Pink Alert 3

Chapters

Introduction
Prologue
Chapter 1, Part 1: Old Time Comrades
Chapter 1, Part 2: Soviet Tears
Chapter 1.5, Twice the Royalty

Introduction

For millennia, Equestria was dominated by its legendary rulers, the Alicorn Princesses. So grotesque were the abilities of these god-like creatures, they were capable of maintaining the Kingdom of Equestria in a state of almost universal happiness – save for the odd disaster, or invasion by some dark monstrosity or lord of chaos. The ponies under their rule showed next to no discontent, and when they did, they did not remain in the safety of the Kingdom for long. The age of the Princesses would end, however, shortly after the ascension of the Fourth Alicorn, Princess Twilight Sparkle, once a humble student, but then an unchecked and unchallenged scientific genius who was nothing short of a mad god to her terrified subjects. Her dream was the creation of an artificially happy population – ponies incapable of doubt or fear, who would merrily follow the Princesses no matter how horrific the calamites that befell them. This proved too much for a single mare – once a friend of Twilight’s, whose identity has since been obliterated completely from Equestria’s history by royal authority. This mare would live on in history as a leader and liberator known as the Pink Lady, and her rise to fame and power would usher in one of the darkest chapters of pony history.

The Pink Lady, known to have been an eccentric and often bizarre character, rejected Twilight’s ideal of unshakable happiness, believing that the true value of joy lay in the fact that it was not guaranteed, but had to be spread and cherished, not enforced. Her perspective that authority should love all equally rapidly developed into a system of communist democracy that opposed Equestria’s capitalist monarchy in every respect; furthermore, the vast number of dissidents within the Kingdom meant that the Lady had no shortage of allies and supporters. As her influence grew, the Alicorns attempted to snuff her and her growing number of followers out for good through force; but, far from the resolution they had hoped for, the result was more catastrophic than they could have ever imagined: the first major rebellion in the entire history of equine civilization.

In the relative safety of Equestria’s north, the Pink Lady used her strategic and mechanical intellect to form an army of pony rebels and creatures of the many races the Kingdom had all but enslaved – the Pink Army – and armed it with powerful tanks, airships and many strange but dangerous technologies. Her war on the Kingdom would set every corner of Equestria alight; in the resulting battles, countless thousands of lives were lost and for a short time, it seemed like the Lady’s indomitable forces would ultimately triumph. But in the end, Equestria’s incredibly advanced technology, mighty air force and the direct intervention of the Alicorns themselves won the day for the Kingdom, and the Lady was forced to gather up her surviving forces and flee across the seas to the lands of the Frozen North. Though her followers were depleted, a steady flow of refugees allowed the Pink Lady to establish a new nation in the cold, barren lands: the Soviet Pony Republic. This small but resilient country was directly opposed by the Holy Equestrian Alliance, formed when the Princesses rebuilt the shattered Kingdom into a brutal police state. The Kingdom of Equestria was gone forever, and no longer could the Princesses trick their citizens into believing that all was well in their small, isolated world. Now, only brute force could guarantee their rule.

In the decades after the Pink Rebellion, the Alliance would mount several half-hearted attempts to destroy the Republic for good; all, however, failed. Eventually, the two sides settled into an uneasy peace, with the Alliance troubled by the constant danger of internal malcontent and a small, rising power in the seas to the nation’s east, the underwater Aquestrian Empire. The Republic, in turn, was continuously harassed in its own lands by vast swarms of parasitic Changelings expelled from Equestria, in addition to other monstrous dangers. Neither side, it seemed, had the resources nor the willpower to finish the struggle that their leaders had begun. Once, war had raged, and there was a chance that it might not burn so brightly again for a very long time.

This was not, it turns out, to be. Its armies swelled by a race of pony clones, the so-called clonies, the Republic would mount a surprise attack on Equestria’s western coast almost a decade after the failure of the Lady’s Rebellion. This was a terrible shock to the entire world, for even many in the Republic itself believed the Pink Army to be incapable of such a vast undertaking. But, the Pink Lady demanded it, and her followers obeyed; as it turned out, her preparations had been fairly thorough, at least compared to her last attempt. However, the Princesses had not wasted their time either, transforming the Kingdom’s army into a truly massive force capable of taking on any threat in existence, and preparing the Alliance for exactly the modern war that it would end up fighting. The conflict that followed would be called the Three Powers War, and would involve almost every known fighting force in the world in one way or another. It was, and remained for some time, the largest, and most famous, war in pony history.

And all of it is just about to begin, under the command of one of the Pink Army’s strangest and least talkative Commanders, an unremarkable earth pony officer known as Squeezie Heart. Squeezie was a miniature horse of humble origin, as were most of his family and friends; but, like many other creatures that were not expected to have a great influence during the War, his decisions would change hundreds of thousands, if not millions of lives both born and unborn. It was a terrible shame, then, that to begin with Squeezie Heart had no confidence or self-esteem whatsoever.

The story of how Commander Squeezie Heart and his associates managed would be remembered by ponies for a dreadfully long number of years. And this, give or take, is it.

Prologue

“Auto-arms are probably the most important invention of the modern age. They are essentially four to five-fingered robotic arms that are strapped onto a hoof and function by automatically detecting the whim of their users. With these devices, and of course, once they finally got the hang of walking around on their hindlegs, ponies and other hoofed mammals were able to build and operate a huge range of complicated machines that require thumbs to use, such as cash registers, flushing toilets and doorknobs, and more recently, guns, battleships and ballistic missiles. Without them, pony civilization would have probably developed into a race of helpless pacifists with only their magic and friendship to defend themselves, or would have just had to use automatic weapons with their teeth or something very silly like that.”

Equestrian History, Chapter 13 – “The Industrial Age of Ponies”

Ponyville

The sun was setting on the small rural town, and it had been a fairly magnificent day by anyone’s standards. There was a clear sky dotted by crisp swirls of cloud, the hills were green and covered in trees and meadows and, for a little while anyway, the singing of the birds had filled the air. To the distant west, the warm, orange sun was setting behind some hills, and there was a little bit of a breeze whistling through cracks in walls and the thinner branches of trees. There were also large black plumes of noxious smoke rising from the dozens of ruined buildings, bodies strewn across the bare earth streets covered in rubble and fresh craters and, in the skies above, a formation of three airborne Equestrian Mechasi streaked over the town, leaving long, white contrails in their wake. The elite Pegasi turned sideways slightly to scan the ground for anything they could kill, before raising their noses and rocketing back into the safety of the heavens.

Lieutenant Crinkle, a humble Dragoon of the Pink Army, pushed himself a little further into the devastated bakery he’d crawled into, hiding himself at the sound of their jet engines. A bullet had skimmed his upper left foreleg, he was almost out of ammunition and as far as he knew every other creature – pony, mule, zebra, bison, everyone – in Victory Company had been butchered from above by Equestria’s lethal air force. All he could do now was escape the town before the rest of the Kingdom’s army arrived to clean out the rebels for good.

It was sad, really. He’d lost a lot of friends taking Ponyville that morning, and barely hours later, they’d got a radio message that the siege of Canterlot was lost, the Pink Lady was on the run and, more or less, the Rebellion was over. And now every single one of his Victory Company Comrades, and close friends, was dead. It felt pretty pointless and unfair, but hey, if you play war the fair way you’re playing to lose.

Anyway, Crinkle sat himself up against a collapsed plaster wall and reached an auto-arm up to his face to pull his gas mask off, dropping it, along with his metal helmet and AFK-93 rifle, to his side. He reached into the front pocket of his bulky pink greatcoat, pulled out a thick cigarette, jammed it between his lips and lit the roll of wafer paper and dried cough-weed by snapping his auto-arm’s metal fingers below it, making a little spark. He took a long, deep breath, the sides of his coat expanding by at least half a foot, held it there, and blew the white smoke out through his nose; between the cigarette and the morphine shot he’d jammed into his foreleg to cope with the pain of his foreleg, there was a small chance that he could feel almost comfortable.

As the sun went down, it was getting a little chillier, and Crinkle’s abandoned building – it looked like it had been some kind of funky bakery, like a gingerbread house – had a lot of new holes in the roof and sides to let the cool air in. There was wreckage all over the wooden floor, and upturned tables, chairs and fancy things strewn around, most of which had been half-burned by the bazooka rocket that some dumb Equestrian Custodian hadn’t aimed properly. Not having eaten properly for days, he’d consumed the remaining half of a cake he’d found under the destroyed counter, which explained what all the charred, sticky stuff on the walls was.

Sad, really, Crinkle thought as he glanced around, wiping little bit of bright green icing from the corner of his mouth with a robotic finger. It looks like some pony, or maybe even a couple of them, had a good time running this place. I guess this is the end of yet another dream.

Once, he’d had a dream; it involved leaving the family farm back in the country’s west, and a life of pulling big hay carts around, and heading off to Manehattan to study medicine with his sister. His specific dream had been to work with children, actually, but then…

His right ear twitched; there was the sound of hindlegs on the ground outside.

Crinkle spat the fresh cigarette into a muddy puddle, where it hissed and went out, and silently fell flat on his stomach. He picked up his gun in one auto-arm, and crawled over to the open hole in the wall where the door had once been, hiding himself behind some plaster. He craned his head sideways, and listened.

“See anything, dude?” a young stallion asked.

“Nothing, man,” another, slightly grizzlier voice replied. “Looks like those fucking pinks have galloped the hell out of here. That or they’re all fly meat by now.”

“Let’s hope,” the first voice laughed.

There were two different ponies walking on their hindlegs outside. They were probably military, then – civilian ponies didn’t usually walk around upright, it was too uncomfortable. It took hoofed soldiers quite a lot of getting used to, and every pony left the military with some serious back problems to deal with later. Crinkle heard the whine of a jet engine, and noticed a small, moving shape in the corner of his eye. The noise grew louder, and louder, until he heard an Equestrian Mechasus swoop in and land on the ground outside.

He heard the female Pegasus speak as she shut off her suit’s twin turbojets. Her voice was tinny and mechanical, relayed through the electronics of her helmet’s comms system, but not unlike the kind you’d hear discussing boys between classes.

“Custodians,” she barked. “Report. Have you encountered any separatists in Ponyville?”

“No, Ma’am,” the gruff voice responded. “Looks like the town’s clean, Ma’am.”

He heard the lady Mechasus’ suit squeak as she looked around.

“I’m not convinced,” she said. “The heat scans show that the town’s deserted, but we haven’t seen them retreat and those rebel fuckers are hard to kill. Where have you checked?”

“We’ve looked all through the town’s centre, Ma’am. The other guys are still searching for any trace of the communist traitors.”

Crinkle started to edge his way away from the doorframe, towards a hole in the wall on the other side of the ruined bakery. It was about time he made a run for his life; if even one enemy soldier spotted him and raised the alarm, he’d be as good as dead.

“Move into the suburbs. Check every house,” the Pegasus ordered. “When we leave Ponyville, I want to know that every socialist here is tangled up in their friends at the bottom of a mass grave. We can’t take the chance that…what’s that?”

There were some metal clicking noises on the other side of the wall as the Custodians loaded their pump-action shotguns, and the muffled sound of a young pony made a kind of surprised, possibly kinda scared whinnying noise. Crinkle paused.

“DO NOT MOVE!” the Mechasus howled, galloping in her heavy metal armour across the open ground. “OUT OF THE SHADOWS, HOOVES IN THE AIR!”

The Custodians were following her.

“Looks like…two kids,” one of them said thoughtfully. “What the hell are they doing here?”

Oh fuck, Crinkle thought to himself, chewing his lower lip.

There were grabbing noises, and a colt gasped in pain. It was hard to tell the age.

“Why are you here!” the Pegasus demanded. “Where are you going! You, soldier, search that bag on the ground. Watch for explosives.”

Something was unzipped, and rummaged through.

“We’re…just…leaving,” a young, female voice said softly. She seemed to be struggling for breath, as though something was holding her tightly by the neck.

“ANSWER THE QUESTION!” the female officer shouted. There was a knock, and a cry, like someone had been slammed against a

solid surface, like a wall. “Where are you going?”

Crinkle ground his teeth; he’d joined the Pink Rebellion as an infantry stallion because he was sick of seeing other ponies, like his family, being bullied, exploited, enslaved and occasionally murdered by the Equestrian Kingdom. It was hard to sit there and listen to ponies, and probably young ones at that, being physically abused just outside; but then again, if he went out there he’d almost definitely be killed. He decided to wait. It was cowardly, but there wasn't much of a choice.

The clicking, rummaging noise finished.

“It’s just…personal stuff in the bag, Ma’am,” one of the Custodians said, sounding uncertain. “They were probably left behind during the evacuation, and are just getting out of here.”

“I’m not so certain,” the officer said darkly. “The enemy uses children as spies, agents, even assassins sometimes. They could be sneaking our secrets out to their army, or worse.”

“Should we…take them somewhere, Ma’am?” the gruff Custodian asked. “Or, maybe stick them under guard somewhere?”

“No time for that, we’re sweeping Ponyville,” the officer replied bluntly. “And today, the Princesses’ armies will make no mistakes. We’ll have to…finish them. I want you to arrange their bodies so it looks like it was the enemy.”

Crinkle thought for a moment, sighed to himself, gently put down his gun, and slowly drew a serrated combat knife from his belt. If he was going to do this, he’d have to do it as quietly as he could; gunfire would attract very unwanted attention. At any rate, he had a simple choice: go out there and die, or run away and probably commit suicide within days from guilt. Children were children; there were no two ways about it.

Anyway, he might as well go out the Pink Army way and die a faceless and forgotten hero, like all of his dead Comrades.

“What?” a Custodian exclaimed. “But, Ma’am! We can’t just…”

“What can’t I do, soldier?” the officer asked. There was something extremely strange about her tone of voice that Crinkle couldn’t put his hoof on, but for one thing, it definitely didn’t leave him feeling particularly comfortable. It was both an invitation, and a warning.

There was another silence.

Crouching down, Crinkle slowly worked his way around the empty doorframe until he was standing on the one side of the ruined street. In the middle of the road, there was a wrecked Pink Army Frogroach transport vehicle – a funny looking machine with six hydraulic legs, an insect-like body and a four-barrelled AA turret on the top – that had taken a Mechasus rocket to the side and still lay where it had collapsed and burned to a crisp. Crinkle didn’t pay attention to the charred pony skeleton, still wearing a metal helmet on its skull, of what appeared to be the Frogroach’s turret gunner hanging over the side. He or she had probably dragged him or herself halfway out of the turret before succumbing to the flames and collapsing.

It was another sad little story, one of about a dozen that he’d stumbled across so far that day, which the history books would forget to mention.

Anyway, just visible on the opposite side of the transport, he could see two Equestrian Custodian troopers in visored helmets and blue and silver uniforms with shotguns cradled in their auto-arms. It looked like he was in luck – they were both facing away from him. There was also a Mechasus in gleaming silver armour with gold and red officer’s stripes painted on the side of her suit, who was standing on her hindlegs and pressing a pair of grey-coloured foals against the wall of a burnt-out building. The suit’s metal wings were folded by her sides, and her two engines were still smoking slightly. She was holding the children there with the retractable fingers built into her suit’s forelegs, which she had wrapped tightly around their necks. The foals, for their part, were hanging three feet clear of the ground and were struggling for their lives. Their squirming was fairly pointless, however; Mechasus power suits could turn your average skinny weakling into a raging powerhouse that could headbutt a door clean off its hinges.

Anyway, there was a lighter-coloured, blonde-haired Pegasus filly who was a little on the fat side, and seemed to be trying to pry the metal fingers from her legs with her front hooves and kick the armoured mare in the face at the same time. She was short of breath from having her neck squeezed, her wings were flapping uselessly, her eyes were wide and her cheeks bulging like tennis balls. The other was a much smaller and more fragile-looking colt, who was black-haired, golden-eyed, and a darker shade of grey. He just looked incredibly scared, and was wriggling weakly like an earthworm stuck in a puddle during a rainstorm.

Crinkle noted that the Custodian who’d searched their little green backpack had discarded the bag, dropping it in the dirt to his side. What looked like a couple of bits of clothing, a colourful, leather-bound book and a rubber bouncy ball had fallen out of the open zip. Crinkle narrowed his eyes; the sight reminded him of being bullied, back at school, when the town foals had taken turns emptying the big, shy farm boy’s schoolbag into one of the bins every Monday morning.

Lieutenant Crinkle wasn’t very fond of bullies.

Finally, the Custodian that had briefly objected to executing children broke the silence.

“Nothing, Ma’am,” came the emotionless reply.

Crinkle held his knife in his right auto-arm, blade up and ready, and stealthily crept up to the destroyed Frogroach. He leaned himself against its side, and silently edged closer to the three Equestrian soldiers.

“More like it,” the officer remarked. “Now, Custodians, do exactly as I tell you. Once I’m done… asphyxiating these two separatist probables, put the carcasses up against that wall over there, find an enemy rifle and shoot them full-auto. Do not use your shotguns. And once everything is in place, tell no-one. If you do happen to, I won’t start with you both. I’ll have the Contentment Police begin with your families, and by the time you end up in a military court, you’ll both be begging the judge for a firing squad. Is that clear enough?”

Crinkle reached the front end of the Frogroach, and peeked around. The two Custodians were barely a meter away from him, and no-one had seen him yet. It was a miracle.

