Revanchism

Chapters

Record 02//Layer
Record 03//Sandstone
Record 04//Recovery
Record 05//Initiation
Record 06//Recognition
Record 07//Raid
Record 09//Gridiron
Record 10//Penitence
Record 11//Arsenal
Record 12//Override
Record 13//Weltanschauung
Record 14//Archon
Record 15//Ritual
Record 16//Consequences
Record 17//Assembly
Record 18//Signal
Record 19//Heartbreak
Record 21//Riposte
Record 22//Sideways
Record 23//Warden
Record 24//Trial
Record 25//Dogs of War
Record 01//Upright
Record 08//Detour
Record 20//The Devil You Don't

Record 02//Layer

//HOL CRY ADV
//CHECKSUM READ
//CHECKSUM GOOD

// … decoding …

Desert Storm

This was really happening. A prison break, after three years of this hell. My heart thumped in my chest with uncontrolled excitement. I had to steel my nerves and calm myself.

I surveyed the corridor further down from where the mare whose space suit I now wore had fallen in combat. There were a couple other bodies down the hall. Ponies. Same suits. No weapons in sight. Their wounds weren’t consistent with projectile or energy weapon fire. They’d been stabbed—or, for lack of a better term, gored—by something very hard and sharp. One of them looked partly dissolved. I wasn’t sure what that was all about. I wasn’t curious enough to take a closer look, either.

The entire passageway showed signs of damage due to decompression. One of the nearby viewports had been cut open, patched, and then sealed with VacStop foam, allowing the compartment to recompress. I remembered the stuff vividly from that time one of my lance-mates emptied a can of it into my uniform as a prank. The shit hardened almost instantly into a headless pony statue. They were on latrine duty for days after that little stunt.

Regardless, that must have been how these ponies gained entry to this side of the station. The way they were taken out so quick, I wondered where these jokers got equipment like this. I claimed one of their undamaged helmets and clicked it into place over the neck seal. I gritted my teeth as the suit’s layers automatically contracted with enough force to provide mechanical pressure against my body equal to one atmosphere of air pressure. The suit’s HUD flickered into view, life support systems reading all green. The rebreather was automatically bypassed to draw in the station’s atmosphere instead of the suit’s limited air supply, which was good for a full half-hour.

Where had the Confederate crew members gone? Panic room? Muster stations? I followed the light that pooled on the deck to a corridor resounding with heavy foot traffic. I hid behind an arch as the footsteps passed, briefly peeking out to make sure the coast was clear. Crossing the brightly-lit passageway, I entered one of the exchange vestibules, which had a passage that spiraled from the horizontal to the vertical, with electrokinetic artificial gravity generators to transition from the rotating habitat rings to the spire. I dove under a rapidly closing door that led to a passage in one of the spars joining one of the outer rings and the central spire, flanked by rows of viewports on either side that provided a panoramic view of the station.

I sprinted as fast as I could down a hall that seemingly had no end. A group of cleomanni technicians dressed in orange jumpsuits appeared about a hundred meters ahead, scrambling in my direction. I stopped and pressed myself face-first into a corner as they passed, holding my breath so the suit’s bypass valve wouldn’t make a sound. I dared a glance over my shoulder, but they were already well down the hall in the direction opposite the one I was going. I hadn’t needed to use my magic to conceal myself, which was a good thing, since the suppression ring made that impossible.

I reached the end of the corridor and encountered a T-junction with passages on either side of me that curved around the central spire. The air ducts and cabling grew thicker and the lighting sparser in this area. Color-coded stripes on the deck indicated the paths to specific compartments, but I couldn’t read the legends. After a moment’s hesitation, I took a left turn. While not watching where I was going, I ran face-first into four heavily armed guards. Or rather, my helmet slammed right into one of their groin protectors, causing me to fall flat on my ass.

The guards were clad in imposing matte black riot gear, specially padded and reinforced to resist even the fiercest of blunt impacts, like the kind a pony could deliver. They also had flechette guns. I remembered the outline of the fearsome cleomanni firearms from my equipment recognition classes. These smoothbore weapons projected small, fin-stabilized subcaliber darts of a unique sintered metal construction. First, their tungsten carbide tips penetrated through body armor. Then, they yawed violently and the flechette’s semi-frangible base shattered into a cloud of fragments, forming a massive wound cavity. Typical kinetic energies at the muzzle were in the area of seven thousand joules, producing fierce recoil that was dampened through the use of a large muzzle brake.

These weapons and their ammunition violated several interstellar treaties. Treaties that, incidentally, did not apply to members of my own species. I didn’t have a mirror, but I could feel the look of horror etching itself onto my face. I’d seen hits from these things pluck the legs off even the most heavily armored ponies from hundreds of meters away. To think that they would actually use weapons with such a high degree of penetration on a space station. Are these people insane?

I yelped and dove out of the way as the deafening blasts of gunfire opened up in the corridor, the thick metal bulkheads ringing with each pressure wave that impacted them. Without hesitation, I kicked out a grating and hurled myself into an air duct. I squeezed inside, crawling as fast as I could with the suit’s bulk and inflexibility impeding my progress.

I made a few turns as the ductwork groaned under my weight, narrowly avoiding being blended by a massive recirculation blower. I smashed another grating in the floor of the duct and lowered myself gently into the darkened, cavernous space beyond. I landed with all four hooves on the deck, catching my breath as I tried to get my bearings.

There were computer terminals and worktables everywhere. Cables, server racks, and monitoring stations wreathed a massive column in the center of the room, lit up like a Hearth’s Warming tree. There were no cleomanni guards, technicians, or drones in sight, so I took a few tentative steps toward the center of the room. I could see the space beneath me through the expanded metal deck, appearing as a bottomless pit for all intents and purposes. Security in the station’s core seemed surprisingly lacking compared to the measures I’d seen in the cell loading areas. I quickly surmised that they never expected a pony to make it this far.

Adjoining the column was a console with a cylindrical object inset in it, flanked on either side by various controls. I had no idea what I was looking at, until I noticed the camera overhead swiveling toward me, its mechanical eye zooming in on my features. A voice blared through the speakers in the overhead, startling me.

“So, you’re alive, Two-Two-Five-Seven. I always knew there was something different about you. Such a special snowflake you are.”

“Can it, ya’ damn can opener.”

“A fine choice of metaphors. My masters are on their way to you right now, but my little pets are right on their heels. Oh, and they will open you right up, so I can gaze inside that hairy little sausage casing you call a body.”

I was perplexed by the artificial intelligence’s choice of words. Pets? Did she mean the drones?

“Ah, you’re pissed. Wonderful. I guess I’ll just go around smashing things in here, starting with this.” I pointed my hoof threateningly at the cylindrical object in the console’s center.

“By the end of this cycle, I will have you on an examination table.” Scheherazade’s voice took on an androgynous, almost demonic quality. “I will turn you inside out. I will show your peritoneum to your dying eyes, you gormless, dim-witted, shambling pile of water and germs.”

“Wow, do y—do you spend all day in here practicing that? That’s pretty good.”

Silence.

“A-hah,” I said, grinning wide. “See? You do!”

“The Empire’s power has been broken,” the AI spoke. “My masters saw to that. Your sole remaining world is barely capable of sustaining life. You have no noteworthy industry. No centralized government. Your people live in abject poverty and misery, as they rightly should. You and your rebel friends resist us at your own peril.”

“You’re mistaken about one thing.”

“And what is that?”

“These ponies aren’t my friends. If they were, they would have secured this entire fucked-up rat’s nest of a facility an hour ago without botching the main objective.”

Before Scheherazade could say another word, I used my forehooves to twist and unplug what I assumed was her core from the console, adding yet another layer of harsh beeping tones to the sirens that hadn’t stopped blaring since the breach began. There wasn’t another peep out of her. I grinned. Success! I set the core on my back. Then, I gingerly used my teeth to manipulate the suit’s quick-release tie-downs and hold it in place. After taking one last look around to make sure that there wasn’t anything I’d missed, I bolted to the nearest door and hit the button next to it. Nothing.

“Come on!” I smacked it a few more times with my hoof. I was about to give up and start looking for another exit when the door slid open, revealing the shocked face of the computer technician who’d been sent to investigate the alarm.

“Angatz fe—”

Before she could finish calling for help, I propelled my body forward, turned, and launched myself backward from the deck with my forehooves, twisting as I lashed out with a hind leg aimed straight for her knee. I heard something crack as my hoof connected with the joint, its striking power enhanced by the weight and solidity of the EVA suit’s magnetic boots. The satyr screamed in pain, crumpling to the floor. She scooted backward with one hand and pressed herself up against the door frame, reaching for her sidearm with her other hand as she continued screeching in her guttural tongue for help that would never arrive. Wrong move.

“Mela aspare ut giege!” I shouted.

The look on the cleomanni’s face was one of incomprehension and absolute terror as I straddled her and unleashed the haymaker to end all haymakers. I was almost certain I heard her jaw shatter. She slumped over, either dead or unconscious. I didn’t care, really.

To be absolutely sure the threat was neutralized, I took her pulse pistol from its holster, set it on the deck, and stomped it flat. Its flimsy composite casing and power source fizzed and sparked, releasing puffs of smoke that my suit filtered out so that the foul stench of burnt windings never reached my nostrils. Without the benefit of fingers, levitation magic, or a combat harness, there was no way I could wield a weapon with such a small trigger.

I heard shouts and the sputtering sounds of approaching contragrav drives. Guards and drones. The situation was worsening with each passing moment. I had to consciously control my breathing and remind myself not to panic. A calm operator was a successful one. I needed to think about this rationally. I hadn’t been able to open the door leading from the central server room, which meant that the effects of the hack had been undone, either by Scheherazade or remotely, from one of the security rooms. I glanced at the unconscious technician.

In a monstrous act born of desperation, I drew one of her arms out and brought my hoof down. Twice. Thrice. By the fourth blow, I’d liberated her hand from her body with a squishy noise that made me wince. It was not like she’d be missing it for long.

After picking her severed hand up with my fetlock and stuffing it in my EVA suit’s chest pouch, I took off on a steady gallop in the direction opposite the sound of the approaching sentries. After a hundred meters, I arrived at a closed blast door, panting heavily, more from nervousness than exhaustion.

Oddly, I found that if I held my breath, I didn’t feel particularly starved for air. I pushed that thought to the back of my mind as I withdrew the technician’s severed hand and pressed it to the palm reader. Two rapid-fire beeps that sounded suspiciously like uh-uh, nope, then nothing. The door wouldn’t open. I could feel sweat beading on my brow.

“Come on. Come on! Shit!”

I felt the barrel of a gun against the back of my helmeted head. I dropped the severed hand and slowly raised both of my forehooves.

“It measures vitals as well, you sick little four-legged fuck,” he said.

One of the biggest mistakes any lone, unaugmented cleomanni fighter could make was to get this close to a pony.

I ducked and wrapped my forelegs around the flechette gun, pulling it—and him—with me. After a brief struggle, I wrenched the weapon out of his grasp and kicked it down the corridor. Using my small size to my advantage, I slipped backward between his legs and leaped atop his back, pulling my forelegs tight around his neck and placing him in a headlock.

“Then let’s try this instead,” I said. “Open the door, or I’ll break your fucking neck!”

He grunted with displeasure in response. When I saw him reach for his sidearm, I applied more pressure, wrenching his spine.

“Yesterday, fuckface!” I screamed.

“I’ll do it! Ease up, will ya?”

The guard ran his arm-mounted badge over the card reader and punched in a four-digit PIN. I figured it was a stopgap measure they’d put in place to allow gloved and helmeted crew members to access spaces without removing protective gear to use the biometric scanners. The door’s heavy bolts slammed open, and the thick steel semicircles retracted out of the way by rotating into recesses in the door frame.

“Much obliged.”

I squeezed harder, feeling him squirm and try to shimmy out of the choke, but it was futile. He was out cold in ten seconds flat. Before his buddies could arrive and see one of their number slumped over on the deck, I dragged him through the blast door and into the passage beyond before shutting it behind me. A warm, triumphant feeling washed over me at the thought of buying myself a few seconds by throwing off their pursuit, followed by the icy chill of realizing that I’d left a very conspicuous severed hand on the other side of the door.

I fled down a half-kilometer passageway identical to the one that had taken me to the station’s central spire, only on the opposite side. Keeping up the tempo, it took me a little over half a minute to reach the end. It’d been at least seven minutes since I’d last communicated with the rebels. I had three more left, and that was it.

“Where the hell are you?” My headset crackled with the voice of the rebel leader. “We’ve got contacts on radar and infrared. They’re three thousand kilometers out and closing fast. They’ll be right on top of us in about two hundred seconds. Move your arse!”

“I’ll be there in a minute,” I said. “Cool your jets.”

It was a bit of an ironic statement. If anything, I was the one having trouble keeping my cool. I heard the staccato cracks of flechette gun fire down the corridor. I turned and watched as a terrified mare with a gunmetal coat and dark green mane angled for a doorway mere moments before her attackers mercilessly cut her down. Three solid hits stapled their way from her shoulder to her neck, leaving ragged exit wounds large enough to fit my hoof into.

She toppled over, skidding into a wall, before slowly and shakily attempting to stand. The doomed mare tried to speak, but her eyes widened as a fountain of blood poured from her mouth and nostrils. She reached out to me with a foreleg, a pleading expression on her face, but I could do nothing but watch as one of the guards drew her sidearm and blew their quarry’s brains all over the corridor.

She had been wearing a control collar, I noticed. Why did they have to kill her? Did my removal of Scheherazade’s core affect the security systems more profoundly than I’d thought it would?

Then, they turned to me, where I stood frozen in the middle of the passageway like a deer caught in the proverbial headlights. Deer sucked at reading warning signs and using crosswalks, the poor forest yokels that they were.

“Atal!” The guardswoman with the pistol shouted and pointed in my direction with a gauntleted hand.

I ran. Anywhere. Away. As fast as I could. A ribbed hose in the overhead got caught by a stray round and fell limply toward the deck, spewing white clouds of gas. A hail of projectiles loudly ricocheted off the bulkheads, slamming into one of the lozenge-shaped skylights that lined the station’s passageways. I heard the whistling sound, but it was too late to stop it.

“You fucking lunatics!” I screamed.

The skylight blew out, sucked into the depths of space. I would’ve been spaced again if I hadn’t activated the EVA suit’s magnetic boots, securing myself to the deck. The guards weren’t so lucky. I watched as they, along with everything else in the vicinity that wasn’t bolted down, including an end table, a chair, some magazines, and a couple of fake potted plants, forcefully ejected themselves from the station. The lights went out and the emergency lighting kicked in, illuminating the corridor with a red hue. Access doors sealed to prevent the atmosphere loss from spreading to adjacent compartments. My route to the ship was now blocked off.

I was so close to freedom, I could taste it. This wouldn’t stop me. I climbed toward the breached skylight, my boots clanking against the deck. I went straight up a ferrous ascending plate along a wall and then clambered out onto the exterior of the station, greeted by miles of bright blue and white armor plating covered in hatches, conduits, and antennae, curving out of view like a metal atoll. I was standing on the inner edge of one of the rotating ring sections, under the influence of rotational gravity. I flipped the helmet’s reflective gold-tinted visor down so I wouldn’t be blinded.

I looked up. Our home, our planet, filled the sky. I felt a sensation of wetness in the corner of my eye. After all that I’d seen today, witnessing the world I’d fought so hard to protect was the one thing that moved me to tears.

Ahriman Station was located in high orbit between Equestria and its moon. Off in the distance, specks of metal trailing columns of blue fire glinted in the sun. The incoming patrol boats were turned with their drives facing us. They were decelerating. Rendezvousing with us. I had to board that ship. It was now or never.

In the vacuum of space, I hadn’t heard the hatch as it swung open behind me. A hand seized my hind leg, trying to drag me inside the station. I grunted from exertion as I kicked and thrashed, barely managing to remain magnetically locked to the station’s hull with my forelegs. I broke free, putting some distance between myself and my attacker. The blue-armored guard climbed out of the access port, leveling an electrolaser. I recognized the face behind the clear visor. My suit-to-suit radio crackled as it locked onto the diplomatic frequency.

“You always were a troublemaker, Storm!” Elgon roared. “Is that Scheherazade’s core? You give that back, you little shit!”

I smiled. “You sad sacks finally started using my real name instead of a number. Getting a little too familiar, aren’t we?”

“Sanwea’s in the medbay because of you, having a prosthetic attached.”

“Oh, I’m sorry.” I cocked my head quizzically. “Was that your girlfriend? Is she all right? I mean, I hope she still has all her brain cells and stuff.”

“I’m sick of this.” There was pain in his voice. “I’m tired of cleaning up after you savages and the messes you make. I can’t believe she convinced me to drop out of college to come work here in this dead-end backwater. You fucking things. You Equestrians make my gorge rise. There’s something dreadfully wrong about the lot of you that I can’t quite place, especially you. It’s like you’ve been worming your way into my head since I got here. You make my skin crawl. I hate you miserable, contemptible creatures so bloody much!”

“You know, if you hate your job so much, then you don’t need to fight me,” I said. “You can just turn around and walk away.”

“Yeah, I’ll get around to it, just as soon as I’m done shoveling what’s left of you into the incinerator.”

He turned the weapon’s dial to its highest setting and pulled the trigger. Warning diodes on the side of the stock lit up bright blue, and then, there was nothing. There were no flesh-frying arcs of electricity lancing out at me. He tried smacking the weapon with the base of his palm, perplexed.

“Maybe if you’d stayed in school, you’d know that electrolasers don’t work in space,” I said, wearing as patronizing of a grin as I could manage. “And even if you did manage to get off a shot, this suit’s non-conductive. It wouldn’t do shit.”

Infuriated, he threw the bulky, rifle-shaped weapon at me. As I ducked under it, he charged and drew out a large combat knife with a serrated spine. I raised my forelegs and braced myself. The impact knocked me flat on my ass. All four of my hooves were now free of the station, meaning that the only thing keeping me from tumbling off the edge of the ring was the fact that I was wrestling in an airless environment with a maddened alien hell-bent on punching a twenty-centimeter piece of sharpened steel through my vital organs.

He thrust the blade toward my chest, trying to breach my suit. I knocked his hand aside with my hoof. He was having trouble getting a good enough footing to deliver a proper thrust, but on the other hoof, it still took everything I had just to keep him from stabbing me. Every move I made felt unnatural without air resistance and with the bulk of the suit holding me back. My unit never drilled on EVA fighting, and that meant I was deep in unfamiliar territory. Business as usual. You had to improvise your way around gaps in training, or you were dead weight.

Just when I thought I’d seized control of his arms, he headbutted me. A few more hits like that one could have smashed my helmet’s visor. He angled the knife toward my side. I swatted at it with one of the metal boots encasing my hooves, knocking it out of his grasp and sending it twirling off the edge of the ring. He drew his pistol. I gripped it with both of my forelegs. He fired. The round would’ve struck my helmet if I hadn’t wrestled the muzzle of the weapon away while flinching my head in the opposite direction. He fired again. Another miss. I could feel my heart pounding in my chest, O2 saturation warnings in my heads-up display blinking red. Every gulped mouthful of saliva, every labored breath, every desperate shriek; I had no idea that hearing nothing but the sounds emanating from one’s own windpipe during a fight could be so stressful and claustrophobic. The whole world was silent, except for me.

Fed up with my resistance, he resorted to looping an arm around my neck and heaving me toward the edge of the ring. Simultaneously, I managed to wrest the handgun from his grip, pinching it between my hooves. I flailed my hind legs around, my limbs trying to find purchase as I tumbled across the station’s smooth hull. The impacts made me lose my grip. The pistol was knocked out of my hooves, spinning off into the darkness. Just before I went over the edge, my forelegs touched down on the station’s hull, my magnetic boots thudding into place. I peered over the edge of the ring. The Confederacy used ring habitats like these to save on electric power. Every square meter covered by in-deck electrokinetic generators drew several kilowatts, and for a habitat this size, the number of additional solar panels or larger reactors would be less economical than simply making the whole damn thing rotate.

I quickly did the math in my head. In order to generate one gee in the central deck of the habitation area, given a centrifuge of this radius, we had to be rotating at over one-point-four revolutions per minute. I eyeballed the distance to the other inner edge. About eight hundred meters. Multiply by Pi to get the circumference of about two-point-five kilometers, then divide by the number of seconds to complete one revolution. My tangential velocity had to be in the area of fifty-nine meters per second, which was how fast I would be flung sideways off the edge of the station with the direction of rotation if I fell off and my linear motion was no longer constrained in a circle.

Elgon uncrossed his arms, coiling his body as though he were about to lunge for me. He’d expected me to fall off the edge and careen off into space. Before he could adequately prepare himself, I broke into a gallop and tackled him into a radio antenna, which crunched under his armor’s mass. While we pirouetted over the station’s hull, he punched me in the ribs, knocking the wind out of me. After Elgon came out of the clash on top, he hunched over me, grabbed my helmeted head, turned me face-down, and smashed my visor into the station’s metal plating over and over. After the fifth hit, a small, spiderwebbing crack appeared in my helmet’s reflective outer lens.

I let out an animalistic growl as I swung a foreleg behind me, striking the side of his helmet with substantial force and denting the armor over his temple. The blow stunned him temporarily, and he let go. It would be his last mistake. I righted myself and wrapped my left foreleg around the back of his helmet. I could see the fear in his eyes as I viciously drove my right hoof through his visor, polycarbonate fragments flying every which way.

Elgon clawed at his face, appearing to gag as the air was sucked out of his lungs. I turned and bucked him in the chest with both of my hind legs, sending him flying off the edge of the hab ring in the general direction of Equestria. I stood there, catching my breath as I watched him recede into the distance, where he would become part of the twinkling debris field that encircled our planet.

“What’d I tell you?” I muttered into the radio, though I was certain he could no longer hear me with the inside of his helmet vacuumed. “Dead before you hit the ground.”

I turned and ran along the inner surface of the ring until I arrived at an access hatch less than a hundred meters from the docked ship. I peered over the edge. The boxy patrol boat bristled with weapons, antennae, and surveillance gear, but a front-line combat vessel it most certainly was not. Even the powerful anti-capital torpedoes and stand-off armor plating typically found on ships of this class had been deleted from this particular design, presumably to cut operating costs. I tried the handle, but it was no good. There was no way to override the lockdown from the outside. I decided to radio the ship.

“This is Sergeant Storm. I’m at a locked exterior hatch near the umbilical. Can you guys get this fucking thing open? Over.”

Static. I waited about ten seconds, glancing at the approaching engine plumes of the returning picket craft.

“What’s the holdup? They’re almost here.”

Another ten seconds passed. Still no response. I gritted my teeth as my insides churned. My annoyance at having come this far only to be ignored slowly built into a seething rage. I pounded my hooves on the hatch.

“Open. The. Fucking. Doo-”

I was cut off by the hatch opening in my face and a pony in a black spacesuit peeking out, his shoulder-mount weapon gimbal tracking his head movements as he swept his eyes over the station’s exterior. I saw the battle-worn and faded logos plastered on his armor. A black silhouette of a rearing horse within an orange diamond. Percheron Solutions. A highly successful, centuries-old private military company that provided VIP protection and security services at the height of the war. It went without saying that they were most likely dissolved in the war’s cataclysmic conclusion, their members scattered to the winds.

Seeing me, he motioned for me to follow him into the cramped airlock, which I did after a moment’s hesitation. The hatch slammed shut, and the vertical, cylindrical, and quite cramped compartment pressurized. The access door at the base of the airlock slid open. We each let go of the ladder, and in turn, our hooves landed on an elevated catwalk with a thud.

As we made our way down about twenty stories of stairs, the gravity subtly shifted as we descended toward the ring’s edge. My jaw went slack as my eyes adjusted to the dim lighting and I took in what was happening before me. The cargo bay below was utter pandemonium. In the midst of a murky darkness punctuated by thick clouds of smoke and red emergency strobes, my cleomanni captors were engaged in a protracted gun battle with the intruders. Flechettes ricocheted off the barricades the ponies had hastily erected. I watched a pony in mechanic’s coveralls try and move from cover to cover, only to catch a flechette round in the face, peeling off her jaw with a spray of red mist. I could hear her incoherent screaming over the gunfire.

Using the superior vantage point, the stallion standing beside me on the catwalk took aim at the cleomanni guard who had exposed himself to make that shot. He placed his forehooves in the magnetic pull-rings under his shoulder-mounted beamcasters and drew them down and back, pulling the cords about halfway to the trigger point as he leaned over the railing. The twin ball turrets in the shoulders of his armor glowed like the eyes of a manticore in the darkness, swiveling to track their target.

He yanked the pull-rings downward. Motes of emerald light swarmed over conduits leading from the beamcasters’ saddlebag power supplies and the weapons discharged. The two pencil-thin beams of green-tinged magical energy converged and caught the guard in the chest in the same spot, right over his heart. He fell and did not move a muscle. As his comrades swept their tactical lights over their fallen squadmate, I could see a small cloud of smoke and water vapor rising from the hole in his armor. The rest scattered and took cover, some elevating their aim in our general direction.

The return fire was swift in coming, and the stallion looped a foreleg around my neck and heaved me out of the way as flechettes pinged off the catwalk, visibly deforming the handrails and metal grating. We galloped down the stairway at the end. I missed a step and took the last half-flight sliding on my belly.

As I approached the barricade, sidling up to a stack of metal crates, I saw a pony bleeding heavily from the leg, his armor partially undone to give a unicorn medic better access to the wound so she could apply clotting agents. If he hadn’t been wearing knee pads, the flechette would have taken his leg clean off. As it was, the wounded area bulged gruesomely, the bone underneath shattered and tissue avulsed. The flechette impacts grew thicker. The green beams lancing out from the barricade were thinning in number. We were losing, and badly.

Just when I thought it would never be safe to make the mad dash to the umbilical linking the station to the commandeered patrol boat, a silver blur flashed in the corner of my eye. Four hooves impacted the deck, wings held high. The pegasus was covered from head to hoof in curvaceous white armor with silver accents. Their face was obscured by a helm that resembled an ancient armet from Pre-Imperial times.

Both sides stopped firing, absolutely dumbstruck, as was I. The newcomer was standing between the barricade and our attackers, right in the open. They were suicidally exposed. It was then that I noticed the heraldic emblems on their gleaming suit of armor and the black form-fitting layer visible between the gaps in the outer plating. This individual was wearing an exosuit emblazoned in the markings of the Dragoons.

The cleomanni guards opened fire, but their flechettes streaked harmlessly around a transparent bubble of purple-hued magic that ensconced the armored pegasus. No pegasus could perform such a feat with their intrinsic magic. I knew very little about Dragoon exosuits, but what I knew of magic as a unicorn told me that such a barrier must have been the product of a powerful enchantment. Her attackers ceased fire, their magazines expended to no effect. The pegasus had a lance mounted to the side of their combat harness, which they raised high in the air in an intimidating display.

“Sem akeh ast pleueve den Rehr Aisseste neimlaros a tarre!” the armored mare bellowed in Equestrian. “Awile Eune! Awile Keleste! Awile Renleus!”

It was the war cry of a fanatic who could never be bargained or reasoned with. That which is blessed by Her Majesty cannot be broken. Hail Luna. Hail Celestia. Hail Twilight. I felt a slight pang of sympathy for the poor cleomanni prison guards who were the subject of her wrath.

As the satyrs prepared to unleash another volley of flechettes, the Dragoon flapped her armored wings and lunged like she was shot out of a cannon, her lance catching one of the guards in the throat. She kept charging forward, pinning him to a bulkhead that let out a shriek of twisted metal from the sheer force of the impact. She dislodged the lance from his severed spine by lashing out with both forehooves, pulping his helmeted head like a ripe watermelon.

In under three seconds, she had rocketed twenty meters, impaled a guard’s neck, and crushed his skull like it was nothing. To say I was shocked would be an understatement. I’d never seen violence of this magnitude up close and personal. It was always through the exterior cameras of my Charger, which provided a sense of clinical detachment from the outside world.

The armored mare was a savage blur as she swung the lance wide, sending her hapless foes hurtling through the air. I averted my eyes from the carnage. From the opposite end of the cargo bay rose a chorus of bloodcurdling screams and wet crunching noises that made my gorge rise. As we hid behind the crates piled up on the storage racks, I simply stood there and shook my head in disbelief. I immediately re-evaluated the intruders’ capabilities based on this new information. If they had someone like this with them, they weren’t fucking around.

“They used to call us volunteer Charger pilots freaks and monsters,” I said. “So, what does that make her?”

“You’re a pilot, eh?” my black-armored stallion companion said in that reedy South Zebrican accent of his. “Looks like this is our lucky day. Nice job making it this far on your own.”

“These Confederate pukes can’t find their ass with both hands,” I said. “The fact that you guys are taking casualties at all is unacceptable. You spaced the fucking prisoners, too! What if one of my lance-mates is now a desiccated mummy?”

“Hey, not all of us know our way around a beamcaster. We had to drum up some extra hooves for this op. Some of them only had a week’s worth of training.”

“A week, or a month, or a year,” I said. “Makes no difference with some ponies.”

