Progress

The pegasus was sure of one thing: she had to be fast.  If that damnable spy had meant what she said it meant they were close.  It was only a matter of time.

Normally navigating the twilit streets of Vanhoover would be difficult, even for a pegasus, but not tonight.  Fueled by adrenaline and fear, it seemed that the light green pegasus made all the right turns, ducking through alleys and over buildings incase somepony was watching her.

Had the pegasus not been so focused on her destination, she might have noted a sort of abstract beauty in the black monoliths that were skyscrapers, with only a few lighted windows that marked truly dedicated.  But she didn’t see those things.  She thought only of returning to base as quickly as possible.

A mere hooffull of minutes later and she was soaring over a part of the city where few of the buildings were taller than a single story.  In this part of the city streetlamps went unlit, and ponies never left their homes after dark.  For all their prattling that Equestria was a safe place, without much in the way of fear, slums like this were the dark secret of Equestria.  Everypony pretended that the world was bright and innocent and happy.  Everypony pretended that everypony else found their one true calling in life and lived happily ever after.  Sometimes that did happen, but not always.  This putrid slum was a testament to that.

The pegasus alighted on the partially gravel, partially smooth stone road, and barged into a crumbling brick ruin.  As soon as the door opened she began shouting orders.

“Biggs, Purple, go grab the foal.  Hurry!  The rest of you, burn every file.  Every scrap of paper.  Pack what we can carry, and burn the rest.   Move!”  Without waiting to see if anypony even heard the orders, the pegasus bodily shoved a desk into the center of the room.  It toppled over, along with the files on it.  Then she rushed to a large box of papers and threw them on too.

Two ponies, Biggs and Purple, slipped out the door to carry out their appointed task.  Nine other ponies began to throw whatever meager furniture and files they could find into the growing pile in the center of the room.  Several began to tie up bedrolls and gather what food stuff they could find.  Somepony lit the pile on fire.

Within minutes, twelve packs waited by the door and a blazing fire occupied the center of the room.  With a word from the pegasus the nine ponies present took a pack and went their separate ways into the night.

“Ice.”  A white unicorn mare was grabbing her pack.  She stopped and looked at the pegasus.

“Boss?”

“Do you have the amulet?”

The unicorn looked guiltily at the floor.  She knew what came next.  “It’s in your pack, boss.”

The pegasus nodded and the Ice hurried out the door.  Closing the distance to her waiting pack with a sweep of her wings, she removed the amulet.

It was a beautiful, if simple affair.  A brilliant ruby, carefully cut, hung from a brass chain.  Etched on the amulet were a series of magical runes.  Such amulets are incredibly expensive things, and while not technically illegal they were heavily frowned upon.  If one knew the command word, anypony of any race could activate it’s enchantment.  It was said most of them were relics from before the time of Celestia, when they were used by knights on fanciful quests or soldiers in times of war.  This amulet was not one of those.  It was new.  Her employer had had it made, and gave it to her for expressly this situation.

Biggs and Purple slipped in through a back door, an unconscious filly in tow.  A bit of blood matted the fur around her temple.

They deposited the filly in front of the pegasus, took their packs, and disappeared.

The pegasus looped the brass chain around the filly’s neck.  She reached down and took the ruby in a hoof, then her resolve wavered.  What if nopony reached the building in time?  What if this poor, innocent filly died so they could escape?

The moment passed.  What was the life of one filly compared to the fate of Equestria?  She spoke the command word.

A great bout of fire burst from the face of the amulet.  Any surface the flames licked instantly started ablaze.  It was more than enough to reduce the crumbling building to ash and destroy any possible evidence left behind.

Dropping the amulet, and letting the filly sag to the floor, the pegasus took the final pack and disappeared behind the building.  She walked a dozen blocks before taking off into the night.  It wouldn’t do to be caught now.

With a final glance at the city she had spent the last six months in, the pegasus turned and flew east, to the rendezvous.

Sapphire Bolt was elated.  Three longs months spent posed as a shopkeeper at a toy store, and she’d finally found where the chaos cult was hiding.

