Moonlight

Chapters

1 - Smoke
2 - The Quiet Earth
3 - Mean Green Machine
5 - Reclaim(ed)
4 - Extremely Loud and Dangerously Close

1 - Smoke

Smoke blotted out the sky. It was dark gray and acrid, the kind that comes when a house catches fire. The kind that clogs the nose, floods into the lungs, and fills the vision with salty tears. It was all Quicksilver had seen for days now. Nothing but smoke.

He didn’t know when he had lost Morning Glory. She’d been right by his side on the flight out of Fillydelphia, but somewhere along the way, he’d realized she wasn’t there. He’d lost a lot of ponies on the flight out of Fillydelphia.

When they had first appeared, the dark things that came from the ground and destroyed everything in their wake, thousands had fled the city. “Go to the stardock,” they’d said. “The stardock. We can escape if we get to the stardock.”

Quicksilver didn’t know who’d come up with that plan, or if they were even still alive. He didn’t know if anypony else was still alive at all. The damn smoke wafted through the air like a blanket that hugged the ground. For all he knew, he could be all by himself or in the middle of a crowd of thousands.

A tiny wail from below him reminded him that there were, at least, two left alive in the haze. He tucked the makeshift sling tighter around his neck and tried to cover the foal inside. The little filly stared up at him with big, silver eyes. Her entire coat and mane, much like his, were colored matte gray from the smoke.

“Just a little more,” he told her, then took off running. Somewhere in the distance, not sure whether it was in front or behind him, he heard a terrible roar. It was like something between the screams of a pony and a dragon, and it was a sound he had been hearing more and more ever since he had left Fillydelphia. Quicksilver ran faster.

His rump had a silver arrow plastered on it. Running was how he had gotten his cutie mark. It was how he had gotten his wife, his job, his whole life. In stadiums they had chanted his name when he tore across the track; no pony had been faster. Now all he heard around him was the clopping of his own hooves on asphalt and the distant sound of terror come to life.

No, don’t think about that, he told himself. Just focus on moving forward. That’s what he always did in races. Even in a stadium of twenty thousand ponies, it all fell away until it was just the track and himself. Like he was running through oblivion, no end in sight, just his hooves and the ground. Now, with the smoke-choked road, he really was running through oblivion.

Then, just like a curtain being pulled open, he emerged into the sunlight. In front of the rolling cloud of black smoke was the Green Hills Stardock. For all the talk it had gotten in the papers, there wasn’t much to see; just a massive field of concrete stretched as far as the eye could see. What was most important, however, was what stood in the middle. Pointing up to the sky like a gigantic needle, a rocket stood at the ready.

Just sixty years before, Princess Luna had come back from the moon, and now ponies had already established a colony on it. Quicksilver had heard the news, seen the grainy film they had brought back, but it wasn’t until he saw the rocket up close that he believed they could really go to space. On a normal day, he might have stayed and gawked at it, but instead he sprinted toward it, muscles screaming and begging for rest.

The spacedock was surrounded by a thick ring of Equestrian soldiers. Many of them were bloodstained, with ripped armor and weapons that looked like they had been dragged most of the way to the stardock. Their eyes were vacant and stared off into a distance that wasn’t there. They opened ranks just enough for Quicksilver to run through, then shut again. He looked over their shoulders into the smoke, trying to see if anypony would emerged from behind him. No one did.

In front of him, a mare in what might have once passed for a white lab coat popped up. Behind her, a great red elevator rose up to a tiny door in the side of the rocket. Dimly, in the gloomy haze, he could see ponies boarding.

“You’re it,” she said, an accusation rather than a question.

She looked up to the rocket, then back to Quicksilver. Her gaze held on him, cold and emotionless. Not of somepony who didn’t care, but of one who had watched everything she cared about ripped away right in front of her. All the while, a rumbling beneath Quicksilver’s hooves grew heavier.

Smoke billowed out from beneath the rocket. No, not smoke, steam, from the water they put beneath them. Somepony had told him that once. He shook his head.

“Sir, sir,” the mare was saying, “we’re already stretching the load limit as it is; we won’t be able to—”

“I know.” He used his hooves to carefully unwrap his foal and present it to the mare. She was a unicorn, he realized, when a field of pink magic—like her coat and mane—enveloped his little filly. “Before the radio cut out, it said children would be allowed on board.”

Her shoulders slacked, and the mare let out a breath. Quicksilver realized he towered over her. If he had wanted, he could have shoved past her and onto the elevator himself. But he wasn’t there to start fights. He wasn’t going to leave Morning Glory; all he had was one last job to do. So, he backed off while she took his filly away.

By the time he realized he hadn’t even held her one last time, his little filly, the lab coat mare was already on the elevator. Instead, he could only watch them ascend up the side of the rocket with a numbness in his hooves. Behind him, he heard the steady clatter of rifles, the zaps of magical weapons, and the cries of soldiers. The monsters had found him at last.

But it was okay. While the world collapsed around him, Quicksilver watched and thought, just for a moment, he could see the mare enter the rocket, carrying his child onboard. Then his view was gone as massive blast shields raised up from the ground.

The ground shook like an earthquake, and then the rocket was gone. Trailing smoke and fire, the thin metal needle rose up into the sky, growing more and more distant with each passing moment. Quicksilver watched as it arced upwards until it was almost parallel with the ground, breaking atmosphere . . . and then it was gone.

From where he stood, he could make out similar smoke trails rising all over the Equestrian sky. Some ended up plumes of explosive flame and debris, but more rose in their place and disappeared past where the eye could see.