“You can say that again.” He cocked his head quizzically. “Hey, what’s that thing on your back, there?”

“The station’s AI core.”

“You—huh—but—” he stammered. “Wow. The Captain will want to see that thing, pronto.”

We darted past the barricade and toward the junction leading to the umbilical. I stopped myself, turning and glancing at the wounded and dying ponies at the barricade. I’d seen this before. So many damned times. Never felt right leaving them behind. Hell, these ponies weren’t even soldiers. They were untrained militia being herded around by hardened guns-for-hire and used as meat shields. Against my better judgment, I hustled over to the nearest fallen mare, looped my forelegs under hers, and started dragging her toward the umbilical, ignoring her groans of pain.

“The hell are you doing?” the black-armored stallion said.

“Help me get the wounded to safety,” I said.

“Leave ‘em. They’re useless.”

I was irate. “You get your ass over here and move these casualties to the ship, boy, or so help me, I will thump you so hard, you’ll look like one big bruise with legs!”

“This is crazy!”

“They didn’t swear any oaths to the Empress. They owe you nothing, and yet, they were willing to give up their lives pursuing your ignorant little errand. Whoever’s in charge of this clusterfuck has their blood on his hooves.”

“We don’t have the time for this,” he said. “Those picket craft are right on top of us. They probably have us locked and are readying a firing solution as we speak.”

“They won’t shoot.” I waved a hoof dismissively. “Not while we’re docked to the station.”

There was a distant explosion and a rumble that shook me to my core. I felt a growing sense of dread. The merc’s eyes locked with mine. Based on the look of utter chagrin spreading across his face, I could see he shared my feelings on the matter.

“W—would they?” I said.

I heard the shouts of a stallion and approaching hoofbeats at the junction behind me. “Run! They’re coming!”

It was Driving Band. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one to make it out of the cell blocks. While me and the occupants of the cells on the station’s exterior had been spaced, there were probably quite a few still at the paddock when the security system was breached. Lucky bastard.

“Oh, it’s you,” he muttered angrily. “I thought you were vacuumed with the rest.”

“Would you lend us a hoof, sir?” I said.

“You’re out of your gourd.” He turned a few shades paler right through his coat. “I’m not sticking around to get killed by those things.”

“You mean the cleomanni? We’ve got a Dragoon with us. She can handle them.”

“No, not them, they’re these fucking—” He stopped himself to catch his breath, absolutely terrified out of his wits. “They’re things. Okay? They’re not ponies, whatever they are. Or if they were, they’re not anymore.”

“The fuck are you on about?” The merc took a few strides toward Lieutenant Band.

At that moment, the lights in the corridor went out. After five seconds, the backups failed to kick in. I felt a lump forming in my throat. In the darkness as black as pitch, I could hear the scrape of metal talons on the deckplates and an eerie and unnatural mechanical clicking and gibbering. I let go of the wounded pony, and we all backpedaled from the source of the noise. Seconds later, I heard the sickening sound of teeth ripping flesh from bone and the gurgle of air escaping a torn windpipe. My heart racing, I turned and bolted for the umbilical as fast as my legs could carry me. Driving Band was not far behind.

As we neared the airlock, I heard screams and the sound of beamcaster fire behind us. The merc in the black armor hadn’t been fast enough on his hooves to outpace whatever it was that doggedly pursued us. I punched the controls for the airlock and cycled us through the vestibule, feeling the artificial gravity flicker under my hooves as I transitioned from the influence of one generator to the next. We boarded the ship and moved quickly through the mess hall and up to the bridge. I could see the tip of a pony’s mane just barely protruding over the headrest of the oversized command chair. I pulled my helmet off and kicked it aside.

“I wanna know what the hell you people were hoping to accomplish here,” I said to the pony who was responsible not only for the deaths of most of the soldiers held captive on Ahriman Station but his ill-fated subordinates as well.

The Captain—presumably the pony I’d been in communication with since I picked up the dead hacker’s radio—didn’t even bother to turn around. I bared my teeth angrily, taking a few steps closer and peeking around the back of the chair. The unicorn stallion’s ribcage was exposed, his entrails torn and splattered all over the nav console. I could hear heavy, almost metallic breathing. I turned and looked at Driving Band, who stood stock-still, his lips trembling in terror. There was something dripping on the deckplates. Saliva?

Our eyes tracked upward in unison to the overhead, where twelve orange eyes glowed in the darkness. Three of them. They had been clinging to the ceiling in near-silence, waiting to ambush us. A mechanical roar filled the compartment.

“Move!” I shouted, propelling myself through the doorway with Driving Band in tow. I threw my limbs around the stallion in a bear hug, sending us careening into a recess in the dimly lit mess hall with U-shaped sectional seating running along the bulkhead.

We crawled under a small dining table. I wrapped my limbs around Band’s back as I hunched over him. I slowed my breathing, trying to calm myself while silencing the whines and protests of the cowardly Lieutenant beneath me by reaching down and holding my hoof over his mouth. I could hear them as they approached. The chattering of the creatures made a chill run down my spine. The vocalizations were too rapid, too mechanical to be any natural language. It had to be some kind of code—a digital shorthand. For a moment, I wondered if they were entirely flesh and blood, or something else.

They were getting closer. Even if they couldn’t see us from this angle, they could still smell us. One of them stopped just a few meters from the table and started advancing toward us, making those rapid clicking noises between sharp, rasping inhalations. I held my breath. I could feel the wetness of the stallion’s tears on my hoof and his muscles tensing up as he squirmed underneath me. I rolled my eyes. If we were going to die, the least we could do was die with our honor as soldiers intact.

I was in the process of coming up with a hastily concocted contingency plan when I heard a loud bang and a pained screech. We both turned to peek out from under the table, immediately finding ourselves face-to-face with something out of a nightmare. The crimson stallion underneath me screamed into my hoof at the sight of it.

If one were to judge the creature only by its silhouette, one could have almost mistaken it for a pony. Beyond the creature’s quadrupedal body plan, the similarities ended. The thing’s gnarled and mutated form was coated in segmented plates of chromed steel. It had four small fiery orbs for eyes, two in tandem on either side of its sloping, reptilian head. A forked tongue slithered forth from a maw ringed with row after row of razor-sharp teeth. Its legs ended in cloven hooves, a bizarre talon protruding rearward from each of its fetlocks. Atop its armored head was a horn of steel, sharpened to a needle-fine point. This was no unicorn horn. It could only have one purpose, and that was to kill in the messiest way I could imagine.

Its bladed tail flicked around menacingly as it turned just in time for a hard-driven lance to pierce the roof of its mouth and exit through the top of its skull. The abomination kicked and flailed, swiping at the white-armored Dragoon with its tail as it struggled to free itself. Another clambered onto her back and latched its jaws around her neck, its teeth slipping off the magical barrier field generated by her armor. She wrenched her lance from her initial target and performed a wing-assisted backflip, the momentum flinging the attacker on her back into a far wall. Before it could recover, she charged, firing the auto-targeting beamcasters on her shoulders with a momentary thought relayed via her implants.

Twin purple beams of a higher, more intense magical spectrum than the standard-issue green variety crackled like thunder, and a significant portion of the moisture in her target’s body instantly flashed into steam, with appropriately gory results. Bits of armor and charred flesh flew everywhere, a whitish-red cloud left in their place. The one that had been speared in the head lay on the ground, kicking at the air for a few moments until it eventually went still, the trauma to its cranium too great to recover from. The air hung heavy with the metallic stink of ozone.

I crawled out from under the table and opened my mouth to voice my appreciation for the timely rescue, but I soon realized my mistake. Something swiped across my cheek. My face seared with unimaginable pain. The things’ tails were as sharp as scalpels, and the incisions they made were like the worst paper cut multiplied tenfold. The tail whipped around in my field of vision, slicing into my shoulders, trying to wrap around my neck and slit my jugular.

I just barely managed to raise my hooves in time to block it, but the pain of the thing’s tail ripping through my EVA suit and digging into my forelegs was almost unbearable. I tried to buck the abomination in the legs as it mounted my back, but it rammed its forehooves into my spine. My face connected with the deckplates. Dazed and concussed, I could feel my mouth filling with blood. I spat out half of a broken tooth. To say that the thing rang my bell would be an understatement.

I rolled over, screaming and kicking madly, desperate to keep the monster from crushing me to a pulp. The fork-tongued not-pony casually swatted my left foreleg. One of my cannon bones snapped like a twig. I gasped in shock, momentarily stunned by the sheer agony I was experiencing. The thing pounded my chest, and for all I knew, it cracked a rib in the process. In the jumble of half-formed thoughts that raced through my mind, I picked out the most salient one, which was that I didn’t want to die.

Right when the bionic beast dipped its head to tear out my throat and end my misery, the Dragoon’s lance speared it in the side. She reared up and stomped its head repeatedly in a gruesome display, each blow like a power hammer, crushing its gleaming chrome skull a little more and a little more until there was nothing left but the faint glimmer of shattered metal beneath the gore.

I felt like I wanted to pass out, but somehow, I managed to stay conscious for the time being. I rolled upright and tested my broken leg. Bad idea. I hissed, biting my lip to stifle a scream. The Dragoon rushed over and cradled me with her hooves to keep me from collapsing. Her helmet split into individual pieces that retracted into her armored gorget, revealing the pegasus’s blue eyes, lilac coat, and salmon-tinged mane with white stripes.

She was perfect, unblemished in every way, her coat seeming to shimmer even in the dimly lit mess hall. She could have been a supermodel were it not for the fact that her sheer symmetry bordered on the uncanny, like a painting by an overconfident amateur, or a porcelain doll. I knew the Dragoons were enhanced in utero before they were born into a lifelong regimen of ceaseless, grueling training exercises and rituals. However, seeing one up close and unmasked was unsettling. I would’ve been jealous of her good looks if the point was to look like a plastic surgery victim.

“You should’ve stayed hidden,” she spoke, her Trottingham accent even stronger than the deceased Captain’s was. “Normal ponies can’t deal with these creatures.”

I glanced at the remains of the abomination that had almost turned me into a wet stain on the deck. “What th—” I coughed and hacked, spitting up blood. “What in the everloving fuck were those?!”

“Karkadann.”

“What?”

“It’s classified.” The Dragoon shrugged. “Bad for morale.”

Back in the day, I’d heard of entire infantry squads going missing without a trace, save perhaps for the occasional pool of blood or discarded helmet. During a few of those ill-fated missions, I’d witnessed intermittent contacts on my Charger’s sensors that seemed to vanish so quickly that I thought it had picked up a bird or malfunctioned or something. I had never imagined that something like this was the cause.

The Dragoon helped prop me up as we walked to one of the sectional seats, where I promptly collapsed, still breathing heavily, my body taxed to its very limit. I checked Scheherazade’s core to ensure it wasn’t damaged, but there wasn’t a scratch on the damnable thing. Every time I swallowed, it tasted like copper. Before, I’d been able to ignore all the little aches and pains I’d accumulated in my sprint to the patrol boat, but now, I felt like I’d been thrown down a flight of stairs or ten. Driving Band was still under the table, whimpering and trembling in fear. The only thing that had changed was that he was now surrounded by a puddle of his own reeking urine. Typical.

The Dragoon started off in the direction of the bridge, but I stopped her, saying, “He’s dead. Don’t bother.”

She turned back to me, a worried look etched onto her face, before wrinkling her muzzle and averting her eyes. “Dammit, I told the Admiral this was a disaster in the making.”

“Could’ve fooled me.”

The Dragoon pointed her hoof at me. “Identify yourselves.”

“I’m Sergeant Storm, formerly of the Imperial Army. The guy soiling himself under the table in front of me is Lieutenant Band.”

“I am Commodore Layer Cake of Her Imperial Majesty’s honored Dragoons. I hold the title of Dragon Knight, and I am charged with the sacred duty of defending the Empire and its subjects in these times of crisis.”

I saluted and held that posture.

“At ease, Sergeant,” she said.

I nodded. “With all due respect, ma’am, I’d say this is well beyond what you’d call a crisis. The war’s been over for three years now. All our major industrial and agricultural centers are dust. Everfree City is a graveyard. Any ships trying to break through the naval blockade encircling Equestria are destroyed in minutes. It’s amazing what you overhear when you’ve got nothing to do but listen to the gossip of a bunch of cut-rate zookeepers for a few years.”

“And yet, we made it this far, didn’t we?” She craned her neck to look at the cylinder on my back. “Is that what I think it is?”

“Yes.”

“Ooo, jackpot.”

“Yeah, I’ve been getting that a lot.” I sheepishly ran a hoof through my mane, trying to ignore the excruciating pain I was in.

The impact of heavy weapons fire shook the eighty-meter-long patrol boat, making my teeth rattle. Luckily, the deflectors held.

“A few more like that, and we may as well put our heads between our hind legs and kiss our own asses goodbye,” I said.

“Sergeant, I need you on the scanner, pronto. Captain Riverdance may be KIA, but he wasn’t the only one who trained on this vessel’s controls. I’m going to fly us out of here.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, getting up and hobbling toward the bridge, trying not to put any pressure on my left foreleg. “I’ll do my best.”

As I made my way there, a couple of the survivors from the battle in the cargo bay came through the airlock. They made an about-face and trained their beamcasters on the vestibule nervously. I could hear them muttering amongst themselves about how those things had mulched that mercenary stallion and left bits of him strewn all about the corridor.

“What’s your specialty?” Commodore Cake said.

“Charger pilot, ma’am. Light Scouts.” As I leaned up against the bulkhead while she set about the unenviable task of dragging Riverdance’s corpse off the bridge and sweeping his guts from the nav console, I kept talking to stay alert and conscious.

“Ahh, one of the housecleaners,” she said. “It was always a pleasure to see you fellows tidying up after us.”

I ignored the bitter sarcasm in my superior’s voice. “And it was always good to have your support laying the groundwork for a major operation. Remember the Zoroaster Dam mission on Kabelaced III?”

“Yes, vaguely. I read the after-action reports, anyway. That was the Red Banner detachment. Not my Dragoons. Different unit.”

“I was there in my Mirage-type.” I paused to spit out a mouthful of blood. “You guys went in ahead of us, cut through their rear lines, and set the charges on the dam. By the time those Confederate bastards realized what was happening, it was too late for them to pull back. Flooded the whole valley and drowned most of the defenders.” I laughed. “It was one of the most badass things I’d ever seen.”

Her expression was grim. “There were also several mechanized platoons of our own soldiers in the valley who perished that day, either because they couldn’t hold their fighting positions or because the water swept them away,” she solemnly intoned.

I held my tongue. A dark and twisted part of me wanted to say it was their fault for being too slow on the uptake when Admiral Star Crusher gave the order to withdraw, but I refused to stoop that low. They really did give it their all, and their sacrifice paved the way for the Imperial occupation of Kabelaced III.

We were forced off that planet a few months later when Confederate reinforcements from the 7th Interdiction Fleet and their infamous Blackbird Squadron made landfall. Nevertheless, we had achieved our primary objective. We drew their front across several sectors by occupying Kabelaced III and a few other worlds in adjacent systems, spreading them thin. This enabled a full-scale assault on one of their key production centers, a hellhole of a planet called New Isfahan.

The Empress, desperate to find something that would give us an edge, had summoned some manner of demon from the abyss a few decades prior to the war’s end, and the engagement on New Isfahan was the first and only time I had seen him. He was easily the size of my Charger, his magic potent enough to level cities. How our esteemed ruler had managed to gain the loyalty and trust of such a beast, I had no idea.

Was Driving Band right? Was all this for nothing? Were we the villains after all? No, impossible. There were no good guys or bad guys in this war. Only slaughter. Mechanical and precise. Efficient. People like me were the keys to that efficiency. But was it right? Was it just?

My thoughts swam in circles. Thin rivulets of blood leaked from ragged holes in my suit. I felt like I was on the verge of losing consciousness.

“Can you hur—hurry up, ma’am?” I said.

She turned and shot me a nasty look that softened when she saw the state I was in. “Are you sure you can do this?”

“I’ll try, but I’m not making any promises,” I said.

The Dragoon ran a gore-soaked rag across the controls one more time, clearly miffed that it seemed to be leaving more juices behind than it was removing.

“Right, that’s as good as it’s going to get,” she said. “You ready?”

I limped over and sat down at the radar and comms station while Layer took a seat in the command chair. I reached out to hit some toggle switches with my levitation magic and was rewarded with a pounding headache as the spell fizzled out. In the haze of my injuries, I’d almost forgotten.

“Uh, ma’am, you wouldn’t happen to have anything to remove a magic suppression ring with, would you?”

“Nope,” Commodore Cake said, deftly flicking a few toggle switches on overhead control panels with the tips of her hooves and wings. “One of our technicians had the special pair of pliers for that specific purpose, but we lost her when the first wave of counter-boarders showed up. Her body and her gear are still on the station, and it’s too late to go back and get it. If you want to try, Sergeant, you’re welcome to. We would, however, be leaving without you.”

“What about the other survivors?” I said, mulling over how the Lieutenant escaped the detention area. “There might be more captives still alive on the station. We’re just gonna leave them behind?”

“Do you honestly think these two enemy patrol boats will wait patiently while we go looking for them? Besides, this op may not be such a failure after all, as long as we can get that AI core to a safe location. It might have valuable intel that could finally turn things around for us. If you ask me, these past few months have been pretty grim.”

“Shit,” I muttered. “Well, that’s just great.”

“Hold on, they’re hailing us. Sergeant? Patch them in.”

The voice that came over the ship’s PA system was deep and smooth and more than a little angry. “Attention, rebel vessel, this is Ordinator Fedrahan of the Confederate Security Force. This will be your only warning; you will power down and surrender immediately, or you will be fired upon.”

“Lieutenant, sir!” I turned and shouted back into the galley. “You mind coming up here and giving them our response?”

Slowly, Driving Band ambled into the cockpit, fidgeting like he’d seen a ghost. He sat down at the weapon station, fumbling with the controls for a bit until he put two and two together and realized he could aim one of the exterior manipulator arms with the aid of a small joystick and switch between them with a series of toggles marked in the inscrutable script of the satyrs who built this ship.

I watched as he awkwardly gripped the joystick between his hooves and took aim at the nearest enemy patrol boat on his scopes, the fire control computer and rangefinders automatically calculating the distance and velocity of the target and indicating how far he’d need to lead them to score a hit.

He pulled the trigger. The ship shook as the recoilless inline cannon unleashed a burst of five twenty-centimeter shells in under a second. Each disposable carbon composite, titanium-lined recoilless gun barrel carried five electronically-initiated stacked projectiles ready to fire, and the entire weapon was discarded and reloaded by an autoloader mechanism that passed the guns from an interior magazine to one of the four hydraulic manipulator arms on the hull. The weapon could fire five rounds before jettisoning the gun tube and replacing it with another. No overheating or vacuum welding to worry about. Just discard the entire gun, barrel and all. The heat would go with it. Primitive but effective.

Many of the smaller Confederate ship classes had powerful robot arms on the hull that could be used to wield various types of ranged weaponry, like rocket pods, missile launchers, particle beam guns, or inline cannons. They could also be used to grapple with ships or debris. They could even be equipped with repair or shipbreaking tools for patching up the large capital ships or salvaging their swiss-cheesed hulks. The Vigilance-class patrol boat we found ourselves in was no different. It had four manipulators that the gunner could switch between and control with a mini-stick.

I knew from my unit recognition studies that this wasn’t the standard configuration. It was a cheap, flea-market version for the private security outfits. The Confederate military version of the Vigilance-class not only carried anti-capital torpedoes and powerful gun turrets, it also had a two-seater telemanipulator station where two crewmen controlled the ventral and dorsal pairs of manipulators as though they were their own arms. This version had just the one rinky-dink joystick for all four.

I mulled these details over as the explosive canister shells released a shotgun-like spread of smaller warheads that splashed over the incoming patrol boat. The enemy ship’s deflector shields flared bright blue but held for the time being. The radio crackled to life once more.

“Wrong answer, Equestrian scum!” The cleomanni patrol boat captain said, before the radio cut off in a burst of static.

“Hey, can you get us the hell out of here?” One of the pony mercs who’d survived the assault nervously approached the bridge.

“I’m going over a checklist to make sure we don’t die,” Layer’s eyes calmly scanned over a small wire-bound, laminated booklet. “Until then, we’re not going anywhere, got it?”

Figuring out the controls for the radar console was trickier than I thought it would be. All the cleomanni scribbles in the world still didn’t mean a damned thing to me. Luckily, most of the graphical interface made use of pictograms with relatively unambiguous meanings.

“And we’re off,” Layer said.

A maneuvering thruster fired, violently forcing us away from the station, severing the umbilical and snapping off one of the station’s robotic mooring arms in the process. Judging by the icon with a blue field covering approximately one-fifth of the hull, our shields were at roughly twenty percent. We’d narrowly avoided an incoming cannon salvo that would have torn through the upper decks had it connected. My left foreleg hung limply at my side, my right one a blur of movement as I tried figuring out the method to lock on to the enemy contacts and pass firing solutions to the weapon command console.

Layer brought us up to full power and pushed the throttles as far forward as they’d go. The acceleration drove me back into my seat. The mercs, who hadn’t thought to secure themselves, went skidding across the deck. We were heading straight toward the attacking vessels. A particle beam lanced out from the rearmost enemy patrol boat, glancing off our shields.

The bubble of force protecting our ship crackled and failed with a string of ear-shattering pops that reverberated from the emission units all the way through the hull. I set my jaw as the other ship turned and fired its particle beams as well. Our patrol boat shook violently and lurched with enough force to nearly throw me to the deck. Damage indicators blinked on my console, warning me that the shot had penetrated through the starboard maneuvering thruster and part of what appeared to be the main shield generator itself.

“Holy shit, holy shit!” Driving Band screamed.

The Commodore used the control yoke to steer the ship toward the planet. Our homeworld. With one of the maneuvering thrusters out, the vessel only sluggishly corrected course to zero-seven-three by one-five-two. We blazed past the enemy ships, and they immediately rotated to train their forward weapons on us.

Driving Band kept whimpering, saying, “We’re gonna die! We’re all gonna die!”

“Not today,” I said. “Put some pressure on them, sir. See if you can fire off another salvo. I’ll pass you the targeting data!”

Driving Band fiddled with the toggles until the lights on his console flashed green. “G—gun ready,” he stammered. “Firing!”

Explosive canister shells rippled across the bow of one of the enemy vessels, smashing through their shields and sending gouts of flame and vaporized metal spewing into space. The crippled enemy ship immediately rotated away to put their crew compartment out of our line of fire. I shook my head angrily. That was one kill we wouldn’t be chalking up today.

The other ship’s particle beams ripped through our main drive cluster, taking out one of the sub-units and cutting output by ten percent. This shifted our center of thrust and made us veer off-course.

“Sergeant, do something!” Layer said. “Our nose is drifting to the left after that last hit!”

“On it,” I said.

Using the engineering panel’s controls, I shut off the opposite engine to compensate, putting us down twenty percent. With their drives at full power, the enemy patrol boats would soon intercept us, grapple onto our hull with their manipulators, and then latch on airlock-to-airlock. Then the ship would be full of boarders, and we’d be solidly fucked. Well, Layer might have survived an encounter like that, but everyone else would be stone dead. We only had one option left.

Layer set the throttle to the neutral position, cutting the main engines. Then, she fired the port maneuvering thrusters and yawed us a full hundred-eighty degrees so that the patrol boat’s nose was facing away from its direction of travel. She lined up the forward particle beam cannons with the engines of the craft that had turned tail on us, watching as the reticule flickered and danced in her heads-up display before locking on and turning red. She pulled both of the control yoke’s triggers with the tips of her armored hooves. A pair of ghostly white particle beams lanced from our patrol boat’s bow and punched out neat holes in their engines. That vessel wouldn’t be making full burn again today.

Lieutenant Driving Band let loose with another inline cannon salvo, and the other pursuing vessel evaded with an emergency firing of their starboard thrusters, causing them to translate to port. This inadvertently lined them up with our particle beam guns, and Commodore Cake was only too happy to return the favor. While I fed her a firing solution from the scanner, she activated the particle beams yet again, a small graphical readout in the engineering quadrant of my console indicating that the synchrotrons were in danger of overheating and failing, perhaps permanently.

We hit one of their manipulators and sheared it off, prompting them to turn tail and apply full burn to disengage from the combat space. Layer turned us back toward the planet and made some minor course adjustments. Driving Band nervously wiped the sweat from his brow, giggling madly. After the two mercs had collected themselves, they let out a whoop and hoof-bumped each other, but the celebration on the bridge would be short-lived.

“There’s a fire spreading from engineering,” I deadpanned.

The gravity generator went out as the fire overtook its wiring, and I could feel myself turn weightless. The mercs panicked, flailing their limbs around and yelping as they drifted toward the overhead. I braced myself against my chair to avoid floating away from the scanner console. From the galley aft of the bridge wafted the appalling odor of an electrical fire. After a few more minutes, all of our remaining oxygen would be replaced with smoke. I motioned the mercs inside.

“Seal that fucking door!” I shouted orders, which they immediately complied with.

I didn’t know how to vent the compartment since I couldn’t read the labels on what were presumably the life support controls and didn’t want to vent the bridge by mistake. Briefly vacating the scanner console’s seat, limping to the door between the bridge and the mess hall, I reached out and pulled an oversized red-and-white T-handle, which I assumed would activate the fire suppression system for the galley and mess. Sure enough, a siren went off, and I could see cloudy streams of what appeared to be either CO2 or Halon fill the compartment through a viewport in the bridge access door. We weren’t in the clear, though. The fire had heated the metal to the point where it could reignite wiring and insulation if the inert gas smothering it was lost through a hull breach and replaced with air during re-entry.

“Buckle up, everypony,” Layer said, punching a few controls. “We’re going to burn at five gees for a while. It won’t be pleasant.”

“What about the naval cordon?” I said.

“They’re beyond the usual path of the moon,” Layer nodded. “There should be nothing between us and the surface.”

The mercs braced themselves against the aft bulkhead as best they could since there weren’t enough crew chairs for them. Layer pushed the throttle as far as it would go. I gritted my teeth as I was forced back into my seat. For the next half-hour, we were squashed against the backs of our crew chairs. Equestria was getting larger on the front viewscreen with each passing minute. There was a brief respite from this literal torture as we hit 88 kilometers per second. If we remained at this velocity, we’d burn up in the atmosphere long before we reached the ground.

Commodore Cake nosed the vessel away from our direction of travel, throttling back up and burning retrograde at five gees for another half-hour. Driving Band looked like he could pass out at any moment. The mercs were practically non-responsive. I was a Charger pilot. Our machines regularly maneuvered at six gees laterally. I could take it.

Once our velocity had been reduced sufficiently, Layer swung the nose of the patrol boat back around and aimed for the terminator, the line dividing our world between day and night, toward the continent that was home to our nation’s great capital. As we entered the atmosphere, the air heated and decomposed around the vessel’s bow, prompting Layer to close the shutters over the viewscreen to preserve our eyesight.

“Hold on!” I shouted. Everyone else was screaming incoherently, except for Commodore Cake, who serenely chanted a traditional prayer of her order.

“Adru uspair siskhaidon, wen torjbol inmenkan. Meirtu lorran ut ferdas, neimse tarre iknan.”

Born for battle, our oaths we keep. Bonds forged in iron cannot be shattered by the faithless.

We plunged through the atmosphere like a meteor, descending from sixty down to forty kilometers in mere moments. Too fast, and Confederate patrol boats weren’t designed to enter a planet’s atmosphere in the first place. Layer fired the retro-thrusters to flatten our approach angle and reduce airspeed, but the ship just couldn’t take the abuse. Part of the bridge tore away from the air resistance, and the weapon control console was sucked out of the breach.

Driving Band would’ve gone with it and plummeted to his doom if the Dragoon hadn’t leaped from her seat and caught him with her forelegs. He and the armored pegasus were thrown free of the vessel, tumbling out of control into the clouds. The howling wind and ferocious heat in the cockpit made our screams inaudible as the ship streaked toward the desert floor with nopony at the helm. The port sponson made contact with a rocky mesa and was ripped free of the vessel, skewing our course so that we came in nearly sideways.

The ventral section hit the ground hard, and the ship rolled violently. While the impact fortuitously sealed the hole made during our descent by literally crushing the hull closed, it also tossed me and the mercs around the bridge like cats in a clothes dryer. The last thing I remembered before blacking out was my head connecting with a steel beam.

// … // … // … // … // … //

When I awoke, thick smoke filled my lungs. I spasmed and coughed, rolling over, trying to find an air pocket underneath the billowing black clouds. The skeletal titanium frame of the ship’s bridge loomed over me like a ribcage. I crawled from the burning wreck, shoving aside hunks of smoking debris, ignoring the pain. I shielded my eyes from the blazing sun with a foreleg, scanning the featureless scrubland and red buttes surrounding me.