She had attended meeting after meeting, from official city meetings to illicit deals in the slums.  She had talked to everypony she could find.  She had scoured the city back and forth, and she finally had what she was looking for.

It complicated matters that so few ponies even believed in the chaos cults, and even fewer were willing to speak of them.  ‘Anti-celestia?’  they all said ‘But who would want to do that?’  It was infuriating.  What’s more, she couldn’t just ask random ponies on the street.  If she did word could get back to the cult and they would disappear.

She’d long suspected that a particular neighborhood in the slums was the center of their activities, but short of negotiating a deal with the local swat team and police departments to search every home, she had no idea how to find out where they were.  Finally a homeless ruffian had told her of some strange goings on in a abandoned building that side of Vanhoover, in the neighborhood she suspected, and only after he’d received a hundred bits.

And now she was here, galloping through the streets of Vanhoover.  She didn’t really have a plan yet, of course, but maybe she could just improvise.  There would certainly be more than one or two of them, so force was hardly an option.  She’d have to watch the place for a while, confirm her suspicions, and things could go from there.

Sapphire rounded the last corner, and stopped dead.  Further down the street was the building she was looking for, and from it great licks of fire leaped into the air.

All her plans of surveillance forgotten, the purple earth pony sprinted to the building and hit the door with her shoulder.  The door crumbled away from the impact.

The whole building was just smoke and fire.  She couldn’t see anything, not even her hoof in front of her face.  Against her better judgement Bolt took several steps into the room, shouting for anypony.  Then she stepped on something soft, or softer than stone at any rate.

It was a filly, lying unmoving while fire raged around her licking at her fur.  Sapphire Bolt took the filly’s leg in her mouth and dragged her outside.

After moving the filly a few feet from the burning building Bolt became aware she was severely burned but still breathing.  What interested her more was the necklace around the filly’s neck.

Reaching out a tentative hoof, she lifted the chain, revealing a glittering ruby.  A ruby etched with runes.

Bolt yanked the necklace off the filly, breaking the chain.  Was this the source of all the commotion?  A filly, and presumably her friends, playing in an abandoned building.  While not common, it was not unheard of for pony’s to accidentally find amulets like this one, and sometimes they even discovered the command word.

Bolt angrily pitched the necklace across the street, and at that moment a firepony chose to approach her.  He looked between the mare and the filly for a moment.

“Help her!” Bolt snapped.

The firepony bent down to attend to the filly,  Bolt retrieved the amulet and began to trudge back to her temporary home, defeated.

A dozen ponies were in a small clearing in a small forest.  Some of them had been there for days, others only a few hours.  All of them were full of dust from the roads.

Most of them laid on their bedrolls or else stood around the fire in the center of the clearing.  One pony did not however.  A light green pegasus stood at the edge of the forest, staring into the trees.

A metal device was about one foreleg.  There was a small lighted panel for readouts and messages, a disc of white material, and a series of buttons.

A white unicorn approached her.

“Have you contacted him yet?”

The pegasus sighed and turned to face him.  “No.  I’ve been trying, but there’s been no word.  I sent an emergency report back, but all I said was that the operations in Vanhoover were shut down.”

“Maize-”

“No, it’s not okay.  I failed.  My first ever operation as a sergeant, and I failed.”  The pegasus briefly entertained notions that her boss would send a ‘cleanup crew’ to kill anypony who knew anything.  She knew it was foolish, that such things only happened in books, but some days her life felt like a book.

As if on cue, the device on her foreleg began to beep.

“It’s him.”  The pegasus said, glancing down at the device.  The unicorn left her.

She nervously pressed a few buttons with her muzzle, and within moments a stallion appeared over the white disc.  Or rather, it was a holographic image of a stallion.  The image’s colors were somewhat diluted, and slightly transparent, and the image was only a hoof in diameter, but her boss seemed no less imposing.

“Si-Sir, there’s been a situation.  Our campaign in Vanhoover had to be abandoned.”  The stallion was silent for a moment that seemed to stretch into eternity.

“Were you discovered?”  It sounded as if he was standing right in front of her, rather than being thousands of miles away on the opposite coast.