“Yes, Ma’am,” they both replied together, in perfect unison.

“Good,” the officer said, and tightened her grip. The desperate gasping noises abruptly changed, and became a sort of soft, barely audible squeaking. It was Crinkle’s time. As he began to rise onto his hindlegs, he whispered a quick prayer for the gods to watch over his mother and sisters, edged around the corner, and crept hastily up behind the Custodians, gripping his combat knife hard. As he rose to his full height, he found it comforting that he was both taller and much wider at the chest than both of the Equestrian ‘peace keepers’. A little comforting; they both had shotguns.

“This shouldn’t take a…” the officer began, glancing around, and at last, noticing that Crinkle was there. “LOOK OUT!” she screamed.

As the Custodians began to raise their shotguns and turn around, Crinkle took two giant strides forward in about the same time it takes your average sniper to blink, standing between them. He raised his blade and slashed at the taller one’s unarmoured neck, carving through the skin and muscle like he was back at home, cutting the top off a turnip. Bright crimson cascaded from the wound, instantly turning the soldier’s bulletproof vest from blue to red as he collapsed into a twitching, limp, choking heap. Now, it was time for the other one.

Turning around, Crinkle grabbed the barrel of the second Custodian’s shotgun with his spare auto arm (which looked like it was about to be aimed under Crinkle’s chin), flipped the knife around in his other, and plunged point-first it into the unlucky Equestrian’s shoulder, right next to his neck. The knife was buried all the way to the hilt, and its serrated side stuck it there; behind his reflective visor, the enemy stallion screamed, dropping his shotgun and staggering back a few steps whilst grabbing desperately at the knife’s handle with his fancy, shiny auto-arms (the Pink Army used the old steel and brass models), which Crinkle had released. He then tripped on a suitcase that some fleeing pony had forgotten, falling over backwards and writhing in fear and agony on the ground. Hand-to-hand was by far Crinkle’s least favourite way of fighting.

Now, for the last, and by far the most interesting problem; it was time for Crinkle to figure out a way to deal with the Mechasus, who was stronger, faster and better armed than him, and willing to kill children, and also had the ability to fly.

If I survive, Crinkle thought grimly to himself, I’m going to award myself with a fucking gold medal, that I designed and made myself, specifically for this. The ‘I survived the dumbest decision of my entire life’ medal, I think. The ISDDEL for short. But first, I think I’ll have sex.

Staring at him through her faceless helmet, the female Mechasus released the foals; they fell to the ground and onto their sides, where they hugged their stomachs, wheezed and coughed uncontrollably. Miraculously, she did not decide to shoot him with the two machine guns built into her forelegs. Instead, she sprang into the air and landed facing him directly, falling smoothly into a practiced martial arts pose. She tapped an armoured foreleg against her side, and with a loud click, a foot-long, spring-mounted blade extended from above the metal hoofcap. Mechasi didn’t have belts; everything they could need was built into their armour. Crinkle looked down at his own auto-arms, and remembered that his own knife was buried in the shoulder of a noisily dying Custodian behind him. Oh, shit.

“For the Kingdom!” The Mechasus growled, and charged at him, stabbing the hoof blade straight at his chest. Crinkle twisted to the side, and the Pegasus mare missed, skewering the air a couple of inches in front of him. He grabbed her bladed foreleg, then turned in an attempt to flip her over his shoulder; the Pegasus was a little quicker though, and knocked his hooves out from under him with a sharp spinning kick. The force of her hindleg was like a kick from a cow; a cow made of metal. Crinkle landed painfully on his back, and the Mechasus sprang about four meters into the air, clicking her hindlegs together above him. They both had a spring-mounted blade built into each of them, which both extended with an uncomfortable ‘ching’, and she aimed her back hooves straight at his head as she came down.

There was only one thing that Crinkle could do. He reached up and made a grab for her hindlegs, misjudged distances, and was stabbed through the hand by a foot-long, needle-like, chrome steel combat blade. Fortunately though, it wasn’t his hand, and even more luckily, because it was an older auto-arm built for the Pink Army, it continued to work even after it had been impaled. Wrapping his fingers around her rear hooves, Crinkle slammed the Pegasus sideways into the ground. The female officer grunted painfully as he yanked his damaged hand off the blade, and then sprang up off the ground, twisted in mid air, and landed facing him on all fours, angrily snorting hot steam out of the air filters built into her helmet’s nose.

Crinkle stepped back, auto-arms raised defensively, and his back hoof touched something heavy, and made of metal. He looked down, noticing one of the Custodian’s shotguns lying dropped on the ground. It wasn’t like had had any other options.

He dropped down and made a grab for the short-range gun, and the Mechasus lunged at him a little more aggressively than usual. As he was closing his robotic fingers around the stubby barrel, the Pegasus kicked him under the chin, sending him – and the shotgun – flying backwards, and landing in a tangled heap against the wrecked Frogroach. Crinkle’s head spun for a moment, and as his vision cleared and he began to pick himself up again, he saw a large, dark, vaguely pony-shaped object towering over him and raising a front hoof, from which a long, needle-like piece of metal was sticking out.

He guessed he had about half a second before she stuck him like a marshmallow on a stick. Curtains for me, Crinkle thought to himself. I guess it was an okay life. Better than a few.

The Mechasus trying to murder him was interrupted by the kinda fat filly from before. Like a flash of ashy grey, she darted up from the side, attached herself to the female flyer’s back right leg and held onto it like it was made of diamonds. The angry-looking girl then proceeded to bite the powered armour plating with her teeth, multi-coloured bracers and all.

Maybe not diamonds then.

Crinkle was fairly impressed. He sure wouldn’t try to use his face to attack an angry Equestrian Mechasus in full armour; maybe she was braver than him. But anyway, the annoyed Mechasus wound up and kicked the filly off her back leg, sending the surprised child flying about twenty feet through the air and landing in a muddy puddle.

That would have been that, if not for how Crinkle had taken the opportunity to grab the shotgun, rise onto his knees and swing it like a baseball bat straight at the Mechasus’ glass visor. It was bulletproof, bird-proof and shielded the user from heat, radiation and even the vacuum of space (not that they could fly there), but it was not Crinkle-proofed. Thus, Crinkle smashed her visor in as she turned back towards him. Her eyeballs didn’t stand a chance.

“My…!” the unfortunate mare began, before she reared up and screamed, grabbing at her face with her suit’s built-in auto-arms. She staggered back a bit, with blood flowing from the cracked visor on her helmet. Crinkle pitied her terribly. But that didn’t stop him from standing up, striding up to the lurching Mechasus, pumping the shotgun in both arms, sticking it under her armoured chin and pulling the trigger.

Instantly, half of the Mechasus’ helmet – and probably more of her head – disappeared in a shower of shredded metal, bright red meaty bits and shards of bone. Crinkle, and what was left of the Pegasus’ body, were instantly covered in blood, and the upright corpse fell onto its knees, balanced unsteadily there for a moment, then keeled over backwards. The damaged power suit sparked and hissed, and from somewhere, jet fuel was leaking. Or, it could have been urine; either way, it would smell pretty bad in a minute.

Crinkle studied the shotgun in his robot hands, and then dropped it. It was an extremely unpleasant weapon to use point-blank; at least you could be sure that whatever you shot was dead.

Really, really dead.

He looked down at his front, observing the blood and splattered gore that coated him. You got used to it, but all that meant was that you didn’t throw up as easily; it was still just as gross. Then, aware that he looked like he’d just fucked up an operation on some poor bastard who’d swallowed a handful of firecrackers by mistake, he turned to look at the two foals. The little guy had gingerly put the stuff back into his mud-streaked bag and picked it up; the filly who’d saved his ass had limped over to her little friend, nursing a foreleg with a pained expression. They were both eyeing Crinkle nervously, like they weren’t exactly sure what he was about to do next.

Well, he had just blown someone’s head to pieces with a shotgun.

Crinkle wiped some blood from his eyes with the back of his hoof, and then smiled at them.

“Thanks,” he whispered softly. “I owe ya for that.”

“…don’t mention it,” the filly replied weakly, still eyeing him. For a second, they all stood there, looking at each other without a clue what to do. Then, Crinkle’s ear twitched, and he heard the sound of hasty hoofsteps in the distance. Crouching down, he made his way back to the ruined bakery, looking over his shoulder at the two younger ones. He beckoned them over with a mechanical finger, trying to look sincere.

Follow me, he mouthed slowly.

The foals exchanged looks, the little colt nodded, and they cantered after him. Feeling slightly relieved that he wasn’t going to leave them behind, Crinkle scrambled into the half-demolished building before more Equestrians arrived.

He’d tested his luck enough for one day, that was for sure.

Half an hour later

They didn’t speak again until they’d left Ponyville, and the soldiers there, far behind. Fairly exhausted, the three of them collapsed on the grassy bank of a river, under the shelter – and hopefully, the cover – of an ancient oak tree. It was getting pretty dark by then, and a little further off, they could just make out a crashed Pink Army helicopter.

They wouldn't get too close to that.

Once he'd stopped, Crinkle took a couple of seconds to catch his breath, then unbuttoned his blood-splattered trench coat, dropping it on the grass beside him. Next came his boots, then his armour, and finally, his auto-arms. All the while, the two foals were watching him. He picked up the pile in his forelegs, walked it over to the flowing stream with reeds and lily pads, and dropped it into the water. The arms, armour and boots sank, while the pink coat floated near the top, and drifted steadily down the river. Almost instantly, the water around it turned red.

He watched the pink coat disappear. It felt good.

Remembering that it wasn’t just his coat that had been messed up, Crinkle trotted up to the bank, standing with his head over the water, looking down at his reflection. He looked terrible; his curly brown mane was so oily that he could probably lubricate engines with it, and his olive fur was covered in dry, red blotches. His eyes were wide and bloodshot, and in less than a day, it looked like he had aged a full ten years.

He plunged his head into the water, shook it violently around in there for a few seconds, and then pulled it out. He gasped for air, shook drops of water from his face, and then plunged his head in again for another round. Leaving her companion by the tree, the filly trotted up beside him as he yanked his head out for the last time. She was wearing her little green backpack; it was ridiculously cute, and a little gut-wrenchingly tragic at the same time.

“There’s…one little bit there,” she said, looking up at him and pointing at her cheek with a hoof. “It’s kind of…just to the right of your nose.”

Crinkle wiped at the spot of dried blood, and then presented his cheek to her.

“That get it?” he asked.

“Yep,” the filly said, nodding. “You’re all good now.”

"By the way," Crinkle said, remembering her limp from before. "How's your leg?"

The filly held her foreleg up, studying it.

"It feels okay," she said thoughtfully. "Thanks for asking."

Crinkle nodded. They were lucky she hadn't been kicked in half.

There was a short silence. Crinkle was suddenly aware that standing on all four of his hooves again felt amazing. If possible, he'd probably never stand upright again. He blissfully stretched himself, back legs, then front legs.

“Well,” said, turning to face her. “My name’s Crinkle. What about you? Do you have a name?”

“Yes,” the filly answered, sat down on the grass, and then thought for a second.

“Oh!” she exclaimed suddenly. “You were asking. Okay! Well, I’m Tickles, and I’m twelve years old, and that’s my brother Squeezie up there by the tree. He’s nine.”

Tickles pointed at him with a hoof, and Crinkle turned to give Squeezie a smile and a wave. The little kid waved back, but he was still looking pretty concerned about everything.

“Nice to meet you both,” Crinkle replied, turning back to Tickles. “What were you guys doing by yourselves in Ponyville? Is there someone around who can look after you?”

“Nah,” Tickles said, glancing at the river. “Dad’s hasn’t visited for a long time, and Mum, well, Mum’s kinda gone now.”

“Oh,” Crinkle said. He felt a pang of sadness in his chest; too many kids he met these days had lost family, or were straight-out orphans. “I’m sorry, Tickles.”

“No, she’s gone,” Tickles explained, glancing up at him. “A couple days ago, she just disappeared, we have no idea why. She went out to buy a couple of eggs and some flour, I think, and she never came back. We told one of our friends, and he said we should get out of Ponyville; but, before we could go, the fighting started, and everyone else went too.”

She turned her head sideways at Crinkle.

“Hey,” she asked. “You’re one of those Pink Army guys, right? A Dragoon.”

“Yep,” Crinkle said, sitting himself down on his bruised rump as well. “Or at least I was.”

“You’re not anymore? Well, you did just throw all your army stuff away... But still, it’s weird. You’re a lot nicer than they said you’d be at school.”

“What did they say I’d be like?”

“They said you would steal all our food and piggie bank money and mothers,” Tickles said, glancing up and biting her lip as she

remembered them all. “I didn’t get it. What would army guys want with Mums? Don’t you know how to cook breakfast and do laundry and stuff?”

“Um…yeah,” Crinkle said gingerly.

Tickles nodded emphatically, her chubby sides wiggling.

“I knew you did! But anyway, thanks for saving us from that mean lady before, Mister Crinkle. I thought she was about to strangle us

or something. I didn’t like her one little bit, I didn’t.”

Crinkle reached over and patted Tickles thankfully on the head.

“Are you kidding? I should be thanking you for saving me,” he laughed. “If you hadn’t bitten on her leg, she would have…punched me, really hard. That was brave, honey. I'm really impressed.”

Tickles beamed at him.

“Thanks!” she said with a wide smile. “I had no idea I could be that brave. Now that I know I am, I feel a lot better about going

someplace safe with my brother.”

“Where are you going?” Crinkle asked.

“We’re going to…” Tickles began, thought, and then paused. “Actually, I don’t know where we’re going, sorry. Mr. Turner just said we should go, he didn’t say where. But…now that Mum’s gone and those army guys are there, I don’t think we should go back to Ponyville. Maybe we could go on an adventure? A Mum-finding adventure.”

A big red flag went up in Crinkle’s head. The least he could do was help these two kids end up somewhere remotely safe, and at that particular moment, there wasn’t a single place in Equestria that was like that.

“You know what?” he suggested. “If you two go somewhere nice and quiet, you can look for your Mum from there. You could call your family, check the internet, ask the police, stuff like that. Maybe you could come with me? I think I’m going to a place like that.”

“What place are you going to, Mister Crinkle?” Squeezie asked from over by the tree. He’d stood up and trotted over to them. At least he wasn’t sitting there on his own any more.

“I’m not sure myself,” Crinkle admitted. “But, my leader, the Pink Lady? She said that was a new country, a long way north, and over the sea. She said that there’d be food there, and lots of nice ponies, and houses with gardens with lots flowers. And she said there’d be lots of fun. And cake.”

Tickles seemed to be thinking about it. Her brother piped up.

“Will there be no Princesses there?” Squeezie asked. He was now standing very close to his sister’s side. Now that he had a closer look at him, Crinkle noticed that Squeezie’s eyes were moist and a bit puffy. It looked like the little guy had been doing a lot of crying recently.

He couldn’t blame the poor kid.

“No, Squeezie,” he replied. “There won’t be any Princesses, or mean guys with shotguns, or ponies that disappear. Also, there will be lots and lots and lots of snow.”

Squeezie’s face lit up.

“That sounds awesome,” he said, turning to Tickles. “I wanna make a snowman! Do you think we can we go, sis? Can we go?”

Tickles chewed her lip.

“I dunno, Squee,” she said. “I mean, we’re gonna have to find Mum, right? I don’t think we should go really far. We might have to come a long way back to find her.”

Crinkle didn’t want to tell the foals that the ponies who disappeared in the Kingdom these days disappeared for a reason, and were not going to be coming back. He had to think of a…gentler way to persuade them.

“The new country’s going to be a pretty awesome place,” Crinkle told them. “If your Mum’s as clever as she sounds, she’s probably on her way there already.”

Tickles’ eyes widened.

“You really think so?” she asked.

Crinkle closed his eyes, nodding.

“Absolutely,” he said. “Just about everyone I know is going there.”

That was pretty untrue. Most of the creatures that Crinkle knew, or had known, were dead. Including his father and older brother.

Tickles thought about it some more, glanced at Squeezie’s eager face, and made a decision.

“Okay, Mister Crinkle,” she announced. “We’ll come with you.”

Crinkle smiled on the outside, and wanted to buck himself in the face on the inside. He was lying through his clenched teeth to two probably orphaned siblings, but, there was nothing else he could do, unless he left them to venture out into a violent Equestria that was being ripped to pieces by a rebellion and a cruel Kingdom that was trying to smash it back together.

“I’m really glad,” he said warmly. “But first, we’re going to need to find a place to sleep, and maybe even something for you two to eat. Know any houses around here?”

Tickles gave Squeezie an evil smile.

“Hey, Squeezie,” she said. “You know how we've always wanted to raid Tiara’s treehouse?”

Squeezie paused, and then grinned back.

“Yes,” he agreed bluntly. “Yes, please, big sis.”

Chapter 1, Part 1: Old Time Comrades

“Dragoons are the basic infantry of the Soviet Pink Army, and by that logic, are the most numerous soldiers on the planet. Most modern Dragoons are clonies, which grow from embryo to adult in genetic factories within a month, and can be armed and fully trained in less than a week. They are easily recognizable from their pink greatcoats, dark-grey armour, gas masks, steel helmets and sturdy AFK-93 assault rifles, which even they struggle to break. While they may sound like every general’s dream, the truth is not so simple: because they are rapidly bred, rapidly trained and serve in a military force not known for having heaps of high-quality weapons and equipment to spare, it is generally accepted that clony Dragoons are not exactly as reliable, competent or tall as their counterparts in the Allied and Imperial armies. By all accounts, they aren’t even able to speak or even spell properly. However, although it is true that without a competent Commander most Dragoons will put up little resistance against a strong attack, many officers in the past have made the mistake of underestimating the cunning, bravery and resolve of the Pink Army’s iconic soldiers, and been very unpleasantly surprised in the process.”