The eighty-meter Confederate Vigilant-class patrol boat had been cut in two by the impact, chunks of red-hot armor plating, ruined manipulator arms, and smoldering engine components strewn across the landscape. The crash had dug a furrow in the terrain that was the length of four hoofball fields. I ducked and covered my head as one of the inline cannons cooked off from the heat of the blaze, letting loose a deafening report as it painted the barren landscape with a deadly spray of high-explosive canister shells that each weighed three times as much as a pony. The rounds dug craters in a nearby hilltop, causing a small rockslide. When the crackling and popping of burning munitions stopped, and I was sure that it wouldn’t resume, I stood.

“Lieutenant!” I called out, placing my hooves over my mouth to amplify my voice. “Commodore Cake!”

No response. Nothing but the echo of my own voice against the wind-worn cliffs. But there were tracks. Two sets of hoof marks leading away from the crash site. The two mercs were still alive immediately after the crash, but Celestia knows what became of them in the intervening time. After a brief search of the wreckage, I found an intact locker that had been thrown free of the ship. I didn’t have a lockpick. Didn’t know how to use one, anyway. I pounded on the part of the door nearest the lock with my good foreleg until I sheared the thin steel bolt. Three tries, and I was in. Clearly, it wasn’t built to withstand the strength of a pony.

Inside was a small medical bag with gauze, disinfectant, and sutures, a portable strobe light, some kind of canned meat that made my stomach turn just looking at the label, a compass, and a uniform meant for a biped, among some other personal effects that once belonged to the captured ship’s former crew. Scheherazade’s AI core was gone, but I still had the hacker’s portable computer terminal, for all the good that did me out in the middle of nowhere with no wireless access and no power outlets for hundreds of miles in all directions. Annoyed beyond all reason, I tossed the portable computer face-down in the dirt, only to see that the entire back of the device was a photovoltaic panel. I rolled my eyes in irritation, feeling pretty stupid right then.

I reeled out the interface cable from the back of the device, pushed my mane out of the way, and plugged it into a small port at the base of my skull. The datajack implanted along my spinal cord was linked to my military-issue neural lace. What I was about to do was something that should only be done in emergencies when there was nothing else available.

Pharmaceuticals were far safer and had fewer side effects, but this time, I didn’t have a choice. I simply wasn’t functional in this state. I moved the rotary dials with my hooves and pulled up the medical diagnostic program, and then I highlighted the red area over my left foreleg. The break had been detected and classified by my medical nanomachines. I tapped the button to administer a neuro-salve, gritting my teeth and letting out a pained shriek.

“Fuck!” It felt like somepony had stabbed a dozen dull kitchen knives into my leg.

The pain gave way to tingling, like my circulation had been cut off and my leg had fallen asleep, which, in turn, gave way to a cold numbness. I flexed my left foreleg, wincing a bit at the damage. My cannon was bending in a place it shouldn’t. I unplugged the terminal from my datajack and stowed it away, sighing heavily.

After stripping off the tattered and torn EVA suit and stowing what little gear I possessed in the unused compartments of the medical bag, I dressed my wounds to the best of my ability. Then, I looked for a suitably sized piece of debris. Finding a broken steel spar that wasn’t too heavy, I set it next to my equally broken leg and wrapped a strip of cloth I’d bitten off from the uniform around it, testing the makeshift leg brace to see if it would hold my weight. Satisfied, I slung the bag over my withers and set out in the direction the other crash survivors had taken.

Over a thousand years had passed since the return of Nightmare Moon. Equestria lay in ruins, one half of our world a scorching desert bathed in perpetual day, the other, a wintry wasteland of eternal night. We were leaderless. Rudderless. Stripped of all power and denied even our basic dignity and rights as sapient beings, our lands kept under the watchful eye of a powerful interstellar government that feared and despised us.

But no matter how hard they’d tried to kill us, we were still alive, and this fight wasn’t over. The cleomanni would pay dearly for what they’d done to us. Every scrap of land they’d claimed from us would be retaken. Every humiliation, every ounce of cruelty that they visited upon us, would be repaid tenfold.

I greeted the barren wastes with the ghost of a smile. My war had just begun.

// … end transmission …

Record 03//Sandstone

//HOL CRY SWT
//CHECKSUM READ
//CHECKSUM FAIL
//ERROR – DATA CORRUPTED

*//SCANREP EXT:\REC*

// … scanning and repairing files …

// … 2 corrupt file(s) found …

// … recovery record present …

// … repairing …

// … complete …

// … playback 01 …

// … error - unknown time stamp …

ERROR 0x1A

// … critical system error - unexpected end of file …

// … playback 02 …

Desert Storm

I trod carefully along the narrow desert path, following the tracks from the landing site. There were drops of blood alongside one set of hoof-marks. The tracks stopped and turned in upon themselves, going every which way. The blood droplets ceased at that point, too. As I recalled, one of the two surviving Percheron mercs was the medic I saw holding the line at the barricade. I surmised that she had dressed the wound somewhere near where the tracks had ended, whether it was on herself or her squadmate.

The tracks continued into a narrow slot canyon. I ran my hoof across the rock wall at the base of the gorge, worn smooth by millennia of erosion. I heard a noise like a foal’s shaker, accompanied by a menacing hiss. I looked down, and sure enough. I had almost stepped on a rattlesnake. I leapt back, my heart pounding in my chest.

I pointed an accusatory hoof at the venomous creature. “Don’t scare me like that, dammit.”

The snake’s tongue slithered threateningly, its head tracking me as I moved off. I didn’t have any antivenin on me. I needed to watch my step in case I ran into another. It had been a couple hours, but the sun hadn’t moved an inch since the crash. Our star wasn’t like other stars. It didn’t do its job automatically. No, it needed to be coaxed, and there weren’t any alicorns available to do the deed. The ambient temperature could only be described as blisteringly hot.

Eventually, the tracks faded to nothing as they transitioned from sand and dirt to a hard-packed dry riverbed. I knelt in the cracked, dried mud, panting, sweat dripping off my chin. I had traveled at least a good eight kilometers from the crash site, and now, I was out in the middle of scrubland with dry, dead plants as far as the eye could see.

I wasn’t quite lost, exactly. With the smoke on the horizon, I could have found my way back to the crash site and picked the wreckage clean more thoroughly or built a shelter in the hopes that the Commodore would find me. There was nothing fit for a pony to eat out here. No water, either. I had lost so much blood. My legs looked like shredded meat, and one cut was so deep I could’ve sworn I saw a flash of bone moving around in the wound. With the condition I was in, I shouldn’t have been able to walk. Only the neuro-salve made it possible.

I was overcome with anger at my predicament. “You fuckers left me,” I shouted, my voice echoing off the cliffs. “You left me to die out here!”

I heard a rattling noise. This time, it was the clamor that accompanied a different kind of snake. The two-legged kind. I dove behind a rock as a Confederate drone whizzed overhead, its contragravitic drives throttled up so high that their characteristic rattle was more like a continuous buzz. I steadied my breathing and inched backwards under a rock outcropping, hoping I hadn’t just been made. I couldn’t see them, but I could hear them. Footsteps approaching from the south. Small foot patrol, maybe four or five of them.

I reached out and dragged a small boulder in front of the opening, trying as best as I could to cover up my hiding spot. I stopped when I heard the footsteps draw uncomfortably close. They were practically right on top of me. I didn’t dare move a muscle.

“Ide fadzun ente, Kapa,” one of them said in a pleading tone.

I mulled over their words briefly before the meaning came to me. Just—disappeared—it? Oh crap, the tracking chip!

“Nev ansleif,” an older and gruffer individual barked.

The transponder chip had been implanted in my right foreleg, like the other captives. I stiffened up like a board, sweat beading on my brow. I could hear one guard—the drone operator, perhaps—fiddling with his slate just a few yards away, the device beeping annoyingly with each touchscreen input.

I knelt there, absolutely still. Minutes passed. The guards continued sweeping north in a search pattern. Ten minutes. Twenty. The coast was clear. I pushed the rock away from the outcropping and then took off at full gallop towards the south, exiting the other end of the ravine. I acted on the assumption that they had just reacquired the subdermal beacon and were doing a one-eighty and heading back in this direction. The smoke from the crash site rose from the east, casting shadows on the desert floor.

With my head swiveled over my shoulder to scan for pursuers, I’d almost ran straight into a lifeless and shriveled tree. As I swerved, the brace came loose and my injured leg gave with a sickening crunch, sending me skidding face-first through the dirt. The neuro-salve had started wearing off, and the pain had redoubled.

It hurt so much, I couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t move. Couldn’t do anything but lay there, every muscle in my body tensed. I clenched my jaw so hard, it felt like I’d bite through my own enamel. I screamed through gritted teeth. I felt a sharp stinging sensation in my rump. I jerked my head around and looked over my shoulder, and of course, a rattlesnake was attached to my ass. It was pretty much the last thing any pony ever wanted to see.

“No, you motherfucker!” I grabbed the reptile’s tail with my teeth, ripped its fangs out of my flank and whipped my head around, beating its tiny noggin against the ground.

I stomped its head into paste with my good leg. “I. Have had. A bad. Enough. Day!”

I could feel my hindquarters starting to burn from the venom the snake had pumped into me. I slumped and rolled onto my back as I felt my remaining strength go out of me. My lowermost regions were overtaken by a pain worse than any I’d ever felt in my life. I lost control of my bladder. That was it. I was done. They’d find my corpse here, lying in a puddle of my own piss, my leg broken, my hooves covered in blood from one final act of revenge against the creature that killed me.

“Barleywine,” I mumbled. “I’m sorry.”

A fog entered the corners of my vision, a figure rising from the bushes and advancing upon my helpless form. So, what? Am I hallucinating, now? Is a vicious predator about to eat me? Is this some kind of circle-of-life thing?

The shape resolved into the face of a grizzled stallion with a gray coat and white beard, draped from head to hoof in tan camouflage netting. He pulled back the cloak he wore to reveal a wide-brimmed hat ringed with teeth of some kind.

“You’re too loud,” he said, his voice like raw iron. “It’s like you want to get caught.”

“Barll—wine?” I slurred incoherently, my mental faculties failing me. “Izzat you?”

“Never heard of a pony by that name.” He rolled me over to get a better look at my wounds. “I’ve seen worse. You’re lucky I found you when I did. This far east, you can’t trot five paces without stepping on a rattler. They’re all over the place.”

He pulled out a syringe, depressed the plunger slightly to bleed the air out, felt around for a vein, and then deftly pushed the needle under my skin. I felt a chill as the antidote entered my bloodstream, neutralizing the toxin. The old pony slung me over his shoulder like a pack, my legs hanging down on either side of him. My head throbbed. My broken leg hurt like hell. I was overcome by waves of nausea and projectile-vomited the entire contents of my stomach, which wasn’t much. Luckily, I’d turned my head aside just in time and managed to avoid getting any on my rescuer.

“Great,” he said. “Lose what little remaining moisture you have in your body. Excellent plan.”

“Feel sick.”

“Of course you do.”

We traveled for what felt like miles, with me only semi-conscious the entire time. The blue strands of my mane clung to me, matted with blood, sweat and puke. We stopped. The sound of contragravitic drives grew near, yet again. The stallion ducked and quickly drew his camouflage netting over both of us.

“How did they find us so quickly?” he said.

“Tracking chip,” I muttered.

“Oh, hell.” He set me down, rather roughly. “Why didn’t you say so in the first place?”

For a moment, he looked ready to just leave me there, but he held his hoof out level to indicate that I should stay low before hurriedly slinking away. I peeked my head above the dead, dry bushes and scanned the horizon, catching a glimpse of the foes we faced. There were two mechanized squads supported by one Pursuer 6x6 wheeled armored car each, moving single file in a column, cresting a dune about a half-klick in front of us.

Ahriman Station was owned and operated by a private company under military supervision. The Confederate Security Force was an organization made up exclusively of cleomanni PMCs, like Javelin Security or Skylark Incorporated, that collectively operated under a contractual agreement with the Confederacy.

They were not affiliated with the Confederate government but were lent a measure of official-sounding legitimacy by government mandate nonetheless, like a sort of privatized militia. Not too different from our own mercs, except they all wore the same uniforms and worked as part of the same command structure and logistics chain. These were the same variety of corporate security goons as the ones we’d fought earlier in the morning, only better-equipped.

The stallion was pulling boxy objects from under his cloak and placing them on the ground in strategic locations a good thirty meters ahead of me. I recognized them immediately as captured F-56 directional anti-personnel mines of cleomanni design. He was going to use me and my subdermal tracking beacon as bait. I had to admit, it was pretty clever, even if I didn’t like it one bit. Then, he disappeared from view. He was an earth pony. How does he do that so easily without magic?

The first squad neared my position. They were heading straight for me, not expecting any resistance. The guardsman on point was messing around with his slate, trying to pin down my exact location. He pointed his gauntleted finger right at me. They closed to within fifty meters. From his concealed position, my savior triggered the directional mines, spewing thousands of steel ball bearings at the approaching hostiles. Three dismounted members of the lead squad simply fell where they stood, quite thoroughly dead. The other three writhed on the ground, too badly mangled to stand.

The machine gunner in the lead vehicle’s ring turret opened fire in my general direction. My ears were treated to the delightful supersonic symphony of snapping and cracking bullets passing overhead. The gunner in the vehicle behind them and the six dismounted guards who were still left standing after the mines detonated soon followed suit. Their flechettes pinged off the dirt just a few feet from my head. Any closer, and I was a dead mare.

After a few seconds, the machine gun on the vehicle in the back of the formation went silent. The rest of the guards ceased fire. I could hear a faint commotion erupt in their midst. When the rear vehicle’s crew-served weapon opened fire again, it was directed upon the lead vehicle. The armor-piercing incendiary rounds tore into the lightly armored scout car, setting it ablaze. The driver and gunner were almost certainly dead. The stallion swept the muzzle of the weapon over the remaining six dismounted guards. They returned fire, their flechettes pinging harmlessly off of his gun shield. Controlled bursts of fifty-cal fire liberated the cleomanni of their bodily extremities, sending limbs and heads flying. He then put a few rounds in the three injured guardsmen for good measure.

I simply lay there, perfectly still, my mouth agape as the stallion approached me, holding a knife in his jaws. He flicked the blood off the blade before wiping it dry and stowing it back in its sheath.

“Who—who are you?” I said.

“I’m nopony, and that’s what you’ll tell anyone who asks, got it?”

He tossed me onto his back as before, carting me over to the vacant six-by-six armored car. He loaded me into the vehicle like a knapsack, before spending roughly half an hour scavenging the guards’ weapons, armor and other supplies and stuffing them in the back of the vehicle with me. I had finally earned my freedom, but I was still little more than cargo. I could sense we were in motion. I peeked out the small armored window in the side hatch after a few minutes. The sun appeared to sink towards the horizon ever-so-slightly. We were heading west.

“Nopony isn’t a name,” I said.

Exhaustion crashed over me like a wave, and before long, sleep took me.

// … // … // … // … // … //

I slowly opened my eyes. My body felt like a hunk of lead. I glanced around the luxurious bedroom I was in. Mahogany wainscoting. Oil lamps. A grandfather clock that rang at the top of the hour. All sorts of trinkets and trophies hanging on the walls. The room smelled of cigar smoke and booze.

I looked out an open window to see a small town with taverns and markets dimly lit in the gloom by neon signs, the nightlife drifting listlessly from one block to the next, the ponies’ torsos bundled up in thick winter coats. Off in the distance, I saw the vague silhouettes of abandoned quarries and coal elevators dotting the hillsides. I hugged the blankets closer. This far towards the planet’s night side, it was cold. Damned cold.

I was in bed. A real bed, after three years of sleeping on a steel slab. An actual, comfortable mattress. I pulled the sheets down to examine myself. My broken leg had been set and put in a cast. I looked like a mummy with how many bandages I had on me. I could smell antiseptic and feel the dull ache of stitched skin.

In summary, my whole body felt like shit except for my spine, which felt wonderful.

I heard voices from an adjacent room, accompanied by bursts of static from what sounded like a radio set. I saw a unicorn mare trot into the room and levitate a pair of pliers with a small, bloody microchip in them, rotating it and gazing at it intently. She turned towards me and noticed that my eyes were open.

“Bellwether,” she said. “Bellwether, I think she’s stirring!”

“I told you not to use that name.” The old stallion who’d rescued me appeared in the doorway, pointing a hoof accusatorily at me. “You. Did you come from that prison starbase?”

“Yes,” I rasped, my throat dry and sticky.

I coughed a couple of times as I swallowed to try and lubricate my vocal apparatus. Bellwether regarded me suspiciously, scanning my features while scribbling something on a notepad with a pencil held in his mouth.

“Hmph,” he said through his teeth. “Where else?”

“Well, where the hell am I now?” I said.

“Tar Pan, at the Regence Hotel. Lots of coal and salt magnates used to stay here on business trips. The rest of the town ain’t nearly so opulent. The Confederate occupation forces are minimal to nonexistent in this region, but that may change at any time.” He frowned, striding across the room. “Will somepony close that damn window? It’s fucking freezing outside. Never mind, I got it.” He slammed it shut with a huff.

Tar Pan. An old mining town north of Vanhoover. I had family out here. Or used to.

“Do you know anypony around these parts by the name of Briarwood?”

“Yeah, I know that fruitcake,” Bellwether said, lighting a cigar and raising it to his lips. “Plays piano at the Wild Mustang when he isn’t sucking cock to support his opium habit.”

I blinked a few times, my face resolving into a scowl. “He’s my fucking cousin, you dickhead.”

“My condolences.”

I paused. “How did you find me?”

“Was doing recon for a joint recovery operation. Saw the smoke from the crash. Started tracking enemy movements. Stumbled across you entirely by accident.”

“Did you happen to see a couple mercenaries carrying a big, shiny metal cylinder?”

“Can’t say I have, no.”

“Alright then. What about a pegasus in an exosuit?”

He raised an eyebrow. “If that’s who I think it is, I’m sure she’ll turn up eventually. You mentioned something about a metal cylinder? What sort of cylinder is this, now?”

“It’s Ahriman Station’s AI core, Scheherazade.”

The stallion fell silent for a few moments.

“This might be the big break we need. You’re a soldier, right?”

“Sergeant Desert Storm, Light Scouts of the Eighth Cavalry Division.”

“Better and better.”

“Alright, now, who the hell are you?” I pointed my injured hoof at him, wincing in pain.

He huffed indignantly. “Before I trust you enough to tell you anything, I need to know you’re not a cleomanni spy. They do that, sometimes. Drug and brainwash ponies and turn them into deep cover agents.”

For some reason, I wished he hadn’t reminded me of that. The first time I’d heard of it while in training, I’d been paranoid about practically everyone I met. For weeks.

“They were hunting me down,” I said, waving a hoof dismissively. “They wouldn’t do that to a spy, would they?”

“They would. It’s one of the oldest tricks in the book. Make one of your own agents look like an escaped prisoner. Good cover story. Makes it easier for your targets to befriend them.”

“I’ll ask again,” I said. “Who the hell are you?”

“Like I said earlier, I’m nopony, and it’s gonna stay that way until I know you’re clean.”

“You’re not nopony,” I said. “You’re somepony. You’re former military intelligence, aren’t you? ORACLE, or some-such.”

He stiffened visibly. The Office of Reconnaissance, Advanced Concepts and Long-range Espionage—or, in Equestrian, the Bolea ut Atenlieue ia Sori Kaalo ia Anlios Fedabe, or BASKAF—was one of the most secretive groups in the Equestrian military, and with good reason. Nothing was off-limits for them, neither torture nor assassination, though they preferred to make use of long-winded euphemisms like 'enhanced interrogation' and 'high-value target neutralization' to describe such deeds. More syllables, less guilt.

“What makes you think that?” he said.

“It’s the subtle things, like the way you move, to the not-so-subtle things, like how you made taking out two whole squads of cleomanni guardsmen with a knife and some hand-me-down anti-personnel mines look easy.”

“That’s because it is easy, especially when they think that all they have to contend with is a wounded, unarmed prisoner with a tracking chip in her leg. When you’ve got some juicy bait like that, all you really have to do is reel them in.”

I grimaced. “Great, so I’m a worm on the end of a hook, now?”

Bellwether laughed. “Just this once, yeah.”

“I’ve seen plenty of spooks in my time,” I said. “Usually, they were debriefing my lance’s leader.”

“Of course you did,” he said. “After all, who do you think scoped out the targets for pilots like you to gas?”

I pressed my lips together, my face expressionless. I went over a mental checklist of the standard loadout for my Courser-class Charger. One Illusion-type spell locus. Four anti-personnel beamcasters. Two 40mm cased telescoped automatic cannons, 464 rounds total. Two back-mounted heavy beamcasters, forty-megajoule range. Eight vertical-launch missile tubes, each loaded with one Mark-76 surface-to-surface missile, each carrying hundreds of submunitions loaded with OA-13. An organophosphate-based binary nerve agent.

Pesticide. Across hundreds of covert missions, we killed thousands—no, tens of thousands—of civilian scientists, engineers, factory workers and various other high-value Confederate logistics personnel with what amounted to fucking pesticide. When we weren’t doing that, we often found ourselves hunting deserters and turncoats who couldn’t stomach what we were doing. That was the real mission of the Light Scouts. It was the reason we were hated and feared by our allies just as much as our enemies.

“I’d do it again, if I had to,” I said. “You know that.”

“Good.” Bellwether nodded. “You might have to, and very soon. While you were passed out in here, I had a talk with the Captain over the radio, and she says you’re free to join up with our cell as long as you’re clear of any cleomanni tracking devices and physically fit for duty.”

“What?”

“You heard me. Once we get you all sorted out, you’re free to become a member of the Equestrian Liberation Front.”

“No, I mean, with what?” I said. “You don’t expect me to start shoving cluster bomblets filled with nerve gas down some satyrs’ throats with my bare hooves, do you?”

“As a matter of fact, no, I don’t. We have a Charger, but no qualified pilots.”

My breath hitched in my throat. These insurgents actually had a functioning Charger at their disposal.

“What kind?”

“Courser-class. An advanced prototype model, the—”

I sat bolt upright. “Mirage two-zero-two?”

“That is correct. I take it you have some experience with this model?”

“More than a little. Our unit had four of them out of a low-rate initial production run of ten. They wanted to take mine back to the factory for some tuning and adjustments, but I insisted on keeping it. They agreed, but on one condition: that they could bring in an on-site team to take telemetry readings and oil samples from my machine round-the-clock and make adjustments as necessary, and we had to do double-duty as their bodyguards.”

He snickered. “That sounds like the Conclave all right.”

“Does it have any unusual identifying marks?”

“Yeah, now that you mention it.” He rubbed his chin. “Nose art of a little tornado, and the words—”

“Dust Devil,” I said, grinning. “That’s my Charger! Where did you find it?”

// … // … // … // … // … //

I sat on the steps to the armored car’s hatch, jaw hanging loose. Bellwether waved a hoof over the peat bog a few dozen klicks east of Vanhoover where my Charger had sunk, ass-end-first, its nose and the remains of its carbon composite reentry shield poking out of the muck. One could just barely see the massive machine’s five-camera head and the upper half of its neck in the perpetual dusk and gloom along the terminator. There was some manner of mossy growth drooping from the left autocannon’s muzzle. There were also bits of charred wreckage scattered about the mire that I assumed were what was left of the HMS Endless Summer, my unit’s transport ship. I shook my head in abject dismay.

“When you said you had a Charger,” I began, my tone even, “I thought you meant you had one sitting in a hangar, inspected and ready for combat.”

“Beggars can’t be choosers, now.” Bellwether snickered.

I turned towards him, my eyes narrowed. “Bullshit. When can we pull my baby out of there?”

“In due time. We need a boom truck, and maybe—”

“That machine weighs thirty-seven tons,” I said, turning tail, adjusting my saddlebags and limping back inside the armored personnel carrier. “It’s going to take more than a Celestia-fucking boom truck to lift her.”

“Well, Sergeant, maybe you can levitate the damned thing out.” He doubled over with rasping guffaws.

“I’ve seen that movie a million times, and no, I’m not doing that.” I shook my head bemusedly. “I’m not the Empress, for crying out loud. Speaking of which, can we do something about this suppression ring? It’s giving me splitting headaches. Oh, and I like being able to lift beverage containers without spilling the contents all over myself, too.”

“How do you think we earth ponies do it?”

I flushed bright red. “Do you have something to remove a suppression ring, or not?”

The corners of his lips curled up into a smile, revealing rows of tobacco-stained teeth.

// … // … // … // … // … //

After driving another hundred kilometers, we descended into a deep canyon. The armored car’s primitive reciprocating internal combustion engine was running dangerously low on fuel, if the blinking light in the dash was any indication. We parked the vehicle next to an abandoned earth-mover. I stepped out and hobbled down the dirt road towards a large corrugated metal shanty, leaning with my injured foreleg across the stallion’s shoulder as he propped me upright.

The place had been built into a cliff face in the depths of Ghastly Gorge, hiding it from casual surveillance. It looked like it would collapse at any moment, but it held, for the time being. We stopped at the entrance. There were a pair of five-story-high hangar doors that rolled on tracks. They looked way more advanced than the rest of the structure, but they were still covered in thick layers of rust, just like everything else in the general vicinity. I squinted as I surveyed the place.

“What a dump.” I shook my head.

“It only looks that way on the outside,” Bellwether said.

He walked up to a dirt-encrusted control panel and swung the cover open. Underneath was a pushbutton, which he depressed with his hoof to the rhythm of Shave and a Mane-cut. After ten seconds, a hollow buzz sounded from the intercom’s tinny speaker.

“Flash.”

“Sentry,” Bellwether responded to the challenge.

My ears perked up as powerful electric motors whirred to life, and the steel hangar doors slowly parted to reveal the cavernous space beyond.

“Welcome to Camp Crazy Horse, one of the ELF’s last bastions.” Bellwether sighed as he led me through the hangar doors.

The interior of the place was quite pristine, in stark contrast to its dilapidated exterior. The back wall of the hangar was recessed into the canyon wall, a good hundred meters deep by roughly two hundred meters across. I was standing on nearly five acres of polished and spotlessly clean concrete. The space was ringed by workbenches with tool boards, tool chests, lathes, drill presses, welding machines, computer-controlled multi-axis milling machines, a machine I recognized as a specialized loom for twining artificial muscle strands, and additive manufacturing machines. They’d somehow even found space enough for a drop-forging hammer in one corner.

There were empty stalls with overhead hoists mounted on the ceiling high above. One corner had been partitioned off into a multi-story data center with rows of server racks and an upper level with monitoring stations. There were about a dozen ponies milling about, but otherwise, the place was deserted. A smile creased my lips. I knew a Charger lab when I saw one. I turned and found myself face-to-face with a rather unhinged-looking elderly fellow with a yellowish-cream coat, wispy white mane, and oversized spectacles with lenses that looked like pie plates. He started circling me, studying my features.

“Let me have a look at you,” the earth pony said, reaching out to touch my shoulders.

He paced around me some more, before giving my torso a good thwack with his hoof. I flinched and hissed in pain.

“No, no, she’s injured!” he said. “This will not do.”

I fixed him with a lidded gaze. “You couldn’t tell that from the cast on my leg, or the fact that there’s like a hundred stitches and fifty bandages all over my body?”

“Oh, yes, hmm,” he said, appearing deep in thought. “Oh, where are my manners? The name’s Crookneck. Crookneck Squash.”

And this poor bastard went his entire life without changing it. Right.

“Sergeant Desert Storm,” I said, shaking his proffered hoof. “I heard you guys need a pilot?”

“That’s correct. A Charger without a pilot is just a lump of titanium alloy and carbon nanotubes. A pilot without a Charger is a unicorn with a big head and an even bigger mouth. See, one completes the other. And in your condition, well—”

He trailed off when he noticed me glaring at him. As I prepared my retort, I pressed my hoof to his chest for emphasis.

“What Charger? You mean my Charger? You mean the one that sank in a bog, where it has sat for three years with no routine inspections or maintenance of any kind? It’s fucking ruined! FUBAR! Do you have any idea how fragile the internals on those things really are? How precisely-fit they have to be?”

“I do,” he said, taking off his glasses as his face adopted a more solemn expression. “I was a member of the Twilight Conclave, child. We built the damned things.”

I took a step back. “Is it just me, or have I been running into a lot of really interesting people these past few hours?”

Bellwether and Crookneck both snickered.

“Yeah, ‘course you have,” Bellwether said. “Everypony else wasn’t tough enough to make it through the apocalypse. That’s why they’re all dead.”

An awkward silence descended upon the three of us.

“So, umm,” I pointed to my horn with my hoof.

“A suppression ring?” Crookneck cocked his head. “I’ve got just the thing for that. Follow me.”

I hobbled after him as he led me over to a workbench. He plugged in a noisy old air compressor and started rummaging around underneath the workbench and through the drawers of the adjacent tool chests.

“Let’s see, where did I put that? Not here. Not there. Nope. Wait, I must be losing my mind. It’s always in the one second from the bottom. Ta-dah!”

He triumphantly raised a pneumatic tool in his hooves. A chill went down my spine as he connected the air hose with his teeth and revved it a few times to test it.

“That is a fucking die grinder!” Utterly aghast, I started slinking away from the wacky engineer out of fear for my precious horn. “I thought you people had some kind of plier thing that would take these off?”