The pegasus swallowed nervously.  “I...We...I–”

“Agent, were you discovered?”  The stallion’s voice took on a hint of steel, each of his words becoming clipped.

“No, sir.  When an operative of the covert guard got too close I immediatly shut down all operation and evacuated.”  The stallion was silent again, for too long this time.

“Sir,”  the pegasus broke the silence, “It was my responsibility, my choice.  I’ll take any punish-”  The stallion cut her off with an upraised hoof.

“Maize, you’re certain that any evidence that could implicate us was destroyed?”  He knew her name.  The pegasus was almost giddy at the thought, but instead responded with a sharp nod.

“Then you made the right call.  I would sooner a thousand missions had to be evacuated than a single one discovered.  You were briefed on the return route should an event like this happen, correct?”

“Yes sir, before the mission.”

“Well, here’s to your safe return.”  The boss cut the communications.

Maize returned to the group.  “That was command.  We are in the clear and will begin the return trip home.  Unfortunately, since things did not go as expected, we can’t simply cram into a train and return to Baltimore.  They could be watching us.

“We are to split into groups of no more than two and each go our separate ways.  In no event is anyone to board a train or come within a league of Canterlot, understand?”  The group murmured their affirmative.

Maize looked into the dying sunlight.  “We’ll break at dawn.”

Thousands of miles away an older stallion with flecks of grey around his muzzle stepped off of a luminescent blue panel.  His once vibrant coat of light brown, and mane of dark brown, was dulled by age.  His cutie mark was obscured by a white lab-coat.

The walls were made of a strange bluish-grey metal.  Put together in large blocks they had been fused together, a process that only made them stronger.  Wire’s ran in and out of the walls, heavily insulated wires made of intricate alloy fine tuned to transmit signals flawlessly.  The room was large, large enough that between the darkness and the machinery that one could not stand in the center and see all four walls.  The only light in the room came from the luminescent blue panel in the floor.

The panel was an odd affair.  Roughly four feet by four feet, it was made of what appeared to be blue glass, but every hoof-length or so and black strip perhaps a half-inch in length ran along the length of the glass.  This pattern was repeated on both sides of the rectangle, creating a grid of small blue panels about the same area as a hoof.

He took a long, deep breath, closing his green eyes as he did so, and then slowly exhaled.  Months of planning had all gone to waste.  Being discovered now would’ve destroyed everything but it was still a setback he could have done without.

Still, the end was approaching.  He pressed a button on the device around his foreleg, a much more intricate version of the one his agent had worn.  A burst of static sounded, and then the voice of his head of production filled the room.

“Sir?”

“Increase production of laser rifles.  I want to make sure every employee can have one in hoof.”

The train trundled down the tracks, the constant sound of the wheels clacking against the iron was always present.  Black smoke billowed from the engine at the front, rising and dispersing into the air.  The landscape whirred by, faster than anypony could have dreamed of half a century ago ago.

Sapphire Bolt didn’t really care about the farmland rolling by, or the smoke from the engine, or the bright and colorful interior of the train compartment.  She didn’t even care about the dozen or so travel-worn ponies she saw as the train whizzed by.  She did stop to ponder where they were going, since there wasn’t a town for miles and the only thing in the direction they were going was the frozen peaks of the Unicorn Range.

But after a moment of pondering she couldn’t really bring herself to care about that either.

There were other passengers in the compartment, hurtling along for Canterlot to destinations unknown.  The mood was bright and cheery, but Bolt just didn’t care.

Ten years.  Ten long years as an agent in the Covert Guard and this was all she amounted to.  She had spent the last three months in Vanhoover, posing as a shopkeeper, while trying to investigate the rumors of a chaos cult.  She had spent eight hours a day standing behind the counter of a toy shop, and the rest of her time had been bent on finding the cult.  In the end all her leads had turned up false.  It had just been a foal and an ancient amulet of terrible power.

Since signing on to the Covert Guard she had had one exciting job.  She had been tasked to infiltrate the highest levels of the Canterlot Society for the Betterment of Children.  And she’d pulled it off flawlessly.  Oh, sure, there’d been no anti-Celestia or anti-Equestria activity but the accountant and the founder had been embezzling charity funds.  After that it had been dead end job after dead end job.  Nearly every assignment ended like the latest one.