Equestrian Army Field Guide, “Dragoon”

Snowball Base, The Frozen North, 10 years later

The best kind of shower was the kind that you earned, and Commander Squeezie Heart, 19-year-old officer of the Soviet Pink Army, was pretty sure that after a day of gunning his way through a swarm of shape-shifting, parasitic, pony-shaped insects with his soldiers, he’d earned a long one. He wasn’t standing on his hindlegs, and he wasn’t even standing on all four; he was lying on the floor of the shower, upside-down on his back, with legs curled and his head held so that the stream of hot, steamy water blasted him straight in the face.

Having a job that involved almost dying several times a day made you really appreciate the little things in life – showers, flowers, meadows, butterflies, stuff like that. Squeezie guessed that it had something to do with the chance that after tomorrow and another day of pony warfare, he might never have another chance to enjoy a shower again.

But enough of such horrible thoughts.

Squeezie was in the cramped bathroom of something called a Mobile Command Wagon, or MCW, which he’d basically bought from the Army with all the money he’d made in his first year of working for them. It was basically a huge, tracked, nuclear-powered beetle-shaped vehicle that you could drive around and watch things, command things and even build things that would be useful on a battlefield – anti-air guns, tank factories, walls, stuff like that. They could even swim. MCWs were so good that every Commander in the world needed one, but Squeezie had taken it one step further: he’d converted the back half of his, usually kept empty for storing things, into a kind of house. He, as well as someone else, had lived in it for almost a year now. To be honest though, Squeezie had been inside bigger garden sheds, but it was warm, cosy, the plumbing worked pretty good and he didn’t need to pay rent.

It was paradise, in other words.

Then, some pony knocked a hoof on the metal door. Squeezie twitched violently in surprise, and then straightened up a little against the tiled wall.

“Uh, yeah?” he said. “Tickles?”

“Hey bro pony,” his elder sister said cheerfully from the other side of the door. Something heavy leaned against it; sounded like it was her. “Bro pony. Bro-pony. Pony-bro. Brony. Bro…”

“What’s up, Tickles,” Squeezie repeated.

“Bro…oh, sorry. I’m coming in. Did you lock the door?”

“What? No,” Squeezie said defensively, clambering up onto his hindlegs.

“Good,” Tickles said, barging through the bathroom door that he’d forgotten to lock again. She clopped the short distance around the corner, and stood with a huge smile on her face in front of the transparent glass door.

Tickles was a tall Pegasus mare, about a full foot taller than Squeezie when they were standing side-by-side on all fours, with light-grey coloured fur and an incredibly long, wavy mane and tail, which were golden enough to glitter in the sunlight like a polished piece of metal. Her wings were pretty small, mostly because she hardly ever used them; Tickles suffered from both terrible air sickness, and a chronic fear of heights. She was kinda chubby, but not quite fat, mostly because she loved to cook almost as much as she loved to eat; as long as she was cooking dessert, though. Vegetables were usually up to Squeezie. Anyway, she had a funny cutie mark – a plain white circle, no-one had any idea what it was – stubby legs, a round face with poofy, spotty cheeks and massive, bright blue eyes that shined in the light like sapphires.

When she was feeling down, Squeezie usually reminded her how pretty her eyes were to change the subject. And just about all the time, it worked perfectly.

Anyway, the funny thing about Commander Squeezie Heart’s older sister by three years was that while her body was twenty-two, her mind was usually somewhere between ten and thirteen. It was a long, kinda sad story that Squeezie didn’t like to think about.

He immediately stopped thinking about it.

“What? No, I mean, don’t come…oh, never mind! Sis, I’m having a shower here.”

She raised an eyebrow, looking him up and down with her luminous blue eyes.

“You don’t look any different to usual,” she observed. “Just a little wetter. Is that bad?”

Squeezie thought about that, with water cascading down the thick grey fur on his front. Eventually, he sighed, shrugged, and crossed his forelegs on his chest.

“Alright, fine, just, knock or ask first next time, please. Anyway, what’s the matter?”

“Matter?” Tickles repeated. “Nothing’s the matter bro, except maybe how there’s someone knocking on the door, maybe.”

“What?” Squeezie exclaimed, turning off the taps. “Who’s at the door?”

“Dunno,” Tickles said. “I was making a marshmallow pie, then I heard them knocking, then I freaked out, and I ran over here

because I was freaking out and stuff, but now I’m okay.”

“Did having visitors freak you out, sweetie?” Squeezie asked.

“Yep,” said Tickles.

“Can you go and see who it is? And maybe let them in?”

“Sure, bro,” Tickles said cheerfully. “Come out soon, though! It’s rude to be in the bathroom when you have guests in the house, right?”

“It isn’t, Tickles,” Squeezie replied. “It just makes it harder for everyone.”

“Oh,” Tickles said, then paused. “Well, I still think it is. I’ll go let them in now, unless it’s a bear, or an assassin, or a dragon or something. Bye!”

Tickles made a kissy face at him, and galloped out of the bathroom, slamming the door behind herself and charging down the hall to the front door. She was a heavy girl, so when she ran, or cantered or whatever, which she did often, she made a lot of noise. Squeezie sighed as he pushed the glass door open; she was a bit of a handful sometimes, but she was a handful that loved him dearly, and a handful that he loved dearly back. Family members put up with stuff; it’s what family members do.

The good ones, anyway.

Squeezie stepped into the middle of the steamy bathroom. Like most of the house, the walls, floor and ceiling were painted metal, but over time they’d added little comforts – a floor mat, colourful wallpaper that Tickles had done an exceptionally good job of sticking on in bizarre but enthusiastic patterns, and little pictures of whales and beaches on the walls. It had been a horribly long time since Squeezie had last seen a beach. There wasn’t a window, but there was a shower, a toilet designed for the subtle contours of pony physiology, a sink and a cupboard, and other than that, there was a tiny bit of room in the middle to allow ponies and other creatures to actually move around in there. It was enough, though. Squeezie wasn’t the kind of pony who was always after something a little better than what he had.

Never wanting better was probably one of Squeezie's biggest problems. It was definitely why he had spent his whole military career in an old army base, going out to fight swarms of Changeling raiders every single day while his old bullies from the Academy were off getting medals and promotions. At least he got paid for it, unlike the clonies.

Still standing straight, Squeezie hooked his hoof around a towel on the rack, pulled it off, and began to furiously dry himself. He hated dryers, they were way too noisy. Once he’d got the worst of the water off, he threw the towel over the glass door, put his hooves on the sink and, after he wiped a couple of long, soggy strands of his mane from his face, studied his reflection in the small, fuzzy mirror a foot or so in front of him.

Squeezie wasn’t a big Earth pony stallion. In fact, he was a little short, kinda skinny, and clumsier than a blind elephant trying out ice skating for the first time. His fur was grey, but much darker than Tickles’, and his hair was long, spiky and black, almost as long as his sister’s, too. He had a small mouth, a mousey face, and his eyes were an extremely striking gold colour. He had no cutie mark, and if that didn’t change for another two years he would break the world record, probably unofficially. Unfortunately, his most attractive feature – those being his eyes of course – were crimped a little by the fact that they were also permanently bloodshot and rimmed with dark bags, because he had suffered from terrible insomnia ever since he’d been nine, and all the interesting things that had happened to him then.

Bottom line, Squeezie wasn’t a very attractive guy, but at least he often smiled. Most ponies said that it was the best thing you could do to make yourself look beautiful, which made most ponies fucking awful liars.

Squeezie heard two things coming down the hall. One of them sounded heavy; probably Tickles. The other thing sounded…even heavier. But she’d let it in, so unless Tickles was feeling especially friendly or it was an especially friendly bear, it was probably someone they knew.

Squeezie didn’t like the word ‘somepony’. It assumed that the thinking, breathing being you were talking about was a pony, as opposed to a minotaur, mule, dragon, cow, sea serpent, sheep, or any one of possibly hundreds of intelligent creatures out there. They used it in Equestria. In the Republic, thankfully, things were a bit different.

“Hey, Squeezie, come on out!” he heard Tickles say very happily outside. “It’s Jalissa.”

“Sure is, baby,” Jalissa replied. “What’s up, pony boy? You taking a shit?”

“No,” Tickles said factually. “A shower to be exact. At least, I think he is. I could go in and…”

“NO, thank you, Tickles, I’ll be out in a second,” Squeezie said loudly. He instinctively reached over, sliding the little lock on the door firmly shut.

Jalissa laughed.

“Okay, bro,” his sister said, sounding a little sad. “We’ll be in the living room, doin’ stuff.”

“Yep,” Jalissa agreed. “Stuff’s gotta be done. Se ya in a sec, Squeezealot.”

“Okay,” Squeezie said warmly as they left. Then, he headbutted the metal wall.

“Sh...shucks,” he grumbled.

It was embarrassing, sure, but at least he knew that Jalissa had seen worse.

He got himself as dry as he could, smoothed his wet mane over a little with a comb (he used his mouth, in case you're wondering), and then took a second to breathe slowly, calming himself down. Once he was sure he wasn’t going to go outside and stutter so badly he’d want to shoot himself in the face, he slung his towel around his shoulders, sank onto all fours, rolled his head around on his shoulders to pop the little vertebrae in his neck, unlocked the door with a hoof, and trotted out.

The MCW’s hall was a long, thin thing that connected every room in the machine, and looked a lot like the inside of a ship. On one end were the business rooms, including the spacious Command Chamber, where they drove the Wagon around. In the middle of the hall there was a door on one side that led out into the big, wide world and on the other end were the storage rooms they’d turned into house-type rooms, as well as the atomic reactor core, which doubled as the area that they hung their laundry to dry in.

Yeah, unless they wanted glow-in-the-dark piss and an extra pair of legs coming out of their ears, the two of them would probably have to move into an actual house sooner or later.

Squeezie turned left, opened the second door on his right and walked into the living room that was also a kitchen. Sure enough, Tickles was by the sink, merrily cooking up what looked like a combination of melted butter, maple syrup and hot chocolate, and Colonel Jalissa the griffon was folded up into Squeezie’s leather armchair, which was visibly bulging at the sides from the mythological predator’s massive weight. They were laughing at something that someone had just said, and turned to look at him as he entered.

“Squeezie!” Jalissa exclaimed, grinning as widely as her beak allowed. “Worked up the courage to crash our little girls’ party, huh? You’re looking moist, son.”

“Yeah, an unfortunate side effect of showers,” Squeezie replied dryly, ha ha, trotting in. “How’s everything been, Jalissa, and what's with the sudden visit?”

Colonel Jalissa the griffon, who was more commonly known by her callsign Raptor Girl, was probably the best, and by far the most famous, Multicopter gunship pilot in the Pink Army. She was about as muscular as she was huge, towering over the biggest ponies Squeezie knew, with a sleek, athletic build, speckled, white plumage on her bird parts and dark brown fur on her lion parts. The feathers on her head were long and swept back, and she was wearing a magnificent, chocolate-brown leather aviator jacket, lined with cream-coloured sheepskin and covered in medals and badges, as well as a pair of bronze, tinted flying goggles on top of the bright pink bandana tied around her head. She also wore an old dragon tooth on a bit of black string tied around her neck – give or take, it was about the size of one of Squeezie’s ears. Colonel Jalissa not only looked business, she was business.

And the coolest kind possible, too.

Anyway, Jalissa was a famous badass, and Squeezie was an antisocial nobody, so a lot of creatures wondered why the hell the legendary ace had anything to do with him. The answer was simple: they were just about best friends, and had been ever since military school. Back then, you see, Squeezie Heart had been the only anything willing to sit next to the lonely, orphaned little griffon with horribly deformed wings and talk about how bullies and not being able to fly sucked.

Still, even on the best of days, she was a little…blunt.

The tortured armchair groaned loudly as the Colonel hauled herself off it.

“’S been, what, about two months since I last saw you both and the first thing you ask is why I rocked up to say hi?” Jalissa repeated, sounding amazed. “Come on, dude, we both know you can do better than that! C‘mere.”

Jalissa tottered over to Squeezie, obviously intending to throw a viciously clawed arm around his shoulders. Knowing it was pointless to resist, Squeezie stood up onto his hindlegs so they’d be at least eye-to-eye, and opened his forelegs with a smile to hug her back. Sure enough, Jalissa threw herself violently around him, leaning on Squeezie with about a quarter of her full weight. At that moment, if someone had accidentally coughed on Squeezie or a fly had crashed into him by mistake, he’d probably have collapsed sideways.

“Ha,” Jalissa exclaimed as they released each other. Jalissa turned around, casually walked back to Squeezie’s favourite leather chair and settled herself down in it again. “Yeah, I’ve been all right, Fruit Squeezer! They’ve got me flying all over the country these days, blowing some stuff up, shooting other stuff full of bullets, you know the drill. Basically, I’m here because I was told to land my fat ass and my entire squadron here and await further orders or some vague bullshit. I’ve got no idea why, but since I was around and it didn’t look like anyone had something for me to do I figured I’d pass the night with some good company, right?”

“Haha, yeah,” Squeezie agreed warmly, sitting himself down on a couch nearby, folding his legs beneath him. “Glad you could visit, Feathers. I'm afraid we don't have any alcohol, though.”

“Weak, bro, but I'll be right. Anyhow, what about you, pony boy? What have they got you up to?”

There was a very short silence before Jalissa’s face transformed into a frown.

“Hold on a fucking second,” she said. “Feathers? Did you just call me ‘Feathers’?”

Squeezie gazed calmly back at her.

“If you use the old school names, Jay, then you’ve got to be ready to take a few back,” he pointed out, smiling a little. “I was hoping it’d be a while before I heard Fruit Squeezer again.”

Jalissa opened her mouth to say something angry, then, she closed it again, and tapped her beak with a claw thoughtfully.

“Yeah, fair enough,” she finished. “But still, Squeezie, how’ve you been? And you too, Tickles, I want to hear it all.”

“Really? Okay! Well, last week I went to the dentist, a couple of weeks ago I ate so many éclairs I had to throw up five times and I think that we should buy a pet beaver,” Tickles said.

“That isn’t something you’ve done, sis,” Squeezie noted.

“I know,” Tickles confirmed. “But, I still felt it ought to be shared.”

“Of course,” Squeezie replied, and then turned to the Colonel. “It’s all been the same here, Jay, just looking after my guys and going out every couple of days when the Changelings show up somewhere to cause trouble. I wish it would get easier.”

“Yeah, tell me about, it son. I hear you got mixed up in an important thingo today?”

“Yep, I sure did,” Squeezie nodded. “This big signal tower, stuck out in the middle of nowhere, was attacked by a couple thousand parasites this morning, and me and my Dragoons were called up to hold them back. We managed to, in the end. They use the towers to aim long-range rockets, so I guess it was kind of important that the Changelings couldn’t blow it to bits.”

Jalissa nodded thoughtfully.

“A couple thousand?” she repeated. “Against you and your guys? And how many ‘goons exactly do you have again, Squeezie? Fifty?”

“Forty-eight,” Squeezie said. “And eight Frogroaches, which I guess is nice.”

Jalissa nodded again.

“There are entire Pink Army Companies that would struggle with ‘a couple thousand Changelings’, Squeezie,” Jalissa said, sounding annoyed. “And they just send in your forty-eight around to deal with threats like that? I call bullshit on that one, and as far as bullshit goes, I consider myself an authority. Someone oughta give you a promotion, kiddo, before you and your bros get killed on a job like that. And a much bigger little army, with some tanks maybe.”

“Anyone want some tea,” Tickles suddenly asked. She was still in the little kitchen thing in the corner and was doing something, he wasn’t sure what.

“Nah, sis, I’m right,” Squeezie said with a wave of his hoof, then turned back to the Colonel. “Yeah, you’re right Jay, but we get by, and you know how it is around here. The Pink Army isn’t exactly rolling around in money and resources these days.”

“You get by now,” Jalissa pointed out. “It’s later I worry about, dude. Things change.”

“True, I guess,” Squeezie admitted. Maybe he didn’t really think about his life, and the dangers of fighting. He usually just got on with the job.

“Anyways,” Jalissa continued, rising off his chair again. “I gotta squeeze the old lemon; I’ve been flying my ugly duckling for a while and, ah, might have had one too many shots of scotch before I left, heh. I’m pretty sure I can find that bathroom by myself.”

“I just hope that you can fit in it,” Squeezie said jokingly. Kinda jokingly, because he kinda was.

“Haha, yeah, it is a bit tight in here,” Jalissa observed as she stood, looking up. There was about half an inch between the top of her head and the ceiling.

“Wait,” Tickles said, sounding worried. She trotted into the living room half of the living kitchen room. “If you’re squeezing lemons, shouldn’t you been in the kitchen?”

Squeezie chewed his lip, and glanced at Jalissa. She looked back at him, shrugged, and gave him a look that said I got nothing, dude.