“Oh, the ratcheting cup-and-pin pliers? No, no, those are for emergencies only. We never use those things around here. I saw a mare’s horn break in half, once. This way is much better. Now, hold still.”

Crookneck gave a knowing nod towards the stallion behind me. Bellwether looped his forelegs underneath mine and wrestled me over to a workbench with surprising quickness and force. I grunted and struggled a little as he held my head in place. Crookneck fitted a dust mask over my muzzle and a pair of goggles over my eyes, sweeping my mane back and out of the way.

“Safety first.” He grinned.

He held the grinder in his hooves, spinning it up to a shrill whine before bringing the cutting disc in contact with the metal band cinched tight around my horn. Sparks flew and I reflexively clenched my eyes shut. The glowing-hot grinder dust stung my cheeks. The vibration from the damned thing felt like it was shaking my brains loose.

“Ohh-h-h-h-h-h-h fuu-u-u-u-u-u-ck.” My voice sounded like someone was giving me a ten-thousand-revolution-per-minute back massage.

“Don’t move,” Bellwether said. “You don’t want your horn nicked. You’re no good to us if you can’t do magic.”

I mentally swore everything under the sun, in both Equestrian and Ardun. The cleomanni had this one word, javalakhra, which somehow condensed the meaning of mucus-covered penis-worm into half as many syllables. It was their most vile insult, reserved for the lowest of the low.

Me and the squaddies used to make a game out of how many alien curse words we could memorize. The brothers Blitz—Barrage Blitz and Barricade Blitz were their names—were the undisputed champs, having mastered a litany of swears in the languages of over eleven Free Trade Union member and associate races.

Just when I thought it was all over, he started making a cut on the other side, and my internal monologue resumed its intense profanity.

“Alright, here we go,” Crookneck said, setting the die grinder aside, letting it spin down on the workbench.

He took a big pair of needle-nose pliers and yanked off the ruined cleomanni device with a guttural growl. Bellwether let go of me so I could scoot off the workbench and stand up. I rubbed my aching head, wincing a little. I looked at the tool board, my eyes settling on one particularly large adjustable wrench. I reached out with my mind and wrapped it in the orange glow of my levitation magic, slowly lifting it off the pegs that kept it in place. After moving it a few inches, my head began throbbing. The magic envelope collapsed and the tool clattered onto the workbench’s surface.

“Don’t strain yourself,” Bellwether said. “If you haven’t done it for a few years, it always takes time to get back into the groove. The mare that patched you up, Argent Tincture, took months to relearn things as basic as lifting utensils to feed herself after her ring was removed.”

“Yeah, well, she’s not me.” I felt my horn with my hoof and there wasn’t a scratch on it, so I was glad for that, at least. “So, Squash, when’s the soonest we can extract my Charger?”

“Your Charger, you say?” He frowned. “I’ll have you know, that particular model was reserved specifically for—”

“The very best of the Light Scouts,” I said, concluding his sentence for him. “The Mirage A202, production serial number 009. Dust Devil. My Charger.”

Crookneck Squash adjusted his glasses, his face taking on a grave expression. “That one went to the Eighth Cav. Are you saying you’re formerly of their ranks?”

“Yeah. Probably the last one who ain’t pushing up daisies by now.”

“What’s your service number? None of the telemetry data we received at the Conclave had a name assigned to it, only a number. If it does not match, young lady, I will be rather irate with you.”

“Kolah-Kovan-Kovan-Vakoh-Van-Koh-Lah-Seh-Koh, Seredo Imrah Vakoseh.”

In other words, 5-6682-4131, Legion 27. At its peak, centuries ago, out of a population of over a hundred and twenty billion spread out over ninety-four worlds, the Empire had over five hundred million active-duty soldiers organized into fifty Legions numbering ten million each, and organized planetary militias that numbered triple that. When I served, we only numbered seventeen million in all, down to a paltry three hundred and forty thousand per Legion.

“That was you?” His eyes widened. “Celestia’s hide, you were a legend among the testing team! We were always wondering what crazy maneuvers and harebrained tactics four-one-three-one would attempt next. Hell, on some slow nights, we’d make popcorn and watch the black box recordings on a projector screen in one of the conference rooms. There was a betting pool on how long it’d be before you went too far and bought the farm.”

“Sounds to me like our taxes were well-spent.” I rolled my eyes.

“We could have made a pretty penny licensing the footage to some movie studio, if it weren’t classified top-secret.”

I giggled nervously. “If it was top-secret, then what were you all doing watching it together in a conference room?”

His grin faded. “Oh, uh, not to worry. The facility I worked in was a bunker, with all kinds of special magtech to keep sound and electromagnetic emissions from leaking out to the surface. Heh, four-one-three-one. In the flesh. Never thought I’d see the day.”

I rolled my eyes. I’d risked life and limb to escape a prison starbase presided over by a malevolent AI that reduced ponies to numbers and stuffed them in shipping containers, and now that I was free, even my own species wanted to refer to me by four digits instead of my real name. At that point, I briefly wondered what kind of fucked-up life I was leading.

“You still didn’t answer my question,” I said. “How the hell are we getting my Mirage out of the mire?”

“Follow me, kid,” Bellwether said.

In one corner of the hangar was a massive vehicle covered in a tarp. Bellwether and Crookneck walked around the back of it, grabbed the cover between their hooves and dragged it away. The tarp unfurled like the cloak of a weary traveler, slowly revealing the enormous thirty-meter-long cab-over truck underneath. Twelve axles. An articulating chassis. A massive bed with eyelets for tiedown cables. Recovery booms with high-power winches. A loading ramp. A pair of metal protrusions from the cab that looked like horns but held fog lamps.

I’d seen many of these machines during my military career. They were a feat of Equestrian engineering and a Charger pilot’s second-best friend, next to their own walking engine of destruction. They could transport everything from forty-ton Coursers to hundred-ton Destriers. They could even carry up to two fully loaded main battle tanks, if necessary.

“If you have a Bull Runner, then why haven’t you recovered the Mirage already?” I said.

“We tried,” Crookneck said. “Tires broke loose in the mud every time. The winches were pulling us towards the Charger, not the opposite. We need somepony to climb into the Charger’s cockpit somehow and see if they can start it up and provide a little extra tractive effort.”

I stared at them, my jaw working silently in shock. “That will fucking ruin it.”

“We know,” Bellwether said. “Why do you think we’ve got so much equipment and so many technicians trotting around with nothing to do? Whatever the damage is, we’ll fix it.”

I paused. “When’s the soonest we can initiate the extraction?”

“As soon as your leg’s healed enough to walk,” Crookneck said. “We can’t have you hurting yourself any more than you already have. You’re too valuable to the Resistance.”

“That might take a while,” I said.

“Indeed, it might.” The aged pony pushed his glasses up. “You never mentioned how you broke it in the first place. Care to share?”

“There were these things on the station that attacked us and tried to prevent our escape.”

Bellwether frowned. “What do you mean by ‘things’, Sergeant? What did they look like?”

“Four eyes, slithering tongue, sharp teeth, sharp tail and covered from head to toe in chrome armor and bionics. The Dragoon who rescued us, Commodore Cake, called them Karkadann. Ring any bells?”

Crookneck Squash blanched visibly right through his coat. Even the normally cool and collected Bellwether seemed nervous, his eyes scanning the room as though some hidden enemy might strike from the shadows at any moment.

“They’re clones,” Crookneck said.

Well, that was underwhelming. “That’s it? Clones?”

“You are aware that, pound-for-pound, we are some of the strongest and hardiest creatures in the galaxy, correct? Our genetic code is a highly valuable black-market commodity, right up there with our magtech.”

Magtech. Products of the fusion of magic and technology. At one time, they had permeated almost every level of our society. With the aid of magic, you could make machines of superior quality. Military equipment was one obvious use of the principle, but magic could also be found in mundane household objects. Even an Equestrian coffee maker was prized over its cleomanni-made counterpart, because instead of the burnt, electrical taste of a beverage heated by resistance coils, you got a smooth, evenly heated brew with the application of a little artificial pyrokinesis. To date, no other species had been able to perfectly replicate our technology because it relied on unicorn enchantments and alchemical principles unknown to alien scientists.

“Yes, I’m well aware,” I said. “Even if you put aside the overwhelming advantage of our magic, the average pony can beat a cleomanni to death with our bare hooves in the span of seconds. The reverse is not easily accomplished. A barroom brawl that a pony would walk away from would put most other species in the hospital, or the morgue. It’s part of the reason why the rest of the galaxy treats us like dangerous animals. But what does that have to do with anything?”

“To make the Karkadann, the cleomanni took pony DNA, modified it, and created hybrid organisms based on our own best attributes, especially our muscle and bone density. Their nervous tissue is modified to be highly receptive to external stimuli, allowing them to be precisely controlled by the electrode meshes and fiber-optics that wend their way through their minds.” Crookneck tapped his head for emphasis. “They’re networked together so they share sensory information with both each other and the rest of the cleomanni military datasphere. They may seem mindless, but in reality, they act together as one collective intelligence, coordinating and converging on their targets with lethal precision.”

“So, you’re saying they’re mind-controlled ponies?” My eyes widened in shock. “How come nopony was told about this?”

“Because you weren’t supposed to know.” Crookneck shook his head sadly. “Their existence has been kept under wraps for a very, very long time. It helps that there are few who survive direct encounters with them. The damn things maintain their own secrecy well enough. Those few personnel who have come into contact with them and lived to tell the tale were always either pressed into the intelligence community or special forces, or otherwise submitted to memory erasure therapy. With the effective dissolution of our government, that is no longer our policy, of course. Cat’s out of the bag, now.”

“That’s how I ended up becoming an ORACLE agent,” Bellwether said. “I was a Combat Engineer, but I saw something I shouldn’t have. A bunch of somethings that wiped out my team. Coincidentally, ORACLE needed saboteurs, and that was that.”

“Is there any way to release them from their slavery?” I said.

Bellwether scoffed at this. “The only way I know of is by shooting them dead. The Karkadann have atrophied frontal lobes that have been largely replaced and augmented by machinery. Their intellect is far more rudimentary than ours. Their general physiology is different, too, as if the four eyes and sharp teeth didn’t tip you off. They’re not sapient. Not like us, anyway. They’re hyper-aggressive animals, goaded into attacking targets by the microchips planted in their heads.”

“Now, just wait a fucking minute,” I pressed, as if what I’d just heard wasn’t bad enough. “This doesn’t make any sense. How do they grow these things?”

Bellwether and Crookneck looked at each other nervously, before the latter shrugged. “How do you think?”

I drew a blank for a few seconds as I stood there, blinking. I already knew the answer, but I didn’t want it to be true.

“No,” I murmured. “Not that. Oh fuck, no.”

Crookneck sighed. “Yes, Sergeant. They implant the modified embryos into captive mares.”

It felt like the room had gotten a few degrees colder. A chill of horror washed over me. My eyes began to water. I felt weak in the knees. I thought of all the prisoners who’d been taken beyond the Blue Door in Ahriman Station, never to be seen again. Always mares. Never stallions.

My mind raced over my own medical records. I’d received a shrapnel wound due to spalling, inflicted by a tank round that had penetrated my Charger’s cockpit five years ago. I was infertile. If one tiny sliver of metal had been a few millimeters off its mark, or if I’d gone for magic healing therapy like I’d planned to when my tour was up, they could’ve dragged me behind that door.

My face twisted up in anger. “Disgusting!”

“Indeed, it is,” Crookneck said. “They’re the reason why this whole war started in the first place, so many centuries ago.”

“How come they don’t teach this shit in school?” I said. “Our history textbooks make no mention of any of this.”

“Those books are wrong.” Crookneck stamped his hoof angrily. “The existence of these creatures has been deliberately erased from our publicly-available historical records. Vetted and redacted by the highest offices in the land. How do you feel after learning the truth?”

A thousand years. The cleomanni had been doing this shit to ponies for over a thousand years, and nopony except a select few with the highest clearances knew about it. As if their extermination campaigns weren’t bad enough, they were harvesting us. Using us to breed monsters. There was a tightness like a band of iron in my chest. I felt lightheaded, like the world around me had somehow become airy and unreal.

“I feel like I wanna puke,” I said. “Those sick fucking bastards.”

He nodded, a grim expression on his face. “The Karkadann are on a list of banned topics for that specific reason. That is, to keep our entire species from feeling the same way that you do right now.”

“This shit’s beyond the pale.” I swallowed the lump that had formed in my throat. “Why cover it all up? We could’ve spread evidence of this far and wide. Used the uproar to our advantage.”

“Maybe you feel like you’re stronger with this knowledge than you are without it, Sergeant,” Bellwether nodded. “But let’s get real. How many ponies think like you do? How many would be angry enough to kill over this, and how many would collapse into a useless pile of self-pity? Order 11: Prevention of Species-Wide Demoralization. It’s been there since the very beginning, by decree of the Empress herself. This material was deemed too sensitive for wide dissemination, because studies showed that it would’ve led to a crippling uptick in the prevalence of various psychiatric disorders.”

“We ran extensive tests,” Crookneck said. “Several decades back, the Conclave ran one study with a thousand participants—mostly young college students—who agreed to extreme confidentiality, to the point of basically being kept under house arrest for the rest of their lives.

“Half of the subjects were given a detailed description of the Karkadann creation process and what they were intended for. The other half was a control group. The group exposed to the Karkadann data experienced a nearly threefold increase in the incidence of clinical depression and suicide. Heck, out of the five hundred who learned the truth, more than half of us were so disgusted, we went on to join the Conclave in lieu of being prisoners in our own homes.”

My jaw dropped. “No way. You?”

Crookneck grinned and thumped his chest. “Yes, indeed. I was one of the ponies from that group. Like Bellwether, in a twist of fate, I ended up serving my country differently from most. They made accommodations for us, just like anyone else who’d learned the horrible truth of the matter. They continued our schooling and allowed us to finish our degrees, and then they lined us up for jobs with high security clearances where they could keep a close eye on us. I went into weapons engineering. I wanted to make stuff to blow those Confederate bastards sky-high. Made a damn good career out of it.” He laughed.

I blinked a few times. “Huh, sounds like it’d be great for a recruitment drive. Perfect propaganda material.”

“It really wasn’t.” Crookneck shook his head sadly. “Many of us went on to have poor psychological outcomes even in our new line of work. I can’t begin to tell you how many of my own colleagues I’ve lost over the years. There were other things they learned. Deeper, darker secrets which the Karkadann were only a gateway to. They simply could not live with the truth. Have you ever tried to open the door to a unisex restroom and found it blocked by a dead mare’s body after she deliberately overdosed? I have. Not the best way to start your morning, I’ll tell you that.”

“There has to be something in the Stellar Code that makes this pony experimentation shit illegal, whether we’re recognized as sapients or not,” I said.

“Nope,” Bellwether said. “Perfectly legal animal testing.”

“Unbelievable,” I whispered. “Fucking unbelievable.”

“Call it what you want, Storm, but it’s the truth,” Bellwether said. “Unpleasant, I know, but it’s a reality we’re going to have to live with. Our enemies see us as things, not people, and we all know where that kind of thinking leads.”

“You said the war started because of these Karkadann things, Squash,” I said. “I thought the war began over eleven centuries ago, when three of the Old Kingdom’s princesses visited cleomanni space on a diplomatic mission, and only one returned alive?”

“That was a dark day in our ancient history, Sergeant,” Bellwether said. “But it’s not the whole story. There’s more to it than that.”

“Like what?”

“No one really knows the nitty-gritty details,” Bellwether said. “Not even us agents. The old records were sealed away, and for a good reason. Don’t know if those archives survived the bombardment or not. BASKAF investigated the matter, and we turned up evidence that there were efforts to resurrect the Karkadann project from data recovered from a ruined research facility years before any attempts at diplomatic contact even took place, which would put our first contact with the cleomanni perhaps a decade earlier than previously thought. The rest has been lost to time.”

Talk of the Karkadann was making me increasingly ill with each passing moment. I had to change the subject. I had to get my mind off of it.

“What happened to Her Imperial Majesty, at the end of the war?” I said. “Where is Empress Sparkle?”

“You know as much as we do.” Crookneck shrugged. “It’d be nice to have her back. Her understanding of magtech is unparalleled.”

“Who leads us now?”

“Admiral Star Crusher is in command of what remains of the ELF. There are about forty thousand of us left, scattered across multiple systems.” Crookneck Squash paced around the front of the truck as he explained how grave the situation was. “A little over an eighth of that number constitutes the resistance cells here on Equestria. We have a few warships, but they’re under-crewed and short on supplies, and we’ve tried to avoid resorting to acts of piracy against the civilizations of the galaxy who are unaffiliated with the Confederacy to obtain the stores we need. Admiral Crusher commands the Luna Tear, likely the last Nightmare-class battleship left in the whole universe.”

“The Admiral’s still alive? That’s good news. He’s a skilled leader.”

“He’s a blithering idiot,” Bellwether said. “He’s sacrificed too many good soldiers for any pony in their right mind to think otherwise.”

“My platoon served in his fleet for years.” I frowned at the bearded stallion. “I always thought highly of him. I think you’d do well to show him the respect that his rank commands.”

He grunted in disapproval. “A naval officer leading ground troops around by the snout. That’s your problem right there.”

“Well, yeah. The Army had to be wherever the orbital strikes weren’t. It was a good thing we coordinated with our eyes in the sky, Bell.”

“During the war, I knew a few fellow agents from other branches who lost their lives due to collateral damage from strikes that he ordered because he panicked and couldn't trust the ground teams to do their jobs. Just between you and me, he was a nutcase back then and he’s a burnout now.”

“The pot’s calling the kettle black,” I said. “That rescue attempt on the station? You guys fucking blew it. Most of the boarding party was lost and you only managed to rescue two soldiers. Me and one other guy. The rest? Spaced, as far as I know. Heck, there could still be survivors up there, and those freaks might be executing them as we speak. Or worse.”

“Oh, we know,” Bellwether said. “That wasn’t our cell, though. That was Commodore Cake’s. Crusher’s little protégé. They did a consultation with us, but completely ignored our recommendations. We told ‘em it was too early. They hadn’t put together an elite enough crew to attempt that op, and the patrol boat we stole for them wouldn’t hold more than a few hundred personnel crammed in there like sardines.”

“Well, that was obviously never going to work.” I rolled my eyes.

“They probably expected to commandeer additional transports when they got there, but without the proper intel, they had no way to know if there would be any transports present in the station's docks at the planned time of the attack, during a security hole in the regular patrols. They went through with it anyway, and boy, we were fortunate to get away with what we did. A Charger pilot and a cleomanni AI. Speaking of which, why hasn’t that AI core turned up yet? Can’t wait to skullfuck that thing.” Bellwether reared up and did a hip-thrusting motion that was as awkward as it was disturbing to watch.

“I don’t know.” I frowned. “The Percheron mercs must have galloped off with it. It wasn’t with me in the wreckage from the ship. Last I saw Lieutenant Band and Commodore Cake, they were sucked out of a breach in the hull. They could be anywhere by now. The mercs ran off and left me for dead. I tried making my way out of the desert when those Confederate bastards started following the signal from my tracking chip. I made a break for it, but my jury-rigged leg brace gave up the ghost and a rattler bit me right on my ass. That’s when you showed up.”

Bellwether stood still as a statue, blinking his eyes, his jaw slightly agape. “Wow. What a shitshow.”

“Tell me about it,” I said. “How many Chargers do we have? For that matter, how many Dragoons?”

“Three in this resistance cell,” Bellwether said. “Two Rounceys and a Destrier. Well, one Rouncey that’s been cannibalized for parts to keep the other one running, and a Destrier. So, two active Chargers. Before you ask, yes, they’re already taken. We can’t use ‘em often because they attract too much attention. We’ve been in need of a Courser and a recon pilot for a while, now.”

“And the Dragoons?”

“What about them, Sergeant?”

“How many are still kicking?”

Bellwether huffed. “We have nine Dragoons in the rebellion, for what little good that does us. I asked Layer if she knew of any other pegasus Dragoon survivors, and she completely stonewalled me. I think she’s hiding something.”

“Dame Cake has a pretty good head on her shoulders,” Crookneck said, using the honorific for a knightess. “She usually doesn’t tolerate failures of this magnitude. They must be getting desperate over on her end.”

“It’s Crusher,” Bellwether grunted. “I’m telling you, he’s the one who put her crew up to this. Assaulting Ahriman Station with one fucking patrol boat. Geez.”

“Enough of this bickering nonsense,” I said. “Let’s go get my Charger. Not tomorrow. Not the week after. Now.”

“But your leg,” Crookneck said, looking increasingly worried. “Will you be okay?”

“I’m fine.”

“No, Sergeant, you’re not,” Bellwether said. “You’ve got a nasty fracture. If you put too much strain on it, you’re gonna put yourself out of commission for months.”

“I said I’m fine!” I glared at him.

“Your funeral, kid.” Bellwether clapped his hooves together, waving over the Runner’s crew. “Alright, let’s go! Get your asses in gear, come on!”

A dozen unicorn and pegasus technicians threw on their saddlebag toolboxes and bandoliers filled with wrenches, pliers and screwdrivers before boarding the back of the massive truck’s equally sizable crew cab. A few of them chose to ride outside on the flatbed. Me, Bellwether and Crookneck piled into the front of the cab. Bellwether took the driver’s seat while Crookneck sat in the passenger seat. I got the middle of the bench, struggling with a tangled-up lap belt that took a few tugs and a few curses under my breath to straighten it out before I could secure it around my waist.

“Just so you understand,” Bellwether began, “you don’t really have any fucking say in this, Storm. The only reason why we’re doing this now is because this might be our last chance. Confederate patrols near the salvage site have been getting heavier, lately, and they could be tracking our movements. For all we know, that hulk of yours in the swamp might be carted off or scuttled tomorrow. If we had any other options, you would be in bed and healing up right now. Do I make myself clear?”

I sighed. “Perfectly, sir.”

I wasn’t sure why I’d used the honorific; he was a spy, not a soldier. I figured it was because he spoke with sufficient authority to trigger my knee-jerk boot-licking reflex. I wasn’t sure if I liked that. Bellwether nodded silently and turned the ignition key to activate the vehicle’s electrical system. The instrument cluster lit up and a menagerie of green, yellow and red diodes in the truck’s dashboard flickered to life. He deftly flicked a few toggle switches with the tips of his hooves, and I could hear the truck’s auxiliary power unit come online in response. He pushed the ignition button and the starter motor began spinning up the three thousand horsepower gas turbine. The synfuel-powered turbine’s soft hiss rapidly turned to a high-RPM howl.

The alternator’s bus synchronized at sixty cycles automatically, ready to take up the load from the electric motors that drove each of the sixty-ton truck’s twenty-four massive wheels. The lights in the dash winked green. The Bull Runner was ready to move. Bellwether pushed the throttle cluster forward, steering the vehicle by slewing the hoof-cups mounted on the control yoke. We rolled through the hangar in the giant truck at a leisurely pace. The rest of the Charger technicians and crew who stayed behind were waving and cheering as we went on by. As we passed through the hangar doors, they slowly sealed shut behind us.

“Ever ridden in a Bull Runner before, Storm?” Crookneck said.

“Are you kidding? Plenty of times. If a Charger breaks down or is disabled by landmines, drones or enemy weapons fire, the pilot’s gonna need a way to get back to base. Very often, that meant hitching a ride on the recovery vehicle, if air transport could not be secured.”

“How did that go?”

“Badly. Bull Runners are deathtraps. Barely any armor on these things, slow as fuck, and, of course, the coal or algae-based synfuel that most of our vehicles run on is pretty much ordinary petrol by composition and therefore incredibly flammable. You know, if enemy armor or air support so much as farts in our direction on the way over there, we’re pony barbecue.”

“My thoughts exactly.” The old stallion nodded.

“I mean, look at this,” I said, waving a hoof at the rock walls of the gorge as they drifted by at a brisk forty kilometers an hour. “I can get out and run faster than this.”

“A Charger ain’t much faster,” Bellwether said.

“You’re thinking of Rounceys and Destriers,” I said. “My Mirage could do a hundred. Three hundred kilometers an hour with the boosters on.”

“Oh yeah? Well, right now, it’s doing zero, and it’s going to keep doing zero until we can pull it from that swamp.”

The giant vehicle lumbered out of the dry riverbed and into the dusty remnants of what was once a meadow, rounding the edge of the Everfree Forest. Or what used to be a forest, anyway. The few trees I could see were shriveled, dead things. In the perpetual twilight of the terminator, there wasn’t enough sunlight to sustain plant life. We drove off the dirt road and onto a highway eerily devoid of traffic. I gazed out the window at the faraway ruins of Everfree City.

It was the first time I’d seen the capital since the end of the war. The sprawling metropolis once covered the entire valley. Now, most of its towers were rubble. There were deep craters from kinetic bombardment that covered multiple city blocks, each filled with glistening shards of metal and concrete slag. The eastern half of the city was bathed in a perpetual dim morning light, while the western half resided in darkness. The pinnacle of one skyscraper, nearly twice as high as all the rest, reflected a ray of sunlight, shining across the valley like a beacon. The Twilight Tower.

Bellwether grumbled as he took a detour off-road into a bumpy field of dirt and dead grass. I soon saw why. The cloverleaf ahead of us at the city’s outskirts was packed with abandoned, rusting cars. When we passed by the scorched steel husks with their blown-out windows and body panels riddled with fragments and bullet holes, I shook with anger as I saw the pony skeletons inside them. Adults in the front seat, foals in the back. None were spared the terrible destruction that was visited upon our species. Youthful vigor was no shield against the armaments traditionally used in interstellar warfare. Once we were past Everfree City, we got back on the road and continued our journey at the previous pace. A half-hour passed. The sky darkened and the air grew colder. Bellwether switched the truck’s fog lamps on to pierce the veil of dusk. He also turned the heater on, so we wouldn’t freeze our flanks off.

“How far west are we?” I said.

“Getting closer to the coast,” Crookneck said.

“The commandeered patrol boat came down way out in the Northeast, west of Manehattan.” Bellwether didn’t take his eyes off the highway. “Everything out in that direction is a sunbaked desert, now. Well, actually, it’s more like a steppe environment. Arid, but with good soil.”

I looked out the window at the abandoned malls, fast food restaurants, barber shops and synfuel stations. There wasn’t a lit neon sign or fluorescent light in sight. No artificial light at all, aside from an occasional oil lamp hanging in a window, indicating perhaps that squatters had taken refuge there. All was still and quiet, save for the screech of the Bull Runner’s turbine and the rumble of its tires. A few ponies along the sidewalk huddled around a fire in a 55-gallon drum for warmth, craning their necks at us as we passed them by. I gritted my teeth at the jarring impact of the Runner’s bull bars knocking a wrecked vehicle aside without so much as slowing down.

“How many of us are left?” I said. “Not the Resistance, I mean us. Ponies.”

“Do I look like I’ve taken a census, lately?” Bellwether sneered. “I don’t know. Probably some hundreds of thousands. Could be a few million at the most.”

My ears drooped and I shuddered. Equestria was once home to billions of ponies. There was no coming back from a defeat like this. Even if we did somehow manage to retaliate against the Confederacy, there were next to no ponies left to rescue from their relentless onslaught. We were fighting with weapons that we no longer had the equipment to manufacture on a large scale. Nothing but salvage and scraps. Our defeat had set us back over a thousand years.

// … end transmission …

Record 04//Recovery

//HOL CRY SWT
//CHECKSUM READ
//CHECKSUM GOOD

// … decoding …

// … error - unexpected drive unmount …

// … please reinsert media to continue …

// … resuming operation …

Desert Storm

The next two hours of our journey were spent in silence, save for the muffled chatter between the technicians in the rear of the cab, which I could barely hear due to the soundproofed partition between us. I practiced with my levitation magic on a mug of cold, stale coffee that someone had left in the cup holder, until I was satisfied that I’d no longer be dropping things. I wasn’t going to take a month to recover my levitation magic. Not if I could help it. Suddenly, Bellwether brought the Bull Runner to a halt.

“What is it?” I said, peering over the dash.

The agent’s steely gaze was fixed on a roadblock a hundred yards ahead of us. There was a makeshift gate across the highway made from corrugated siding and a guard tower with a machine gun. A unicorn levitated a cleomanni rifle. A few of them wore salvaged beamcasters, but most bore fairly crude weaponry of the gardening tool variety. They were all clothed in heavy parkas and armor made from cut-up and taped-together bulletproof vests. As the lead unicorn waved them forward, a gaggle of ponies and griffons started advancing on us. About six more ponies emerged from the drainage ditches along the highway, much closer than the others.

“Well, that’s not good,” Crookneck said.

“Contact, twelve o’clock!” Bellwether yelled. “Everyone, down!”

Bellwether flicked the switch that lowered the ballistic shield over the windscreen and pulled hard on the throttle lever, putting the Bull Runner in reverse. The drive motors emitted a high-pitched whine as they were loaded to the limit. I ducked below the dashboard. I could hear the guard tower’s machine gun opening fire and the sound of bullets pinging off the vehicle’s exterior.

