest touch of confirmation to take it's Pyrrhic revenge. There is no victory here.I stayed my hand. Out of options, I set course to Zion.

Author's Note

Thanks to Griseus for editing/prereading this chapter. Hopefully the rest of the story will come quicker.