The sound of weapons died down, and screaming replaced them. The unpony sounds of gurgling and screeching erupted across the starport. Quicksilver ignored them. Don’t turn around, he told himself. His hooves shook and his teeth chattered. Don’t look.

He wondered what it would be like to die. Would he go meet Celestia? Since she had disappeared when the monsters emerged, everypony had assumed she was dead. Maybe he could see Morning Glory again.

The monsters came closer. Quicksilver thought he should go out in some sort of way, but he wasn’t sure how. Maybe with good dying words, though nopony would be around to hear them. Maybe go out thinking of his time with Morning Glory and their brief time with their filly. Maybe just yell at the monsters bearing down on him more every second. All he could think of, though, was that it was unbearably hot and he wished there wasn’t so much damn smoke around and what he wouldn’t give for one last breath of fresh air.

Then, with the slash of an unseen mandible sharp enough to sever steel in two, Quicksilver didn’t think anything again.

2 - The Quiet Earth

85 years later.

Luna strode through silent halls of plastic and steel, her horn almost scraping against the ceiling. When ponies had begun construction of the lunar colony, they hadn’t had alicorns in mind. The hasty add-ons once the emergency rockets had reached them hadn’t helped matters either, but Luna had long ago learned to accept the casual nuisance in exchange for security.

The sound of clopping hooves echoed from down the hall behind her. As it grew closer, the princess fumbled to get out of the way, her bulky form and large wings hindering her in the narrow hallways of the lunar colony. A mare came jogging around the corner, eyes closed and earbuds in both ears. She hummed to the tune of whatever music was coursing through her ears. The mare trotted along, passed Luna without so much as a notice, and kept going disappearing down a curve in the hallway.

Luna allowed herself a smile and a little skip in her trot. To think, decades before, the colony had been filled with overcrowding, sickness, and despair. Now, ponies took nighttime jogs without a care in the world. Or, well, dimmed light jogs, as the lights spaced every two meters never really turned off.

It took a few more minutes to navigate down the windowless corridors of the colony. Some of them still contained faded paint from murals painted long ago. When they had first arrived, the refugee ponies had found it comforting to paint peaceful scenes from their previous lives in Equestria. Two generations down the line, however, and the ponies now didn’t know anything but slate gray corridors and the occasional starry view out the window and had let them become relics of the Equestria that once was.

Luna shook her head and made her way to a bank of elevators set within one wall. She pressed her hoof on a panel, and a door smoothly slid open from the wall. She squished and shoved herself into the metal box and pressed the top button on the panel inside: the Observatory.

The elevator shuddered and rose through the deep bedrock beneath the surface of the moon, struggling toward the outermost layer and the highest room in the entire colony, not counting the greenhouses which dotted the surface. Luna arched her back, felt it pop, and wished she were laying down in her extra large chambers rather than riding a cramped little box up to see Twilight.

At last, the elevator doors slid open, and Luna stumbled out into the observatory. A dome of hardened glass enchanted with as many spells as Twilight and Luna could come up between them protected a circular room with soft carpets, creamy couches, and nothing else in the way of furniture. Twilight had been quick to fill that void with stacks upon stacks of books; probably around a fifth of all the tomes ponykind possessed at the moment.

Twilight, as usual, had her nose pressed into a book. Her eyes passed over the words like a mother over her favored children. Unlike the other tomes, this one was bound in fragile plastic, with no art nor name on the cover that Luna could see. When Luna cleared her throat from the other side of the room, Twilight’s head shot up, and the book snapped shut in a flurry of magic.

“Princess! I didn’t think you’d come so . . . early.” Twilight pushed the book beneath a stack of more ancient novels with cracked spines and yellow pages. “I was just poring over some of the local literature.”

Luna stepped over a stack of novels balanced precariously on top of one another. She stood across from Twilight, shifting her weight back and forth between her hooves. They ached, but she wasn’t about to complain. Especially not when Twilight stood up on three legs made of steel and infused with spells. The long, white robe she usually wore covered them when she walked, but in front of Luna, she wasn’t as careful.

“It really is good to see ponies writing again,” Twilight said, carefully clearing a stack of worn magazines from one of the plush couches. She sat and smiled at Luna. “The passing down of knowledge and spread of information will go on, even all the way up here. Of course, most of the books are either space adventures or trashy romance, but it’s better than what we had before.” A pause. “Of course, anything is better than what we had before.”

Twilight looked up, and Luna with her. Directly above them—or below, depending on how one looked at it—the earth spun in its eternal dance with the moon. It was greener now than it had been before Emergence Day, as the land ponies had farmed and lived on was steadily reclaimed by vegetation.

“Sometimes I can’t even remember that was our home,” Twilight said. “That we really thought the whole planet belonged to us, that Equestria would be around forever.”

Luna noticed that, without her crown and throne, Princess Twilight reminded her less of the pony who had united the elements of harmony and more of the timid mare whose royal domain had consisted solely of a town library.

“While I was trapped up here for my imprisonment,” Luna said, “I thought the same thing. I had the same doubts, and yet I returned. We’ll take it back, Twilight. All of ponykind is working toward it.”

Twilight’s gaze hardened, and she turned away from the dome. Instead, she pored over maps tacked to the far wall of the observatory. Some were old drawings and simple maps of Ponyville, while others were newer pictographs, showing the spread of the Everfree Forest and current landing sites in detail.

“You’re right,” she said. “We will take it back. The Golems are advancing steadily now. The Mark Is and Mark IIs may have been failures, but from Mark III on, well . . .” she pressed a hoof to a mark on one map, a large metal structure surrounding the ruins of Zecora’s hut.