“Who’s attacking us?” I said.

“Vandals,” Bellwether said.

I frowned. “They’re ponies. Why the hell are they shooting at us?”

“Hunger does strange things to a pony’s mind,” Crookneck yelled over the din of gunfire.

“What, are they gonna pawn off everything we have for a few sacks of potatoes?”

“Actually, they’ve been known to settle for just eating travelers instead,” Bellwether said. “Especially the griffons.”

“You mean they’re cannibals?” I said.

“Well that’s just it,” Bellwether said. “Out here? With these freaks? You never know what they want from you. Nothing good. It’s never anything good.”

After we’d reversed a few hundred yards, Bellwether pushed the throttle forward and turned the yoke hard left, taking us off the highway and into a forest of tall, dead conifers. We made it a few hundred meters in, but after we’d traveled about a kilometer from the roadblock, the path narrowed until we were surrounded by trees on all sides. Dead end.

“Well, genius, looks like your special agent training really paid off this time,” I said.

Bellwether flashed me an evil glare which melted into a worried look as a pair of dull thuds sounded through the roof of the cab. I could hear the shrill voice of a griffon above us.

“Shut off the engine and get out, before I toss a thermite grenade in the bed of your penis-compensating truck and call it a day!”

As Bellwether turned the key in the dashboard and the turbine slowly spooled down, he motioned his head in my direction, as if giving me a signal to act. I nodded, knowing exactly what I needed to do. As he opened the door, I closed my eyes and focused, thinking back to the Magister’s words during my training. Become as a grain of sand in a vast desert. As the invisibility spell coalesced around me, I was plunged into a lightless void.

All wavelengths of non-ionizing electromagnetic radiation, from radio all the way up to ultraviolet, were redirected around me, leaving me completely transparent to radar, thermals, and the naked eye. I used my levitation magic to feel the environment around me, probing for obstacles in every direction, using my magic like a plethora of walking sticks. I was still a little rusty, after spending years with a suppression ring on my horn. I had barely half the spatial resolution I was used to.

I could hear the griffons drag Bellwether and Crookneck from their seats. As they left the cab, I went with them in lockstep while remaining invisible, slowly hobbling out the driver side door before they could shut it behind their captives. Another one, perhaps one of the ponies who’d attacked us, opened one of the rear doors to the cab.

“No one in back,” she said.

“Keep looking,” one of the griffons grumbled.

Quietly as possible, without disturbing the dead foliage too much, I walked around behind the griffons, tracking their position by their breathing, being careful not to poke them too hard with my levitation magic and spook them. I knelt in the dead grass and concentrated.

“What do you want from us?” Crookneck said.

“Me and my companions haven’t eaten in three days,” an unfamiliar female voice said. “We thought we might like to borrow your truck. Find some new hunting grounds. Right, boys and girls?”

I probed around until I found the one who’d spoken last. I felt around with a few light taps of my magic around her cranial area, and yes, there was a horn. The unicorn in charge. The one I saw on the wall brandishing the Confederate flechette gun. The rest of them had arrived as well, their beamcasters humming and at the ready. They were pretty fleet-footed for starving ponies.

“You can’t just walk away with our Bull Runner,” Crookneck said. “It’s a vital component of the Resistance’s activities in this region.”

“You’re with the Equestrian Liberation Front?” The unicorn’s voice took on a darker tone.

“Who else do you think would be driving around in one of these things in a Confederate-controlled airspace?” Crookneck said. “You think I do this for my health?”

“Hah, and people think we’re crazy.” The unicorn’s words were tinged with bile. “You fucking morons are going to get us all killed. There are so few of us left. What do you suppose the point is in fighting anymore? It’s over. The Empire is done. Through. Look at us. Look at me! I used to be an actress on Bridleway. My family and I lived in a mansion. Now, I hold ponies at gunpoint for canned fruit, just to stay alive!”

She’d made one fatal mistake, which was that nobody present here gave one solitary fuck about her sob story. Least of all me. While keeping invisible, I felt around on one of the griffon’s waists, finding a holster with a pistol inside. I slowly drew out the weapon with my levitation magic without arousing any suspicion, before ensconcing it in a magic field to render it invisible. The griffon had her rifle trained on Bellwether and Crookneck, so she wasn’t paying very close attention.

“We only have emergency rations,” Crookneck said. “We weren’t planning on being out here long.”

“Well, that’s too bad for you,” the unicorn said. “Because my griffon friends here need something a little more substantial than canned goods. What do you think, Gertrude?”

“These two look too old and sinewy. I like ‘em young and supple.”

I hovered the invisible gun along the ground and swept it up and behind the unicorn’s head, feeling out the orientation of the muzzle. I estimated the position and orientation of the unicorn’s flechette gun. She was standing a few yards behind the griffon I’d stolen the pistol from, with her gun pointing in the same general direction. Perfect.

“You’re too damned picky,” the unicorn said. “Just stew ‘em for several hours on low heat until they’re nice and tender.”

I pulled the trigger, splattering the unicorn’s brains with a deafening report while simultaneously pulling the pin on the thermite grenade the griffon had on her bandolier. I failed to properly anticipate the recoil, and the pistol flew out of my magical grip. I had prepared for this possibility. As the unicorn’s flechette gun fell when her magic vanished forever, I caught it with my levitation, turned the muzzle towards the griffon, and released a short burst of fire. It was surprisingly difficult to keep the magnum-caliber automatic weapon under control, but I maintained my grip on it because of its larger surface area relative to a sidearm. I also turned the weapon invisible, so its position could no longer be tracked by the enemy.

The griffon dropped low to the ground, the flechettes having missed her by a hair. Then, a few seconds later, the thermite grenade went off, starting her parka on fire. I could hear her screams as she writhed on the ground in agony. I silenced her with another burst from the flechette gun. Immediately afterward, a number of things happened simultaneously. Though I could not see, I could hear—and, with my magic, feel—Bellwether draw his combat knife with his mouth and go about the messy business of gutting the other griffon like a fish, delivering a series of deadly thrusts to her neck even as he bludgeoned her with his sharpened horseshoes. I hadn’t noticed those, before.

The technicians, who had been hiding inside the Bull Runner, popped up out of cover and over the edge of the truck’s flatbed, their beamcasters spewing hot death. I felt out the rest of the assailants with my magic, some of whom were just arriving. It was time to go loud. I used a modified levitation spell to release bursts of kinetic energy into the air at strategic locations, producing a series of loud clicking noises that radiated omni-directionally, and then used another spell to read the resulting reflected sound waves. Active echolocation magic. Definitely not something they taught ponies in basic.

There were approximately eight ponies, too paralyzed from the shock of being waylaid by an invisible attacker to even react properly. I swept the flechette gun across them, raking their position with full-auto suppressing fire, even as the technicians provided accurate fire from the relative safety of the Bull Runner’s lightly armored hull. The vandals realized their mistake and ran for the cover of the trees, but it was too late. The firefight was over in under half a minute. I released the invisibility spell and stood. The area beside the giant twelve-axle truck was littered with corpses, or soon-to-be-corpses.

“Good work, Sergeant,” Bellwether said. “It’s a good thing they didn’t think to look in the passageway between the bed and the crew cab. That’s where we keep our beamcasters for shit like this.”

“Oh, they did think to look,” one of the Charger mechanics said. “We took her out nice and quiet, though.”

I inspected the cleomanni weapon, going over what I knew from my equipment recognition classes. It was a projectile weapon, not too unlike what the griffons used. The weapon was hefty by any standard. The muzzle was fitted with a compensator, to direct combustion gases upward and negate some of the muzzle flip. The barrel was fluted. The heat shield and parts of the lower receiver made extensive use of composites and plastics dyed Confederate blue, but the upper receiver was CNC-machined and ceramic-coated steel. To withstand the chamber pressures of the powerful 10x70mm cartridge, it had to be.

The weapon was also fitted with a ballistic computer with grid-finder functionality. Not only was it forgiving to the untrained marksman, it could even paint targets for airstrikes and artillery. A soldier armed with this weapon had no need to mark targets with smoke. All they had to do was point it at the enemy and press a button, and indirect fire assets would do the rest. Compared to a cheap griffon-made rifle, it was extravagant, to the point where it probably cost twenty times as much to manufacture.

Belt-fed machine guns and automatic cannons were common in Imperial Army service, but only as crew-served or mounted weapons. For personal weaponry, beamcasters were preferred by ponies and used more widely than anything else. I depressed a button on the side of the lower receiver and pulled the magazine free. Empty. These weapons needed to be reloaded often, unlike beamcasters, which had a fusion power pack and electro-magical transducers that were good for thousands of cycles before they needed to be serviced.

I walked over to where the unicorn mare lay, gasping, flailing, choking on her own blood. I recognized her face. Sleetmane. By Celestia, I’d watched this mare singing in front of a crowd of hundreds in Manehattan, once. Even now, having sunk so low as to become a bandit, she still took the time to do her makeup, something I hadn’t done in years. She wasn’t so pretty anymore, though. The full metal jacket military ball round from the griffon’s pistol had entered the top of her head and exited through her cheek on the opposite side. Her eyes were looking in two different directions. A good portion of her brain’s left hemisphere had probably been turned to mush. I levitated a magazine out of one of the pouches she wore, loaded the flechette gun, charged it and put one right between her eyes.

At point-blank range, the effect of the flechette’s sintered metal body undergoing fragmentation was devastating. I reflexively blinked as my face was splattered with gore. When I opened my eyes, I could plainly see that her head was splayed open like an overripe melon that recently had a hot date with a power hammer. Not what I was expecting, but it would do. The Charger technicians watched with horrified expressions on their faces as I methodically walked up to each of the wounded vandals and double-tapped them. One earth pony stallion protested as I descended upon him.

“Wait, it’s just my leg! Don’t kill me!”

Oh, but I did. Then, I shot the mare lying next to him. I savored her screams as I took my time with her, working my way up from her abdomen, to her chest, before finally putting one in her brains. I was laughing. Trembling and laughing. Better that she die at my hooves than be taken alive by the Confederacy. Worthless cannibal scum.

Bellwether put a leg over my shoulder. “That’s enough, Storm. What’s gotten into you?”

A few more chuckles escaped my throat as I let the weapon clatter to the ground, falling on my haunches. Their blood was splattered all over my muzzle. I looked like a feral hound, fresh from the kill. Crookneck walked up and offered me a kerchief, which I promptly used to clean my face off before the blood had a chance to stick to my coat.

“You heard them,” I said. “What they were going to do to us. We can’t let them live. They’re like a festering wound. The longer you let it go, the blacker the limb turns until it’s gangrenous. That’s when you amputate.”

“When I exert lethal force, it’s to neutralize a threat, not toy with the lives of others.” Bellwether flicked open his chromed Hippo lighter, lit a cigar and took a puff, shaking his head in disgust.

He tossed me the lighter and I snatched it out of midair with my levitation magic, turning it over to inspect the unusual hexagram logo on it. It was BASKAF-issue, that much was certain. I was somewhat surprised that they’d allow their agents to carry objects with identifying marks on them, but I figured that any pony caught deep behind enemy lines by the cleomanni would be an assumed spy anyway, so it didn’t make much of a difference.

“Take a good, long look at yourself,” he said. “Decide if that’s the pony you want to be.”

I scowled at him for a moment, but then brought the lighter close and stared at my blurry reflection in its mirror finish, at the evil glimmer in my eyes. I was still trembling from the adrenaline rush. When did I become like this? I couldn’t remember. There was so much that was lost in the haze of the war. So many friendships that soured. So much time I’d wasted wallowing in procrastination and pain. We were an embittered, hopeless people. The cleomanni had made sure of that.

I had passions, once. I wanted to travel the farthest reaches of Equestria, but I never had enough money. I wanted to live a quiet life, far away from the war, but nowhere in the galaxy was safe. My desires had given way to feelings of utter futility, until every waking moment felt like it would be better spent banging my head against the wall of my apartment in a drunken fit. When staring into the void that was my future became an unbearable exercise, when my life felt empty and purposeless, I’d signed up for another tour of duty, and just like that, I gained a purpose again. I had a reason to live, once more.

We all lost something. We all lost a piece of ourselves. What did I lose? Why couldn’t I remember? Oh, there was that one thing.

“Barleywine,” I muttered.

“All we’ve got is cider,” Bellwether said. “If you’re lookin’ to drown your sorrows, that is.”

“My fiancé. Barleywine. He was in the capital, three years ago.”

“Well, then. Sounds to me like you’re out of luck, killer.”

My gaze fell to my hooves. “That’s what I figured.”

I took the VB-10 Flechette Gun, turned the fire selector to safe and set it across my withers, pulling the sling tight. It sagged uncomfortably, being made for a biped to operate. I also levitated the spare magazines and stuffed them into my saddlebags. I paused and pulled one of the cartridges out. They were caseless telescoped rounds, with the nose of the subcaliber flechette dart held in the mouth of the cartridge by a plastic sabot. Very light cartridges for their size and power.

The magazines held only twenty rounds each, so the weight of the magazines was more of a problem than the weight of the cartridges themselves. That aspect of the standard cleomanni infantry weapon always puzzled me. A higher-capacity mag would’ve made more sense than simply carrying more mags. I put the cartridge back in the magazine and placed it in my saddlebag as well. After we had finished looting our assailants for anything of value, we climbed back into the Bull Runner’s cab and continued our journey.

The rest of the trip was uneventful. Not a word was shared between us, and there was nothing to do for hours but gaze out at thousands of acres of empty farmland as we passed one abandoned town after another. I closed my eyes. I could hear the whine of the turbine. Feel every bump in the road. For a moment in time, I felt as though I had become one with the machine. It made me yearn for the opportunity to pilot a Charger once more. An opportunity that was fast approaching.

We stopped. When I opened my eyes, we were at the edge of the bog. I opened an access hatch leading into the rear of the Bull Runner’s cab, where the technicians were huddled, formulating a plan of action. They looked up at me as one, doing that annoying meerkat-like group stare that I’d grown accustomed to receiving from ponies.

“Oh, great,” one blue pegasus stallion with a cutie mark of diagonal pliers said. “Look who decided to join us.”

“Cut the patronizing bullshit,” I said. “Are you gonna stand around all day playing with your dicks, or are you gonna get my Charger loaded onto this thing so we can get the fuck out of this swamp and get back to base in time for dinner? Would you prefer to tear open and rehydrate those packs of dried textured vegetable protein we brought? Mmm, soy. Soy with a side of soy. Soy, lentils, soy, apple-shaped tofu-substitute, and soy-shaped soy drizzled with soy sauce. I dunno about you guys, but I’m no doomsday prepper. I like my fruits and vegetables fresh.”

That got them moving. We all piled out into the small passageway connecting the rear cab to the truck’s enormous bed. There were hazmat suits, beamcasters and toolboxes arrayed on racks in the cramped space. I briefly considered arming myself with one of the beamcasters, but relented, deciding that the gun slung over my shoulder would be enough for now. Didn’t want to look too greedy. Besides, all I really needed was my Charger. My stitched-up legs ached from my encounter with the Karkadann. I winced. Every so often, I’d move my limbs wrong and the pain would nearly take my breath away.

We exited the passageway and stepped out onto the bed itself. It was difficult to articulate just how large the truck’s bed was. A couple main battle tanks could have sat end-to-end atop it. We had already backed into position at the edge of the mire. I motioned towards the head of my Charger, sticking up from the swamp.

“You see that?” I said. “That there is the machine that got me through my last tour, before everything went to hell. Dozens of successful high-risk ops. Hundreds of confirmed kills against enemy armor and aircraft, and Celestia knows how many infantry. You’ll treat her with the utmost of respect. Is this understood?”

They nodded in unison.

“Now, mister, uhh—” I trailed off, pointing a hoof at the blue pegasus stallion.

“Wind Shear,” he said.

“Right. Wind Shear, can you get me up on the head of the Charger?”

“No problem, Sergeant, ehh, what was it again?”

“Storm. Desert Storm.”

Wind Shear snickered. “Sounds like a pegasus’s name.”

“My father was a pegasus. I’m the youngest of three sisters, fairly close together in age. All unicorns. Mom’s genes were just too strong. She always used to tell me that dad wanted a pegasus, and a son, to boot, but that he gave up after round three. Oh, and before you ask, as far as I know, they’re all fucking dead, except me, and I don’t plan on living forever, so let’s get going.”

“Tragic,” Wind Shear muttered. “Hop on my back, I’ll wing you over there.”

My foreleg was too injured for me to be lifted by my legs, so I straddled his back, being careful not to obstruct his wings too much. He experimentally flapped his wings, finding that they brushed up against my saddlebags.

“Uhh, no,” he said. “Those have got to go. It’s too much weight, and not enough clearance for my wings.”

I grumbled under my breath as I unlatched the saddlebags and unslung my VB-10 and set them aside. And then, I was airborne. I hugged Wind Shear close as the blood rushed to my head, finding the sensation more than a little disconcerting. It’d been a long damn time since I’d ridden on a pegasus’s back. I was a little filly, and it was with my dad. Before I knew it, we were perched atop the Charger’s head.

“Thanks,” I said, before dismounting his back. “Nice taxi service.”

“Don’t get used to it,” he laughed.

I fumbled around in the darkness a bit, before using a spell to create a magical flare that hovered with me as I traversed the uneven surface of the Charger’s head. I brushed my hoof against the composite plating of the radome above the main sensor cluster and inspected the feed mechanisms for the twin autocannons. The lightweight fiber-reinforced armor over the cannons was cracked and frayed in places. There was no repairing that. Once composites were cracked out, that was it. You couldn’t cut out the damaged section and weld in a new one like you could with sheet steel. The whole shroud would have to be replaced or patched over somehow.

“I’m sorry, DD,” I whispered.

I wove my way around to the back of the machine’s head, perilously close to the muck, and quickly found what I was looking for. An emergency escape hatch. Since the main cockpit entry hatch on the Charger’s back was buried in the mud, this was my only way inside. I placed my hoof on a circular depression in the center of the hatch and turned. A red light winked on next to it in response.

“Sergeant Desert Storm, security code zero-one-nine-six-eight-four-two-five-seven-five,” I said. “Open the sarcophagus.”

“Voice print analysis, confirmed,” the speaker next to the door crackled to life. “Security code, confirmed. Passphrase, confirmed. Thaumatic signature, confirmed. Welcome—back—serge—” The speaker popped and crackled its last.

Great. Another thing that needed fixing. After a few seconds, the light turned green and the hatch’s locking mechanisms clicked open, allowing me to swing it out of the way with the help of the heavy-duty gas struts mounted to it. I recalled my training, and how I was never particularly fond of the emergency ingress and egress part. I squeezed my hindquarters into the exceedingly claustrophobic space beyond the escape hatch. The opening was just barely wide enough for a pony to fit through it by crawling. It didn’t help that I was descending vertically through the passage due to the Charger’s orientation in the bog. As I moved down the ladder and into the pitch-black space beyond, my hind hooves touched water.

“Fuck, it’s flooded!”

I crawled back out. Wind Shear hovered above the hatch, looking at me expectantly.

“Bring a pump over here. Cockpit’s full of water.”

“That’s what I was afraid of,” he said, before darting back over to the Bull Runner to retrieve the tools we needed.

In the blink of an eye, a couple of pegasus technicians were lowering a gas-powered portable air compressor onto the Charger’s head. As the compressor rattled away and built up pressure in the reservoir, Wind Shear hooked up a small diaphragm pump and hoofed over the hose leading to its suction side. I picked up the end of the hose with my levitation magic and fed it down the escape hatch and into my Charger’s waterlogged cockpit.

I nodded to the blue pegasus, and, in response, he opened the valve to supply the pump with air. The small diaphragm pump sputtered and chugged away, pulling water out of the cockpit and discharging it over the side and into the bog. Most Chargers weren’t exactly submersible, but they were sealed up pretty well. I was betting that the rate of leakage was so minuscule that it took three years just to fill the cockpit up completely. There had to be a pinhole somewhere. That was bad. Charger cockpits were supposed to be resistant to nuclear, biological, and chemical threats.

Now, all we had to do was wait. And wait. And wait some more. As minutes turned to hours, I periodically fed the hose deeper into the cockpit, just to be sure that I was getting every last drop. I heard more than a few bored or exasperated sighs, both from myself and the technicians. Two and a half hours later, the pump stopped discharging water. Wind Shear secured the pump and disconnected the air line. I descended into the Charger once more. I crawled into the cockpit through a small recess at the front of the compartment.

As I lit up the cockpit’s interior with my magic, I found it acceptably dry, aside from a couple muddy puddles here and there. Arrayed in a semi-circle to the front and sides of the pilot’s command saddle were a plethora of toggle switches, display panels, pushbuttons, sticks, levers and gauges. It was easy for even a layperson to see why only unicorns were qualified to operate these demanding vehicles. I mounted the Charger’s cushioned, motorcycle-like seat, placing my hooves in the stirrups.

I wasn’t wearing a Syncsuit, so this was going to be a royal pain in the flank. I’d have to do everything manually. I went over my mental checklist. First, I reached out with my levitation magic to the cluster of controls associated with power generation and propulsion, and turned on and keyed in the auxiliary power systems; I was surprised that the backup batteries had lasted long enough to gain me access to the electronically-secured emergency hatch. A bunch of lights in the cockpit flickered on, some fading out and dying, probably shorted out by moisture. It was the best I could do under the circumstances. Almost as soon as the power came on, red lettering flashed over a monochrome display; WARNING: SAFETY INTERLOCK FAILURE A3-D7.

My eyes widened as I recalled that Systems A3 through D7 included the cannons. “Oh no, no, no!”

A series of rapid thumps reverberated through the cockpit as the autocannons on the Charger’s head fired uncontrollably, without any input from me whatsoever. The fire control system had suffered critical damage, either from the reentry and subsequent impact or from water infiltration, or both. In a panic, I used my magic to pry off the panel covering the fire control circuits and then I ripped out the bundle of wiring underneath, severing the connection between the controller board and the relays. The autocannons ceased their distinctive bassy report. I could only hope that no one was downrange when they opened fire.

“What the fuck?!” Wind Shear shouted down the hatch. “Are you trying to kill us?”

“Sorry,” I said. “FCS failure. My baby’s pretty beat up. I had to pull some wiring to get it to quit.” The electronics on newer Chargers had proprietary fireproof and waterproof sealant coatings all over the circuit boards and components to keep humid air or water intrusion from frying them, but they were not meant to be fully immersed for years on end. The coatings had obviously degraded. “In fact, I think half of the electronics in here are in highly suspect condition.”

“Oh, well, yeah.” He sounded almost disappointed. “That makes sense, I guess. We’re all hooked up on the outside, and we’ve moved the compressor and the pump back to the Bull Runner. Ready to winch ‘er in. How are things on your end? Think you can get it to move?”

I knitted my brow. “I don’t know if I can do it without fucking her up any more than she already is, but I’ll try.”

With the flick of a switch, the main wrap-around widescreen display lowered into position above the main control console. I did a diagnostic systems check. An upsettingly large number of damage zones were reading red in the main display. I booted up the Anima System.

“Hey, DD, you all there? Where is that damned succubus, anyway?”

A holotank lit up with a small whirlwind that coalesced into the impish form of a goblin-eared pony with leathery, dark-veined wings and a pair of devilish horns. The cleomanni weren’t the only ones with the benefit of artificial intelligences.

Every Charger had its own unique Anima, a self-aware and fully sapient creature that was part AI and part living spirit. It was rumored that their creation involved a dark magic ritual where a once-living being was sacrificed and their soul was captured and embedded in a magtech phylactery with a necromantic spell.

Some said that the Conclave used mortally wounded soldiers, magically preserved and transported from the front lines and into their ritual chambers, but nopony knew for certain where they got the candidates from, and few desired such knowledge. Regardless, the finished Anima had no recollection of their past life. The Charger’s AI matrix was their new brain. The machine’s hull, their new body. A Charger wasn’t just a giant fighting robot. It was a person in its own right. A mighty war golem. The very pinnacle of the magtech arts.

“You called?” DD said.

“Thanks for letting me in.”

“Not a problem, boss,” she said, her expression immediately turning to one of shock. “Whoa, shit! We’re underwater, and the system clock is reading three years since last boot-up. What the hell happened?”

“War’s over, technically,” I said, my head dipping low. “We lost. Up until very recently, I was held prisoner on a cleomanni science station in orbit.”

“Well, my partner in crime, I’m sorry to hear that.” The devilish pony shrugged. “After all, we gave ‘em hell.”

I looked up at her and smiled. “Yeah, we certainly did. But we both know this isn’t over for either of us until I’m six feet under. I was damned lucky to find you so soon, my friend. Intact, no less.”

“Uhh, ’intact’ isn’t the word I’d use to describe the condition I’m in. Actually, I’m pretty far from combat-ready.”

“How far?”

“Very far. Our readiness level is down to twenty-seven percent. Fire control system is offline. Did you do that? Huh. Active sensors are totally fried. So is cockpit climate control. About half of our cameras are out. We can only use two-thirds of the artificial muscles due to blockages in the micro-fluidic channels and damage to the power conduits. Booster pyrojets are clogged with mud, but they’ll function if we purge them. Actually, everything is clogged with mud. The self-diagnostic smart materials are indicating that there’s also some moderate corrosion and pitting around the joints and main bearings.”

I grimaced. Yep. I had found my Charger, all right. What was left of her.

“Enough, I get the picture, DD. Just one question: can we move?”

“How far?”

“Just to the Bull Runner a few hundred yards away. They’ll winch us in, but the bog is too deep for them to do it alone. They need us to supply a little of our own propulsion to get us back on dry land.”

“That’s a pretty dicey proposition.” DD tapped a hoof to her chin, clearly fretting. “Normally, I’d say don’t touch anything. Just exit the cockpit, and let the eggheads take care of the rest.”

“That bad, huh? How’s the reactor doing? Vacuum chamber still intact?”

“It’s not at atmospheric, but it’s not a perfect vacuum, either.”

“Start the pumps, then. Pump it out, and then let’s fire up the reactor.”

“Wow, you’re actually doing this.” Dust Devil shook her head.

The AI clapped her hooves together and vanished. An indicator appeared in the main display, showing the magrid, collector, electron guns and ion sources of the hundred-megawatt polywell-type fusion reactor at the Charger’s heart, as well as the capacitor banks and electro-magical transducers that provided clean power to the electrically-activated contracting polymer strips. Also, using pyrokinesis and cryokinesis-based heat exchangers, the transducers magically controlled the temperature of the fluid running through the vascularized channels that ran between the heat-activated twined nanotubes in the Charger’s muscles. Together, the electrically activated polymers and the temperature-activated nanotubes made up the artificial musculature of every Charger. Fast-reacting and slow-reacting muscles, just like a living organism.

I brought up another picture-in-picture display that showed the status of the muscles and fluid channels themselves. Not good. Several groups were almost completely out of commission. Our movement would be unstable. Worst-case scenario, a joint might collapse and sink the head of the machine into the bog, condemning me to a slow death in the muddy depths as the cockpit ran out of breathable air. It was a morbid thought.

The devil-pony’s hologram flickered into view once more. “All done. Vacuum chamber integrity is good. Just a slow leak in through the seals, is all. Should have those replaced ASAP.”

I double-checked the display, verifying that the vacuum chamber was reading less than one-ten-thousandth of a millibar. Well within acceptable bounds.

“Prepare for beam injection,” I said, alerting the Charger’s Anima to my intent.

“Aye. Circulating coolant through magrid. Prepping ion guns.”

“Mark.”

I lifted the safety cover with my magic and pressed the reactor startup pushbutton. Aside from a faint electrical buzz, the thing was eerily silent as it crept up to rated power. All was seemingly as it should be. If anything, a noisy polywell was bad news. The electron guns’ red outlines lit up green on the display, and then the magrid itself.

“How are we doing, Dust Devil?”

“Good. Electrostatic conversion rate within design parameters. We’re making full power. Purging radiator outlets now. Operating temperature is stable.”

“Prepare to take on the load,” I said.

“Got it.”

“Mark!”

I used levitation magic to depress a few more buttons to transfer the power to propulsion. I heard the thuds of closing breakers and the faint buzz of electrical transformers. The electro-magical transducers rose to a shrill, ethereal whine as power was applied to them. The diagnostic overlays disappeared, replaced by the augmented reality view from the broad-spectrum imagers in the Charger’s head. There was a great big spiderwebbing crack in the armored lens that partly obscured my field of view. I flipped the toggle that activated the public address system.

“We’re good to go! Start pulling!” my voice boomed from the loudspeakers hidden in the Charger’s armored head.

I felt a slight tug from the Bull Runner’s winches, but it wasn’t enough.

“Tires have broken loose,” Wind Shear yelled down through the hatch. “This is where we were at last time.”

“You might wanna get inside and seal the hatch,” I said.

The pegasus did as instructed, closing the hatch and crawling through the escape passage and into the cockpit. He watched intently as I went about extracting the armored behemoth.

“Get clear!” I shouted through the PA system.