“Not that kind of lemon, Tickles,” he said, looking at his sister. “In fact, I don’t think that Jalissa is actually talking about lemons at all.”

“But what...?” Tickles exclaimed, thought about it, and then looked embarrassed. She slowly turned, and went back into the kitchen.

“Never mind,” she said back over her shoulder. “It’s just, you say lemons, and I think of...what I don’t think of is...never mind.”

“It’s all good, babe,” the Colonel said as she ambled over to the door, playfully punching Squeezie in the shoulder as she passed him by. He smiled at her, then, once she was gone, painfully rubbed his upper arm where her clenched claw had connected; at least she’d learned how not to bruise him with her friendly displays of affection.

He turned his head around to Tickles, aware that she’d probably still be feeling a little bit embarrassed. If he didn’t do something, there was a chance that she’d stay that way for hours and hours; Tickles didn’t have emotions, her emotions had Tickles.

“On second thoughts, sis, some tea would be great.”

“Sure,” Tickles said, facing the other way. She then turned around, listening intently. “I think I hear someone outside, Squeezie, walking up to the Wagon. With army boots.”

“Huh?” Squeezie said, rubbing an ear. “I don’t hear anything…”

There was a metallic tapping sound. Squeezie recognized it as the noise that an auto-arm made when someone, usually somepony, knocked on his door.

“Another visitor,” he said, surprised.

“This is getting weird, bro,” Tickles observed. “Everyone likes you all of a sudden. You’re not retiring, are you? Or dying?”

“I wish, kinda,” Squeezie said, lifting himself off the couch. “Let’s hope that one of the Dragoons hasn’t gotten himself into trouble again. Honestly, sis, I thought they would have learned after the Taco Night incident...”

Tickles shuddered at the memory.

“I hope not too, Squeeze,” she agreed. “I’ll be here if you need a sudden hug. And you should also probably take that towel off your shoulders bro, it looks kinda silly.”

"What? Oh, thanks Tee," Squeezie said, shrugging the towel off and dropping it by the sofa.

"No worries," Tickles said cheerfully. "Scream if it's a bear or something. I've got a rolling pin right here, and it's nice and heavy."

Squeezie gave his sister one last smile, then trotted out of the living room and down the hall. He was careful to ignore the bathroom completely, lest he hear some noises coming out of there, went straight up to the front door, unbolted the waterproof closing mechanism and swung it open. Immediately, a wave of freezing cold air gushed into the MCW, blowing his mane around like someone was holding a hair dryer in front of him, and a couple of flakes of perfectly white snow blew in and gently settled on the doormat that said “Wipe ‘Em”. The night was young, but in the north, most nights involved snowfalls, pitch darkness, heavy winds and temperatures so cold that if you fell asleep outside and didn’t somehow freeze to death you’d wake up to find that your nose had shrivelled up and fallen right off the tip of your face.

And tonight was no exception there.

“Hello, Commander,” the tall, muscled unicorn just outside said, politely bowing his head. Standing on his hindlegs in the snow just outside, he was wearing a dark, formal uniform with a light dusting of melting snowflakes on the shoulders, black leather boots and a tall peaked cap with the symbol of the Pink Army on the front of it – a pink star, with a smiling face in the centre. He was a caramel brown colour, with brilliant chocolate brown hair and rather piercing silver eyes that Squeezie was very, very familiar with, and not for the best reasons. “It’s been a while.”

“Twist?” Squeezie gasped, holding the door open, his eyes wide. “What are…? I mean, hey, Commander Twist. Is there…something I can help you with?”

To be quite honest, the well-groomed pony at his door had been Squeezie Heart’s bitter rival for most of his school years. He and Cinnamon Twist, or Commander Twist these days, had been total opposites in every way – popular, attractive and tall, versus lonely, ratty and short, and so on – but they’d had two things in common: they’d both studied hard, and more importantly, they were two of the best tactical brains ever trained by the Soviet Patriotic Foals’ Academy. They’d been very good, but not good enough to always beat the other.

Squeezie couldn’t even remember how it had begun, but for years he’d thought that Cinnamon was the perfect example of an annoying, upper-class, gay pretty boy, while Cinnamon had probably resented Squeezie for being horribly dressed, uncultured, awkward and yet, still somehow beat him sometimes. Then, only a few weeks away from graduation, another student had tried juggling grenades, failed, and Squeezie and Cinnamon had ended up with sharing a single hospital bed because the doctors were running out of room. It had started pretty tense, but by the end they’d chatted a bit, a few apologies had been made and they agreed to part ways not friends, but definitely not enemies. Since then, all Squeezie had heard of Twist was that he’d been doing a good job of helping keep the Equestrian Navy out of the Republic’s western oceans, but all of a sudden, it seemed like his old rival had returned for some reason.

And knowing Twist, he had no doubt that the reason would be pretty good.

“You sure can,” Twist replied, eyeing Squeezie with his auto-arms behind his back. “But first, do you mind if I come in? I can’t really feel the tips of my ears anymore.”

“Of course,” Squeezie said, trotting to the side to let the pony officer in. Cinnamon nodded to say thanks, stepped up onto the MCW and walked past Squeezie, who immediately sealed the door shut against the freezing winter outside. Twist wiped his boots, but didn’t remove his hat; instead, he slowly stepped into Squeezie’s hall, looking around.

“I’m impressed, Squeezie,” he said, running a robot finger along the wall. “You know, when they told me that you decided to live in your MCW, this definitely wasn’t what I had in mind when I pictured you and your and your sister sleeping in here. This is actually…

pretty cosy. I like the wallpaper.”

“Yeah, Tickles did that,” Squeezie replied, closing the latch on the door.

“She’s here tonight, right?” Twist asked, turning around to gaze at Squeezie. “It’s been a while since I’ve seen her. In fact, I don’t think we’ve even been introduced.”

“She is,” he replied, smiling back at his old schoolmate. Slightly. “And Colonel Jalissa, as it happens, she was just passing by so she stopped for a visit.”

“Really? Raptor Girl’s with you? Excellent!” Twist exclaimed, cheerfully clapping his auto-arms in front of him. “That means I won’t have to spend another second outside in that bloody freezing wasteland looking for her. I wouldn’t mind sitting down for a moment, Squeezie, I’ve been up on my hooves quite a lot today, but I might as well tell you now: I’m here to inform you both that all three of us will be required to report to an important meeting in half an hour’s time. It’ll be quite the Academy reunion, eh?”

“I guess it will be,” Commander Heart said thoughtfully. “What’s the occasion?”

“We’re reporting to General Zulu,” Twist replied. “He arrived here at the Base about ten minutes ago, and he isn’t intending to wait for us for long.”

Squeezie looked Cinnamon in the eye.

“Zulu?” he repeated. “Here? Snowball is small game, Cinnamon, all we do is sleep, fix lots of broken crap and go out sometimes to chase bears and murder shape-shifters. Why send a General all the way out here? Is he planning something?”

“I can’t tell you that,” Twist replied, studying one of his auto arms and casually flicking a little bit of ice off it. “But I can tell you one thing: something big is about to happen, Squeezie.”

“Why do you say that?” Heart asked. Then, he glanced down at his hooves; for some reason, he could feel the floor of his MCW shaking, and outside, he could hear some kind of low, mechanical, rumbling noises.

“Have a look outside, old friend,” Twist said with a smile.

Squeezie raised an eyebrow at him, then turned around and slowly hauled open the door just in time to see them clattering past.

He'd parked his MCW in a shed, right next to a row of broken trucks that someone would eventually get around to fixing up. On the other side was a line of humming mega-reactors generating nuclear power for the base’s buildings, scanners and defences; the night sky was dark and cloudy, sheets of snow were fluttering down on the icy breeze and snow covered absolutely everything that was even slightly flat. And driving past, between Squeezie’s Wagon and the reactors, was a column of four Soviet Apinkalypse Tanks.

The Tanks weighed about 200 tonnes each, drove around on two sets of tracks, could survive a hit from any weapon in existence and came equipped with a massive double-barrelled turret that would not have looked weird on a naval warship. They were the pride and glory of the Pink Army; the biggest mass-produced tank ever, and also, they were the perfect symbol of Soviet might: big, slow, but ridiculously dangerous, virtually impossible to stop and utterly badass.

Squeezie watched them from his doorway, not quite sure what to think but still enjoying the sight; he didn’t seen one of these babies every day, let alone four. As the front Tank drove past, its Commander – some bored-looking female mule in a pink and black leather coat covered in medals who he hadn’t met before, standing in the open turret hatch – casually gave him a smile and an auto-arm salute, and he returned the gesture. To have four of them in the once place left no room for doubt; Twist was right, and something big really was planned. And chances were, that plan had nothing to do with the Changelings to the Republic’s east. The Apinkalypses had been built to fight other threats; threats with tanks, like Equestria.

Cinnamon had walked up behind Squeezie to watch as well. Once the Apinaklypses had driven past, dozens of Armourdillo Tanks followed – the Pink Army’s smaller armoured fighting vehicles, short, chunky and nowhere near as impressive as an Apinkalypse, but still pretty damn tough.

“Well,” Squeezie finally said. “That’s a lot of tanks.”

“Definitely is,” Cinnamon replied. “By the way, do you have any tea, Comrade?”

“What’s that rumbling noise?” Tickles asked as the two extremely different stallions came into the kitchen living room. She’d sat herself on a bean bag by the little coffee table, and had arranged a random set of saucers and teacups that didn’t match each other even a little bit, and was holding their old teapot in her hooves. She had one eye closed, and she was peering intensely down the spout with the other. Probably for no reason.

“There are some tanks driving past outside,” Squeezie explained. “And, Tickles, we have another visitor! This here’s Cinnamon Twist.”

Tickles put the teapot down, looking at Twist.

“Hi,” she said. “Who are you?”

Twist bowed, ever the smug-faced gentleman.

“I’m Commander Cinnamon Twist, Tickles,” he explained, rising back up. “We’ve met before, but, not for very long. Your brother and I were at school together.”

Understanding swept across Tickles’ face.

“Oh,” she said, suddenly remembering. “Yeah, I remember you now! Squeezie’s mentioned you a few times. He said you were a…”

“IT LOOKS LIKE CINNAMON Twist and I will have to leave in a little, Tickles,” Squeezie hastily interrupted. “Sorry about that. More army business.”

“Awww, no tea?” his sister complained, pouting. “That sucks hoof clippings. Well, at least Jalissa and I can still have fun.”

“She’s…coming with us too,” Squeezie admitted.

Tickles’ face softened.

“Will none of my dreams survive this night?” she whispered.

Squeezie gave her a regretful look.

“I’m sorry, sweetheart,” he continued sadly. “I’d stay if I could, but you know that…”

Squeezie was interrupted by a booming voice behind him.

“Twist!” Jalissa exclaimed from the hall. “How are you, you little bitch! And what the fuck are you doing here in Squeezie’s place like this? I thought you were out west, putting those fancy looks of yours to good use and getting your ass some quick promotions. Heh heh.”

Twist closed his eyes, sighed, and slowly turned around to face the Colonel.

“Hello, Jalissa,” he said calmly. “I’m glad to hear that you’re still the subtle and eloquent little flower you were in the Academy. How’s being a famous ace? I hope that they’re teaching you some longer words. Might come in handy next time someone wants to interview you.”

“Fuck you, Twist,” Jalissa laughed. “But seriously, you don’t visit for the hell of it. So, what’s the deal? You here to collect us or something?”

“Got it in one,” Cinnamon replied. “Command got us here to meet with Zulu in the Army HQ building here at Snowball. Sounds like he’s planning some kind of major operation.”

“Well it did sound like the entire fucking Pink Army just drove past outside,” Jalissa observed, vigorously scratching her shoulder.

“How much time have we got before we have to go visit the old fart? Enough to have something hot to drink? I only just got here.”

Commander Twist checked the clockwork watch strapped to his auto-arm.

“Not really. We’ve got…about twenty-five minutes, but you know Zulu as well as me. We’ll want to get there as soon as we can. So, if thirty seconds is enough, then yes, I guess you do have enough time. By the way, Tickles, can I have a cup?”

“Oh, sure!” Tickles replied happily, busying herself with pouring out a mugful of boiling-hot, brown liquid from their old teapot, which they’d found in a ruined forest cabin two years ago. She picked up the mug in her hooves and held it out to the slender Commander.

“You don’t have sugar or anything, do you?” she checked. “Because, sorry, but we’re out of that. If you really want it sweet, though, I could always add treacle, or ice cream.”

“I think he should be all right, Tickles,” Squeezie said gingerly.

Meanwhile, Twist pointed his horn in the cup’s direction, narrowing his eyes as he telekinetically lifted it from Tickles.

“Thanks, Miss,” he said politely, levitating it towards himself and then delicately taking it in an auto-arm. Jalissa watched him, not looking amazingly impressed.

“Thirty seconds,” she said. “I’ll be counting.”

“No need,” Twist said, throwing the tea back like a shot of vodka.

“Careful!” Tickles squealed, reaching out a hoof. “It’s hot…!”

Twist sloshed the scalding tea around in his mouth, concentrated, and suddenly blew a cloud of hot steam from his nostrils. Squeezie raised an eyebrow; it looked like he was venting the heat of the tea through is nose, obviously some kind of fancy Unicorn magic thing. Evolution hadn’t been very fair to Earth ponies; Pegasi could fly, Unicorns could bend reality to their will, and what did they have? Besides being better at manual labour, that is.

“Perfect temperature,” he said softly to himself, putting the cup down on an armrest.

Tickles stared at Cinnamon blankly.

“Are you a wizard,” she asked.

“Nah, Miss,” Twist replied. “I’m just a regular old unicorn whose grandmother taught him how to calmly drink tea in a blazing hurry. Now, Comrades, we probably should get going, unless we want General Zulu to come after us himself and join our little expanding guest club in here.”

Tickles clopped her hooves together, and her little wings beat the air in excitement.

“Ooh! Another visitor?” she asked.

“Do you remember the fat Zebra, Tickles?” Squeezie said, glancing at his sister. “The guy in the big, pink coat at the Winter’s End Party a few months ago.”

“You don’t mean…?” Tickles gasped.

“Yeah,” he continued. “The guy who tried your banana and popcorn cake.”

Tickles sighed loudly, and buried her face in her hooves. Twist shot Squeezie a curious glance.

“Best leave that one in the past,” he whispered.

Chapter 1, Part 2: Soviet Tears

“Completely unable to stand upright because they are just too damn heavy, Electricorn Troopers are the biggest and nastiest of the Pink Army’s formidable infantry, much taller than an average pony, and bred to be the strongest and toughest clonies around. As if that wasn’t enough, they wear full-body suits of powered armour strong enough to stand up to pretty much anything less powerful than a missile, a bomb or a super-laser. Their purpose is to go hoof-to-hoof with battle tanks and other armoured vehicles, and generally speaking, to attack one with bullets is not advised, unless you’ve got a lot of bullets.

The most impressive thing about them is their weapons, though; huge Thunder Coils built onto their gas mask-like helmets that stick about a meter into the air in front of them. The Coils are hooked up to a pair of nuclear batteries on the backs of their suits, and can throw a bolt of supercharged lighting about a hundred feet; whatever that lightning hits will look much worse than it did before the Electricorn noticed it. Bottom line, whoever you are, Electricorn Troopers are extremely bad news. Their only real weakness is that lightning can’t hit anything that’s flying. That and the fact that every now and again their batteries will suddenly break, causing the unlucky Electricorn to explode.

Important note: while not a rarity, under no circumstances rely on this happening in battle.”

Equestrian Army Field Guide, “Electricorn Trooper”

The three of them left Squeezie’s MCW behind and, because of the intense cold, hastily made their way through Snowball Base and headed directly for the HQ building. Snowball wasn’t a huge army base, but it was one of the biggest in the east, and was more or less a big collection of concrete buildings, sheds, huge tents, fuel tanks, helipads and nuclear reactors surrounded by an armoured brick wall and several formidable Thunder Towers, designed to throw lethal bolts of lightning at any enemy of the Soviet Republic stupid enough to get too close to them. They trudged through the ankle-deep snow, avoiding the deeper parts, and hardly exchanged a word; they didn’t meet anyone or anything either, because only a complete idiot or someone who was getting paid would be outside on a night like this.

Twist and Jalissa were as they’d been before, but Squeezie had changed into his Commander’s winter uniform, stuck his auto-arms to his forelegs and was now uncomfortably walking around upright. Usually it wasn’t so bad, but the day’s fighting had left him a bit on the sore and bruised side of things. He’d tied his tangly mane into a ponytail, put on a peaked Pink Army cap much like Twist’s and slipped into a dark, pink-trimmed leather coat with a couple of his small and boring medals pinned to the chest. He was also wearing a scarlet-coloured woollen sweater under the coat, because even for a creature covered in fur like him, it was pretty damn cold.

Eventually they reached the Headquarters. It was a pretty nice, two-storey brick building, complete with windows, chimneys and a proper roof. It definitely looked a lot better than all the concrete and metal garages and barracks surrounding it. On either side of the front door, two Soviet Smiling Star flags fluttered in the breeze from tall flagpoles. There were also a couple of Electricorn Troopers guarding the entrance; that meant there was definitely a General inside.