“In twenty years, my Golems have taken us from complete isolation to having a permanent base in the Everfree Forest. We even own most of the forest now, too!” Her voice climbed a couple octaves. “We’ve survived counterattacks and assaults from the Brutes, and now we can advance into Ponvyille! With Operation Sugar Rush, we can finally—”

“Twilight,” Luna said, pressing a hoof to her shoulder, “you have to breathe. Your lungs can’t handle the hyperventilation, remember?”

A pained look crossed Twilight’s face, but she nodded and took slow, deep breaths. Luna smiled in sympathy, but inwardly was glad for the pause. The Golems may have been Twilight’s favorite toy, but they made Luna’s skin crawl.

Machines that looked like a deadly cross between a pony and a timberwolf, the Golems were the only things able to survive on the ground in Equestria; all while their pilots were safely tucked away on the lunar colony, connected to them by magic. Of course, that survival came at the cost of more weaponry than Luna thought somepony could possibly fit on them, despite the Golems’ massive frames.

“I know that Operation Sugar Rush is important to you, but we still have to be cautious,” Luna continued. “We lost four pilots last month in that ambush near the old Carousel Boutique, and that’s just on the outskirts of Ponyville. Taking your castle is going to see our Golems face many more Brutes, and I fear that we will take many more casualties as well.”

Twilight shook her head. “A month ago, you would have been right, but not anymore. The Mark VI units are in place and will be launching with this mission. They’re faster, stronger, and need even less synchronization to control; our pilots won’t have to worry about the negative feedback.”

She smiled and tried to stand. Her legs squawked and groaned under the load and only managed to dump her back on the couch before Luna caught her with a field of magic. She pushed Twilight to her hooves, who gave her a sour look. “I can handle myself,” she said.

“Anyway, the first wave of twelve Mark VI units are ready to launch with half the Mark Vs, including that one we still have in orbit. The Mark VIs will drop in to encircle the castle, and no Brute can stand in the way of so many of our Golems. We’ll have my castle—and all its books and spells—secured in no time!”

Luna bit her lip. Twilight was staring out the observatory’s dome again, but this time with a smirk. It was a look that said “I’m coming for you, just you wait.” After what she’d been through—and how she was now—Luna couldn’t blame her. Still . . .

“Are you sure this is the best course of action?” Luna prodded. “You’ve seen the numbers; pilot casualties are mounting . . . and this will only make it worse. We can turn back now and—”

“And what?” Twilight asked. “And leave behind everything we’ve worked for? Everything we’ve died for?”

“Twilight, these ponies haven’t even been to the planet before,” Luna said. “They don’t know what it’s like to run in the grass or see the open sky. It’s not something they’ll ever miss, and they’re happy with being comfortable on the moon. Resource projections from the moon itself and the asteroid belt say we can sustain ourselves almost indefinitely here or even expand outward. We don’t have to keep fighting this war.”

Silence settled between them. Twilight, covered in her robes to hide the scars that marred her body and legs that weren’t hers, and Luna clothed in nothing but her fur. The quiet was only broken by Twilight’s hacking cough, which, Luna knew from experience, would come out crimson.

“Maybe you don’t have to keep fighting this war, but I do,” Twilight said. “Living in fear of our home, keeping ourselves penned up in a fancy cage isn’t any way for a pony to live. You said, twenty years ago when this project began, that I could do with it what I wish. Operation Sugar Rush begins tomorrow.”

Luna looked at her with a steady gaze. “Do you really think it’ll work?”

For a moment, Twilight was back to the timid mare in the library, her lower lip quivering and eyes shaking. “It has to,” she said. Then, her back was turned, and she was Princess Twilight once more, staring up at Equestria from among her books.

3 - Mean Green Machine

Azure Field was drinking her morning coffee when the klaxons started going off. She liked to tell other ponies that she preferred a rich, dark roast because it made her sound fancy and like she was acting her age, but in reality she poured so much gunk in it that it was almost white. She sipped at it while the sirens continued to sound, rousing the rest of Pilot Level from their sleep.

Young, spry pilots with manes that hadn’t grown back from the boot camp buzz went running by the mess hall, shouting and laughing to each other. Other unicorns followed them, shouting orders and pushing everypony down Pilot Level’s central corridor, toward the drop rooms. All except one mare with a hard look on her face.

She trotted over to Azure’s table and stood in front of it with a smirk on her face. “Does the old mare need to wake herself up before her drop?”

Azure’s silver eyes gleamed. “Just don’t like going on a mission without my daily dose of caffeine, is all. Nice to see you’re up and ready, Gray Joy.” She looked the onyx mare up and down, her gaze traveling across the bland, beige suit that covered the mare from neck to tail. “Your uniform’s getting loose.”

“And yours is getting tighter.” She helped pull Azure up and walked her out of the mess hall. “Remember, on a normal day, I’m Gray Joy, but today’s D-Day. In front of the ducklings, I’m Mom. Don’t want them getting any ideas about getting personal with me, Joker.”

Azure smiled at her codename. “Right, Mom, because I know from personal experience that it’d be a tragedy to get to know you.”

Mom rolled her eyes and trotted down the main hall, while Joker followed. Pilot Level, superficially, was like any other main level on the colony, with a system of living quarters, mess halls, recreational rooms, and other facilities that could operate in the event of one or more being destroyed. Unlike the rest, Pilot Level was centred around a central hallway, one Joker had taken to calling the Birth Canal.

Past the mess halls, pilot quarters, rec centers, and more, the Birth Canal branched outward in all directions. Mom went down the center hallway, while Joker made her way right. Each of the new halls was guarded by a door with a number and a slot for a keycard. Joker’s door had a big, red one painted on it. She used her magic to slide her keycard and stepped on through the door.