I pushed the hoof-cups forward, increasing the throttle. The locomotion system hummed and groaned as the Mirage’s legs began to move, paddling through the mud and lurching forward. All of a sudden, a joint gave out with a squeal, causing the head of the machine to dip forward. Just what I was afraid of. Before the machine’s torso could sink into the bog, I used my magic to punch the booster controls. The eight pyrojets on the Charger’s shoulders and flanks let loose a thundering roar as they sucked in air, compressed it with telekinesis and heated it with pyrokinesis. With fifty-five tons of thrust at our disposal, we ascended skyward, slowly but surely. I smiled. It always felt good to fly without wings.

The boosters burnt out as we neared the top of our arc. Whether they failed or overheated, I couldn’t be certain. I felt the contents of my gut accelerate upward as we rapidly lost altitude. Wind Shear screamed like a filly and hugged my shoulders close, but I shoved him aside. I couldn’t have anyone interfering with my control over my machine. Cleaning sprayers cleared the mud from the central camera in the Charger’s head, just in time for me to see on the main viewscreen that we were descending directly towards the Bull Runner’s bed. I gasped and splayed my legs out and the Charger responded in kind, reacting just in time before the machine’s four giant metal hooves slammed into the earth, making a small quake.

My Mirage stood hunched over the Bull Runner, its legs spaced just far enough apart for the bed to sit between them. The giant truck rocked back and forth from the shock of the Mirage’s hooves merely landing near it. If we had actually landed on top of it, the Bull Runner would be so much scrap metal. The impact had wrenched my injured leg. I shrieked and moaned in excruciating pain, feeling my cast grow damp from within.

That was when a loud pop and a cloud of billowing smoke filling the cockpit signaled that one of the transformers had failed. Wind Shear yelped and coughed sharply. One by one, the electro-magical transducers in my Mirage’s legs overloaded with a rapid snapping, crackling sound much akin to a runaway fireworks display. The Charger’s legs gave out and it collapsed onto the Bull Runner’s bed with a screech of twisted metal.

“I told you, Storm,” Dust Devil spoke. “Twenty-seven percent.”

The cockpit lights, main display and holotank went out as the Charger’s systems lost power, plunging us into darkness. I used a light spell, filling the cockpit with an orange glow. To add insult to injury, an overhead multi-function display’s mount came loose and it clattered loudly to the deck with a glassy crunch, probably breaking it in the process. I buried my face in my hooves, groaning exasperatedly. An interminable day just got that much longer.

// … // … // … // … // … //

After another half-hour, we had the Mirage secured to the Bull Runner’s bed with high-tensile steel cables. It was a real pain in the ass loading the damaged Charger’s legs onto the heavy transport truck’s bed. We’d just barely managed to winch them aboard. When I resumed my station in the Bull Runner’s crew cab, I wasn’t feeling well at all.

“Uh, Bellwether?”

“Yeah? What is it, Sergeant?”

“I’m slightly messed up here.”

“What do you mean?”

“My leg. I think I tore open my stitches. I—fuck, I’m bleeding all over the place, here!”

Bellwether sighed explosively. “Keep pressure on it and keep it elevated. And try to stay conscious.”

As the minutes passed, the pain mounted. I started to shake. I fished through my saddlebags for some painkillers. I upturned the bottle into my hooves. Nothing. I was out.

“Fuck it.” I grimaced, hurling the pill bottle angrily into the hull of the Runner.

I could hear Bellwether using the radio. “This is Dark Star, come in.”

“This is Papa Wolf. Go ahead, Dark Star,” a voice came over the encrypted channels, big and bold, like the voice of a film narrator; almost as much of a cliché as the codenames they’d chosen.

“I am requesting to have our contacts at zero-six relocate to zero-four. Their assistance will be required.”

“Understood. However, there will be a review to determine placement of qualified personnel. I cannot guarantee that they will be able to stay for very long.”

“Copy that. Dark Star, out.”

“What was that about?” I said, my voice strained.

“The surgeon that patched you up and her assistant are going to pay Camp Crazy Horse a visit for a little follow-up appointment with you, and to treat some other casualties we have coming in from the front, before they’re recalled elsewhere. Anything else you wanted to know?”

“Yeah.”

“And what is that?”

“Are we there yet?”

The sky dimmed as we headed further south, my question left unanswered. The steel hull of the Bull Runner felt more and more like the walls of a coffin. I felt cold inside. Cold and tired. But there were miles of empty road left ahead of us. To stay conscious, I checked and re-checked my captured rifle obsessively. For the time being, I would simply have to mind my training and persevere as I had in the past. This wasn’t my first rodeo.

// … // … // … // … // … //

“Gear up! We drop in five!” The Commander’s voice boomed over the loudspeakers.

The Charger Bay of the Endless Summer was host to a great commotion as hundreds of ponies milled back and forth in front of kneeling metal behemoths that resembled crosses between ponies and praying mantises, each festooned with more armaments than an entire tank platoon. The titanium beasts were asleep in their hangars, secured to their platforms with high-tensile steel cable. Various test stands and pieces of diagnostic equipment were wheeled out of the way.

In his haste, one technician carelessly knocked an oxygen bottle off a cart, his partner berating him as he moved to keep it from rolling across the deck. They all went stock-still when we emerged from the blast doors at the end of the bay, decked out in our neon green syncsuits bearing the dreaded unit patch of an 8-ball pierced by a sword, the symbol of the Eighth Cavalry Division. We were each like a personification of death itself, and we commanded just as much fear and respect. We quickly donned our helmets, flicked our communications microphones into place, and fanned out to our respective Chargers, boarding them with a degree of deftness and coordination that could only come from years of experience.

I straddled Dust Devil’s command saddle, strapped down my safety harness, plugged in my syncsuit and booted up my Charger’s control computer and fusion reactor. An AI hologram of a small, demonic-looking pony greeted me with a sarcastic bow.

“Storm, ready to roll,” I spoke over comms.

Other voices came through on the radio, one after another.

“Sierra, good to go.”

“Sunnyvale, ready for drop!”

“Comet, ready for drop.”

“Barrage, ready.”

“Barricade, ready for drop! Damn, beat me, bro.”

“Capodastro, ready.”

“Lieutenant Terror, ready to kill. Just getting this locus dialed in.”

The voice of Operations came last. “Red Lance, One through Four, you are cleared for drop. Hold until we reach the target area. Gold Lance, stand by and await further instructions.”

Klaxons sounded, yellow strobe lights providing ample warning to the vessel’s crew as to what was about to happen next. The technicians quickly cleared out of the workshop as each of our Chargers’ platforms moved along rails, deeper into our respective hangars. Robot arms assembled and fitted our re-entry shields and installed the explosive bolts that held them together.

Each of the four podded Chargers in my lance were tilted ninety degrees nose-down, giant airlock doors closing behind us before the spaces our machines occupied were depressurized. The four massive external drop bay doors silently slid open in the vacuum of space, revealing the upper atmosphere and distant surface of the planet Cain IV, a guild-owned world that contributed substantially to Confederate industrial power.

“Coming up on the drop zone in ten, nine, eight, seven, six,” the drop coordinator counted down.

Magtech launch rails extended, their levitation fields building to a steady blue glow.

Sunnyvale sounded like she was practically humping her seat in anticipation. “I fucking love this part!”

“—five, four, three, two, one, drop!”

The four drop capsules were flung free of the Charger-transporter at a breakneck acceleration of over six gravities. Our capsules assumed a loose formation based on their pre-programmed autopilot data, attitude rockets making small burns to adjust our trajectory. We streaked towards the ground like meteors. Our re-entry shields began to glow red, then yellow, and then white-hot.

Our approach most likely did not go unnoticed. I would’ve bet anything that on the ground far below, a team of Confederate commandos had already picked up the white trails in the sky with their binoculars, along with the characteristic sonic boom of the capsules’ descent. Nothing about orbital insertions was subtle.

“Drogue deploy,” I said over the radio, receiving a green acknowledgment light in my heads-up display.

A small chute re-oriented my pod’s descent, before being released.

“Capsule jettison, re-entry shield jettison.”

Explosive bolts separated the walls of the capsule from the re-entry shield like five giant flower petals, revealing my Mirage A202 and its stabilizing platform with guy wires underneath. The capsule walls flew away with some violence in the whipping winds of our rapid descent, tumbling into the air before rapidly vanishing into the distance as five black specks. The nose of the capsule soon joined them, revealing the daylight beyond. Dust Devil’s computer switched from the now-absent capsule altimeter to my Charger’s own instrument cluster and navigation system.

“Platform jettison,” I said. “Altitude, twenty kilometers.”

At a pre-determined moment, the cables securing my Charger to the platform were released with explosive bolts. My Charger’s pyrojets were fired momentarily to propel it and the platform away from each other to avoid a mid-air collision. After descending in freefall for a while longer, an alert sounded in the cockpit.

“Warning: Altitude,” Dust Devil spoke. “Altitude. Altitude. I love saying that over and over again until my pilot goes crazy. Altitude.”

“Quit joking around, DD. It’s all business today.”

“Aww. Spoilsport.”

I waved a hoof to scroll the map in the picture-in-picture view in my HUD. “That park, there. Plot our descent so we come down in the middle of it.”

“Roger, roger.”

“Contact!” Lieutenant Night Terror called. “Enemy SAM sites are tracking our descent. Evasive maneuvers!”

I applied short bursts to the gimbaled thrusters in my Charger’s shoulders, slipping sideways at a few gees to avoid a missile lock. I tilted Dust Devil nose-down and poured the coals to her, increasing my rate of descent with the main boosters. Shortly after crossing three hundred meters a second, there was a sonic boom that shook my machine like a thunderclap. When I hit five hundred, it sounded like every fastener in the cockpit was trying to rattle itself loose.

“Missiles, incoming!” DD said.

“DD, arm the forty! Set fuses to gated proximity, radar range!”

I gripped the triggers in my hoof-cup controllers with a fetlock and unleashed a ten-round burst that intercepted the first surface-to-air missile, turning it into an orange bloom of fireworks. I applied another lateral thruster burst at the last moment to avoid the second missile. After streaking past me, it started to pull a one-eighty, curving down towards me to try and intercept my descent from above.

“Damn, those fuckers have good tracking, don’t they?” I muttered. “Well, so do I.”

I rolled my Charger onto its back as I continued to descend, my cannons facing skyward. My reticule locked on and turned from blue to red as I bracketed the incoming missile, the rhythmic beeping of the radar tracking resolving into a solid tone. Another ten-round burst, and the second missile was in pieces. The warhead didn’t even go off. It simply separated from the rest of the casing and aerodynamic forces rapidly disintegrated the rest. I rotated upright, and just in time, since there were only a few thousand meters left between me and the ground. My evasive maneuvers had shaved off a lot of speed, but we were still dropping fast.

There were orange flashes from the ground far below. Tracers from anti-aircraft gun fire. I applied evasive side bursts and pulled my Mirage into a high-speed roll, the autocannon rounds streaking harmlessly by. The staccato popping of airbursting shells rattled my skull, but the fragments were deflected by my Charger’s armor.

“Ten seconds until touchdown!” DD called.

I rotated the main boosters to face towards the earth and I applied maximum thrust; my rate of descent rapidly decreased, from a hundred meters a second, to fifty, and then ten. The ground came up fast. “Three, two, one, hooves down!” There was the jarring thump of four metal hooves slamming into the dirt, my Charger’s legs bending at the knees like a free runner to absorb the fierce impact. The pyrojet boosters dug furrows in the terrain, sending up great clouds of dust that helpfully obscured my position.

“Dust Devil, systems check!” I said.

“One sec,” she said. “Reactor, nominal. All actuators, nominal. Radar and detection suite performing within spec. Active protection system armed and ready. All weapon systems, nominal. Operational readiness, one hundred and three percent.”

“What’s the three percent?” I raised an eyebrow.

“Recent maintenance has increased performance slightly beyond baseline specifications.” DD’s hologram snickered, covering her mouth with a hoof. “It’s complicated, but I’ll make it simple so you can understand, boss. By my estimation, every percent above a hundred is equal to one whole blowjob you owe our techs.”

“Fuck off.” I smirked, clicking on my radio. “This is EIDOLON, checking in. DD and I are hooves-down and moving to engage. We’re going quiet, out.”

I cloaked my machine, my magic funneling through an Illusion locus that magnified its effect. My Courser’s entire 37-ton bulk turned completely see-through, with not even a shimmer to hint at its presence, save for the communication aerials I left uncovered so I could still send and receive radio signals. I launched my recon drones and fired up the magtech acoustic detection suite, pinging the tree line ahead. Point cloud data was fused with images from the satellite and drone feeds and the picture slowly resolved itself into a flickering, pointillist color image of my surroundings. I was in a mildly forested stretch of parkland bordering a large industrial zone, if the footpaths and wooden benches were any indication. There wasn’t a soul in sight. To the west stretched row after row of faceless concrete commercial buildings. Research centers, administrative facilities, and warehouses as far as the eye could see.

“DD, where are those AA guns located?”

I couldn’t launch my surface-to-surface payload if there was even the smallest chance of the enemy intercepting it mid-flight. I had to knock the Confederate AA out, and then, I had to go after the SAMs.

“My drones have detected their heat signature. Their gun barrels are still red-hot. One-point-two klicks, Northeast. They moved into the wooded area for concealment.”

“They can’t hide from me.”

I pushed the hoof-cups forward, throttling up to a steady eighty-kilometer-an-hour trot, moving into the tree line. Four titanium hooves beat against the soil like a drum. I applied the boosters, the legs of my Charger scything through trees like blades of grass. From the outside, it would have appeared as if an invisible giant troll had swung its mighty limbs in a fit of rage and paved the forest flat as it sprinted from one end of the park to the other.

I spotted the two self-propelled anti-aircraft guns’ heat signatures. Two Confederate Arbalest-model tracked AA units with 20mm rotary-barrel cannons. The vehicles were swinging their turrets around frantically, trying to get a lock on me based on where the forest had been freshly clearcut in the shape of a Charger. With plumes of hot, sooty smoke spewing from their exhausts, they started moving off, trying to move deeper into the forest to conceal themselves.

“Too late,” I laughed. “You’re mine, motherfuckers!”

I extended the twin back-mounted heavy beamcasters and put two full-charge shots downrange, right on target. Two circuit breakers slammed shut with heavy thuds. Twin columns of blinding ultraviolet lanced out into the woods with a crack of thunder. The tracked SPAAGs simply ceased to be. A little bit of roadwheel went one way, and their tracks went the other, and their turrets were blown ten meters into the air on an ascending column of fire. There were two flaming peepholes through several layers of foliage that were rapidly turning into a full-blown forest fire.

A forty-megajoule beamcaster pulse was nothing to be trifled with. Any tank struck directly with that level of firepower, even a formidable Conqueror MBT, would instantly pop its turret into the air like a jack-in-the-box. With its meager armor, an Arbalest didn’t stand a chance. There was no defense they could muster against my weaponry, save for putting either several meters of dirt or a couple city blocks between their hull and my beamcasters’ projector lenses.

“Was that it for the AA?” I said. “I could’ve sworn we were being shot at by more than two measly guns on the way down.”

“Wait one,” DD said. “Contact, nine o’clock!”

I reflexively applied the boosters as a burst of twenty-millimeter cannon fire sailed past where my Charger had stood just moments before. The Confederate Army weren’t stupid. Even if they couldn’t see me directly, they could infer my location based on a number of things, like the way my movements disrupted the foliage or created Charger-shaped holes in clouds of smoke, dust and debris, or by tracing my weapons’ fire all the way back to the point of origin.

The heavy beamcasters were still cycling. One of the disadvantages of the new-generation, lightweight, Courser-compatible models was that they had a much longer cycle time compared to the ones found on Rounceys and Destriers, to keep from overheating. My guns were about seventy percent done cycling. I just had to keep dodging and weaving. More twenty-millimeter shells ripped through the forest. They were firing randomly, now. Trying to see if they could graze me.

Twin chimes alerted me that the beamcasters had finished their cycle and were ready to fire. “Finally.”

I swung the hull around with a thruster-aided sliding stop and put a shot each into the Arbalests. They were as good as done.

“Alright, we clear?” I said.

“Not seeing anything else on the scope at the moment.” DD’s hologram tapped her chin with a hoof. “Those SAMs are located on a rise about three klicks north, but there’s nothing between us and them that should pose a threat.”

“Good, that should be an ideal spot for us to launch our own missiles from.” I was dripping with sweat, both from magical exertion and the Charger’s own waste heat radiating through the cockpit. I released the invisibility spell and set off towards the north at a hundred-kilometer-an-hour gallop. “Keep scanning for hostiles. I don’t wanna get blindsided on the way over there.”

All it took was a couple of minutes, and we were up the hillside and right on top of them. The top of the rise was several acres of leveled dirt with a good view of the horizon, currently occupied by three erector-launchers linked to a command truck and a radar array, forming a SAM complex. There were panicking missile technicians running every which way, screaming ‘reneztaffal’. Quad-demon. Charger. One desperate SAM crewman tried firing his pulse pistol at my vehicle, but it did nothing other than scorch my glacis armor black. He wasn’t even wearing body armor, just overalls. I didn’t even bother wasting any 40mm ammunition or heavy beamcaster shots. These were the softest of soft targets.

“Arm anti-infantry casters,” I said. “Stream mode.”

“Ooo, feeling diabolical, are we?” DD laughed.

I smiled. There were three different kinds of beamcaster in Equestrian military service. Pulsecasters were the most common, and they fired a needle-thin beam of arcane energy that penetrated armor and heated and carbonized tissue. Widecasters were like beamcaster shotguns and were used by close-combat specialists. Streamcasters were fundamentally different from the other two types. They did not fire arcane beams. Their diagrammatic engines were tuned to emit focused, unrelenting streams of pyrokinesis. The stream-type emitters on my Mirage’s head weren’t nearly as ferocious as those on a Fire Drake-model Rouncey, but they were good enough for this kind of work.

I pulled the triggers on my hoofcups and the SAM crewman was engulfed in a stream of plasmatic flame. He didn’t even have a chance to scream. His tissues disintegrated and his bones burned black in a fraction of a second, and what was left of him fell right where he stood. I swept the head of my Charger over the crew cabs of the vehicles, instantly cooking their occupants alive. Next, I turned their radar arrays into puddles of molten metal. And then, for the coup de grâce, I swept the streamcasters over the missiles themselves. Their fuel exploded immediately, setting off the warheads in a massive conflagration that shook the hilltop and pelted my Charger’s hull with debris. When the tinkling of raining rocks and dirt had ceased, I scanned the area. No survivors.

“All right, are we clear now, DD?” I said.

“That’s affirmative. No other enemy ground units for many tens of klicks in all directions. You’ve got hostile air incoming, though. ETA about fifteen minutes.”

“Fuck it. Now or never. You got the coords locked in, right?”

“Sahyer Industrial Park, twenty kilometers to the southwest.”

I took in a deep breath and let out a shuddering sigh. I hated this part. I really did. There would be hundreds of employees milling about. There was no telling how prepared they were, or if they got the memo that the airspace had been penetrated by Imperial Army assets and they ought to run screaming. Regardless of their state of preparedness, I was about to condemn potentially dozens or even hundreds of Confederate civilians to a choking, miserable death.

I aligned the hull of my Charger with the target area, the vertical bracket in my main display turning green. “DD, arm the surface-to-surface package.”

“Storm, your heart rate is highly elevated.” The tiny hologram looked up at me with concern from her tank. “You okay, boss?”

“It doesn’t get any easier, does it?” I rubbed my brow with a hoof. “DD, are we clear to engage?”

Dust Devil was silent for longer than usual. I found it disconcerting. Then, Lieutenant Night Terror’s voice came through on the radio. “EIDOLON, this is WIDOWMAKER. You are clear to engage. Fire when ready, and then regroup on our formation five klicks due east of your position.”

“Acknowledged. Firing.”

With my levitation, I turned a key in my Charger’s console and a magic-shielded flip-up cover exposed a red pushbutton, which I promptly depressed with my magic. One after another, the eight Mark-76 SSMs roared as they departed their tubes with a flash of light, leaving a white rocket plume behind as they ascended skyward on a ballistic trajectory.

As soon as they reached the target area, the protective covers would be blown off and the nerve gas bomblets would be flung out to blanket a wide area. Their contents would combine to form clouds of lethal OA-13 that would engulf the Sahyer Industrial Park in a shroud of death.

One of the bigwigs at Sahyer was Aressa Baltoritz, a developer of sensor equipment for Confederate contragrav drones, and one of the leading minds behind the push for new-generation thaumosensitive systems that could detect the magic aura of ponies, even through solid objects.

Our intel indicated that she and her closest associates would be present at the facility at this very moment, caught outside at the security checkpoint during shift change. For the Empire to live, they all had to die. As the Empress commands, so let it be done.

“This is EIDOLON,” I said. “Missiles are away. I’m regrouping on the rest of my lance, out.” I clicked off the comms, shaking my head. “Run, you goat-legged bastards,” I whispered to myself. “Run from what’s coming.”

With their payloads expended, the empty launch tubes automatically jettisoned from my Charger’s hindquarters, exposing the rear pair of thruster gimbals. The process shed some weight and improved my maneuverability.

I turned to the east and jetted down the hillside, picking up speed. There were four basic gaits that every Charger was capable of. In order of ascending speed, they were walking, trotting, galloping, and bounding. Anything below forty kilometers an hour was a walk. Above that was a trot. Towards their maximum cruising speed, a Charger’s gait shifted to a gallop, and beyond that, with the boosters active, the gallop became the bounding gait, the fastest of all.

In a bounding gait, a Charger’s hooves would briefly touch the ground before soaring into a leap with a two-second hangtime that crossed over a hoofball field’s length. It wasn’t so much a gallop as it was a series of jumps; an endless chain of parabolic arcs intersecting the ground. This was how Chargers overcame the limits of legged locomotion and the need to wait for gravity to accelerate a limb towards the ground. They periodically became aircraft.

I poured the boosters on, working my way up to a bounding run. I watched the digital speedometer climb to two hundred, and then three. The world outside was reduced to a blur. I crossed an abandoned street and flattened a lamppost. Even with the strength of a Charger’s artificial muscles to dampen each landing, every impact with the ground jarred my skull.

Research had been done on vertebral deterioration and chronic traumatic encephalopathy in Charger pilots, but it was inconclusive. Standard wisdom was that four years of Charger duty was the safe maximum limit for one’s health. Most pilots exceeded that, by simple necessity. The war hadn’t been kind to us.

I was shaken from my trance by the frantic voice of Dust Devil. “ATGM, incoming!”

There was a white orb on my scope trailing glowing orange rocket exhaust that couldn’t be anything other than a wire-guided missile, and it was closing in fast. Then, there was a concussive thump and a muffled hiss of rocket propellant as the APS automatically fired an active countermeasure, slapping the incoming anti-tank missile out of the air with a blinding flash and a deafening bang.

I applied full reverse boosters and came to a skidding halt, digging trenches in the mud. Snapping flechettes and streams of blue pulse rifle fire lashed out from a string of sandbagged positions a few hundred yards to my direct front, pinging and scorching my armor. One of DD’s cameras took a direct hit, cracking the lens.

“Range the target!” I shouted.

“Four hundred and thirty-two meters,” DD said.

“Lock it in.”

“Range lock.”

“Set the fuses on the forty to airburst, with a thirty-meter dispersion.”

“Affirmative,” Dust Devil said. “Arming.”

I tracked my targets patiently, elevating the guns slightly to put a burst of rounds right over their heads, before pulling the triggers with my levitation. Eight rhythmic thumps shook the Charger’s crew compartment. Eight forty-millimeter shells arced through the air like white-hot darts of death on the thermal view. Four puffs of smoke appeared over one of the positions I was taking fire from. Over a dozen cleomanni troops were killed or wounded instantly by high-velocity shrapnel. I quickly repeated the process with the others. The incoming fire petered out to nothing.

When the smoke cleared, I noticed that the enemy troops had been guarding an obelisk of some sort.

“What’s that?” I said.

“I don’t know,” Dust Devil said. “You’re going to have to get closer for me to get a better reading.”

I opened up the throttle and cantered over to the object in the clearing. I had my Charger kneel and exited through the lower hatch, armor plates unfurling to allow my passage. My hooves hit the dirt and I rolled upright, taking a few tentative steps towards what lie in the center of the clearing. There were no bodies. Not a trace of violence. Instead, there was a three-meter-tall monument of black marble with an embossed metal plaque of some sort.

The text was in multiple languages. Ardun, Linnaltan, Xicc’en, Nemrin, even that ugly Damarkind scrawl, but not Equestrian. Never Equestrian. If I stared hard enough at the foreign letters, they seemed to rearrange themselves into something I could understand. I read it aloud.

“In memory of the one million souls who perished in the terrorist bombing of—”

The rest was illegible, but I could see my surroundings more clearly, now. What I thought were strangely shaped rock formations were actually the bones of impossibly old skyscrapers, crumbled almost to dust and covered with overgrowth.

“Uh, Sergeant?” Dust Devil spoke over my syncsuit’s communicator. “We should get going. We’ve got contacts. Lots of them.”

In the depths of the ruins, glowing orange eyes flickered open. Thousands of them, all focused upon me with clear malicious intent. I turned back to the monument, and it was gone. In its place was a snarling Karkadann. I recoiled in abject terror. They looked so much worse in the light of day, like something that ordinarily dwelled in the deepest oceans. The skin between the gaps of their armor was dark and leathery and ridden with surgical scars. It was as if the head of an anglerfish or some dread lizard had been sewn onto the body of a pony. The beast was a blur of chrome as it coiled and pounced, letting out an unearthly screech while tilting its head to latch its jaws around my throat.

I gasped awake. I was in the Bull Runner’s cockpit. I hissed. The pain from my injured leg had returned with a vengeance.

“You okay there, Storm?” Bellwether looked me up and down. “You were talking in your sleep.”

“I dunno,” I said. “I feel like shit. Damn.”

“Well, just keep it together. We’re almost there.”

I frowned as I tried recalling details from my dream. It was all a jumble of half-remembered figments. There were so many things that didn’t fit. Aressa Baltoritz wasn’t a drone engineer. She wasn’t even a cleomanni. She was a linnaltan talk show host and Equestrian sympathizer. The unit composition was wrong, too. Major Capodastro wasn’t even in my unit. It was a bunch of fragments, all stapled together in the wrong order, but it was a damn close approximation of a typical mission.

No, on further reflection, that wasn’t quite right, either. An orbital insertion would have alerted our targets to seek shelter from the gas. OA-13 only did the job right if you had the element of surprise. If we’d been detected that early, the only way to get the job done would’ve been to shift to a full-blown search-and-destroy operation and assassinate the targeted individuals directly, along with whatever defenses they could muster, be it mercenaries, guardsmen, or even the Confederate Army.

I’d done it myself, more than once. Launched SSMs only to get the call from the forward observers that we had negative effects on target, and then we marched our Chargers straight into the clouds of gas, fought our way through the perimeter, pinged the structures at the target area with deep-penetrating scans and found the bastards hiding in a safe room with masks on, at which point the standard procedure was usually to bring the whole building down with some well-placed heavy beamcaster salvos. Sometimes, nerve gas was only useful insofar as it pinned our targets in place, making them seek shelter in a fixed location instead of trying to slip away in a vehicle.

“Hey Bellwether,” I said, shaking the residual grogginess.

“Yeah?”

“Where the hell is Cain IV? The planet?”

He gave me a haunted, wide-eyed glance, before returning his eyes to the road. “Where the fuck did you hear that name, Sergeant?”

“It was something I dreamed just now. Seriously. Not sure where I heard the name. It could’ve been from the terminal in my cell.”

“They let you guys have terminals?” Bellwether raised an eyebrow.

“Yeah, they did,” I said. “They were mostly loaded with propaganda. Heavily censored and compartmentalized from the station’s secure networks. I think they had ‘em in there mostly just to taunt us. Like, ‘here’s a terminal, but you can’t hack it or do anything useful with it except read about how great we are’, or something.”

Bellwether seemed to relax a bit, before letting out a long sigh. For several long seconds, he didn’t say a word.

I leaned over to size up his features. “Is there something you’re not telling me, boss?”

He fixed me with a glare. “Stop asking stupid questions. That shit is way above your pay grade.”

I relaxed back into my seat, shivering in the cold.

// … // … // … // … // … //

Hours later, the Bull Runner pulled into Camp Crazy Horse. I was drifting in and out of consciousness. I had been propping myself upright with my captured flechette gun, but as the vehicle came to a halt, the last of my strength left me. I collapsed face-first on the floor of the recovery vehicle, too weak to even lift a single limb.

“Sergeant! Stay with us!” came an unfamiliar voice.

A light beamed into the claustrophobic space. I squinted, the intolerable brightness of it very nearly causing me physical pain. I was seeing double. I could barely feel it as they strapped me to a stretcher, raised me aloft on their backs and carried me into the facilities at the rear of the subterranean structure. I watched as the technicians secured the Charger to the overhead gantry, raised it, and then drove the truck out from underneath it in the span of less than a minute, like a highly trained motorsports pit crew.