Memories dredged out of the depths of Bolt’s mind.  A little wooden counter, with a cash register.  The blank walls.  Inane chatter.  Boring, useless customers.

Bolt rubbed a temple with a hoof. It was bad enough she had a terrible job; she couldn't afford to live in the past.  Bolt turned her attention to the train compartment.  It was colorful, with a pink ceiling and a pink runner on an otherwise wooden floor.  There were a series of seats, with room enough for two.  Two seats would face each other, with one facing the front of the train and the other facing the back.  The cushions were a deep red, but the seats themselves were made of wood.  Even the wood of the compartment striked Bolt as being especially colorful.  The whole thing came across as being very bright and happy.  Other ponies were in the compartment, having conversations Bolt could not hear.  And Bolt didn’t care.

The world became a blur, and then became black.  Bolt seemed to float in the darkness for a second, then the world burst into color.  It was fuzzy at first, an unidentifiable mass of brown and blue, with darker and lighter patches of color in splotches.  Then the colors came into sharp relief, with the fuzzy masses resolving themselves into well defined shapes.

Bolt saw a large, ornately carved wardrobe, which had been carefully painted.  It was a mural of a beautiful princess of myth and legend.  There was a toy chest next to the wardrobe, but she had long ago filled it with materials with which she could build: bolts and nuts, bits of scrap metal, screws, nails, rocks, mesh filters, wooden scraps, anything she could scrounge up.

On the opposite wall, at the foot of the bed she was lying on, was a fairly plain writing desk.  Instead of books of philosophy or works of classic literature there were books on designing and engineering, books of science.  Rather than the works of a young artist trying to find her own there were diagrams for swords, reinforced axles for carts, and a device that stored eggs efficiently.

Then Bolt became acutely aware of the unicorn standing in the room.  He was tall and slender, like most male unicorns.  A cutie mark of a blank canvas adorned his flank.  His face was a mask of rage.

“Sapphire, what is this?”  A diagram trapped in his magic waved itself before the young earth pony.  Bolt had gotten carried away.  Father had said she was only supposed to work on art, not her ‘foolish science’.  Bolt stared at a point just over her father’s shoulder.

“It’s a… it’s art.”

“Pah!  This isn’t art.  This,”–he gestured at the wardrobe–“is art.”

“It is art.”  Bolt insisted.  It was a sketch of a sphere, where she had labeled the functions necessary to make those shapes.  She’d learned about it in a book in her father’s library.  “It’s a sphere.”

“Why does it have–”  Bolt’s father turned the diagram to face him “–math all over it?”

“It’s...It’s how you make a sphere.”  Her father gave her a long look.  Then he put all her papers and books into the parts chest.

“What are you doing?”  The filly demanded.  Her father said nothing.

His work done, Bolt’s father wrapped the chest with his magic and dragged it from the room.

“Wait, dad, you can’t”  Bolt sprung from her bed.  Hooves hitting the floor, she began to run as fast as her little legs would allow.  The door slammed shut behind her father, locking from the outside.

“You can have these back once you make some real art.”  Bolt heard her father’s hooves ring out against the hard floor as he walked away.  She curled up, weeping with despair.

Then she was somewhere else.  She was standing in the drawing room with her father, who was staring at an empty canvas.

“You can’t deny it now!”  Bolt shouted, turning to show her cutie mark to her father.  A gear was prominently displayed.  “I’m destined to be an engineer.”

Her father stood there for a long moment, staring at the canvas.  “I should’ve made your mother take you.  She was an earth pony, like you.  Just a maid.  It was a mistake.  I couldn’t let her stay, what would everypony think if I Leopardo Da Pongolo the third married a maid.  I couldn’t do right by her, but that didn’t mean our child deserved the same fate.”  He turned to look at her.

 “Six generations of the most prolific artists in history, and you’ve broken that.  I brought you into my home.  I sheltered you.  I tarnished my reputation for you, and this is how you repay me?  Your stepmother is right, I think.  You would be happier in a boarding school.”