The three of them climbed some concrete steps, heading for the door, and Squeezie looked the two anti-tank Electricorns up and down. Electricorns were pretty much the fighting elite of the Pink Army, and had more in common with the tanks they were supposed to fight than your average Dragoon or Alliance Custodian. Their armour was painted grey and white for winter camouflage, there were Smiling Stars on their shoulder pauldrons and the reflective glass eyes of their helmets glowed a bright red. All in all, they looked pretty cool.

Looking at them, Squeezie couldn’t shake the sight of seeing Electricorns in battle, though. They were supposed to fight vehicles, but Troopers really loved to blow stuff up with the big bolts of lightning they shot from their metal horns, so usually what happens when you ask them for help is that they go crazy, happily zapping any bad guys or girls they can see. Basically, when a flesh-and-blood creature was hit by an Electricorn, all the water in their bodies instantly boiled, turning to steam, and the poor whatever would expand like a balloon in the blink of an eye and explode violently in a shower of hot gas and other stuff. Squeezie was familiar with the sight, and it was one of many memories of his that he preferred not to revisit before dinner.

As they got closer, the two Electricorns stood to the side a little to let them pass.

“Hello, Comrade Bosses,” one of the Troopers said, his ridiculously deep clony accent muffled by his helmet’s air filters. “Boss General will be big smiling when he see you three come.”

Yeah, they were bigger than Dragoons, but not much smarter.

“Thank you, Comrades,” Squeezie said, smiling at them as he passed between the two perfectly still Troopers. He was ridiculously careful not to accidentally brush up against one of their long, sharp, metal horns as he passed; the unfortunate result would have been a rather overcooked roast Squeezie. He ducked ahead, opening the door for his two friends – or at least, his friend, and sort of acquaintance. Jalissa wiggled her eyebrows at him thankfully as she went on in, and Cinnamon Twist gave him a courteous little nod.

“Opening the door, for me of all ponies,” Cinnamon noticed as he plodded past. “You really have changed, Commander.”

Squeezie shrugged to himself as he went through. He’d never been able to work much out from Twist’s tone of voice, and even now he wasn’t sure if his old rival was giving him a backward insult or a subtle compliment. As he stepped through the doorway himself, closing the door behind him and lifting his auto-arm from the handle, he decided to think about it some other time.

Then, he turned around, faced into the Headquarters, and stopped still. He had not been expecting the sight that was waiting for him there.

The whole building was chaos. There were usually about four creatures in there, but tonight, there were dozens and dozens, some in and some out of uniform, all running in and out of doors, carrying papers and boxes or whatever and talking to each other very loudly. Several Dragoons, wearing their iconic masks, helmets, boots and pink coats, stood still against the walls with their trusty old rifles by their sides. Well, mostly still; one of them seemed to be playing with two grenades, happily tapping them against one another with his auto-arms and moving them around, like he was making them have a conversation in his head. No-one seemed to mind, and Squeezie sure wasn’t going to stop his fun. Anyway, every creature in the room wasn’t exactly crazy panicking, but they definitely weren’t calm; Squeezie didn’t like the look of it at all.

“Woah,” Jalissa said, whistling. “This is pretty cray.”

“Yeah,” Squeezie agreed dumbly. He’d been at Snowball Base for almost a year, and had never seen it anything like this here before. Or anywhere, really.

“The last time I saw activity anything like this,” Twist said quietly, crossing his forelegs, “Was the last time the Equestrians had a crack at us. Double that, and you have this here.”

Squeezie glanced at his old rival.

“What are you saying, Cinnamon?” he asked.

“I’m saying that I seriously, seriously doubt that all three of us just happened to be here tonight, and got called over here together to help sort paperwork because someone’s secretary is stuck in bed with the flu,” Twist replied. “We’re needed for something, Comrades. And by the looks of this, it’s going to be the highlight of our careers for quite some time.”

“Yeah, maybe, Twist,” Jalissa said dryly. “Or maybe the Entertainment Minister lost his daughter out in the wilderness again. This’d be what, the third time now?”

“There you are! D-D-D-DON’T MOVE!” something yelled at them from across the room.

Squeezie and his companions froze on the spot, looking over at where the sound had come from. A short, beige-coloured Earth stallion in a bad-fitting uniform was quickly limping upright across the room toward them. He was kinda short, his auto-arms were a couple sizes too big, and his blue-and-brown mane was cut extremely short. His expression was complicated, but if it had to be something, Squeezie would have called it scared. Squeezie also noticed that there was something odd about the stallion’s right eye; it didn’t quite look straight. His left arm was funny, too.

“The General wants to…!” the stallion began, before he walked straight into some unlucky pony that was trying to get past with their forelegs full of cardboard boxes. The limping stallion was knocked to the ground and the other pony staggered around for a few seconds, desperately trying to balance the stack of boxes, and then finally managed to. The pony with the boxes sighed with relief, shot the stallion an angry glance as he slowly got to his hindlegs, and continued on.

Squeezie took a few steps over to the guy who’d shouted at them a couple seconds before.

“Hi,” he said, holding out an auto-arm. “Do you need a hoof, Com…?”

“NO I DO NOT,” the stallion said loudly back, straightening up onto his back legs incredibly quickly. “You three! Jalissa, Twist, Heart, the General needs to see you immediately in his office. Not right now, because he is talking to someone else, but he will not be talking to someone else for long so you must follow me right away so that you can see him at once.”

“Cool,” Jalissa replied.

“WELL STOP STANDING THERE PLEASE,” the agitated stallion continued. He wasn’t really being rude, just insistent. “FOLLOW ME, THANK YOU VERY MUCH.”

The three of them exchanged some quick glances, and followed the limping stallion back across the main foyer, all very careful not to accidentally cause any more serious collisions. He led the three old schoolmates to the back of the room, through a double door, down a long hallway and finished up at a door on the left.

“We are here,” the stallion said clearly. “Here being the General’s office. Do you understand?”

“Y…” Squeezie began.

“EXCELLENT,” the Stallion interrupted, slamming the handle on the door with his auto-arm, pushing it open and hurling himself through. “COMRADE GENERAL! WE HAVE ARRIVED.”

Squeezie went into the room, followed closely by Jalissa and Cinnamon. It was a pretty basic thing, with the walls covered by shelves and cabinets, a single window that was completely blocked by snow and a large desk in the middle of the room. Sitting on a swivel chair, behind the desk, was General Zulu, a massive, bald zebra in a huge fluorescent pink overcoat. He was sitting with one elbow on the desk, looking at the four of them thoughtfully. There was also a slender, staggeringly beautiful Pegasus mare standing upright in front of the General, who’d turned slightly on her hindlegs to gaze curiously backward at the loud interruption. She was a creamy white colour, with a black and bright green mane and tail and bright red eyes, and was dressed in a dark Navy uniform. He recognized her as Captain Blaze, the famously beautiful and even more famously deadly submarine commander.

Squeezie shivered slightly. It was amazing to think that, at that moment, his childhood crush of way too many years was looking

him straight in the eye.

“Thank you, Sergeant Fritter,” Zulu said warmly. The only way his rich zebra accent could have deeper would have been if he was shouting it up from the bottom of a mine shaft. “Now, Miss Blaze, I believe we’ve chatted enough. You have your orders; and if I hear anything about any Alliance warships or other juicy targets you might bump into as you move your submarines south, I’ll be sure to send it on to you. Good hunting.”

Blaze bowed slightly.

“Duly noted, General,” she said smoothly, gracefully straightened her back, and saluted. “Glory to the Lady.”

Zulu saluted back, and Blaze turned around and briskly left the room, her long coat tails trailing in the air behind her. The four of them parted immediately to let her through. As she went, though, Blaze glanced at them all, one by one.

“Good luck, kids,” she said with a smile. “Make us proud.”

Jalissa and Squeezie exchanged confused glances. Twist didn’t react.

“Well, the three of you should come in,” the General continued. “And Fritter, well done, but you can leave now. I’ll send one of my assistants if I need you again.”

“YES, S-S-SIR, COMRADE GENERAL, S-S-SIR,” Fritter shouted, saluted spastically, turned around and fled Zulu’s office, slamming the door shut behind him. There was an awkward silence for a few moments, until Zulu broke it just in time.

“Poor bastard,” the fat zebra sighed. “Believe it or not, he was one of my brightest officers, a long time ago. Before his airship exploded over northern Equestria.”

Jalissa looked at Zulu, surprised.

“Exploded, Sir?” she asked, confused. “How did he make it out?”

“His left foreleg, right eyeball and spleen didn’t,” Zulu replied sadly. “But the rest of him fell 20,000 feet and landed on a passing hay cart. It was a billion to one chance, but he survived. Luckiest stallion on the face of the earth or not, poor old Fritter was never the same after he lived through it all. It’s all I can do to let him keep his job.”

There was another short silence.

“But anyway,” Zulu said loudly, clapping his leather-gloved auto-arms together. “You three are probably all wondering why you’re standing here in my office, and now that you’re all here, which I’m very glad to see, I should probably get to explaining why. Come, stand closer. But before we begin, anyone care for a drink?”

Squeezie and his companions walked up to the General’s desk. Zulu reached down, rummaged through a drawer, and pulled out four glasses and a bottle of vintage turnip vodka flavoured with strawberry essence and pine-needle dew.

Jalissa’s beak stretched into a wide smile at the sight of alcohol, and her eyes twinkled like stars.

“Oh, yes please, General,” she purred, rubbing her avian claws together hard enough to make her hardened scales squeak softly.

“Wait, did I ask?” Zulu said thoughtfully, putting the bottle and glassware down on the desk. “I apologize, young ones, that wasn’t a question. You all look like you’ve been out a few minutes too many in the snow; this little bottle of Soviet Tears, though, should help you some, General's orders. Colonel, would you mind?”

“But of course, Comrade General!” Jalissa said, picking up the vodka, sticking a clawtip into the cork and popping it in a single, well-practiced motion. As she poured out some shots, Zulu continued.

“Well, young Comrades,” he said, settling down in his swivel chair. “You’ve no doubt seen all the tank divisions driving around here at the base, and witnessed first-hoof how busy the Headquarters have become tonight. The reason for this is that a massive operation is scheduled to begin, very, very soon. And it will go down in history for many years to come, I believe. Ah, Colonel! Generous with your liquor as always I see, ha ha! Poured like a true Soviet, I like to say. Pass us a glass, would you? There’s a good girl.”

Jalissa distributed the shots, one to each creature in the room. When she passed Squeezie his slightly overfilled glass, he reached out an auto-arm; but, she held it back at the last second, raising an eyebrow at him.

“Remember, featherweight,” she whispered. “Drink it slow. I don’t want to have to explain to Tickles why you decided to go to sleep two hours early and then threw up all over her cushions.”

Hilarious, Squeezie mouthed at her as he took the glass.

Meanwhile, Twist was talking.

“With all due respect, General,” he said calmly. “None of us, or any of our Comrades, had any idea that such a major operation was planned. It’s all been a great surprise, really. May I ask why there was no prior warning? Is this a matter of secrecy?”

“Not exactly, Commander,” Zulu said, smiling and peering at Twist while holding his shot of vodka in one auto-arm. “To be quite honest with you, it was not until very recently that even I was aware that the Pink Army had such important business. This very evening, in fact. But for now, let us drink a toast, Comrades! To the Soviet Pony Republic; may she stand a thousand years, resist a thousand foes and prosper long under the great leadership of the Lady.”

“To the Lady,” the three young officers said together.

Zulu and Jalissa immediately threw back their shots like they were drinking apple juice, Twist sipped at his glass of hard spirits elegantly, and Squeezie hesitated with his own half-raised to his mouth. If he wanted his throat to burn he’d set fire to petrol and drink that, which was more or less what it was like to drink the more expensive brands of northern vodka. As a Soviet pony he’d drink his, no question about it, but he did need to gather his courage a little first.

“Well,” Zulu finally said, slamming his glass down on the table. “Let me delay no more. The task I have for you three is simple, but one that bears a most heavy burden of responsibility. It is my wish, and the wishes of many others, that you young patriots lead the imminent invasion of the Equestrian mainland by the armies of the Soviet Republic.”

Jalissa and Twist’s eyes widened in shock, and of course, Squeezie had chosen that moment to gulp some vodka. The combination of the news and the alcohol was too much for him, and he exploded into a short but intense coughing fit. As he chocked and wheezed, struggling to remain standing straight, Jalissa helpfully gave him a few pats on the back.

Zulu gave Squeezie a disapproving stare.

“Easy does it, little guy,” the General said dryly.

The burning in his throat had finally started to die down. Squeezie took a deep breath, and blinked as many of the tears from his eyes as he could. There were a lot of things going through his head at that moment; first all, his mind was reeling from the revelation that a war with Equestria was coming. Every Soviet citizen and his dog knew how violent and destructive the last fight with the Alicorns’ kingdom had been, and if another one came, it could easily be twice as bad. It was funny to think that there was a very real chance that thousands of lives, including innocent ones, were about to be lost; he’d need to worry about that later though.

But then again, if the Pink Army won, Equestria would be liberated, and its citizens free. Squeezie was pretty familiar with the stories of what life was like for the unfortunate ordinary ponies that lived there, and maybe, he would get a chance to help them out.

“I’m okay,” he heaved. “But, General Zulu, Sir, if I could just ask one question…”

“Go on, son,” Zulu said.

“You’re quite sure that we’re going to invade Equestria? The whole country?”

Zulu put on a monocle and studied a piece of paper on his desk.

“Yep,” the zebra confirmed. “Soviet…Republic…invades…Equestria. That’s definitely what’s written down just there.”

“But, Sir,” Squeezie continued, confused. “An attack like that would need the entire Pink Army to even hope to win! There are still hundreds of thousands of Changelings to the Republic’s east, maybe even millions, and we’re no closer to finding their Queen. We’d be fighting two wars, with no chance of winning either!”

“Good point, but you are mistaken, Commander Heart,” Zulu replied. “I’ve been informed that, from now on, the Changelings will no longer threaten the Soviet Republic in any way whatsoever.”

“Has there been some kind of negotiation?” Twist asked.

“No, well, maybe, but a fairly one-sided one. Last night, I have been told that the Lady’s Pink Shadows were deployed to an as-yet unknown location to the east, where the Changeling’s central hive is located. Their mission was to capture Queen Carapace and her only remaining daughter, and naturally, this mission was a total success. Let’s just say that, along with the influence of a specially grown toxic fungus that our agents have been slipping into their camps and villages, once their two remaining leaders were taken prisoner the rest of the parasite horde was extremely willing to talk about surrendering with us.”

Squeezie raised an eyebrow. The Pink Shadows were a small team of elite snipers, so secret that quite a few Soviet citizens weren’t even sure that they existed. He’d definitely never seen one of them himself. Anyway, according to various legends they were completely separate from the Pink Army, and there was only one pony that the Shadows took their orders from: the Pink Lady herself. They were also the best of the best of the best, and a single rumour that a Shadow was lurking around was enough to cheer up Soviet soldiers better than a broken down vodka truck, and of course, strike pants-wetting terror into the hearts of the Republic’s enemies. The Shadows were not fond of letting their fat, juicy targets go walking off.

But for now, Squeezie had more important questions to ask.

“A special fungus?” Squeezie asked. “How many will it kill?”

“As many as 90% of the population,” Zulu replied. “By now, roughly 30% of them have already died, and they have no queens to fart out any more. Those filthy, chittering worms won’t think of raising a tooth against the Republic for a very long now, ha ha.”

Commander Heart wasn’t quite sure what to think about that. How long had the army had this magical anti-Changeling fungus? Why hadn’t anyone been told about it? And why had it been used right now, at almost exactly the same time it was announced that another war was about to begin, and not before, when it could have saved a few lives since lost in the fighting? His gut told him not to bother Zulu with his thoughts, which was exactly what he did. Squeezie Heart liked the cruel, back-stabbing, shape-shifting insectoids that had plagued the Republic ever since its creation no more or less than any other Soviet, but solving the war with a bio-engineered mass plague sounded uncomfortably like some kind of genocide to him.

Again, though, not the time to ask.

“Understood, Sir,” Squeezie said, saluting apologetically. “I’m extremely glad to hear that all that’s been taken care of, Sir. Sorry for the distraction, Sir.”

Zulu shrugged.

“Eh, it’s alright. Anyway, here’s what is going to happen. This Wednesday, the morning after tomorrow, you, Commander Twist, will be placed in command of a large invasion force that will land on the beaches of Vanhoover. You will share this position with an old student of mine, Lieutenant Twitchy Brows, who will oversee the invasion as a whole and ensure that all runs according to my detailed plan. Your duty will be to secure the city from Allied forces as rapidly as possible, so that the rest of the Pink Army can land there without danger. To do this, you will have access to the finest weapons and troops in the Soviet Republic.”

Twist bowed his head.

“I’m honoured, General,” he said respectfully. “I will execute this mission as flawlessly as I can.”

Zulu nodded.

“That is why you were picked for the job, young Comrade. And you, Colonel,” he said, turning to Jalissa. “From this night you will be Colonel no more, because I am promoting you to the rank of Air Commander. In addition to your own you will receive an additional two Multicopter squadrons to personally command, and you will give your two Comrades here help from the air in the likely event that they will need it.”

Jalissa smiled, and then saluted.

“Thanks, Comrade General!” she barked. “If they try anything funny, I’ll show ‘em what the Soviet Air Force is made of.”

Zulu laughed.