I closed my eyes. The next time I opened them, I was lying in bed in a room painted sterile white. There was a small shaven patch on my neck where an intravenous line delivered various fluids through a catheter. Most concerning was the pack of blood. Ponies had shitloads of different blood types, to the point where finding the correct match was practically impossible. One basically had no choice but to transfuse whatever they had and hope that it didn’t cause a reaction. Bellwether was sitting to my right on a folding chair, hoofing through a magazine.

“I’m probably worth a lot more to you guys alive than dead,” I mumbled. “I know what you’re gonna say. It was reckless of me, what I did, but hey, we got my baby back in one piece, and I’m alive. For now. That’s what counts.”

Bellwether huffed. “Not many unicorns left out there who know how to pilot a Charger, or the vagaries of invisibility magic. It’s a real game-changer. We don’t exactly have the luxury of time, either. The Confederacy could be bearing down on this location any minute. Or they might not be.”

“Oh, so now, after I’ve learned my lesson, you’re the one who wants me to rush headfirst into this shit. Figures.”

“You’re lucky that we had enough blood to spare for a transfusion,” a silver-coated unicorn mare standing in the corner of the room said.

“And who the hell are you, exactly?” I croaked. I recognized her from the Regence Hotel; one of the ponies who had patched me up and extracted the tracking chip.

“Argent Tincture. I believe we’ve met once before. You were out cold, though. That makes twice in two days.”

“I really oughta take better care of myself—was what you were going to say, right?”

“That just about sums it up, yes.” She shook her head disapprovingly.

“Just one of the risks of the job, Doc.”

“Risks can be mitigated, if you care to learn how.”

“I don’t always have the luxury of avoiding action entirely,” I said. “However, I like not having my legs broken. I also prefer not being shot, or at least having armor impervious to small-arms between me and the ones doing the shooting.”

“Don’t worry,” Bellwether said. “Your wish will be granted just as soon as we get the parts together to fix your rig. You just stay focused on your, uh, convalescence. Okay?”

“The meds,” I said, staring at the catheter line. “What did you guys pump into me this time?”

“Hydroset,” Argent Tincture said. “The Confederacy’s standard in care for fractures. Well, that and morphine. And blood. Fluid support, too.”

I started and leaned upright. “Well, great. Uhh, did you guys test it to make sure I wouldn’t have a deadly reaction to it? Because last I checked, I’m not a satyr.”

“That’s not necessary, in this case. The substances they use to make it are biologically-inert.”

She moved closer and passed a black wand-like device over my injured left foreleg. I sharply inhaled as a tingling, swimming sensation ran from my hoof to my shoulder.

“There. Now, we just wait for it to set up before we move on to the next layer. The paramagnetic, osteophilic nanomaterial passes harmlessly through undamaged blood vessels and automatically sticks to bone, filling gaps, forming a healing scaffold and allowing new bone to grow into it. Then, it degrades over time, before being completely absorbed and excreted by your body. All the surgeon has to do is introduce the material into the patient’s bloodstream and then wave an electromagnet over the injury site. The procedure is one hundred percent safe and simple enough to perform in any field hospital.”

I hoped I looked as skeptical as I felt. “How do you know so much about cleomanni medicine?”

“Trust me, this isn’t the first time we’ve used this stuff. Hydroset has been used by cleomanni medics for something like a hundred and fifty years, under various trade names. Hydroset, Magnaset, it’s all the same stuff. Everything you want to know about it is available on their public datasphere. I’ve even downloaded and read the translated white papers of the scientist who developed it. It’s completely compatible with pony physiology.”

“It’s not as good as a Bio-Accelerator,” a white earth pony mare standing in the doorway said.

“No, Gauze Patch, it isn’t. Except it’s like a hundred times less likely to give you cancer.”

A Bio-Accelerator. An Equestrian magtech medical device consisting of an ensorcelled band placed around an injured body part which emitted healing energies that stimulated the body’s own natural growth factors. Which, sadly, included tumors, often necessitating screening and follow-up procedures. But they worked, and they worked fast. During my first tour, I was in and out of a field hospital in an hour thanks to one of those. After I started puking my guts out, they had me back in there a week later for a few rounds of hyper-immune therapy, too, which sucked beyond belief. At least we had a reliable cure for cancer, too.

“No Bio-Accelerators,” I whimpered. “Please.”

“Lucky for you, we don’t have any. At least not any functional ones.”

“Good. Very good.”

“Pfft, whatever,” Gauze Patch said. “Hydroset can cause fatal clotting over a matter of minutes to hours if used improperly. You have to meter the dose carefully and spread it evenly over the injury site.”

I felt the blood drain from my face.

“How long will she be out of commission?” Bellwether said, clearly quite eager to make use of my unique skillset again at the earliest opportunity.

Argent Tincture frowned. “She should avoid any strenuous activity for at least six weeks. The bone needs to be stabilized to heal properly. If not, her leg could end up permanently deformed. She’s already jeopardized her chances of making a full recovery as it is.”

Bellwether threw the magazine he was reading across the room and stood from his chair, his face locked in a scowl. Without another word, he stormed out.

I rolled my eyes. “That was a little huffy.”

As Gauze Patch and Argent Tincture left the room, I leaned my head back, shut my eyes and tried catching some rest. But even with the drugs coursing through my system, I found it hard to fall asleep. I spent the rest of that night staring at the ceiling.

// … // … // … // … // … //

A week later, I was up and about, allowed to freely walk around the medical wing of the facility with the aid of a wheeled cart supporting my forelegs. I felt on-edge. The painkillers had worn off, and I needed to pee. Badly.

The journey down the hall was laborious, my hind hooves clicking against the cold, hard concrete. I was momentarily taken aback as I peered into a conference room window. The space had been cleared of desks and chairs and turned into a makeshift infirmary, jam-packed with ponies on cots in varying states of distress. Casualties were still pouring in, and I was forced to move out of the way as Argent Tincture, Gauze Patch and several medics pushed gurneys that held uniformed patients who were in dire need of care, if the way they moaned and bled was any indication.

Bellwether stumbled into the hall, his fetlock gripping a fifth of hooch. He tilted the bottle back and took a long swig, nearly tripping over his own legs in the process, steadying his wobbly gait with the nearest wall that presented itself. His eyes were puffy and red, his mane and coat were disheveled, and he looked sweaty, like he’d just ran in a race. I had never seen this side of him before. The former ORACLE agent was never one to show any discernible weaknesses.

“What happened?” I said. “And what are you drinking? Is that gin? I thought you said all we had was cider. Gimme a swig of that!”

Ignoring my request, he glared at me, as though I had picked open a freshly hardened scab. “A raid went bad, and some mare I was havin’ a fling with bought the farm. Satisfied?”

My standoffish demeanor softened somewhat at this. I reached my good foreleg out and rested it on his shoulder.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

He took another drag from the bottle, nearly choking as he angrily sputtered, “And I never even got to fuck ‘er!”

And just like that, any sympathy I’d gained for the old coot had been kinetic-strike’d all the way through the planet’s crust and straight on to Tartarus.

// … end transmission …

Record 05//Initiation

//HOL CRY ADV
//CHECKSUM READ
//CHECKSUM GOOD

// … decoding …

// … error - operation timeout …

*run holoptima#xap EXT:*

// … optimizing 44% …

// … optimizing 73% …

// … optimizing 98% …

// … done …

// … decoding …

Desert Storm

I experimentally tested my left foreleg, pressing my hoof against the concrete, putting more weight on it than I had since well over a month ago. It pinched a little bit, but it was functional. I held it out straight. No distortion of the bone, even after all I’d put my poor leg through.

“I guess that cleomanni bullshit really does work after all,” I muttered.

“Sergeant?”

I looked up at the voice’s source. It was Wind Shear, the pegasus technician who assisted in the recovery operation to retrieve Dust Devil from the mire. He looked a little unkempt, his fur stained the color of honey with hydraulic oil in various places.

“Do you have it?” I said.

“Of course, ma’am.”

He passed me a set of laminated, hole-punched printouts connected with binder rings. Crookneck’s list of repair parts for my Charger, with suspected grid coordinates where they might be found.

“Seventy-six-millimeter ammunition?” I frowned. “This doesn’t look like stuff for a Courser.”

“It’s not. You’re not our only Charger pilot. We need parts and consumables like these to keep the other Chargers running, too.”

“Right, Bell mentioned something about that,” I said. “So, who are the others? Anypony I know?”

“There are two other pilots in this resistance cell that I know of,” he said, looking a bit uneasy. “Corporal Sierra and Lieutenant Night Terror.”

All of a sudden, an icy lump formed in my throat. The pace of my breathing quickened. I narrowed my eyes at Wind Shear and he seemed to shrink away from my withering gaze.

“What did you just say?”

“The two pilots, Sierra and—”

“Night Terror.” I collapsed to my haunches, holding a hoof to my chest in the hopes it would still my madly beating heart. “That son of a bitch is still alive.”

My mind raced. Why did so many good ponies die, only for that fuckface to survive to the present?

“Look, he gives me the fucking creeps, too.” Wind Shear was looking more than a little bit worried.

“What else do you know about him?” I said.

“I’ve heard the rumors. Some say he fragged a superior officer for not letting him go on some killing spree against the general cleomanni population, or something along those lines. Made it look like an accident. Somehow, he avoided a court-martial. That sound about right?” Wind Shear fixed me with a glare that seemed to indicate that he considered me to be cut from the same cloth.

“He’s a fucking sick bastard,” I said, my face screwed up in anger. “He was only ever in it for himself and his twisted fantasies about making the battlefield into his own personal playground.”

“Honestly, it ain’t much different from what the rest of you Eighth Cavalry freaks were up to.”

“That’s bullshit!” I stamped my hoof. “We were just following orders. I make light of what I did sometimes because I’d go nuts if I didn’t. Night Terror is a monster, even among us volunteer pilots!”

“I don’t doubt it. Sierra, well—”

“Sierra?” I laughed. “You mean Hissy Fit?”

“She doesn’t like that name.”

“Too bad for her that she resembles it.”

“I haven’t worked with her, much, because she prefers to do—”

“Her own maintenance, I know,” I finished for him, rolling my eyes. “Let me guess. She’s still piloting that cobbled-together pile of junk Rouncey of hers, Scofflaw?”

“Yeah. What’s her deal?”

“Beats me. She’s a little bit touched in the head. Anyway, I’ll catch up with you later. Got some business to attend to.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Oh, and let’s get something straight.” I narrowed my eyes. “You compare me to that son of a bitch again, I’m gonna slap your shit. You got me?”

Wind Shear sighed. “Yeah.”

I circled my Charger where it sat, legs folded, in one of the maintenance bays. The mud had been washed off and much of the ruined armor had been stripped from the hull. Over in the fab lab, the techs busied themselves scanning damaged armor pieces with a LIDAR wand so they could fabricate a suitable facsimile. Even while crouched, the titanium chassis of Dust Devil stood an imposing four meters, or half of its full, standing height.

Its stout equine limbs terminated in armored hooves. There were four pyrojet boosters on gimbaled mounts at the top of each leg joint that could vector thrust in any direction, as well as four heavy boosters that had a more limited range of motion but far greater thrust. Standard performance rating was a two-gee vertical ascent for up to thirty seconds before they needed some time to cool down. With proper timing and enough of a running start, a Courser like mine could jump-jet over a half-kilometer gap. The pyrojets could also manage six-gee-plus for very short bursts. Evasive burns.

If an incoming guided missile or shell was detected by radar, the whole damn thing was capable of propelling itself sideways a good hundred meters in the blink of an eye. Even without the pilot’s input, if the APS ran out of ammo or failed to neutralize an incoming munition, the Anima would react automatically within milliseconds to move the entire machine out of harm’s way. In spite of the walker’s size, it could quite literally dodge bullets.

The head was covered in angled plating with a single protruding camera in the center of its face, flanked by four multi-spectral sensors. Lower, to either side of its chin, sat the two 40mm automatic cannons, their feed mechanisms and magazines exposed by the removal of a good portion of the head armor. Projectile weapons were not uncommon in crew-served or vehicle-mounted configurations throughout the Imperial Army. Unlike Beamcasters, they were less vulnerable to atmospheric conditions, they had a nice and compact anti-armor punch to them, and they didn’t consume very much electrical power or require heavy or sophisticated cooling systems.

The forty-millimeter cased telescoped ammo was reverse-engineered Confederate tech and had been in continuous service in the Imperial Army for hundreds of years. The cartridges were light and compact enough that each of the helical magazines carried a hundred and sixteen of them, in a fifty-fifty mixture of alternating high-explosive multi-purpose and armor-piercing discarding-sabot rounds. The APDS rounds would pierce the rear armor of a Confederate tank, if you were lucky, but they were much more effective at wrecking armored cars and other lightly armored targets.

The HEMP rounds were like HEDP rounds on steroids. They had programmable electronic fuses and could be fused to airburst over infantry, detonate after penetrating a wall, or even take out aircraft with a gated proximity mode. The Mirage’s radar was more than capable of tracking low-flying jets or helicopters and providing accurate firing solutions. The twin forties weren’t for direct fire support alone; many Coursers also doubled as self-propelled anti-aircraft platforms. On the battlefield, there was always a need to defend oneself or one’s lance-mates against attack planes, gunships, cruise missiles, and drone swarms. The heavier Chargers tended to mount commensurately heavier ordnance that was ill-suited for tracking fast-moving targets. Coursers filled the gap in defense.

The guns themselves had a combined fire rate of two thousand rounds per minute in alternating fire mode, or half that in linked-fire mode. They could put out ten 40mm shells in a fraction of a second. Short, disciplined bursts of fire were necessary to get the most out of them without returning to base to re-arm, but in any case, the fire rate could be dialed down to a more sedate two rounds a second if necessary. Otherwise, the magazines could be depleted in a mere seven seconds of sustained fire.

Usually, all you got was one reload from the torso magazines transferring their rounds to the drums on each side of a Mirage’s head, and then another seven seconds of sustained fire. Sometimes, we carried add-on ammo packs that could quadruple our reserve 40mm cartridge capacity, but usually, that meant leaving the twin heavy beamcasters behind for weight limit reasons.

Occasionally, in addition to the extra ammo, we used a frontal applique armor kit with reactive armor tiles equipped with thermal camouflage, converting the Mirage into what we called the Chameleon configuration, a defensive setup for dealing with incoming waves of enemy attack planes, gunships, drones, cruise missiles, and light armored vehicles. The only problem was that it raised the Mirage’s weight to a good sixty metric tons, severely limiting movement because of the added strain on the actuators. In case we needed to make a hasty escape, the armor panels could be severed with explosive bolts and full mobility regained.

For dealing with infantry without wasting rounds from the forties, Dust Devil’s head was equipped with four pulse-type and two stream-type beamcasters that had practically limitless ammunition, drawing their power from the walker’s polywell fusion reactor. The pulsecaster beams converged to a single point and were capable of killing power-armored Confederate commandos with even a momentary burst.

I circled around back, beaming with pride at what I saw. The Charger’s tail fauld—a long, pointed banner bearing the sword-in-horseshoe insignia of the Equestrian Armed Forces—was tattered, but still intact. I grimaced. None of the other weapons in my usual loadout were equipped. Not the back-mounted 40-megajoule heavy beamcasters that I’d frequently used to liberate main battle tanks of their turrets with explosive force, nor the missile launchers.

“Shit,” I muttered. “Shit, shit, shit. Half of my fucking loadout was strewn across the countryside when the Summer bought the farm. If I run headlong into an armored column while kitted out as pathetically as this, I’m fucked.”

As I approached the rear of the Charger, I spied the venerable Crookneck. He was wearing a stained lab coat and a pencil behind his ear, reading from his own personal copy of the spare parts manifest.

“Let’s see, we need twenty-three new electro-magical transducers, about eight tons of duostrand, a new fire control computer, four new radiators, three new main bearings, a new AESA radar, new auxiliary infrared imagers, a new echolocation pinger, new LIDAR sensors, new target designators, and the list goes on and on and on,” the engineer said.

“When will she be combat-ready?” I said.

“Up and about, I see. How’s the leg doing?”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“Oh, we don’t have all the parts,” he said, shrugging. “So, I’d say approximately never.”

My features sagged in exhaustion. “That’s what I was afraid of. So, where do we find the parts?”

“Some of them, we could make ourselves if we had the raw materials. Others, we’ll have to salvage. I’ve compiled a list of supply depots, storehouses, military bases and other locations that might be good places to look for the things we need. There’s also the possibility of using jury-rigged Confederate equipment, if we manage to recover enough of it.”

“What about the crashed patrol boat?” I said. “It might have some sensors and other things we can use.”

“Perhaps. If it’s convenient, we might go take a look. Enemy activity in that sector is high, however, so we tend to keep our distance.”

“Maybe we should spend less time running from those cocksuckers and more time killing them? I mean, I’m here. I’m ready. Let’s win this thing, already.”

“Oh, stop being such a sourpuss. If it were that easy, we’d have done it already, with or without you. You did a good job, by the way. Thanks to you, we’re one Charger richer. Don’t worry about the Bull Runner. I got the techs to cut out and replace the damaged bed section weeks ago. Try not to pull any more stunts like that if you can help it, though. Our resources are not infinite. Just so you know, I’ve passed my report on to Bellwether through the local datasphere. He’ll be here shortly. Oh, speak of the devil.”

A heavy hoof landed on my shoulder and I jumped, startled out of my wits. Bellwether was a very, very sneaky pony indeed.

“Alright, mech jockey,” he said. “You ready to pay back your debts to our medical team? Not to mention the Charger techs, who are already just about fed up with your shit.”

“I’m not gonna fuck them, if that’s what you had in mind.” I laughed.

“Nah, nothing like that. Just a little raid on some Confederate shitbags to stock up on medical supplies. You comin’ with?”

I sighed. “Sure, why not? It’s better than waiting around here with my hoof halfway up my ass. So, am I supposed to call you ‘sir’, or what?”

“You don’t have to.” Bellwether shrugged. “In this cell, a lot of us are technically civilians. We’re kind of a recon support and logistics group, not an attacker cell. But just the same, it’d be in your best interest to treat my word, or Crookneck’s, as law around here. At least until Captain Garrida gets back. We clear?”

“As crystal.”

“Good. Follow me.”

He led me to a security door, unlocking the retina scanner by sweeping his RFID-badged right foreleg over it before placing his face in the scanner for a few seconds. The blast-resistant door hissed open and we entered the yellow-lit room beyond. He powered on the diode lighting with a flick of his hoof and the room was bathed in an obscenely bright white. There were two rows of lockers, and on the far side of them, beamcaster rigs and armor lined the walls, all appearing in perfect working order. There were some more beamcasters and armor suits in varying states of disrepair on the shelves in the armory’s center, some appearing to have been cannibalized to repair the others.

I stopped in front of one rack at the end that Bellwether led me to. Resting on it was a pristine set of Bulwark-type medium body armor. It was your bog-standard infantry barding, only this was an upgraded model with an advanced communications set integrated into the helmet, typically worn by non-commissioned officers. Composite plates of sandwiched fiber-reinforced plastic, titanium and resin-impregnated synthetic spider silk covered all the vital regions of the body. This particular example had a cloth cover with a mottled desert camouflage pattern.

The suit was nothing even remotely like a powered exoskeleton, of course. The ponies around here qualified to operate an exosuit could be counted on both hooves. I briefly wondered where the Commodore and the mercs had ended up. We could’ve used them on an op like this. I shoved those thoughts to the back of my mind and continued taking stock of the equipment in the armory. Resting on the same rack as the armor was a beamcaster rig. Phoenix Fire PF-27. Standard pulse type. The emitters were so highly polished, I could see my reflection in them.

“Where did you guys get all this stuff?” I said.

“We’ve spent the past three years scrounging up whatever we can,” Bellwether said. “Occasionally, you’ll run into an intact store of supplies that looters or vandals haven’t gotten to yet, but most of our stuff’s refurbished. Believe it or not, our techs cobbled that set you’re looking at together from about five different ruined suits of Bulwark armor and PF-27s.”

I stared at the suit of armor and the beamcaster, deep in thought.

“What’s our game plan, going forward?” I pawed at the floor absent-mindedly.

“Depends on who you ask, Sergeant.”

“Lay it out for me. What the hell are we doing out here, exactly? These past few weeks, I’ve kinda been all caught up in the excitement of getting my Charger back. I never even thought to ask who’s in charge of this cell, and what our mission is. Makes me wonder if the crash left me a little brain-damaged.”

“Enough with the hypochondria, kid. Your experience is typical of new recruits. They often drift in from parts unknown, still in a daze from their ordeals. I saw one mare who’d gone mute, and it took a whole year before she finally regained her speech. You’ve got nothing to worry about, ‘cept doing as you’re told.”

I knitted my brow. “They left me out there to die, you know. They didn’t even think to drag me out of the wreck. They ran off with our only good catch of the day, too.”

“Well, you’re still alive, so quit complainin’. And that was our patrol boat that you ponies wrecked, by the way. We captured it, and on Admiral Crusher’s orders, our leader had to hoof it over to the Commodore and her people, just so they could trash it. I don’t suppose you’d be up for helping us capture another?”

“Fuck outer space!” I said, raising my hooves for emphasis.

He doubled over laughing, seeming to share my opinion.

“You think that’s funny?” I tilted my head. “I was fucking vacuumed. Twice. In one day. If I go out there again, it’s gonna be aboard one of our ships, not some Confederate hunk of junk.”

“Oh, I’m right with you there, kid. You know, those Vigilance-class patrol boats are built crudely on purpose. Low-tech presence ships, for low-intensity warfare, picketing, surveillance, and so forth. Lowest-bidder stuff. Cheap and easy to maintain. Not a liability to them if captured by us, since all it takes to overwhelm one is two others, not a whole fleet.”

“Yeah, well, not to toot my own horn, or anything, but I think you ought to know that we fended off two enemy patrol boats on the way here.”

“Then you’re very lucky to be alive,” he chuckled. “Count your blessings, for they are many.”

“You still didn’t answer my question. Who’s in charge of this cell, and what are we doing? What’s our plan for taking the fight to those bastards?”

Bellwether frowned, as if he wasn’t sure whether he could trust me with the information he was about to reveal. But then, his expression softened.

“Captain Garrida’s in charge of this cell. But I can’t tell you what we’re up to until you do something first.”

“And that is?” I cocked an eyebrow at him.

“This.” Bellwether hoofed me a sheet of paper on a clipboard with a pen. “It’s already been filled out except for a couple boxes that have been highlighted. Just need you to sign it. I think you’ve more than proven your loyalty to the cause so far.”

The Equestrian Liberation Front had a sheet for recruits to fill out, compiling information like their age, height, weight, medical conditions, former military rank or job title for placement purposes, and various other details, ending with what was basically consent to indentured servitude. It was something along the lines of agreeing to be provided with room and board in lieu of monetary compensation, along with the promise of back pay remuneration in the event of the Empire’s restoration, which would be hilarious if it wasn’t so sad.

“Are you guys like, broke or something?” I said.

Bellwether huffed. “Damn near. Our ‘economy’, if you can call it that, is more of a barter and salvage thing, for the most part. What few bits we have are spent on mission-critical stuff. That said, we do get a stipend. It’s not much. About a hundred bits a month, per head. Not many opportunities to spend any of it, unless we’re on leave in Vanhoover and you want to hit the tavern or something. Ain’t no such thing as leave in this outfit, though. Shit can hit the fan at any time, in any place.”

With a heaving sigh, I took the pen up in my magic, filled in the missing data, and scribbled my signature on the line at the end before hoofing it back over to Bellwether. I had this sinking feeling in my gut the entire time. I wondered if this was a new beginning for me, or the same old shit repeating itself over and over again. I felt that same blend of nervousness and stark anticipation that I felt while sitting in front of a recruiter’s desk, years ago. This was it. There was no turning back. This was our last chance to turn this war around.

I smiled and huffed softly to myself. What sentimental nonsense. This was no fairytale. No epic poem. We were no brave heroes and there was no winning this fight. This whole rebellion was nothing more than the mad, desperate, bloodied thrashing of a beast in its death throes, and we would send as many cleomanni bastards to Tartarus as we could before breathing our last. In truth, it would take more than a ragtag group of rebels to save our species. We needed a miracle.

“Okay,” I said. “How about now?”

“We’re searching for Empress Sparkle.” Bellwether nodded. “We have reason to believe she ain’t quite dead after all.”

My breathing quickened, my heart nearly skipping a beat. Perhaps miracles did exist, after all.

“What’s your proof?”

“For the past few weeks, we’ve been intercepting encrypted communiques. Not local datasphere stuff. Long-range cleomanni data bursts containing strings of numbers in Ardun, read aloud real slow-like. You know how to count in Ardun, right?”

“Ev, deze, ton, renez, boal, shatire, fliaz, echt, onire, zet. Base-ten, right?”

“Your pronunciation’s a little off, but that is correct.”

Unlike the rest of the galaxy, which preferred base-ten, we ponies counted in base-four, using four basic numerals; lah, van, seh and koh, with numbers advancing by multiples of four until you reached sixteen, whereupon numbers were spoken as 'sixteen plus another number', like twenty-four, or imrah vakoh, which literally meant 'sixteen and two fours', continuing this pattern until you reached the fourth multiple of the last group, which constituted a new group of its own. Sixty-four, then two hundred and fifty-six, then a thousand and twenty-four and so on and so forth. For example, the number one-hundred-and-eight was pashna vaimrah seukoh, which, in base-ten, meant 'sixty-four and two sixteens and three fours'.

But there were deeper nuances and shades of meaning there. The Equestrian word for friend, nenlah, literally meant heart-close one. The word for friendship? Same as the word for oneness. When counting, you went clockwise, starting from your front-left leg, which was the leg closest to your heart, hence the slang term for a close buddy; heart-leg. Ardun, by contrast, lacked such subtle intricacies. It really was a boorish, mechanistic language, well-suited for conniving, grasping, cave-dwelling imbeciles who daily schemed of ways to deprive their neighbors of everything they ever held dear.

I kept counting up into the teens. “Zetev, zeteze, zeton, zetren, zetoal, zetatire, zetiaz, zetcht, zetnire, de-”

“Enough!” Bellwether stamped his hoof. “By Celestia’s left teat, that shit grates on my ears. But yeah, very good.”

“Too bad I can’t read those weird scribbles they write it in, or I’d be all set.”

“Anyway, we picked up what seemed like random strings of these numbers. We set about decoding some of it, but it was no use. They were probably using one-time pads.”

“So how did you decrypt it?”

“We triangulated the source of one of the transmissions. I went in, and—”

“You chopped the radio operators up like the villain in a bad slasher movie and stole a freshly-used codebook before they could destroy it.” I grinned.

“See, that’s what we need more of in this outfit,” he said, his voice laced with sarcasm. “Perceptive ponies like you, who can suss this sort of thing out very quickly.”

“What were you able to find out?”

“The radio transmissions mentioned an ‘Aubergine’. That’s Confederate military code for Twilight Sparkle. Everything else was in some kind of personal code on top of being encrypted. Stuff like, ‘The Narwhal jumped over the moon at the corner of Elm Street and Broad, and my pancakes were cold this morning—did the blubber have a nice catnap?’” His lips curled in disgust.

I could tell he hated it when they did that. Encrypted text could be broken, but the only way to understand a personal code was to grab the people who knew what it meant, shoot them up with truth serum and smack them upside the head with a pipe wrench until they gave it up.

“Any idea where these reports are originating from?”

“No clue. Trust me, we’ve looked.”

I paused, rubbing my chin with my hoof.

“Personal codes like those tend to be shared between—and understood by—only a very, very small number of people.”

“Yeah? What of it?

“What I’m saying is that this isn’t a message meant for just anyone’s ears, even within their own command structure. It’s from some head honcho to another. Those radio operators you gutted probably didn’t even know what it meant. They were just relaying it from elsewhere.”

“I think I have a feeling what you’re getting at, but please, continue.”

“Even if we don’t know where it came from, do we know who this communique might be addressed to? We’ve got to have a shortlist of possible matches for the identities of the sender and the intended recipient. For example, who’s in charge of this sector?”

“That would be Corrector Dieslan Veightnoch and his assistant, Ordinator Wertua Naimekhe.” Bellwether almost spat the words.

“Well, if we want to know where the Empress is, why don’t we simply ask them?”

“Can’t. Corrector Veightnoch is responsible for coordinating the Confederate Security Force units in our system. He only rarely leaves his flagship, a Vindicator-class frigate by the name of Grenlan’s Bounty. Ordinator Naimekhe is always under heavy armed guard, so no matter where she is, we’ve found it difficult to get close enough to snatch her.”

“Armed guards? You mean those Gafalze Arresgrippen cyborgs who follow that creepy bitch around?”

The GARG, or Special Assault Squadron, haunted the waking dreams of every Equestrian soldier. Fast, emotionless, lethal killing machines. Augmented spec-ops in powered armor. The first and last that a pony usually ever saw of them was a monomolecular blade headed straight for their throat at lightning speed. Only a Dragoon stood a chance in hell against one in single combat, and any time the Army encountered them, standard operating procedure was to bombard the whole area with airstrikes and artillery.

Bellwether was shocked. “You’ve ran into her before?”