Inside, she walked down a short flight of stairs into a cramped room just big enough to fit her and her handlers. All earth ponies, the handlers gave her their usual blank expressions while she stood in the center of the room. Each Golem pilot needed a special suit to wear, and putting it on was a hassle without any help.

First came the basic underpadding, which was lined with electrical nodes that pressed against similar ones implanted across Joker’s skin. Then the handlers hooked plates onto the padding, which made her look like a knight from a kid’s book, donned in armor, only hers was white and plastic instead of metal. Each of the plates, which together hugged her whole body, were filled with feedback sensors that would transfer her movements to the Golem, and send back the impacts they had on her Golem.

After attaching a few more sensors until she looked like a plastic pony figurine, they lowered a helmet onto her head. Joker felt a buzz as the nodes inside connected themselves to the ones sticking out of her head, which would allow her thoughts to be transferred to the suit, and from there to the Golem’s movements.

Joker sighed and blinked a few times to try to chase away the icy feeling that crept into her head every time the helmet secured itself. While she did, one handler came up behind her and helped her onto her hind legs, while the other snaked what looked like a large hose from a port on the wall and attached it to a special outlet on the underside of her suit.

What the brass called an emergency shutoff valve, Joker called an umbilical cord, and the hose fit both functions. Back in basic training, whenever it had been brought up about dying with your Golem, the answer had been the same: you cut the cord. Severing the umbilical cord would end all transmission of thought and feedback to the Golem, separating pilot and machine. Or, at least, so long as you weren’t too deep in synchronization.

A buzz came in Joker’s ear, and then Mom’s voice was pouring through. “Goooooooooooooooooood morning, boys and girls!” she crowed in her high-pitched “performance voice,” “Nice to see all my pilots awake and hooked up, right on time. A gold star for that, though a few of you were spotted emerging from the same quarters. You know who you are.”

She paused to let the new meat laugh, then continued. “It’s D-Day, pilots, and that means you’re bringing your best to the playing field today. This isn’t any simulation or Everfree patrol, but the real deal, everypony. You’ve all gone over the objectives, and I’ve seen more than a few of you in the sim chamber for Sugar Rush, so you know what’s coming.”

Mom’s voice dropped. “I’m not here to tell you to do your job or to follow your orders. You’re pilots, you know that already. I’m telling you that today’s the day to stay alive. All but one of you are Mark VI pilots, equipped with the very best that we can give you. Don’t waste it. Stay alive, finish the mission, and all of you come home to momma, you hear?”

A chorus of affirmations rang in Joker’s ears, and then the channel cut out. She’d lost count of how many times Mom had given the same speech. It was cheesy at first, but now it was just part of a routine. Giving the pilots a goal beyond mission parameters would give them, especially the newbies, a reason to make it home. Just do the job, de-sync, and get back to your bunk.

The handlers cleared out of Joker’s room, and vents opened on each wall. A viscous red liquid poured out and began filling the room. It was the final touch to making Joker feel like she was being shoved back into the womb. The “womb juice” was heavier by the gallon than just about anything else, so Joker in all her equipment floated in the middle of it.

Encased in the thick liquid shell, hard feedbacks would be absorbed by the womb juice instead of her body, turning what could be a spine-breaking blow into a jolt against her back. As many times as it had saved her life, Joker still had to force herself to breathe it in and remember that she could breathe oxygen through it just as well as air.

Once the liquid reached the top of the chamber, a tinny voice in her ear announced: “Pilot-to-Golem sequence activated.” Just like that a nauseous feeling overcame here, and where before she had been a pony swimming in a red gunk, now she was in a metal body looking down over the earth.

The same sensors connected to her brain that allowed her to instantly communicate with her other pilots and receive feedback also acted as rerouting her thoughts from her body’s highway, connecting the electrical impulses in her brain via magic into the half-magic, half-machine brain of her Golem. She was still aware of her real body, but it was like a distant thought, a picture hanging on the wall.

Truth be told, she liked her Golem body better. Several thousand kilograms of steel infused with magic and bristling with the most powerful weapons ever conceived by ponykind was more secure than the weak flesh and blood she normally wore. Then again, that might have been the Golem talking, she thought. With so much magic in them, the Golems weren’t completely machine, and could take over if a pilot wasn’t careful; another one of the reasons to keep the umbilical cord around.

With a shake of her mechanical head, Joker turned on her comm array, built into the tips of her Golem’s ears. “Joker successfully loaded into Golem V-113, Thief. Running diagnostics scan now,” she said, back on the moon where it was broadcasted through her helmet.

Back in Thief—the brass’ name, not hers—Joker quickly ran through the diagnostics exam, which was more just mentally kicking every part of Thief to see if it was still working right. Missiles? Loaded. Chain guns? Wound up. Beam guns? Primed.

She shook her steel body back and forth to check the joins and reactions—normal, as usual. Joker smiled when she did it, though. Being back in Thief was good. The newer Mark V and Mark VI Golems seemed more timberwolf than pony in appearance, compared to the first models, but she preferred it that way.

Joker looked down toward her target, exactly thirty five thousand, seven hundred and eighty six kilometers below. Thief hung from the geostationary launch platform only by a clamp on its back, with its limbs pointed toward the world below. The first few times Joker launched, she had stared in awe at the world below, at how deep the greens and blues were compared to the stark gray and white she had always known. Now, returning only meant she’d be risking her life all over again.

“Diagnostics are green, Thief is looking mean,” Joker said into the comm. “Golem ready for drop.”