A hoof suddenly connected with her father’s face.  “How dare you.  How dare you insult my mother.”  Her father looked at her dispassionately.  When it became apparent that Bolt had no further retaliation in mind he opened his mouth, then closed it and opened it once more.

“You’ll be going to the Fillydelphia academy of science.  The train leaves tomorrow.  Please make sure you take all the possessions you’ll need.”  He walked back through the doors of the drawing room.

Bolt jumped awake, nearly upending the cider in front of her.  She must have fallen asleep.  She was sitting on a stool in a dingy but busy bar.  The whole establishment was made of warped, twisted lumber.  Through cracks in the wall darkness was visible outside.

The room itself was arranged like a saloon, with a bar against the far wall from the door.  There were a smattering of tables and chairs littered throughout the main floor.  Ponies, mostly earth ponies, crowded at the tables and chairs, all ordering varieties of liquor.  They were all grubby, working ponies, who had come to this place after a hard day of laboring under a hot, merciless sun.

Bolt’s train had arrived in Canterlot that afternoon.  Going to the palace she had been quickly debriefed.  Now, until she was contacted by a fellow Covert Guard agent, Bolt had nothing to do.  When she had first come to Canterlot she had been amazed by the upperclass of the city.  She had lived her whole life in the presence of the upper class but the Canterlot elite were the envy of upper class ponies everywhere.  Her father had nearly turned green with envy at the mere mention of Celestia’s court artisans.

As the years had trudged onward Bolt had begun to see through the illusion of those ponies.  It was all thinly veiled insults and unhappiness.  Sure, these ponies were unhappy but at least they were upfront about it.  They didn’t try to hide behind nice clothes and fake marriages.

The bar was located in a place known as ‘The Shadow of Canterlot’, or ‘The Shadow’ for short.  If one exited from the north of Canterlot they would find the Shadow at the base of the mountain, very nearly underneath Canterlot proper.  The farmers of the countryside came here, those that could not afford Canterlot itself, those that could see through the lies.  These ponies were the butt of a joke that the world played against them.  The most honest ponies in the world, and they were forced here, they were laughed at and spat upon by the upper echelons of society.

But what if, thought Bolt, these ponies are the way they are because of their station in life.  Maybe if they were raised to the status of lords they would quickly become deceitful.Bolt couldn’t reach any conclusion, and instead took a drink from her cider.

Her father had offered to pay for her education, but Bolt had refused.  He only offered because he believed he had to to keep his reputation.  At least Celestia had waived her education fees after her induction to the Covert Guard.  With a bitter smile Bolt leaned her head back, holding her mug of cider horizontally so as to drain the last golden drops from it.  When she lowered her gaze back to the countertop a letter sat in front of her.

The whole world seemed to slow down.  In a heartbeat Bolt looked at everypony in her field of vision.  There was nopony out of place, nopony suspicious.  The bartender was on the far side of the bar from where Bolt sat.  Bolt spun off of her stool, only to stumble and fall heavily to the floor.  There was nothing.  Regaining her feet, Bolt sat back down on the stool.

Finally given up on seeing the agent involved, Bolt took the letter in her hoof.  There was no marking on it to indicate who it needed to go to.  One can always tell when a unicorn not skilled in the finer points of telekinesis writes a letter, the letters always come out a little blocky.  At least that’s what her professor of Equestrian had said.  It was a trademark of the Captain of the Covert Guard she served.

The letter read:

        ‘The smithy.’

Bolt grimaced, tossed a few bits on the counter, rose from her stool, and started to trudge up to Canterlot.

Red was happy.  For the first time in his life he was walking the streets of Canterlot.  Canterlot!  It was here that famous ponies walked the streets, as if they were any other pony.  And the Princesses were here, well most of the princesses anyway.  Princess Celestia and Luna ruled all of Equestria from here, while Princess Cadence was overseeing the Crystal Empire’s transition into Equestria.  Princess Twilight lived in Ponyville, but Red wasn’t sure what she did, and besides his mother always said that Celestia and Luna had all the power anyway.