“I see the vodka is working already! Good,” he said, then turned to Squeezie, and paused for a moment before continuing. “And you, little Commander Heart. I have for you a very special job, not the biggest, but definitely not the easiest, that much I know. On the morning of the invasion you will lead your amphibious transports and Dragoons and land them on the beach before any other Soviet forces arrive. Your task is to secure it for your Comrade Commander Twist here, report to him what kinds of Alliance resistance he can expect to meet in Vanhoover, and then await his arrival. You, and your soldiers, will be the very first Soviet patriots to stand on Equestrian soil in this glorious coming war.”

Squeezie blinked a few times. It was quite an honour, being the first to set hoof on the beach, but it did sound awfully like he and his Dragoons would be some kind of first wave. And of course, in the Pink Army the general idea of a first wave was that most of them would die.

But, he wasn’t about to say no.

“Commander?” Zulu asked again, leaning over his desk toward Squeezie. “Is there a problem?”

Squeezie snapped back into reality; he’d let his mind wander.

“Uh, yes, Sir! I mean, no, Sir, there’s no problem. I am greatly humbled by this opportunity to serve the Republic in such an important and glorious manner. I guarantee to you that, with our forces united, our Soviet victory will be most swift indeed!”

Zulu nodded slowly.

“Uh-huh,” he said.

There was an awkward silence. Squeezie swore at himself in his head; he’d succeeded in making himself sound like some kind of fresh Academy graduate who’d never held a gun in his auto-arms before, and by Zulu’s unimpressed expression, it did not look like the General thought that putting him in charge of the first wave of the invasion of Equestria was a good idea.

“Is there anything else, Comrade General?” Jalissa said at last.

“No there is not, Comrade Commander,” the zebra replied. “You should all probably leave now, and perhaps go to sleep; you will all be given more detailed orders tomorrow morning, and by the afternoon, the three of you will be on your ways to battle. I wish you all the very best of luck, young Comrades, which you will not need of course with unstoppable Soviet might on your side. And, I think I will look forward to seeing you all safe, well and victorious in Equestria in two day’s time very, very much. Dismissed.”

The three young soldiers saluted together, turning one by one to leave.

“Yes, Sir. Good night, Sir,” Squeezie said robotically.

“Comrade General,” Twist said softly, nodding.

“Later, General Z!” Jalissa chirped with a wide smile.

“Wait,” Zulu suddenly said, rising up from his chair onto his hindlegs, and straightening up his greatcoat with his auto-arms. He fixed his eyes on Squeezie. Oh, shit, the skinny little stallion thought to himself with a hopefully inaudible gulp.

“Except you, Commander Heart,” the zebra said sternly. “I want you to stay with me for a little bit longer, if that is not so impossible.”

Squeezie froze on the spot. He was probably screwed.

He turned around to Twist and Jalissa. Cinnamon gave him a sympathetic look, nodded a goodbye, and left. Jalissa gave him a quick smile.

“I’ll be back at ya Wagon, Squeezer,” she whispered warmly. “I’ll see you there when you’re done, kay? See ya.”

With that, Jalissa plodded out, closed the door, leaving Squeezie alone in the office of the high-ranking soldier he was pretty certain hated his guts. So, Squeezie turned around, faced the General, and stood with his auto-arms behind his back and his neck straight.

If he was about to cop a licking, then at least he could try to do so with dignity.

Zulu just stood behind his desk for a few moments, looking at Squeezie. So, the short stallion figured he’d try to break the ice himself.

“Is there something I can do for you, General Zulu?” he asked.

The General shook his head.

“No, little Comrade, there is not. Tell me, and tell me honestly, because I will not be very pleased if you do not tell me honestly, and I’ve been told enough lies to notice one easily. This mission that you have just been given; does it trouble you?”

Squeezie hesitated, but only for a heartbeat.

“Yes it does, Sir,” Squeezie replied. It was the simple truth.

“Why,” Zulu replied.

“Because, Sir, I’ll be starting a war,” he said glumly. “If I fail, then the first action of the Soviet Republic’s invasion of Equestria will be a, well…”

“A total clusterfuck, yes?” Zulu finished for him. “One which will make your entire country a bumbling laughing stock, and you the single pony held responsible.”

“Well, ha, yes, I guess so, General,” Squeezie said, covering his mouth to hide his laugh. It wasn’t a regular laugh, about half of it was due to fear, but whatever. As long as Zulu couldn’t hear how fast his heart was going, he’d be all right.

“You’re honest, son, I appreciate that,” Zulu continued, glancing down to look at a picture on his desk. Squeezie couldn’t see what was on it, it was turned away from him. “And if any soldier wasn’t bothered a little by the idea of getting killed, then they’d have no place in the army, as far as I’m concerned. But if this is too much for you, well, maybe you should consider another career.”

“No, Sir,” Squeezie blurted. He winced, chewed his lip, and started again. “Sorry, General, I’m not trying to say that I don’t feel I can follow these orders, I do. I guess that after all my time hunting bugs here in the frontiers, I wasn’t expecting such an important task.”

“Still being honest I see,” Zulu observed. The zebra sighed, reached one of his gold-plated auto-arms down onto the desk, and turned the little picture around towards him.

Squeezie looked at it. It looked like some kind of faded graduation photo, with about thirty mares and stallions standing in some kind of garden in two rows, one sitting down on chairs, the other standing upright behind. They were all dressed in bright blue Equestrian police uniforms, complete with little caps, and they were smiling like crazy. Squeezie cast his eye across the picture, and noticed a grinning, slightly fat young zebra standing in the back row, to the right.

“Spotted me yet?” Zulu asked.

“Yes, Sir,” Squeezie said, pointing with a mechanical finger. “That’s you there.”

“Yep,” the zebra replied. Zulu picked up the photo and held it in front of himself, peering at it through his monocle. “Anyway, I think it’s about time I explained why I picked you, little Commander Heart, to start this war over every other young Commander in the Pink Army. You see this picture? It was taken about thirty years ago now, when I graduated from the Equestrian Police Academy in Manehattan. My entire life I had dreamed of catching bad guys and making Equestria a place that was good, or better, at least.”

“What happened?” Squeezie asked.

“I was a cop for three years,” Zulu continued. “In that time I had a great boss, a wonderful old stallion who was brave, kind, and as straight as an arrow. I loved it, son, I got to beat up street thugs every single day! But then, you see, things changed. All I know is that my boss had a disagreement with some kind of government agent, who’d been sent in to see that a couple of strange new guys that no-one had seen before were put in charge. I heard an argument, and that argument was the last time I ever heard anything from my old boss. The next day, he’d disappeared.”

Squeezie nodded his head. He believed it; he’d heard similar stories before, and also seen enough to know that most of them were true.

“But that wasn’t when I left,” Zulu continued. “I left the next day, when my unit was ordered to arrest a mare of twenty-four years and her infant daughter. I asked what they had done, and was told to shut up, or else. Scared the shit out of me it did, but I was always a good little officer though, so I was about to do it when I heard from a friend that they had done nothing wrong.”

‘Why were they being arrested?” Squeezie asked.

“They were the girlfriend and daughter of some unicorn. An investigator, who had published a book about the Fourth Alicorn, Princess Something Sparkle, and a certain controversy about a scientist who had revealed details about an experiment of hers that had somehow killed a few test subjects and had had some kind of accident. The book had sold well, you see, but I think that someone did not want it to sell so well.

“Anyway, I went back to my new boss, and told him no. I was booted out on the spot, and they weren’t very nice about it. So I went home with no job, and in two days, girlfriend and baby had turned up in some back street. Apparently, she had died of a drug overdose, and the little one had frozen to death in her arms overnight. I knew that was wrong, though, and when I heard the news, I had never been more scared in my life. And the next day, the investigator had thrown himself off the side of a building before the police could get him. Right then, I realized the truth about this Equestrian Kingdom, and those Alicorns that ruled it. So ten years later, I was a part of the tiny Pink Party. Ten years after that, I was leading soldiers in the Rebellion, and now, I am a General.”

Squeezie paused to take it all in before he spoke again.

“I’m sorry, General,” he said sympathetically. “That’s terrible.”

“Bah! I got over it a long time ago, son, anything can be cured with hard work and many victories. Anyway, come with me, we should have a quick walk up to the balcony. You look like you could do with some fresh air, Comrade.”

Zulu walked over to the wall and pushed a cabinet to the side, revealing a hidden door. He opened it and beckoned Squeezie to follow him, which he did, and found himself and the General in a tight, spiralling staircase. The General started to climb, and Squeezie followed.

“Anyway, now that long story is over,” Zulu continued, lumbering up the stairs with an auto-arm sliding up the metal hoof rail. “I will say this: I did not become a General to get revenge, little Comrade Commander, or to destroy this evil Equestria and its Princesses who deserve to be locked away forever. I became a General because there were a lot of creatures, ponies, mules, bison, griffons, all kinds of things living there that I liked, lots of kind souls who would like the entire world to be a better place. But it is ruled by four Alicorns that no-one can challenge, no-one can say no to, and that share all the power in the country between themselves. I wanted to fix that, Comrade, to make Equestria the sunny paradise with colourful cities, green forests and meadows, and happy little towns and villages it was always supposed to be. And I think you can help me with this.”

“Why me, Comrade General?” Squeezie asked.

“I will tell you,” Zulu said as the two of them came up to a metal door. The General turned the handle, swung it out, and they stepped out onto some kind of empty guard tower, walking up to the edge. From where they were, they could see every tent, hangar, building and nuclear reactor in Snowball Base, and beyond that, the snowy plains of the Republic’s eastern frontier with their frozen rivers, clusters of boulders and little patches of snow-covered trees, and beyond those, the great ring of mountains surrounding them on the horizon. The snow had stopped falling, and every now and again, a starry sky and a half-full moon shone down through the gaps in the clouds.

“What a view,” Squeezie breathed.

“Yep,” Zulu said, pointing an auto-arm finger at the sky. “Look straight up.”

Squeezie leaned forward over the railing, and saw a formation of five huge, armoured Pink Army Bomber Balloons slowly flying south directly overhead. The massive light-brown airships were flying in and out of puffs of grey cloud, making a low-pitched buzzing noise with their red and green navigation lights flashing on and off in the darkness. Squeezie could see the pink star symbols on their tails, and on the noses of the airships, huge, and somehow rather terrifying smiling faces had been painted. It was an incredible relief to Squeezie that the Bomber Balloons were on his side in the coming war – unless, of course, you were unlucky enough to have one crash on top of you.

“An impressive sight, yes?” Zulu said, looking up at them. “I remember when he had exactly three of those in the entire Pink Army. And now, we have dozens. How times do change, eh?”

“Yeah,” Squeezie agreed. “I’ve never seen five of them together out here.”

“That’s General Cookie up there,” Zulu explained, “A good friend and old rival of mine. She’s moving her airships south, to meet up with Admiral Plod and the rest of the Pink Navy for the voyage to Equestria. For a mare of eighty she’s a tough old fox, she is, and after a couple of shots she turns into quite a she-bear! If this invasion goes well, Commander, you’ll end up meeting her yourself.”

“Sounds like I should look forward to that, Sir,” Squeezie said, half honestly.

A couple of moments later, Cookie’s Bomber Balloons had disappeared into the clouds, and silence once again descended on the Base. There was a short silence before Zulu continued.

“You know, I haven’t always liked you much, little Comrade.”

“You haven’t, General?” Squeezie asked gingerly.

“No,” Zulu continued. “Sometimes, when I would ask you to do something, you did the opposite thing, and I afterwards I really wanted to strangle you like a snake. You also did things in some very, very strange ways. All this made you a hard little Commander to work with.”

There wasn’t really much for Squeezie to say to that. So he just stood there awkwardly, and waited for the General to continue with reminding him of his flaws.

“But even after all the times you made me boil inside like a coffee pot, there were always other things I noticed about you. How your Dragoons respect you like a brother. How your fellow officers, even the ones that don’t like you, appreciate how polite and respectful you are. How you put yourself and your career at risk without hesitating the moment you hear that somewhere nearby a life is at stake. A long time ago, little Comrade, I believed that the new Pink Army would be a force of heroes, who would do no wrong in their crusade for liberation. Since then, I have seen how I was so very wrong; there are many in our ranks who wouldn’t think twice about sacrificing one, ten or even a hundred innocents to kill just one single enemy soldier. But then, a pony like you comes along, and gives me just a little hope, Comrade.

“I chose you to begin the invasion, Commander Heart, for a few reasons. It will mean that the first Pink Army Commander that the ponies of Equestria will see is an honourable soldier who will be very careful not to waste a single life if he can help it. And secondly, I chose you because for two years now you and your tiny force of clonies have stood against odds that only the Republic’s best could hope to trot away from alive and well, and not only have you lost precious few of your soldiers, but I do not believe that you have a single military failure to your name. If there is any pony that could land on that beach first and make it out okay, I think that it is you. Even though I have no doubt that by my standards, you will win in the strangest and most wrong way possible. But, the most important reason? With a little work, Comrade, I believe that you could go on in this war to become quite the hero of the Soviet Republic, and perhaps even beyond.”

Squeezie snorted. The General was definitely right about that; he had quite a reputation for failing to follow orders completely, but still winning at whatever by a long shot. At any rate, he was pleasantly surprised. He wasn’t used to getting many compliments, and the last place he’d expected to get any was from Zulu. With all the jerks and douches out there in the world, it was nice that one old zebra wasn’t so unfriendly any more.

“Thank you, Sir,” he ended up saying. “That means a lot to me, really.”

Zulu nodded, with a satisfied smile.

“Good,” he said. “And how do you feel about going home now, Squeezie?”

“I feel like showing them what they missed out on,” he replied confidently. “You know, if I hadn’t left Equestria, come here and joined the Pink Army, but, instead, I’d stayed there, joined up the Alliance, and become, you know, some kind of Commander…there…um… I’m ready for it, Sir!”

Zulu peered at him, then turned back to the scenery.

“Go to bed, Commander,” the General said. “That’s a direct order. You’ll need every snatch of it you can get in a couple of days, believe me there.”

Squeezie saluted.

“Yes, Sir. Night, Sir.”

He then turned around and went back through the guard tower door. As he did, Zulu turned to him one last time, and winked.

“I’ll see you in Vanhoover, little Comrade,” Zulu said warmly. “And tell your friendly sister sometime that I am sorry for the remark about the peanut fritters. I hear that it hurts her greatly still.”

Squeezie paused, turning around to look back at Zulu.

“I believe it was actually a popcorn cake, Sir,” he replied.

Zulu raised an eyebrow.

“Popcorn?” he repeated slowly. “Those little crunchy things were popcorns? Then, how did I get the allergic reactions…?”

One twenty-minute hike on his hindlegs later, Squeezie was back at his MCW. Jalissa had left the front door unlocked, of course, so it wasn’t very hard for him to let himself in. He took off his fancy hat and coat, hanging them on the hooks on the hallway wall, and sat down on a little wooden crate just inside the door to pull his boots off his sweaty hindlegs. He rubbed his sore hooves with his auto-arms, then rose back onto his legs and plodded down the hall.

It was pretty quiet, which was unusual. A combination of Jalissa and Tickles in the same building was usually the perfect recipe for quite a lot of noise.

“Hello?” he said softly, pushing doors open and checking each room as he went down the hall. There was no-one in the bathroom or the laundry, no shocks there, but when he carefully nudged the bedroom door a little bit, he was greeted by the sight of Tickles lying sprawled on her back over their double bed, all tangled up in the tattered old blanket with the ladybug pattern. She was totally asleep, and her round, whitish-grey stomach was gently rising and falling as she breathed noisily through her very open mouth.

Squeezie crept on the tips of his hooves over to the bed, gently untangled the quilt and half-covered her with it, then carefully walked back out, flicking off the light as he went. He turned around to give her one last look before he left the room. It was funny to think that he was about to go home to Equestria after all these years, and after the hell they both went through trying to escape to the Republic. Of course things would be different this time, because Squeezie was not a tiny little colt any more, and also, he had a small but deadly army.

But the last time he’d stepped on Equestrian soil, his older sister had been a normal older sister, who’d been there to look after him after their mother vanished and they were left alone in Ponyville as the Rebellion tore it apart. Now, he was the older brother, even if he was a few years younger than Tickles. Whatever happened, there would be a lot of painful memories waiting for Commander Squeezie Heart when he arrived in Vanhoover.

Feeling like something normal to drink, Squeezie strolled into the living room, where Jalissa was once again folded comfortably into his best chair. She was eating half a cheese and clover pizza that she’d found in the fridge, and was just posting the last piece into her beak when he walked in. She turned towards him, with a blank expression.

“Tickles said I could have it,” she said around her mouthful of pizza, spraying dozens of tiny crumbs onto the floor. “For weak-ass

pony vegetarian food, is pretty good.”

Squeezie nodded with a smile, and pulled off his auto-arms, one after the other, which he dropped on the sofa. He flopped onto all fours and trotted into the kitchen, filling himself a glass of water.

"You were gone a while," the griffon observed. "Was General Z telling another one of those long-ass stories?"

"Yeah, he was. Not a bad one, actually. Kinda sad though."

"I'll bet, he's one tough motherfucker. A very friendly and honest motherfucker, though."

"Yep," Squeezie agreed, screwing the water tap closed with his mouth.

There was a short silence.

“Well,” Jalissa continued, “This is it, bro. The big one. We’re invading Equestria.”