Eleven other voices rose in chorus with her own in quick succession. They were all the nasally, high-pitched tones of new pilots, and Joker rolled her eyes. Or, thought she did anyway. Golems didn’t actually have eyes, just a multitude of cameras all over their bodies to see out of, and she couldn’t see herself back on the moon.

Silence prevailed over the comms for a full minute. Joker waited on the last pilot to check in for a few more seconds, then keyed a private channel to Mom. “Hey, everything alright up there? I’m reading green across the board down here.”

No answer, and her private channel was wiped away for her. Joker sighed and waited along with the rest of the pilots. Her metal limbs twitched, and her steel maw filled with teeth that could bite through boulders hung open in anticipation. She felt like a runner at the starting line, pumped up and waiting on the gun.

Finally, Mom’s voice came over the open channel. Her voice shook; not enough for a new pilot to notice, but for a veteran it was enough. “Pilot Goose did not make it through the Pilot-to-Golem sequence,” she said, enunciating every word carefully. “Goose’s position in Fireteam Philomena will be filled by Pilot Joker. Pilot Joker’s previous assignment to support the Mark V fireteams around Sugarcube Corner will go unfilled. Good luck, boys and girls. Drop in five.”

There was no time to argue or protest; not even enough time to grieve. A thick clamshell of steel coated in ceramic descended over Thief, securing her in darkness. A countdown timer appeared in the corner of Joker’s vision. 5 . . . 4 . . . 3 . . . 2 . . . 1 . . .

A small jet on the top of the clamshell ignited and sent Thief hurtling toward the earth’s surface. Joker’s mind raced the whole time. She had trained in the sims and pored over mission data for hours with the intent of veering off from the Mark VI fireteams and joining the Mark Vs. If Thief hadn’t been sent back to the moon to repair its magic cortex, Joker would already be with the Mark Vs. But supporting Mark VIs? There was a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach, and it wasn’t from the orbital freefall.

A private chat opened on her comm, and she keyed over to it. The voice that came from it was only vaguely familiar; Pilot Jaeger or Lager or something like that; Fireteam Philomena’s leader. Mouthy, from what she remembered.

“So you’re the pilot they decided to dust the mothballs off and send into battle,” Jaeger said. “Figures that they’d give you to me; Mom knows me and my other two pilots can make up for whatever slack you’re going to leave us with. Goose was always the weak horn anyway.”

Joker groaned inwardly. “Look, rook, I’m not here to mess up your squad. The Mark V has more explosives than the Mark VI, so just give me the grenadier position, and we’ll—”

“Rook? Do not even dare call me rook!” Jaeger exploded. “I’ve run more sims than you and gotten more scouting hours than anypony else in this whole operation! Just because you’re old as Luna doesn’t mean you get to call me a rookie! You’re taking Goose’s rifle position, and that’s final. Listen to me, do everything I say, and shut up so maybe we can both forget about this whole mess when the operation’s over.”

The private comm channel clicked off. Joker shook her head and gave a small prayer to Celestia that they’d make it back in one piece. The last thing she needed was Thief getting ripped to shreds again.

The clamshell around her—burning red hot from atmospheric entry—finally burst off, leaving Thief falling through open air. With any luck, the extra parts of the entry shield would confuse any Brutes below. Thief’s own entry jets engaged, slowing her descent. A succession of parachutes engaged and tore off, further slowing down the metal beasts’ impact speed until, at last, Joker just let herself fall.

She landed with a massive crunch. A fallen log exploded into splinters around her, and the ground cratered inward from the thousands of kilograms of metal landing in one precise spot. Thief itself was unharmed, and after a good shake, showed green across the board.

A sparkling, magic-powered heads up display appeared in the corner of her vision, marking the location of her new fireteam, just a few dozen meters to the west. She heard them land, the ground-shaking thumps of Golems coming down hard. All across her comms channel, war cries and whoops of combat fever exploded from Mark V and Mark VI pilots alike.

Mom’s voice came over the cacophony, just for a moment. “All pilots are in the green; Operation Sugar Rush is a go,” she said. “Golems, move out!”

5 - Reclaim(ed)

20 years earlier.

An eight year-old Azure Field stuck her head outside of her dormitory door into the poorly-lit hallway outside. The only sound that could be heard were the fillies sleeping peacefully in the dorm and the soft whirring sound of air filters in the hallway. With one look back into the only home that she had ever known, Azure Field stepped out into the hall.

She shivered. There was frost on the windows lining the hall. They were too high for her too look out of, but let in bright light that chased away the gloom. “Left, right, left, left, straight, right, down,” Azure whispered to herself. The directions she had memorized from the blueprints danced in her mind. She set off to the left, down the curving and empty hall.

Her hoofsteps echoed in the dimness. She came to a door at the end of the hallway that was twice as large as she was and immeasurably thick to a little filly. Like all filly dormitory doors, it had no lever, or wheel, or other means of opening it; only a small keycard slot.

The hall around Azure glowed silver. A keycard levitated out of her messy mane in a field of magic, and slid through the slot. The door whined for a moment, then clicked open. Azure slunk through, closing it behind her with a soft click.

Inside, Azure trotted down one of the inner levels of the Moon colony, away from the windows and the universe outside. All light was artificial, coming from buzzing fixtures hanging above her head. No adults were in sight, but Azure kept herself pressed to the walls. Her coat blended into the bluish-gray metal. The halls themselves were cramped and claustrophobic, but to a pony who had been born and raised on the moon they felt like home.