Presently, a unicorn was giving some sort of street performance.  He was standing at the top of a four-story building.  Red couldn’t make out what he was saying but the crowd gathered at the base of the building were cheering up at him.  Then Red turned at a corner and lost sight of them.  Canterlot was so cultured.

Red looked over to the other side of the street to see unicorn stallion wearing a suit and sporting a monocle.  It was Fancy Pants, what other unicorn was sporting that well made mane?

Red called out to the dignified unicorn, but he must not have heard him.  Red called out again, and the unicorn lifted his chin higher, nearly prancing down the street, but he did not look at Red.  Drat, he didn’t hear.

Red had been attending an art school in Trottingham, a small farming community to the west of Manehattan.  The day he graduated a mysterious pony had approached him and given him a letter.  The letter had instructed him to go to the new Princesses favorite donut shop three weeks after her coronation.  He had received that letter two months in advance of the coronation, giving him plenty of time to prepare.

Of course Twilight Sparkle was the newest princess, and her favorite doughnut shop was Doenut Joe’s.  Joe had been advertising that all over Equestria, after all.

Entering the shop, Red took a seat and ordered a doughnut from Pony Joe himself.  Canterlot really was full of famous ponies.  A large silver platter was toted from the counter to the table, a single doughnut in the center.

Taking a bite from the doughnut, Red set it back on the platter to stare out the window.  Then he perceived that somepony was passing by him from inside the restaurant.  Turning to look, there was nopony there.  In the restaurant there was just himself and Pony Joe.

Red turned his attention back to the doughnut, only to discover that it was gone.  In it’s place a letter sat on the tray.  Rather than question why he would be delivered a letter in this fashion, or where the delivery pony had gone, why his doughnut was gone, or even the possibility that his doughnut had spontaneously transformed into a sealed letter, Red took the letter in a hoof and ripped open the envelope.

The letter read:

        “The old smithy, beneath the castle.”

Without questioning anything, or looking for his doughnut, Red went off to ask a guard about how to reach the old smithy.

The old smithy was a small, dilapidated room deep within the mountain that Canterlot jutted from.  It was so deep in the now abandoned reaches of the castle that most of the castle staff did not know of it’s existence.  As such it made for an ideal meeting place for one who did not wish to be seen.

The tunnels, which were a small city within the mountain, were relics from a time before the founding of Canterlot.  When the unicorns had used the gem reserves deep below this mountain for their talismans, assorted magic apparel, and wealth.

The unicorns had built this place as an all-purpose community.  It had been designed as a military fortification, a gem and metal processing area, civilian housing, and had a bank for holding gems and gold.

There was an official contingency plan that if Canterlot fell, the Princesses and Royal Guard could fall back to this place, since it was easily defensible.  Of course all other access points to these mines had been sealed when Canterlot had been founded.  If the enemy proved to be overwhelming after the Royal Guard had dug in, there would be nowhere to run.  Then they would have little choice but surrender or fight to the death, which is why that particular contingency plan was a ‘last option’.

As Bolt exited the portcullis that led to the particular landing where the smithy was she had to step over the fallen remains of a statue.  She saw the first light she had in hours flickering out of the partially obstructed doorway to the smithy.  Instead of a torch Bolt had relied on a gift from the Captain, a talisman that allowed her to see in total darkness.  It was so useful that it really was a shame that she could not take it on most jobs.  It would seem out of ordinary for some lowly shopkeep or janitor to have an intricately crafted, powerful, expensive talisman.

Bolt made her way to the doorway the light emanated from.  A stone archway had collapsed in front of the door, blocking it completely.  Some force had taken the crumbled mass of stone and had flung it aside.  Entering the smithy Bolt saw a single, armored unicorn stallion standing in a far corner of the room.  He was older, his grey mane flecked with white, and white peppered around his muzzle.  His coat was a lighter grey, well-maintained.  His cutie mark was a black shadow of a pony.  Bolt didn’t know what his special talent was, he’d never told her, but she assumed that he was adept at hiding or some other stealth related activity.  A single torch sat in a bracket on the wall.