“I know, sister,” Squeezie replied, taking the glass in both hooves and sipping it. “It’s crazy. I have, like, no idea what to think, Jalissa. We could get killed, both of us.”

“So business as usual? Come on, Squeezie, grow a pair. You’re been out here in the middle of fucking nowhere for years with a shitty job, and Zulu has just handed you the chance to become one of the most famous officers in the Soviet Republic. If you pull this mission off, and keep pulling them off, hell, you could make a bloody General by the end of the year.”

“I’m not that amazing,” Squeezie said, turning around and strolling back to her. “Just another very lucky soldier. By the way, I’m really happy you made Commander, Jalissa.”

The griffon clapped her claws.

“Ha! Thanks for reminding me dude, I’m pretty crazy happy too! I mean it was always just a matter of time, with my awesome reputation and everything, but still, it’s great that it finally happened. Ha ha. Anyway, here’s hoping I get to finally scratch a few Mechasus kills onto my record.”

“Yeah,” Squeezie said warmly, sitting himself on a couch and thinking.

“This war is going to be massive, Jalissa,” he said, staring at the table.

“Yep,” Jalissa said, picking some dirt out from under one of her claws.

“I mean, huge, big,” Squeezie continued. “The Soviet Republic against the Equestrian Alliance. If the Lady really ordered this to happen, it could go for years and years. Thousands of ponies, and all kinds of other creatures are gonna die.”

“And how many Equestrians die every year so that the Alicorns can feel like there isn’t going to be a second Rebellion any time soon?” Jalissa said, annoyed. “Come on, pony boy, here was me thinking that you’d be too smart for this. We can’t just write those Alicorns a pretty please letter asking them nicely to stop brutally oppressing their citizens. We’ve gotta go there ourselves and stop ‘em, up close and personal! And if anyone’s going to pull something like that off, it’s us Soviets.”

“Or the sea ponies,” Squeezie pointed out.

Jalissa waved a claw in the air.

“Bah, those limp-dicked Imperials couldn’t be bothered to crawl out of the ocean if their mad-ass Emperor told them that Equestrian Earth ponies were made of fucking candy, or fish salad, or whatever those aquatic freaks eat. And even if they did, they couldn’t even handle Equestria, let alone us. I don’t think that they even have 20,000 soldiers in their army.”

“True,” Squeezie pointed out. “But all of those soldiers are either cyborgs, ninjas, or ride around in giant transforming robots.”

“I’d like to see how one of those robots would do against an Apinkalypse Tank,” Jalissa replied. “Who the hell would think it’s a good idea to fight a war with giant fucking robots? Those things are like big-ass, noisy ‘shoot me’ signs painted all yellow and red and shit.”

“Yeah, I guess,” Squeezie said. Jalissa had a good point; the Aquestrian Empire, for some reason, seemed to prefer robotic mechas to tanks, which was a pretty stupid decision to be honest. As awesome as a giant robot looks, they are generally pretty impractical, especially compared to something like a Soviet tank. “I guess I’m just a little nervous. If this war with Equestria turns into some kind of long stalemate, it might be a pretty good chance for the Empire to try and take us both out at once.”

“Yeah, but that’s assuming that we do badly,” Jalissa, giving him a confident smile. “Do you really think that the Pink Army’s going to cock this one up?”

“I hope not, Jalissa,” Squeezie sighed, settling a little deeper into his couch. “I hope not.”

“Yep,” Jalissa said, suddenly rising onto her feet. “Well, Squeezie, as awesome as it would be to go on yakking all night, I need to hit the sack, and so do you. Mind if I snuggle up next to Tickles in that double bed back there? It’s the only place I think I’ll fit, you see. You’ve got somewhere else in this thing to crash, right?”

“Here’s all right,” Squeezie said, nodding at the sofa he was sitting on.

“If you say so, dude,” Jalissa said. She stretched herself, bumping her claws against the ceiling, and yawned. “Anyway, sleep well, little brother. I’m glad I could drop by!”

“Me too, Jalissa,” Squeezie said, closing an eye as she ruffled his mane while she was walking out. The griffon paused, though, just inside the door.

“Oh, Squeezie,” she said, turning around. “That reminds me. What’s gonna happen with Tickles?”

“Huh?” he asked, looking around at her.

“You’re going to war, son,” Jalissa pointed out. “And you’re going to be taking this Wagon thing here with you, right? Well, what’s

Tickles going to do?”

Squeezie paused and thought.

“I guess she’s going to come with me,” he said.

Jalissa gave him a hard look.

“You know, Squeezie, you look after your sister. I respect that, I respect that a lot. But one land mine, one Mechasus rocket, one anti-tank grenade and this thing could blow up like a house-sized balloon. You want Tickles to be in here if that happens?”

Squeezie felt a knotty feeling in his gut. Jalissa was right, if Tickles went with him, not only was that technically not allowed (not that it mattered, the Pink Army wasn’t really that keen on checking its officers for pets and family members and things like that) he’d also be putting her life in some very real danger. But, now that he thought about it, he didn’t have much of a choice.

“Well, what else could I do, Jalissa,” he said sadly. “We don’t have any friends here in the Republic; or at least, anyone I could leave Tickles with. I’m not going to stick her in some kind of home for, well, ponies that are a little bit different. That is never going to happen. So, she’s going to come with me, and for as long as this invasion goes she won’t be leaving my side. If one of us has to die, then we’ll both die together. I won’t let anything else happen.”

“You don’t always have the luxury of choice in these kinds of things, dude,” Jalissa sighed. “But, I guess you have a point about leaving her behind. Still, doesn’t sit right with me. Some of our buddies are probably going to die, but I really don’t wanna see Tickles go. Or you. Like, seriously.”

“You don’t have to tell me,” Squeezie replied. “I do wish I had another choice, Jalissa; believe me, I really do. But here we both are, Soviet Commanders, and we’ve been given a job: we’re going to help remove those Alicorns from power, free the creatures they’ve conquered and turn Equestria back into what it was always meant to be: a pony kingdom, run by actual ponies. But not even that will make me leave my sister behind.”

“Fuck yeah to that,” Jalissa agreed. “Look bro, you’re making the right decision here, I know that, and it’s wrong of me to bitch about it. Just as long as you’re sure you’re making a call that you’re not going to regret later.”

Squeezie smiled, shaking his head.

“I have no idea if I’m going to regret it later or not, Jay,” he said. “But, whatever happens, it’s the only decision I can make. Family is family, and Tickles is all I’ve got.”

Jalissa nodded thoughtfully.

“Yeah, about that,” she continued. “Squeezie, I have no idea what Zulu talked to you about after I left, and I don’t give a shit because it’s no business of mine. But, I gotta ask you this. I know you went through a lot of shit in Equestria when you was little. I know how you lost your Dad, I know how your Ma disappeared, and I know how you two were both left all alone. I’ll be honest; that’s some tough shit bro, but I’m not trying to bring it all back here. I need to ask you this, because I’m your friend, and I don’t want any more bad shit to happen to you, if I can help it. You’re ready for this, right, Squeezie? You're all mentally prepared and shit? You’re ready to go home again, maybe for a while?”

Squeezie scratched himself on the cheek with a hoof, pondering her question.

“To be honest, I don’t know, Jalissa,” he said, staring at the table again. “You’re right, I’m a bit of a mess, especially in the head; but that isn’t news to anyone, is it? Psycho Squeezie, and all that. One thing I do know is this, though: I’m good at fighting, as good as just about anyone, or anypony, out there. I’ve been avoiding a lot of my…mental problems all my life, but now I’m going back, I think there’s a chance I might sort some of it out, you know, by retracing my steps a little. I’ll have you around, and Tickles, so I should be okay. And when this invasion thing starts, well, all I can say is this: for too long I’ve been fighting shape-shifting bugs that can’t really fight at all. But I’m about to get a chance to show what I can do fighting some real bad guys, Alliance bad guys. And I’m pretty damn sure that when this is all over, there’s going to be a long list of all kinds of things that aren’t gonna want to mess with me, my friends and the Pink Army ever again.”

Jalissa nodded her approval, beaming at him.

“Ooh,” she giggled. “I’m getting tingles, bro! It’s like you’re whole new Squeezie all of a sudden, one with a taste for the fine art of kicking ass. This is going to be fuckin’ awesome.”

Squeezie smiled back at her.

“We’ll see, Raptor Girl,” he said simply. “We shall see."

Chapter 1.5, Twice the Royalty

“Sparkle Industries is a cutting-edge corporation based in Canterlot, Equestria. Specializing in experimental technology, military hardware and magical research, this huge organization has bases all across the country, and is supposedly in charge of developing all the advanced technology that has transformed the Alliance into the most powerful nation in existence. However, its history has been plagued by allegations that it is in fact little more than multi-billion-bit laboratory that builds expensive toys for its founder and owner, the Fourth Alicorn Princess Twilight Sparkle, and that its benefit to Equestria as a whole is little more than a side-effect of serving the Princess. It would certainly be difficult for anyone to challenge her about it given her position of absolute authority in the Equestrian Monarchy, like it has been difficult for the Princess’ opponents to accuse her corporation of certain violations of ponies’ rights that are rumoured to have occurred within the walls of her mysterious facilities. While none of these violations have been fully confirmed to have occurred, there are an awful lot of them. One can only wonder...”

Sparkle Industries: an Analysis (book banned and all copies incinerated by Royal Authority)

Sparkle Industries Test Facility, 500 meters below Vanhoover, Equestria

Professor Acorn, a thin and fairly well-aged unicorn stallion, sat at the cramped little desk in his underground office, finishing a plan for a cybernetic foreleg he’d been working on in the past couple of weeks. He was wearing a simple shirt, a tie with a purple strawberry pattern and a standard white lab coat; his forelegs were resting on the flat surface, his horn glowed bright green as he telekinetically scribbled a pen back and forth and back and forth, and it had been a little while since he’d trimmed the fur hairs on his face back. Probably too long. Most of the ponies who worked at SI tended to look a little grizzled; it was just too easy to forget about looking after yourself when you were working for what was basically an evil corporation.

Well, maybe not exactly evil, but Acorn knew as well as any other employee that they weren’t exactly making medicines and hospital beds at Industries.

Then, the buzzer sounded on his desk. He glanced over at it. Odd, Acorn thought to himself. It’s eleven thirty at night. I should be the only one doing anything around here, other than the security guys, I guess.

He put the pen down, reached a hoof over, and pressed the buzzer.

“Professor Acorn,” he announced loudly at the mike on his desk.

“Professor!” an exhausted-sounding voice replied. It was Bread Basket, his personal assistant, a young Earth pony with a bad habit of dropping things. He should have gone home ten minutes ago, but for some reason he hadn’t. “It’s Bread. We have a situation!”

“What’s wrong, Big B,” Acorn replied.

“It’s the Princess!” Bread Basket exclaimed. “She’ll be here in ten minutes, for a surprise inspection of the Project 13! She just directly called me herself, and, uh…”

Bread Basket’s voice trailed off.

“She insisted?” the Professor asked.

“…yeah,” Bread confirmed. “It was…scary, Sir. She’s scary.”

“I know, Bread, I know,” the Professor said. “But, don’t worry, I’ll be right over to walk her through it myself. With a bit of luck, you won’t have to say a single word, but unfortunately as my assistant you will have you actually be there.”

“Thanks, Sir,” Bread said gratefully. How long will you be?”

“I’ll be at the entrance in five minutes,” Acorn replied, opening a drawer with his horn magic and telekinetically lifting out an old electric razor, which he flicked on and started to run up and down his chin. “And, Bread, if you get the chance, comb your mane, redo your tie and, also, if you have any psychic protection devices lying around, remember to put one on.”

“Will she…try to read my mind?” Bread asked nervously.

“No, not even Alicorns can just do that, and to be quite honest, she probably wouldn’t care about what’s going on in your head even if she could,” Acorn replied, putting down the razor for a moment. “But, she’s an Alicorn, remember? And she’s a young one, too. If we hooked her into the power grid she’d probably be able to light up Canterlot without breaking a sweat, and of course, I never said that, okay? Anyway, once, I saw Professor Humbug stand a little too close to her while she sneezed. Poor bastard; it was a mess.”

“The sneeze?” Bread asked.

“No, not that,” Acorn replied. “His head was. What was left of it, anyway. If Sparkle’s concentration breaks and she’s too badly distracted, all that magical power she’s keeping down has to go somewhere, right? And a raw surge of psychic energy really likes to go into a head.”

There was a silence.

“Um…thank you, Sir,” Bread finally stammered. “I’ll, uh, try to find something, or, uh, make myself a tin foil hat, or…”

“That might work,” Acorn pointed out, “But she’d probably notice that you look silly. And between you and me, son, we really don’t want that to happen.”

“Good point, Sir,” Bread finished. “See you in five.”

Five minutes later

The entrance to the Vanhoover Test Facility was a small, simple elevator, big enough to hold eight to ten ponies, or maybe a couple of boxes. Bread and Acorn were standing side-by-side on all fours just outside, waiting in the big, rectangular entry hall, a grey. The room was a concrete thing with polished floors, a thin blue stripe on the walls and a couple dozen blue-coloured light strips hanging from the roof, lighting everything up. It was cold, and smelled vaguely of plastic, chemicals, and strangely enough, electricity.

“Remember to bow,” Acorn said softly as they listened to the humming sound of the approaching elevator. “The same time as me. Try not to say anything, or look at her, or trip on something, and if she does talk to you, don’t flatter her, just remember her titles and be incredibly polite.”

“Yes, Professor,” Bread said, gulping. He was a slender, bluish stallion with dark red hair, and his green eyes were always wide and worried. Acorn felt very sorry for the guy, another genius who’d been snapped up by Sparkle Industries and more or less forced to work on the Princess’ personal pet projects night and day.

That was the thing about Sparkle Industries. It was funded by citizen’s taxes, and quite a lot of them at that, but all it ever did was create stuff for Princess Twilight Sparkle, according to her strict and detailed requests. That was it; the huge labs, testing complexes and production factories did nothing else but satisfy her curiosity. Sometimes, Acorn wished that he could go out and use his genetic engineering skills to make things that would actually help ponies, like cures for diseases, or apple trees that would grow with only half as much water. He knew that others, like Bread, felt the same way. But, he was trapped underground, and if he complained at all, well, he wasn’t exactly sure what would happen to him but judging by a few familiar body parts in the organ library he didn’t want to give it a try and find out for himself.

There was a bumping sound behind the elevator doors. They were here. Acorn adjusted his lab coat with a hoof, took a breath, plastered a fake smile across his face and straightened his back. Bread followed his example. And then, at last, a red light turned to green, and the hydraulic elevator doors hissed open in a cloud of transparent vapour.

Standing in the elevator were the Fourth Alicorn, Princess Twilight Sparkle, a rather bored-looking General Dash of Cloudsdale, and two Mechasus bodyguards, whose dragon-like metal helmets were sweeping back and forth across the room, constantly scanning for danger.

Acorn didn’t think it made any sense to bring elite air superiority infantry down into the underground laboratory. Maybe the Princess needed them to make sure she didn’t trip up on a little bolt someone had dropped on the floor. Or maybe Royalty just liked to surround itself with big, badass-looking bodyguards; Acorn could definitely see the appeal.

Princess Twilight didn’t need much explaining; she was wearing a titanium tiara studded with multi-coloured diamonds, her mane and tail were utterly perfectly done up and she had a rather tense, worried expression on her face. General Dash was wearing her heavily customized Mechasus power suit, but like most powerful leaders in the military, hadn’t bothered to put on the helmet. That might explain why there was a large, pink, and very intimidating scar on her right cheek. The two Mechasi were a little sleeker than most of their kind, and their armour was quite a bit darker and shinier; the rainbow patterns on their legs and sides, however, left no room for doubt. They were members of the Seven Spectra, the General’s hoof-picked, elite bodyguards. Unfortunately for Equestria’s enemies, and for any ponies that wanted to disagree with Dash, you could not find more formidable fighting flyers anywhere. Like, at all.

“Your Majesty!” Acorn gushed, bowing low. Bread followed his example. “Welcome back to Sparkle Industries. I trust that you and your entourage arrive quite well?”

“I can’t believe I have to take this stupid elevator every time I come down here,” the Princess replied dryly, stepping out of the cramped, mobile platform indignantly. “I mean, I could teleport, but seriously, is it so bad around here that a Princess has to make her own way around? It’s thirty whole seconds of my life that I could spend doing something else, and something very important too, because I’m a Princess, and Princesses do important things because it’s what Princesses do! And besides, it is just so not-Alicorn to wait around. Professor Acorn, I Royally Demand that you invent a more stylish way for me to get down here.”

Oh dear, Acorn thought to himself. Another Royal Demand. Just what I need.

“You said it, Twi,” General Dash said as she and her Mechasi followed the Princess out, their suit actuators humming and squeaking as they moved. Looking tired, Dash rolled her armoured forelegs around in their powered metal sockets. “How about getting some kinda soda or coffee dispenser installed on the wall in there to pass some time? Just for a little extra cider cash for the janitors, y’know. Or just a bowl of jelly snakes on a stool, I’m easy either way.”

Acorn bowed again.

“As you wish, your Majesty,” he agreed. “I’ll see that the budget for your personal teleportation project is doubled within the week, and with luck, we’ll have it working by the time of your next illustrious visit. And General, I will see what can be done about that bowl of jelly snakes.”