She didn’t meet any more keycard slots in her path, as she turned right, left, left, went straight until her legs felt like they’d collapse, right again, and then reached a single elevator. It was a freight elevator—long and bulky, with no required passes to get into. She’d seen earth ponies from below and pegasi from above using them to haul food from the protein farms, so she wasn’t surprised when the doors slid open at the touch of a button. Most pegasi and earth ponies didn’t rate keycard access anyway. She hopped inside, and gazed at a panel built into the elevator’s side.

Rows of buttons covered in chrome lined the panel, each with a number assigned to them. Azure had to try to think back to the blueprints she had found. The number for the floor she wanted, so desperately desired to see. After a moment, her face lit up and she mashed the one marked “44”.

The elevator groaned and began to slide downward into the bowels of the moon. The freight elevator was massive, as it was made to haul equally-large cargo, so Azure took to standing in the corner, away from so much open space. She shut her eyes and waited for the elevator to come to a rattling stop at its destination.

When it did, the doors slid open and let a burst of heat flood the elevator. Azure gasped and coughed before she was able to breathe in the sticky, muggy air. She stepped out of the elevator, and realized the reason for the heat.

Azure stood at one end of a massive chamber that stretched up toward a domed ceiling high above her head, coated in carefully-chiseled rock. In fact, the entire chamber was rock instead of the usual bland metal, complete with indentations and deformities a ponymade structure wouldn’t have. The chamber was bathed in orange light from bulbous fixtures built into the domed ceiling that illuminated the masses of Golems that covered the ground below.

Just as the blueprints said, Azure had found the Golem storage facility. Heat wafted from all of them as the metal bodies struggled to keep themselves running and cooled at the same time. Azure walked between them and, in spite of the heat, felt a shiver run down her spine. All fillies were forced to learn about the Golems, but they didn’t look nearly so large or imposing in picture books. The machines towered above her, their faces snarled like a timberwolf’s and metal covered in pockmarks and burns; signs of previous battles.

Almost all of the Golems surrounding her were Mark IIIs, ones that had been put in storage during the lull in fighting. Further toward the center of the chamber were the Mark IIs, what was left of them, and the few scraps of Mark Is that had been recovered after their first disastrous mission, before ponies realized putting ponies actually inside of them made them more vulnerable to attack. Each successive generation was larger and more imposing, less and less like a large pony and more like a nightmare vision of one, covered in deadly weapons. However, at the very center of the chamber was . . . something that Azure had never seen before.

It was like a Golem, but even more gargantuan, towering above all the rest. In appearance it was less like a timberwolf and more like a pony crossed with an ursa minor. Stranger, there were no visible weapons hanging off of it like the other Golems, just odd lines etched into its metallic skin.

Before Azure knew it, she had approached the massive Golem, and reached out with one hoof to touch it, if almost by instinct. Her whole body felt cold, and her horn glowed dimly. Before she could press her hoof to it, an action she didn’t even fully realize she was taking, she heard a crack coming from the roof of the dome.

She looked up to see bits of rock falling from the uneven ceiling, hurtling straight toward her. The magical feeling died, and Azure broke out of her trance with a cry of fear. She raised her hooves to cover her face and looked away.

Azure waited, and waited, and waited for the stones to hit her, but none ever did. When she chanced a peek, a single, gargantuan hoof was raised above her. It was as if the mighty Golem beside her had activated itself to protect her. It made no other movement, but Azure could swear it was staring right at her.

At the far end of the cavern, the elevator doors slid open again, and Azure looked over to see Princess Twilight step out. She gasped and got to her hooves, just in time to notice the behemoth Golem’s hoof was back in place. Had it ever moved in the first place? Maybe one of the rocks had hit her head.

She didn’t have much time to think it over, as Twilight teleported herself to the center of the domed room and stood in front of Azure. The usual stern look she reserved for most fillies was gone, replaced with tired eyes and an exhaustive sigh.

“If you’re going to keep doing this, Azure, we’re going to send you to isolation,” Princess Twilight said, taking a wing and wrapping Azure in it. She pulled the little filly away, taking her back to the elevator.

“I suppose I should punish you in some way,” Twilight said, “but I have a feeling you’d wriggle your way out of it. Dragging your own Princess down here to look for you, I swear . . .” She chuckled, but it wasn’t aimed at Azure. “Something tells me Pinkie Pie would have gotten a kick out of this.”

“Who?” Azure asked, looking up at the princess.

Twilight smiled slowly, then sighed. “Someone I used to know. Now, let’s get you back to Miss Sitter and back into bed. I understand you’re excited about the Golems, but.if you ever want to join the Golem Academy, you have to start by getting lots of sleep so you can grow up big and strong.”

Azure tilted her head. “But why do I need to be big and strong if the Golems can do it for me?”

“You'll find out soon enough,” Twilight said.

4 - Extremely Loud and Dangerously Close

They landed in a grove of trees, near where the road to Applejack’s farm met Ponyville’s main thoroughfare. The geography of the area was burned into Joker’s mind, after years of forced study in school as well as pilot training. For a mare who supposedly mourned the loss of Ponyville, Princess Twilight seemed almost obsessed with making sure nopony forgot exactly how the town was.

Of course, eighty-five years later, most of the former dirt roads were overgrown with trees and wild grass, with the occasional grove of flowers sprouting from the ground. It seemed almost peaceful, except for the Brute presence.

Shortly after hitting the ground, Joker activated her heat pattern gear, a little machine that passively monitored fluctuations of heat patterns to identify friendlies and enemies. The half-magic, half-tech Golems almost constantly showed up as white-hot, while the Brutes, more often than not, were colder than their surroundings. The gear had already picked up at least four Brute signatures by the time Joker managed to run Thief over to where the rest of Fireteam Philomena had dropped.