“Captain.”

“Operative Bolt.”  Bolt waited for a moment to allow the Captain to explain why she had been called here.  Likely, he had another mission for her to embark upon but even that would be out of the ordinary, as there were usually weeks or even months between assignments.

Bolt coughed, drawing the Captain’s attention.

“Operative, we are waiting on your partner.  Please sit down and wait.”  Bolt rocked back, her eyes dilating in surprise.  Ponies in her line of work didn’t have partners.  Partners created a dangerous liability if one of the team was captured.  The only time she’d even come close to having a partner is when the Captain sent another Operative to the same location to investigate the same happenings as she had, but neither of them had been told of the others existence.  In the end that had created problems and both herself and the other pony had become aware that somepony was operating on the sidelines, leading them to spy on one another, each believing the other was the enemy.  It had culminated with a hoof-fight across the rooftops of Las Ponysus, the non-pegasi version Las Pegasus.

Bolt knew better than to voice her concerns, and instead went to the corner opposite the Captain at the far end of the room, and waited.

An hour later a red earth pony walked into the old smithy.  He saw the single torch in the brazier on the wall, an armored unicorn stallion in one corner of the room and a purple earth pony mare in another.  The mare appeared to be staring at her hooves, while the stallion was staring intently at the red pony.

“Is this the old smithy?”  The red pony asked.

“Yes, it is.”  The stallion spoke up.  His voice was a bass rumble like a low thunderclap.  “I hope you didn’t have too much trouble finding the place.”

“It was no trouble at all.  I only got lost twice and had to ask a few guards for directions.”  The red pony smiled proudly.

“You what!”  The mare looked up from her hooves, her voice high and grating.

“I asked a guar–”

“I know!  You can’t just ask a guard when you find a note telling you to come to a dark ruin under a castle!  Are you trying to blow everything!?”

The red pony shrunk under the outraged shouting of the mare.  “I’m sorry, I didn’t–”

“Captain, who is this fool?  Why is he here.”

“Operative Bolt, this is your partner Red.”  Bolt stopped her ranting and stared slack jawed at Red.  The stallion waved at her.

“B-B-But he’s an idiot!”  Red winced at the barb.  The Captain watched with a neutral expression.

“Operative, these orders come from the top.”  Bolt knew what that meant.  She had no authority to question an order from Princess Celestia.

“Alright.  Alright!  Captain, why are we here exactly?”

“I was told to gather you here and wait.”  At that exact moment a cloaked figure appeared in the center of the room with a loud crack.  It was taller than any of the other ponies in the room, and longer.  A large white horn jutted out of the hood that concealed the figure’s face.

Bolt and the Captain bowed to Celestia.  Red simply stood there, unsure of who the newcomer was or why the others were prostrating themselves before it.

“Please, I’ve asked you not to do that.”  The figure’s voice was flowing a melodious.  Bolt and the Captain righted themselves.

“Ma’am, what business is there.”  It was the Captain who spoke, a note of reverence present in his gravelly voice.

“Captain, we must first attend to our newcomer.”  The Captain nodded his assent.

Celestia approached Red.  “Red, you were a different pony before you came here.  You had different dreams, different loyalties.  You must leave that behind.  Now, if you chose to accept it, your loyalties lie with all of Equestria.  Do you consent, Red Remington?”

Red nodded mutely.

“Then I hereby admit you into the Covert Guard.”  Celestia turned to the Captain.

“Now, time is short, Captain.  There are whispers and secrets surrounding a company on the east coast of Equestria, near Baltimore.”  Bolt paled and even the Captain nervously gulped.

“I must return before my presence is missed.”  Celestia left a scroll for the Captain and disappeared, golden light surrounding her form as a loud crack sounded once more.

“Who was that?”  Red asked.  Nopony answered him.

“Captain, why am I being paired with this fool?  Why did the CG seek him out?  Why did Celestia deliver those orders?”  The Captain ignored Bolt’s questions and instead wrapped the scroll in his gray magic, undoing the seal.

“Captain, what’s going on!”

“Operatives, the two of you are going to infiltrate the Progress company.”