“I want it tripled by tomorrow morning,” Twilight corrected him with a warm, cheerful smile. “Just say it’s me asking, and I don’t think that any pony will say no. Anyway, how are things, Professor Acorn? How are you? How’s your back? And how’s the Project?”

“I’m well thanks, my back is all right and Project 13 is progressing well, your Eminence,” Acorn replied gracefully. “The specimen has matured very well, initial tests are complete and we’re just beginning the main procedure….”

“Hold on,” Twilight suddenly said, the smile melting from her face as she stared intensely into Bread Basket’s wide, startled eyes. Acorn’s ears pricked in alarm, and he saw the blood drain instantly from his terrified assistant’s face.

“I don’t remember this one,” the Princess said menacingly. “You, Earth pony! What are you doing here? How long have you been here? Are you a Communist Traitor?”

General dash sighed and rolled her pinkish-red eyes, but of course, the Princess didn’t pay her right-hand soldier any attention, and continued to stare madly at the young scientist. Bread opened his mouth to speak, but could only manage a faint, gaspy wheeze. Acorn immediately intervened, for the sake of his young employee’s hide.

“That is my assistant, Bread Basket, your Highness,” he explained in a rush. “He got you a cup of coffee the last time you were here, remember?”

“I REMEMBER NO SUCH THING!” Twilight squealed, twisting around to General Dash. “Rainbow! Royal Demand. Tell me if the young one looks like a Communist Traitor to you!”

“He looks like he’s about to piss is lab coat, Twi,” Dash responded dryly. “But no, he doesn’t look like a ‘Communist Traitor’. In fact, I don’t think he’s going to be able to trot in a straight line after you’re through with him. Cut the poor kid some slack, will ya?”

“Really? Well, if you say so, Rainbow,” Princess Twilight sighed, turning back to Bread Basket and smiling at him, all trace of her psychotic aggression from a few seconds before gone. “Well I guess you’re not a Communist Traitor after all, my dear! Go on being a good Sparkle Industries employee, will you? There’s a good boy!”

Bread Basket stood there and nodded blankly, probably too overwhelmed by fear and confusion to even think properly. General Dash caught Acorn’s eye, and mouthed a few words at him: sorry, Doc. Rainbow then raised a hoof to her ear, made a little circular gesture, crossed her eyes and poked out a tongue. The Professor smiled slightly.

“So,” Twilight said, turning back to Acorn. “Is the Project ahead of schedule Professor? I want you to tell me that it is. It’d be the first nice thing that’s happened to me today. Urgh.”

Acorn didn’t pause. Lying would be pointless, and incredibly stupid.

“No, your Majesty,” he replied. “I’m afraid I can’t tell you that we are, in fact, we’re slightly behind schedule. We’ve been delayed by unforseen…”

“Oh. Is she resisting?” the Princess continued, her voice suddenly cold.

“She…it, rather, has proven slightly more resistant to the psychic erasure process than we’d first thought,” he explained gingerly. “Exactly how resistant, we don’t know for sure yet.”

Twilight nodded slowly, with a blank face.

“I see. Well, that’s a real shame, Professor! I was really, really hoping that you’d have some good news to brighten up my day, but hey, I guess you can’t rely on anypony anymore these days. Take me to Project 13, Professor. Directly. I want to see her for myself.”

Acorn and Bread exchanged nervous glances.

“Is there a problem, Professor?” the Princess repeated. “I came here to inspect the Project, you know, so I intend to inspect the Project, and not drink coffee and chat with inept peasant scientists.”

Acorn took a breath.

“Of course, Princess,” he said glumly. “The Project is right this way.”

Acorn led the little group of six, including him, down a few very long cold concrete corridors, up some stairs, down a couple others, through some bulkheads and past a lot of labs. Everywhere there were pale, blue lights, that automatically switched on as they trotted near them. The entire facility was almost completely deserted; the only ponies that hadn’t gone home were a couple of security guys in the camera room. Now that the Princess was here, there wasn’t much of a chance that they would show their faces; every pony in the Alliance, except the absolutely stupidest ones, knew to keep out of Twilight’s way if they could.

General Dash studied the bare, stone-like walls as they progressed.

“You know, this place could really use a couple pictures on the walls or something like that,” Dash observed. “I mean, it feels like some kinda morgue. What do you think, Twi? Reckon you could put something about redecorating the labs into the next Industries budget? And maybe even some kind of heater, it’s getting nippy in here.”

“This place,” Twilight breathed. “Is perfect, Rainbow. No pictures, no heater. A place of cutting-edge technological development should not feel even the slightest bit warm and fuzzy!”

The General sighed. “Whatever tingles your little horn, Princess.”

“Yes,” the Princess agreed. Acorn quickly glanced at her face; Sparkle was looking a little on the jumpy side tonight, even compared to how jumpy she was normally. That was a very bad sign; the Princess was not the same pony who’d been handed a throne ten years ago and told to rule a whole quarter of Equestria at a time. Once a chirpy and bright little Unicorn, as a part of her private corporation almost since the very beginning Acorn had witnessed Twilight transform into a paranoid and sometimes violent ruler whose strange habits were constantly surrounded by total secrecy. No pony in the world really knew what went on in the Fourth Alicorn’s head, but anyone with half a brain knew that she was far from sane.

And with all that corrupted Princess power constantly surging through her veins, she was the last pony in existence that you wanted to have an argument with.

They reached a thick, metal double door, with a small keypad on the side.

“Here we are, your Highness,” Acorn announced. “Give me a moment, and I’ll show you inside.”

“Kindly step on it, Professor,” Twilight said irritably. “I very, very much want to see how much this absolutely vital project has been screwed up while I’ve been away.”

“Yes, Highness,” Acorn said briskly, trotting up to the door and sticking his right foreleg over the 9-button keypad. Keypads were much easier to use with an auto-arm, but, with enough practice it was just possible to make by with a bare hoof. He keyed in a 16 number code, and breathed into a tiny hole above the panel.

“Identifying… Breath… Composition,” a computerized pony voice said slowly. “Project… 13… Managing… Director… Professor… Acorn… Identity… Confirmed. Admission… Permitted…”

“The main computer’s a little slow these days, Highness,” Acorn explained with a nervous smile, trotting back from the door to make way for the Princess. “We think there’s an issue with the CPU core, and the technicians are hard at repairing it.”

The Princess ignored him, staring intensely at the two doors. There was a loud alarm, and two strobe lights, one blue and one red, started to flash on either side of the entrance. They both hissed, coughing clouds of thick, white disinfectant steam from the corners, and slowly scraped open with a high-pitched metal squeaking noise. Behind them was pitch darkness, and a strange, blue glow.

General Dash itched one of her ears uncomfortably.

“Sounds like you should send these guys some oil too, Twi,” Dash said gingerly. “I think those hinges could use a little tender loving care.”

Twilight ignored all of them, walking briskly into the dark Project 13 laboratory. Dash shrugged, motioned for her Mechasi to follow her, and went in after the Princess, leaving Acorn and Bread outside in the passage. Acorn shot Bread a look of exhaustion, and the young intern just shook his head at his boss.

Never again, Bread mouthed. Please.

Acorn raised a hoof to his mouth, signing his assistant to be quiet, and then trotted into the darkened lab. It was a large, circular room, shaped like a drum, and the air was quite warm and humid. There was a strange blue light in the centre, one that flickered and danced, kinda like one of those pretty atmospheric phenomena that you could see from the Frozen North, the Northern Lights, or whatever. There was also a flowing, bubbling noise, like there was some kind of thick, warm water churning away somewhere close by.

“I can’t see, Professor,” Twilight said angrily. “Why can’t I see?”

“The…specimen is very sensitive to light, Princess,” Acorn explained, slowly making his way over to the switch on the wall. “We try to minimize exposure as much as we can. We’ve also tried getting some night vision goggles for the scientists who work here, but, that’s yet to happen.”

“The light, Professor!” Twilight snapped, stomping a hoof. “NOW!”

“Yes your Majesty,” the Professor said in a hurry, stumbling over to the wall, feeling around for the switch and flicking it on. One by one, a series of dim, red lights came on, followed by a couple of slightly brighter white ones. The lights revealed multiple rows of computer screens and strange machines arranged around the walls, several wheeled tables covered in medical equipment lying around the room.

And in the centre, was Project 13, otherwise known as TS02, encased in a huge, ball-shaped glass tank of warm, sterile water. Inside the tank were several submerged robotic arms, fitted with cameras, hypodermic syringes, sensors and other nasty-looking devices; also in there, with her eyes closed, a plastic oxygen mask on her face and the short, purple and pink strands of her short, shaggy mane and tail fanning out in the water and slowly whipping to and fro, was an almost perfect Unicorn clone of Princess Twilight Sparkle.

The clone was slightly fatter than the Princess, on account of having spent her entire ‘life’ floating in a tank without any exercise or muscle movement at all other than the occasional twitch, and was totally unconscious, never having had a single moment of waking life in her two-year existence. There were hundreds and hundreds of tiny metal wires attached to her spine, which snaked up into bundles that disappeared into the top of the ball tank, as well as a single larger one that attached to the back of her head by some kind of suction cup. So that the clone wouldn’t starve to death, an artificial umbilical cord was buried into her stomach, and tattooed onto the fur of her neck were several red letters and numbers: TS02.

The clone had been grown for a single purpose: Princess Twilight Sparkle was the youngest and most inexperienced of the Alicorns, but her magical power was incredible. Her spirit was up to it, but her mind and body weren’t, and there was a quiet rumour in Sparkle Industries that the Princess would need another, younger, and generally stronger body if she wanted to live a life of several thousand years, like the other Alicorns. The fact that she’d had TS02 created confirmed that, but unfortunately, preparing the clone’s brain for the soul of Princess Sparkle was proving to be considerably more difficult than it was supposed to be.

Acorn didn’t like to think about it, but sometimes, it seemed as though the clone was fighting against them. It was not reassuring to think that it didn’t want to die.

Princess Sparkle trotted right up to the tank, staring up at the floating clone like it had just shouted some kind of insult at her face. Dash looked at it uneasily.

“Fukkin’ thing creeps me the fuck out,” the General grumbled. “Can we burn it or something, if it doesn't work?”

“What’s the delay, Professor?” Twilight asked, not taking her eyes off the clone.

“Well, Princess, the only reason we can think up is that we miscalculated how long it would take to prepare the specimen’s brain for a soul switch,” he explained. “There’s no trace of any consciousness in its brain, so that can’t be interfering with our procedures.”

“Is that so, Professor?” Princess Twilight said. “And what about you? What do you have to say for yourself, hmmm?”

There was a very awkward silence. It seemed, as far as Acorn could see, that the Princess had just directed a question at the unconscious clone. The Professor and Bread exchanged confused glances, and General Dash screwed up her face.

“Um, Twi?” she asked. “You okay?”

“I’m fine! Can’t you see I’m talking here!” Twilight snapped back at Rainbow, then continued to talk to the glass tank with her clone inside it. “Yes, I’m talking to you! How dare you speak back to me like that, you miserable little wart! I’m a Princess! You can’t talk to Princesses as though they were not Princesses. It’s not what you do.”

There was another short silence. Acorn looked up at the clone; it was just floating there, unmoving, like it always did. He had no idea what to do.

“I am NOT a crazy head!” Twilight suddenly screamed, angrily stomping her hooves against the polished floor. “You have NO IDEA how hard my stupid job is! If it wasn’t for me Equestria would be overrun by millions and millions of Communist Traitors, and other despicable types that nopony wants around! THESE PONIES NEED ME.”

There was another silence.

“How dare you,” Twilight whispered angrily. “HOW DARE YOU! The only reason you EXIST is because I told these stupid scientists to stick some of my DNA in a tank of warm water and grow it into a piece of me-shaped meat! If they weren’t so stupid and dumb, you wouldn’t even be able to talk like this! If they hadn’t made all those mistakes, you WOULDN’T EVEN BE ABLE TO THINK! You are a mistake. A mistake that I wish I could squash like an ant! But you’re lucky, oh, you’re so lucky that I need that juicy little magically tolerant body of yours, oh yes. You are lucky. Otherwise I would drop you in a vat of acid and laugh as the skin and muscle melted off your bones.”

More silence. General Dash pawed the ground uncomfortably; the Mechasi didn’t react at all.

“NO, IT ISN’T YOUR BODY!” Princess Twilight howled, head-butting the glass tank in anger. Professor Acorn jumped in shock, but luckily, the Alicorn’s sharp horn didn’t break it. “IT’S MY BODY, YOU HEAR? I TOLD THEM HOW TO MAKE IT! I PAID FOR IT! IT’S MINE! MY BODY, NOT YOURS! MY BODY! MY BODY! MY BODY! MY…!”

General Dash dashed forwards.

“Twilight!” she gasped. “I mean, uh, Princess! What the hell are you doing? I haven’t seen you this crazy since Game of Alicorns was cancelled after the shitty seventh season.”

Princess Twilight glanced around at General Dash, breathing heavily, and looking extremely stressed out. Her eyes were wide, shining…and, as far as Acorn could see, totally mad.

“General,” Twilight finally said, calming down slightly. “We are leaving.”

“Yes, Ma’am,” Dash replied, standing to attention and calmly saluting the Princess. There was still quite a bit of confusion in her eyes, though.

Then, very slowly, Princess Twilight turned around to Acorn and Bread, who’d snuck around to stand next to his boss for comfort.

“Professor,” she gasped slowly, staring at him with an expression that was halfway between embarrassed and insane. Her voice was many things, but most of all, it was scary.

“Yes, Highness,” Acorn replied instantly.

“Wipe its brain,” she said coldly, gesturing at the clone in the tank. “Do whatever you need to do, understand? I want that thing’s mind to crack open and drain like a split coconut within three days from now. Double the psy-energy exposure, run the extraction night and day, I do not care, as long as the Project is completed, you understand?”

It was not the time to say no. Acorn bowed low. Bread, thank goodness, did too.

“Of course, your Majesty,” he gushed.

Twilight nodded.

“Good,” she said. “Don’t fail me, Acorn. I wouldn’t want to have to remind your hypothetical successor what happened to the lazy traitor who came before him.”

There was another silence. Acorn gulped.

“Yes,” he said simply. “Your Majesty.”

Twilight turned away, and stormed out of the lab. General Dash glanced at acorn, mouthed the words sorry, man, stuck her tongue out, crossed her eyes and made a little circular motion around her ear with a foreleg. The universal gesture for That Princess is Fucking Nuts.

Acorn gave her a tiny smile, and Dash, and her two Mechasi, rushed out after the Princess, since it was their job or whatever to follow her around everywhere. Bread, and Acorn, were left alone in there with the silent, floating Twilight clone. As Bread trotted up to him, Acorn stood there in silence for a couple of seconds, looking up at the tank.

“It’s unconscious,” he breathed. “I can’t think, it can’t talk.”

“Professor?” Bread asked quietly.

Acorn glanced at his assistant, and shrugged helplessly.

“I don’t know, son. That was the most bizarre and terrifying thing I’ve ever seen in my life. That Princess…ah, I don’t know. She’s…different, now, to who, or what she used to be.”

“Was she talking to the clone, Professor?” Bread asked, confused.

Acorn shrugged again.

“I don’t know, son. She could have been, or, we just witnessed a Princess lose her mind. In a lot of ways, Alicorns are far too powerful to understand, anyway.”

“Sir, I have something to tell you,” Bread admitted.

Acorn looked the young pony in the eye.

“What, Bread?” he asked. “What is it?”

Bread glanced at his hooves, took a breath, and looked up at Acorn.

“It’s some times, Sir, when I’m alone in here in the lab. I hear things, Sir. Voices…these strange voices in my head. I never told anyone, because, I was scared, and I thought they were just background noises, but now… No, not voices, that’s wrong, I just hear one voice.”

“One voice?” Acorn repeated, glancing up at the clone, then back to Bread. “You aren’t joking, son? This is true?”

Bread closed his eyes, shaking his head.

“I couldn’t lie to you, Sir,” he said, crying softly. “Not after…all that.”

Acorn nodded. He believed him.

He put a hoof on his assistant’s shoulder.

“Tell me about this voice, son,” he continued. “Does it say anything?”

Bread nodded.

“Yes, Sir, it’s a soft, female voice. But it’s faint, and soft, so soft I can’t make out the words that it’s saying. But, it’s talking to me, in my head; I know that it does, sometimes. Do you…do you think it’s the clone, Sir? Trying to…communicate with me?”

Acorn looked up at the motionless clone again, floating in her heated tank and stuck full of metal wires and tubes. There was no way of finding out whether or not the clone had some kind of psychic ability, but with the bizarre behaviour of the Princess and Bread’s strange story, Acorn didn’t really have much doubt that something seriously weird was going on.

“I don’t know, son,” he said. “Maybe it is.”

“What do we do now, Sir?” Bread asked.

“What the Princess told us to, my boy,” Acorn sighed. “Exactly what she told us to do. Believe me, to do anything else right now, whatever we do or do not understand, would be a very bad idea. No, it would be worse than that… It would be suicide.”

Bread gulped.

“What if, you know, the clone tries to stop us?” he continued. “With some kind of strange, mystical, psychic ability that was passed down to her from the Princess?

“In that case, Bread,” Acorn suggested, “I propose you make me a tin foil hat, too.”