Up close, the Mark VIs were about a head shorter than Thief, but longer and meaner looking; so much that Joker wasn’t sure if there was much pony left in the design of the things. Pilot Jaeger’s Golem was easy to make out, with a red stripe painted down the right side of the Golem’s “face.” She turned to Joker.

“Pilot Joker is making up for Pilot Goose today in his rifle position; Joker, in the back. Ragtag, Arrow, flank me,” Jaeger said over the fireteam comm channel. “We’re going to hit Sugarcube Corner. Our orders are not to touch the building itself . . . but not all orders have to be obeyed, clear?”

“Clear, ma’am,” Ragtag and Arrow shouted, and Joker echoed. She wasn’t about to piss off Jaeger, at least not before the mission even got underway.

Joker moved to the rear of the fireteam and broke into what passed for a trot in the Golems. She kept Thief’s “eyes” on Jaeger’s Golem as much as possible, while checking her rear and side cameras every few seconds. Over the open channel, cries of alarm and shouts of victory came in from the Mark V teams, who had begun fighting their way through Brutes to Twilight’s castle.

The shells of houses around Ponyville loomed above Joker, most of them rotted away and only a few pieces left standing. Some were just piles of refuse, while others, oddly, looked like they had just been left for a day, with only the decaying paint an indicator of how long it had been. Being inside the Everfree Forest, even around Zecora’s Hut or Fluttershy’s Cottage, was one thing, but seeing the world so empty would have sent shivers up Joker’s spine if she had one. The houses were so familiar from the brightly-colored pictured books of her childhood, but then run through a wringer of pain and waste.

“Eyes on the prize, girls,” Jaeger said. “Brute activity is being drawn away by the Mark Vs. We should be able to make it to Sugarcube Corner before we can expect to run into—”

A burst of magic opened up in front of Jaeger’s Golem, forcing the behemoth to a stop. In front of her stood a Brute, a monstrosity just like the rest of its race. Like all Brutes, this one was different from the rest; it stood on three misshapen legs with too many joints while a fourth limb that was too long for its body ended in a bony hook. Its head, or what passed for it, had too-large eyes and a jaw that stretched forward like an alligator’s, but hung open limply.

By the time the monster’s scythe-arm was swung at Jaeger, she had already leapt out of the way and opened fire on the Brute. Her plasma rounds impacted its chest, and the Brute staggered, long enough for Ragtag and Arrow to open up with shrapnel grenades and chain guns, respectively. Joker selected her anti-material rifle by clicking her teeth together, and her vision filled with the familiar scope.

The Brute, for being so brittle-looking, was fairly agile and managed to dodge the brunt of Arrow and Ragtag’s rounds. It leapt away across the street toward a hollowed-out house, then disappeared in a flash of magic, only to reappear in another flash. Unfortunately for the Brute, their magic still gave off plenty of heat, and it reappeared right into Joker’s crosshairs.

She “pulled the trigger” by grinding her front teeth together, and a bullet the size of her pony head spat out of the massive rifle attached to her side. Coated in a field of magic, it impacted into the Brute’s eye socket in a hail of viscera. Joker didn’t spend anymore time looking, instead getting the Golem to automatically load another round into the chamber and lining up another shot.

By the time she brought up her scope, however, the rest of the fireteam was pouring their ammunition onto the stunned Brute in a hail of brass and magic. The thing dropped to the ground and attempted to cover itself with its three bony legs while slashing out with the scythe, but couldn’t hit any of them.

Finally, after another thirty seconds, the stop command—a short, high-pitched beep in their comm—sounded from Jaeger. “Don’t expend any more ammunition,” she said. “There’ll be plenty more around Sugarcube Corner. Keep moving.”

Joker took off in a trot after them, taking up the rear once more. She afforded herself a few moments of quiet before she put her weapons away and started to scan their position. Sugarcube Corner was just up ahead, but her gear showed no hostiles around the vicinity. Her eyes scanned the rest of the radar-like gear, and her heart dropped just in time for her to whirl around.

The Brute from before, missing half its flesh but still coming, leapt at them with its full weight behind it. Joker managed to get out of the way, but one of the other pilots—Joker couldn’t tell if it was Ragtag or Arrow—wasn’t so lucky. Whoever she was, she screamed loudly when the scythe went right through the middle of her Golem like it was made of recycled paper, and the Golem’s lights went dark. Joker hoped it was because they had cut the cable.

The Brute made for Joker next and threw itself at her as well. She tried to bring up her rifle, but the thing was too fast and sent her toppling to the ground, with its whole body on top of her. The only thing that saved her was its midsection landing on her, forcing the Brute to pull itself up and bring its jaws back down on Thief.

For a split second, the Brute’s head was just above the extended barrel of the anti-material rifle. No more than eighth of a second. Not even enough time for Joker’s own brain to process what was happening, but Thief had all the time it needed. The Golem’s robot brain was simple, but it worked: threat in front of gun means fire gun. The anti-material rifle ripped the Brute a new one right through its brain cavity.

The Brute’s body jerked for a moment, allowing Jaeger and whatever pilot remained to pour more fire on it until the monster lay still, its body leaking fluids from a hundred different holes and its eyes dark.

“Pilot Joker, status!” Jaeger barked.

“Pissed off,” Joker said, shoving the Brute away. She maneuvered her mouth to get the Golem to retract the anti-material rifle in favor of her twin grenade launchers. “What about . . . the other pilot?”

“Ragtag’s Golem is a goner, but her vitals are fine, if in the yellow.” Jaeger scanned their immediate vicinity. “Tough bastard, this one was. I don’t think I’ve seen anything this tough before, even in the sims. Joker?”

“I haven’t seen these kind around the Everfree,” she said. “Could be a new breed, or the ones defending Ponyville are meaner. Either way, let’s get to Sugarcube Corner. I’m taking grenade position. Fuck rifles in urban combat.”

Jaeger didn’t protest. Joker figured this was her first command—and, by extension, her first casualty. Even if Ragtag was safe back on the moon with a blanket around her, hearing the dying scream of a Golem mixed with a pony was disquieting even to a veteran, much less a newbie commander.

They made it to Sugarcube Corner, or what was left of it. The overall structure still stood, but all the windows were long gone and one of the walls was completely missing. The rest looked like it had been hit by a hurricane, but miraculously still stood.

“Form a perimeter around the door, tight pattern,” Jaeger said. “Keep your weapons toward Twilight’s castle, that’s where that last one came from, and probably the rest too. Anything moves that’s colder than my heart, kill it.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Arrow answered, her voice audibly shaking, though Jaeger’s crack about her heart seemed to calm her down a little. The poor mare had probably never even seen real combat before, and all the fancy gadgets on her Mark VI couldn’t make up for a lack of experience. She had even managed to turn on her maximum load out of weapons; enough that anything directly in front of her would be shredded to bits, but that her Golem would temporarily lose power for a few seconds afterward.

“Alright, everypony,” Jaeger said, “hostile at our one o’clock! Get ready, girls!”

Arrow whirled around, while Joker took her time to train her grenade launchers on the inbound target. She had them loaded with magical explosives—toxic mixtures of various potions that tended to have very random and very deadly side effects. Anything that could survive a barrage practically deserved to bring her down.

The Brute that emerged through the side of a crumbling house was a more typical monster, like those Joker had fought in the Everfree. A shambling mass of limbs and tentacle-like appendages, the only sign it was even alive was a bloated head in the middle of it all with the signature wide eyes of the Brutes. Underneath, drooling fangs were already snapping at them.

Arrow shrieked and unleashed her barrage of chain gun rounds, plasma gun charges, and other assorted weaponry in one massive burst. Joker sighed and added a few of her grenades to it, but it was pointless by then. The Brute may have stayed up longer than one of the forest ones might have, but it was down in seconds, and by the end of the barrage, had been reduced to glowing cinders and scattered bits of flesh and bone.

Arrow’s Golem sagged as it began to recharge its power, but the pilot’s ragged breathing could be heard through her mike.

While she took her break, Jaeger keyed a private channel for herself and Joker. “Arrow’s out of it,” she said. “If the other teams are ahead of us, I’m going to tell them to pull the plug and get her out of here. Poor girl . . . hell of a way to start her career, huh?”

“Better do it now, before her sync gets too high,” Joker said.

“Right.”

The private comm cut off, and soon Arrow’s Golem fell to the ground, its power gone. Joker let out a sigh of relief. They had lost two members of Fireteam Philomena already, but Golems could be replaced, and both pilots were safe. Still, two Mark VIs gone within the first hour probably would land as her own fault for dragging along her Mark V . . .

While Jaeger paced their little perimeter, Joker switched over to the open channel. Golems technically couldn’t hear their surroundings like a normal pony could, so Joker had no way to tell whether the city was deathly quiet or alight with the noise of battle.

When she switched to the open channel, Joker hadn’t been expecting to be greeted by screams. Her entire head filled with them until she turned the volume down long enough to focus on the voices, and immediately wished she hadn’t.

“Fireteam Manehattan is gone, I repeat, just gone!”

“This is Fireteam Poison Joke, falling back to Carousel Boutique perimeter, lost the rest, just me, I’ll be there—”

“No, no, Luna, please . . . help me, Luna, please—”

The cries grew more distressed and filled with static the longer Joker listened. The feeling in her gut had gone from ice cold with fear to fiery with rage. How the hell were just some Brutes destroying the most disciplined force in Equestrian history?

Finally, a calm voice broke through the rest, shutting them up with a protocol only command possessed. “This is Marshal Roughshod. All active Golems, fall back to the Carousel Boutique perimeter. Wounded near the perimeter, move back to Everfree station; the rest of you wounded, cut the plug if you can; activate your beacons if not. We’ll come for you, I repeat we will come for—”

The transmission cut out entirely, replaced only by static. The entire mission was . . . lost? Joker reeled. There’d been more Golems than she had ever seen, more fireteams on one mission than ever before; they had to win, they had to! No, it must have been the Marshal losing it, had to be . . .

While she was trying to figure things out in her head, Joker had neglected to switch back to her fireteam channel, or notice that her gear was picking up a new signature. She only had time to look up as a winged Brute dove for her, its “feet” resembling tooth-filled gaping maws that snatched and snarled at her.

At the last moment, she was shoved aside and landed hard on the ground while Jaeger took up the spot she had just occupied. With a cry of, “Pull the plug you idiot!” over the fireteam comm, she was gone, carried off by the Brute over Sugarcube Corner and out of sight.

Joker’s breath was ragged. With Jaeger gone, she was the only friendly showing up on her gear so far into town. Everypony else had gone dark or fled. Though she couldn’t actually hear them, other tech on her Golem could pick up the sonic vibrations of Brutes howling all around her. There was no way she’d make it back to the perimeter alive.

“Fuck this,” Joker muttered and slammed her head upwards, the bodily signal to pull the plug. She waited a moment, but opened her eyes and only saw the burnt-out remains of war-torn Ponyville. She did it again, harder this time, and was given the same result.

A screen popped up on her HUD that sent every organ she had to the pit of her stomach. It read: De-Synchronization Error—Synchronization Rate Too High.

The howls of the Brutes grew louder.