“Yeah, she kneed me in the pussy so hard, I was just about ready to ask her if she wanted to get us a room.”

“Really?” Bellwether smirked and raised an eyebrow in mock interest.

I blushed fiercely when I realized what I’d just said. “Uhh, it’s long story. I thought Crookneck said we had warships?”

“Yes, and the cleomanni don’t know we have them. We’d like to keep it that way as long as possible. Bagging one high-value target isn’t enough to merit their use. It has to be something that causes some lasting damage before the Admiral would be willing to give the go-ahead to commit those ships to a combat operation, like knocking out an orbital shipyard or something of that nature. For that matter, you saw how our last boarding op went. Do you think we can afford a repeat of that so soon?”

“Point taken.” I sighed. “So, how about this: we lure the Corrector out. We’ll use his secretary as bait. Get him to show up, in person, on the surface. Then, we nab him.”

Bellwether chewed on an unlit cigar, deep in thought. “If we want to pull something like that off, we’re going to need more materiel and more personnel.”

“Why not ask Admiral Crusher for support?”

“We have, and he ain’t giving it to us. No way, no how. Especially not for something as crazy as this.”

“Then let’s round up some ponies who’d be willing to take up our cause. Let’s go recruiting.”

“Wow, you seem real invested in all this for somepony who’s only been a freedom fighter for all of five minutes.”

“I was born to fight.” I smiled. “There’s nothing else in the whole world I’d rather be doing right now.”

“So, three years trapped in a box hasn’t dulled your instincts? Are you sure you’re ready for this?”

The question ate away at my resolve. The skin on the back of my neck crawled.

“What do you mean?”

“Charger pilots need constant refresher courses and active combat duty to stay in top form. Three years out of the saddle is a long time.”

“You saw me recover the Mirage, didn’t you?”

“Yeah. Damn near wrecked our only Bull Runner, too.”

“Excuse me?” I said, recoiling with disgust. “It was either that, or I would’ve sunk. Then, you would’ve lost me, my Charger, and one of your technicians.”

“You have a habit of breaking things, Sergeant Storm. I just wish you’d use that talent to break the enemy’s things instead of ours.”

Bellwether lifted the armor and the beamcaster off the rack, presenting them to me.

“Here, tack up.” He smirked. “I would say that this is worth more than you are, but at this juncture, skilled vehicle crews of any kind are getting to be too hard to come by.”

I stepped into the armor’s moisture-wicking undersuit, grabbing the zipper with my teeth and pulling it along my underbelly and up to my neck. I slipped on the Bulwark armor’s knee protectors and buckled the straps of the vest around my midsection, clearing my mane out of the way as I donned the helmet and lowered the integrated eyepiece and microphone into position. I shrugged my shoulders a bit and shook around to get accustomed to the weight and make sure there wasn’t any loose plating.

I tapped a control on my helmet and booted up its onboard computer. A few basic vital statistics appeared in my heads-up display in luminescent blue; heart rate, heading in degrees, time, and remaining battery charge. It had been a long time since I’d worn one of these. I preferred my old Syncsuit, because if I was wearing one, it usually meant that I was about to have a whole heck of a lot more plating surrounding me than some two-bit ballistic armor. I was a pilot, not a grunt.

Bellwether lowered the beamcaster onto my withers, locking the power supply and data link in place and aligning the emitters with the shoulder openings in the armor. A remaining shot count indicator displayed six hundred charges. Damn near running on fumes. I hoped I wouldn’t end up in a situation where I’d have to use all of them. I slung my captured flechette gun over my withers, double-checking how many spare mags I had in my saddlebags. Twelve box magazines; two hundred and forty rounds. At least they were relatively light.

“So, chief,” I said. “We get our hooves on Veightnoch. Then what? Where do we go from there?”

Bellwether clapped his hooves together forcefully. “Eir kartares as rotrkenna. Oskan ress plukki auas destena eiren ast utanas Harranftah Renleus Tika veerenschirkse.”

We interrogate the son of a whore. Make him spit out where they’re holding Empress Twilight Sparkle prisoner.

“And then?” I said, my voice low.

“We go in with everything we have and rescue her, of course.”

“And then we have a ragtag band of rebels plus one Empress. What will that accomplish?”

Bellwether scowled. “Freeing your sovereign and mine.”

“Bell, I look up to her more than most ponies do.” There was a tight knot of sadness in my chest. “She’s my idol. But let’s be realistic, here. What can we do with her that we can’t do without her? How does she change the game?”

Bellwether worked his jaw, a look of uncertainty creeping over his face as my words sunk in. “I—I don’t know. I’m sure she’ll think of something.”

I shook my head. “That’s not good enough. We have to find something Her Majesty can use. A trump card. Otherwise, she’ll be in the same boat as the rest of us.”

“Well, one would hope she’d use her razor-sharp intellect to come up with a ‘trump card’, as you put it.” Bellwether fiddled with his beamcaster.

“So, that’s it, then,” I said. “All of this hinges on getting her out alive. After that, there’s no plan. Just wing it. Terrific.”

“We’re gonna need you.” Bellwether fixed his gaze on me. “You and the Mirage. If we go and get her, we won’t be able to go in guns-blazing. They’d squash us like bugs. A cloaked Charger and its pilot might have a chance. Enough of that shit, though. Time’s a-wastin’.”

I sighed. “Which vehicle are we using?”

“The scout car I captured.”

“I thought we were nearly out of gas?”

“We keep a stock of that heavy petroleum distillate fuel the cleomanni like to use.”

“That’s some nasty stuff.” I helped Bellwether into his lightweight body armor with my magic. “I’ve seen those engines all apart on a workbench. All the carbon deposits, scoring and grit. Can you imagine what’s in the exhaust? They just pump that shit right into the atmosphere.”

The former agent snorted skeptically. “So says the chemical weapons user.” Bellwether grinned, tossing his trusty hat aside and donning his helmet.

I squinted at him. “Alright, you win this round.”

“Let’s get moving. We ain’t got all day. Or, actually, I guess we do, since the sun don’t move. But that’s no excuse to waste time. Neither of us are getting any younger.”

“Do we have a plan, or are we going in blind?”

“We have photos of the outpost, taken just last week.” He sent the images to the picture-in-picture view on my heads-up display through the local datasphere. “There’s a small garrison of about a couple dozen Confederate Security, a field hospital consisting of a few tents, a guard tower, a shelter for a couple armored cars, and a chain-link fence topped with razor wire around the whole kit and caboodle. The plan is simple, Sergeant Storm; you cloak us, we trot right in and take what we need. Maybe I slash a few throats, maybe I don’t. Then, we leave. Simple as that. You get your painkillers, and everyone’s happy.”

“I’m kind of amazed that you guys would be willing to go to such lengths just for my sake.” I fluttered my eyelashes at him mockingly.

“Don’t get too full of yourself, kiddo. We ain’t doin’ this for you. We’ve been running low on medical supplies for a while now. You just happened to need some right around the same time.”

“Oh.” I smirked. “Well, in that case, fuck you.”

“No, fuck you!” He grinned.

I nodded. “Let’s get this shit done.”

“Let’s.”

Bellwether set a plastic gas can full of sickly-sweet smelling diesel oil on his withers, and the two of us left the armory. After a few turns, we entered an underground tunnel dripping with condensation. I swore I saw a rat crawling around on the floor in the corner of my eye, but when I turned and looked, there was nothing. The tunnel led to a big steel hatch in the overhead that swung open with a metallic groan. As Bellwether beckoned me from outside the hatch, I climbed the rusted ladder to the top, peeking my head out the opening and finding myself right next to the base’s outdoor parking area.

I used my levitation to retrieve the yellow plastic gas can from the base of the ladder where Bellwether had left it, since there was no way either of us were carrying it and climbing at the same time. He took it from there, walking up to the armored car, unscrewing the gas cap, placing the nozzle in the filler and tilting the can up with the tips of his hooves until it was empty. I closed the hatch behind us, pulling the dirt-encrusted tarp back over it to conceal the entrance.

The two of us boarded the vehicle and Bellwether gunned the engine, making the tires scrape dirt. Along the way to our destination, about an hour out from Crazy Horse, we parked the armored car inside the collapsed facade of a ruined building for concealment, each of us catching a couple hours of shuteye, sleeping in shifts in case of Vandal activity.

I dreamt of my flight from the Confederacy’s clutches, but instead of boarding the captured patrol boat and escaping successfully, the events kept replaying in my head, each attempt ending in failure. In one iteration, their drones caught up to me and shocked me into submission with their electrolasers, before that bitch in the pencil skirt walked up with her armed guard in tow and calmly put a bullet in my head.

In the next, I was so close to making it out alive, but Commodore Cake failed to drive off the Karkadann in time, and the one I’d struggled with slashed my neck with its whip-like tail as I thrashed and screamed, my throat gurgling as it filled with blood. It kept on and on and on like this, the cycle repeating time and time again. In the last repetition, I’d crawled out of the crashed patrol boat on my knees, only to look up and face Driving Band’s wicked smile as he raised Scheherazade’s core above his head and brought it down upon my shocked countenance with a sickening thud.

When I woke with a start, I bumped my head on a protruding panel in the armored car’s cramped troop bay, cursing loudly. We were on the road again. I heard the sound of crumpling metal and breaking glass as the ten-ton 6x6 armored car smashed an abandoned sedan out of the way without even slowing down. My head throbbed, and the jarring sensation didn’t help. I removed a small translucent plastic bottle from a vest pouch and popped another painkiller. My headache and the stabbing pain in my leg began to dull.

“How close are we?” I said, leaning my head into the cab.

“Another fifty kilometers,” Bellwether said.

My lips curled back. I felt an itch in the back of my mind. An eagerness to kill, bubbling up from beneath the doldrums. If there wasn’t any cleomanni cannon fodder around, then there was no reason for me to even be up and about.

I rolled back over, sighing exasperatedly. “Wake me when we get there.”

It felt like I’d closed my eyes for not more than two seconds before I was roused by the staccato sound of gunfire and flechettes pinging off the troop carrier’s angular hull.

“Contact!” Bellwether said. “Confederate patrol, ten o’clock, distance six hundred meters!”

I surged up from my seat, throwing open the hatch and grasping the fifty-cal’s spade grips in my hooves as I stood awkwardly on my hind legs. I brought the gun around and depressed the trigger with my magic. Click. Nothing. I reached forward and pulled on the charging handle, ejecting the dud round, before taking aim at the foot patrol and depressing the trigger again. The big gun’s reports reverberated through my chest as it spat hot lead, spent brass and links clattering over the armored car’s roof all the while. Motes of dust were kicked up on the far hill as the rounds dug into the dirt. Dead trees turned to splinters before my withering suppressive fire.

I got off about six or seven utterly deafening five-round bursts before the weapon ran dry. Panting from adrenaline, I ducked below the turret ring, levitated up another belt, flipped up the machine gun’s top cover, placed the belt in the feed tray, lowered the top cover and racked the charging handle. By that time, the enemy squad had already dug in and we were taking accurate fire.

I heard the supersonic crack of a round whizzing past my head. “Fuck!” I yelped and ducked into the vehicle’s armored interior.

I felt a burning, stinging sensation and something wet on the side of my head. I ran my hoof across it. It came back covered in blood.

“I’m hit!” I shrieked, my heart pounding and my ears ringing.

I gulped down the lump that had formed in my throat, taking in a deep breath through my nostrils. I broke out in a cold sweat as an overwhelming sense of dread came over me. Bellwether turned around in his seat momentarily and glanced at me before returning his eyes to the road.

“Iz a grz whrr yr righ ur eet yur ed. Yur fai.”

His voice was muffled, like someone had stuffed gauze in my ears.

“What?” I said.

“It’s a graze where your right ear meets your head!” he repeated at the top of his lungs. “It only nicked you. When you’re on the gun, stay low. And for the love of fuck, put your helmet back on!”

I nodded, grunting in pain as I reached up and brought the gun around again, keeping my head behind the receiver as I aimed blindly. The incoming fire began to slacken. I dared a peek over the top of the weapon, only to see a distant golden flash and a tiny black blur streak across my vision. I reflexively ducked, an action that probably saved my life. There was a Doppler-shifted scream of whistling fins of death, followed by a loud bang that shook my teeth. It all happened in a split-second.

“Rocket!” I screamed.

I stood up through the hatch and scanned the terrain momentarily. The round had impacted an earthen berm on the other side of the dirt road, kicking up a plume of dust that quickly faded into the distance behind us. The incoming fire petered out as the distance between us and our attackers grew. We’d lucked out. If I’d been standing up, the fragmentation alone might have killed me. If the rocket had found its mark, we’d both be charred skeletons in a burning steel coffin.

“So much for stealth,” Bellwether said. “Now, every patrol within thirty kilometers knows we’re coming.”

“How far is the objective?”

“Three klicks.”

I shook my head. “Shit, by the time we get there, they’ll be vectoring in on our position from everywhere.”

“More or less. Let’s get in and get out.”

“Isn’t this a bit risky?”

“It always is.”

“Shouldn’t we bail? RTB and re-assess the situation?”

“After coming all the way out here? Fuck no. Get your gear ready. We’re close.”

I levitated my helmet from the bench seat and set it atop my head, fastening the chin strap hastily. I had removed it because it didn’t make for a very good pillow. Though the burning sensation in my ear had subsided slightly and the flow of blood had stopped, I was regretting that decision.

The vehicle came to a halt well outside the perimeter. “We’re here. Let’s bounce before they come down on us like a sack of bricks.”

I checked and re-checked my flechette gun and beamcaster. The flechette gun wasn’t compatible with my helmet’s heads-up display, so I couldn’t keep tabs on how many rounds I had remaining, nor could I get a picture-in-picture view from its scope or a reticule overlaid in my display. I was going to have to aim the weapon and keep track of its remaining ammo the old-fashioned way.

I frowned, pondering something that I probably should have mentioned before. “Just so you know, sir, my invisibility’s only good for thirteen non-consecutive minutes a day. No longer. After that, I need to rest my horn for a while.”

“Let’s not push it,” Bellwether said, tossing me a large duffel bag. “Eight minutes, Sergeant. No more. We stick together like glue the whole time. Grab anything useful that you can see, but remember what we came for. Medical supplies. Suturing thread, bandages, meds, disinfectant, surgical tools. You get the idea.”

“I hear you.”

“I’ve got us parked in a spot where the vehicle will serve as a distraction. They’ll come out and search it, and that’s when we slip inside. Do not open fire unless we’re detected or fired upon.”

“Alright, I’ll cloak us,” I said. “Hold on to me, this is gonna get a little weird.”

As Bellwether put his hoof on my shoulder, I concentrated, enveloping both of us in my magic field.

“I can’t see a damned thing,” Bellwether said. “It’s pitch-black. How do you see where you’re going, Sergeant?”

“I can feel out the environment with levitation and echolocation magic. Unless somepony came up with a spell that redirects light around your eyeballs while still letting you see the redirected light and they neglected to inform me, this is how every unicorn’s invisibility magic works.”

“Good grief, kid. You could’ve told me this before.”

“You're some super-spy, and you seriously didn't know? When the coast is clear, I’ll uncloak us so we can see what we’re stealing.”

“Looks like we don’t really have much of a choice.”

Using my magic, I felt for the armored car’s side hatch and opened it. We filed out of the vehicle quickly before taking cover near what I assumed was the fence around the outpost. When I reached out with my levitation, I could tell immediately that we weren’t alone. I pinged the environment once, then twice, getting a better picture of our surroundings.

I lowered my voice to a whisper. “Shh, don’t move. Enemy patrol to our rear, approaching the vehicle from the hill. It’s like you said, they’re searching it.”

They were pretty stupid to just walk straight towards it. It could’ve been rigged with explosives, or the occupants may have been preparing to engage them with the crew-served weapon, for all they knew. I paused for a moment, holding my breath. I heard a gate swing open and the voice of some NCO barking orders in Ardun.

“We got two guys coming out of the compound,” I said. “Let’s move.”

We slipped inside unseen before they shut the gate in the chain-link fence behind us. There was a building straight ahead. Though I couldn’t tell without seeing it directly, based on the intel of the outpost’s layout, I surmised that it was the barracks. I kept feeling around until my magic pressed up against what felt suspiciously like waterproofed canvas. That had to be one of the medical tents.

“We’re in business.” I moved towards one of the tents and brushed the simple fabric flap of a door aside. I felt around with my magic. No casualties on the stretchers. No one sitting or standing inside the tent, as far as I could tell. I uncloaked us.

“Alright, kid,” Bellwether whispered. “Grab everything. Keep an eye out for that stuff we used on your leg. It’s handy to have.”

I searched the field hospital, scanning the storage racks, rummaging through drawers and lockers as quickly and quietly as I could. I used my levitation to float everything that looked useful into my duffel bag, while Bellwether scooped hooffuls of gauze, bandages and peroxide into his. I searched through drawer after drawer, until finally, I happened upon a set of syringes and IV bags that looked suspiciously like what had been used to mend my wounded leg, with pictograms of bone breaks alongside cleomanni gibberish. I carefully wrapped them up and tossed them in, as well.

That was when all hell broke loose. I turned just in time to see a rifle brush aside the opening to the tent.

“Anzala Ekkestreun!” the cleomanni guardsman shouted.

I quickly centered him in my field of view and used my levitation to trigger my beamcaster. The twin ball-turrets on my shoulders swiveled, locked and fired a pair of piercing emerald beams that drilled through the guard’s helmet. He collapsed in a heap, thin wisps of smoke rising from the charred holes in his facepiece. Shortly thereafter, we could hear the characteristic accusatory howling of the base’s siren.

“Oh shit,” I muttered.

Bellwether pulled his knife from his shoulder sheath with his mouth and ripped an improvised side exit into the tent with one big slash. I quickly followed him through it. We darted around the perimeter, between the rear of the barracks and the fence, while the guards responded to the commotion in the tent. I cloaked us and we went straight to the motor pool. I followed the smell of diesel and soot, feeling around until my magic touched what felt like off-road tires. We surreptitiously boarded one of the armored cars, finding its hatch unlocked and the coast relatively clear.

Once we were inside the vehicle, I uncloaked us again. The armored car’s white livery and interior configuration seemed to suggest that it was a medevac vehicle, but otherwise, it was similar to the other Pursuer we’d captured, minus the crew-served gun. While I stowed our bags, Bellwether reached under the armored car’s console and ripped out a colorful bundle of wires, hotwiring it faster than I could say nipple twister. I was almost stunned at how dexterous he was with his hooves, teeth and tongue. It sent a slight thrill down my spine, thinking of their other possible uses. Then I remembered he was kind of a dickhead and my enthusiasm waned.

“Now we’ve got two Pursuer six-by-sixes,” Bellwether said. “If you’re up for sneaking back over and driving the other one, that is.”

“Yes, sir!”

“That’s the spirit.”

I hauled ass out of the armored car, immediately finding myself face-to-face with two very alarmed Confederate guardsmen armed with pulse rifles. The sleek Confederate pulseguns were a newer development, part of a gradual phase-out of flechette weapons and their eventual replacement with miniaturized plasma pulse technology; a modernization plan that stalled due to cost overruns and disappointing field trials that revealed the weapons’ maintenance-heavy nature. They worked by subliming metastable metallic hydrogen into a gas, heating and ionizing it before projecting it as a focused stream of energy with magnetic fields.

The guardsmen shouted angrily in Ardun, raising their weapons and moving for cover. I cursed and launched myself into a rolling dive as hot blue streaks of plasma singed my flank. They’d taken cover behind another of the armored cars, taking blind potshots at me. I levitated out the flechette gun and cloaked it, slipping it past their cover and blasting them from behind with a full-auto spray of flechettes. They panicked and stumbled out from behind the vehicle, one of them bleeding from a wound to the leg.

I dashed out into the open and put beams into both of them. One fell to the ground, dead. The other crawled across the dirt, leveling his gun at me. With a shove of my levitation, I pushed the muzzle of his weapon aside before he could let loose with a volley of plasma that would’ve cooked my face off. I quickly closed the distance. Without hesitation, I brought my armored boots down upon the guardsman’s head with a sickening crunch. He wouldn’t be getting back up for a while, if ever.

I heard shouting from a distant corner of the base, prompting me to go invisible again. I only had about a minute or two of invisibility left. Moving this quickly while maintaining the spell strained my concentration faster than normal. When I arrived at the vehicle we’d abandoned, I was fortunate to find that the cleomanni had left it unguarded in their haste. I imagined the enemy racing on foot through the camp to try and find those damnable pony intruders who were in the process of making themselves some medical supplies and one armored car richer.

I boarded the crew cab of the armed Pursuer, squirming into the oversized driver’s seat as I uncloaked. My hind legs couldn’t reach the pedals. I tried scooting down so my hooves just barely brushed them, but then, I couldn’t see over the dashboard.

“How in the fuck does Bellwether drive this thing?”

I returned to a more upright position and resigned myself to using my magic. I turned the key, put the vehicle into gear and worked the throttle with my levitation magic, bringing the wheel around and accelerating directly away from the compound. That got their attention. It wasn’t long before dozens of Flechettes rang the vehicle’s hull like a gong.

Through the armored viewports, I could see Bellwether approaching from the rear, similarly assailed from all sides. There were bright pinpricks of light from muzzle flashes in the midst of the dust kicked up by his tires. Bellwether veered right and rammed his vehicle through the wooden supports of a guard tower, sending the machine gun nest and its screaming occupant toppling to the ground.

After he smashed through the front gate, I watched him turn and run over one unfortunate cleomanni guardsman. Even from within my own Pursuer’s armored hull, I could hear the crunch of bone and body armor beneath his wheels. I laughed like a madmare. There was no stopping us, now. My elation turned to panic when I heard a rattling cacophony overhead. A large contragrav drone whizzed over us, appearing briefly as a white blur in my front viewport.

“Enemy air,” I shouted over my helmet’s radio. “They’re coming around for another pass!”

Bellwether acknowledged by clicking his mic twice, sending bursts of static. Then, there was a tremendous thumping noise that reverberated through the vehicle’s hull. I yanked the wheel hard. Dust and falling debris obscured my viewport as a string of high-explosive automatic cannon shells kicked up dirt on the edge of the road. They were strafing us. I had to think fast. After a few seconds, I decided on a plan. I was only going to get one shot at this.

“Bellwether, bring your vehicle into direct contact with mine!” I yelled into my microphone.

“Why?”

“Just do it!”

I hit the brakes, bringing the armored car to a halt. I felt the vehicle jerk forward as his bullbars impacted the rear bumper. Using what little remained of my willpower, I reached out and extended my magic field to encompass both of our vehicles. We were plunged into pitch-darkness as I redirected the photons around us. Both of our vehicles winked out of view. The drone settled into a hover directly in front of us, its operator no doubt somewhat confused as to how two armored scout cars could have simply vanished. Neither of us could see it, but we could certainly hear it.

Holding a hoof out in front of me and navigating by feel, I crawled back to the crew-served gun, lining up my sights with the source of the rattling noise. Just in time, too. There was a thunderclap of pain in my head as my spell field collapsed, exposing us. However, the failure of my magic allowed me to see the drone and quickly line it up in my sights. Lacking the magic to use my levitation, I depressed the trigger with one hoof while holding a spade grip in the other.

“Die, motherfucker!” I shouted.

The fifty-caliber armor-piercing incendiary rounds shattered the drone’s lightweight composite armor. One of the spars holding a contragrav drive split like balsa wood and the drone plummeted to the ground. It pancaked into the terrain approximately a hundred meters ahead of us, kicking up puffs of smoke and tossing fragments of fiber-reinforced plastic everywhere as it thrashed madly on the ground like a thing possessed, its other three drives unbalanced for the lack of a fourth.

“Good work, Sergeant,” Bellwether spoke over the radio.

I crawled back to the driver’s seat, settling in for the long haul. It was then that I realized that I’d burnt out my horn. I lacked the strength to perform levitation magic, which was necessary for me to even drive the Pursuer at all.

I tapped the push-to-talk button on the side of my helmet. “Sir, this is going to sound like a stupid question,” I said.

“Go ahead, Sergeant Storm,” he responded over the radio.

“How do you reach the controls on these things?”

Bellwether cackled. “It helps if you have a fifth leg.”

It took a moment for me to fully process what he said. “Seriously?”

“No. In case you haven’t noticed, I’m just plain bigger than you are and have more reach. What’s the matter? Hornskull lost her magic?”

“This is no time for wisecracks. They’re right on our tail!”

“That didn’t answer my question, Sergeant.”

“You’re right. I can’t do magic right now.”

Bellwether let out a long, static-filled sigh over the radio, before dismounting from the medevac APC with the captured supplies slung over his withers. We had to abandon the second armored car, and it was all because of me. My shoulders slumped dejectedly. As Bellwether took his place behind the wheel, I scooted back to the crew-served weapon, opening the belt box to see how many rounds I had left before I’d have to reload it again. It wasn’t nearly as many as I would have liked.

Bellwether brought the vehicle to a stop near the wreckage of the drone. “Grab that piece of shit and toss it in here, Sergeant. We ain’t goin’ home empty-hooved.”

“Yes, sir.”

I stepped out of the armored car’s side hatch, looking over the wreckage of the drone. It was once a surgical white in color with some Confederate-blue accents, now caked with dirt and grime after its fight to the death with the ground. I wrapped my hooves around the central fuselage of the drone, and, with some effort, started dragging it, digging furrows in the dirt road. Every inch felt like a mile. Sweat beaded on my brow. The thing easily weighed half a ton, even in pieces. By any reasonable measure, this was earth pony-grade grunt work that strained my slender unicorn frame.

“Sir, this cocksucker’s too heavy. And too big. I don’t know if I can get it through the hatch.”

“Break it down. Take the micro-fusion reactor and the repulsors. And grab that cannon, too. Leave the rest of that shit behind.”

It was time to put that legendary pony strength to use. I did as instructed, seizing one of spars that held the contragrav drives in my hooves and snapping the hollow composite monocoque frame clean apart with a hearty tug. Even though it’d been a month, and even though I’d had the best treatment available, my leg still hurt like hell. I was beginning to wonder if I’d have to live out the rest of my years like this.

“I’m still healing from my injuries, y’know!” I said.

“Don’t be a big crybaby, Storm,” Bellwether muttered. “Just do it.”

After breaking the other two spars, I braced myself and pulled free the 20mm automatic cannon with a throaty grunt, tearing it right from its gimbaled mount by pulling the heads of eight hardened steel retaining bolts right through the thin sheet metal they were secured to. The Confederacy sure didn’t build these things to Equestrian standards of robustness.

That made the central fuselage section a lot lighter, down to about a hundred and fifty kilos for both pieces. Reasonable enough. I picked up the fuselage with the reactor—along with the cannon plus its loading mechanism and ammo magazine—and stuffed them into the APC’s cramped troop bay as best as I could. Then, I grabbed the drone’s contragrav repulsors and tossed them next to the rest of the junk before mounting back up on the turret.

“I’ve loaded what useful bits of wreckage will fit into the APC,” I said. “Are you sure this is a good idea? What about the transponder?”

“We’re gonna meet up with some of the techs on the way back. They’ll take care of it.”

“Whatever you say, chief.” I shrugged.

I brought the gun around. The other Pursuer, the one we’d left behind at the base’s motor pool, was chasing us. A couple cleomanni guardsmen were hanging off the sides, firing their guns wildly in our direction. I laughed at the spectacle, before opening fire right at their grille. After a few short bursts of fifty-caliber fire, their engine belched a roiling gout of flame as the incendiary rounds smashed through the block. The armored car swerved, veering off the road and into a ditch, whereupon it promptly rolled over, crushing the unfortunate guardsmen on the outside.

“I thought these things were supposed to be armored!” I yelled.

“Yeah, against ponies throwing rocks,” Bellwether said.

I felt less safe knowing that my conveyance was, yet again, cleomanni trash made by the lowest bidder. I scanned the terrain, firing suppressive bursts at the muzzle flashes I spotted in the dust cloud behind us. Eventually, the snap-crackle of incoming fire faded over the churning roar of the Pursuer’s diesel, with columns of smoke from the short and violent engagement left hanging off in the distance. I released a breath that I hadn’t realized I’d been holding the entire time, slumping back in the turret ring.

// … end transmission …

Record 06//Recognition

//HOL CRY SWT
//CHECKSUM READ
//CHECKSUM GOOD

//WARN

// … command not recognized …

// … directory write-locked …

//WARN

//EXT DEVICE DISCONNECTED

run killjoy#xap

//KILLJOY - by Killteam

//Enter run killjoy#xap -h for list of commands.

run killjoy#xap -h

//-h: view this list, -s: full scan, -q: quick scan, -n: scan without quarantine, -l : save log

run killjoy#xap -s

//1 virus found and quarantined:

//Worm.Eohippus64

run holcryreader#xap -r

// … resuming operation …

Desert Storm

When we got back to Camp Crazy Horse, they gave us a heroes’ welcome. Well, Bellwether got one, anyway. Out of the corner of my eye, I spied him posing for the crowd of Charger techs and rebel troops, rearing up and flexing his forelegs. Strutting his stuff.

My first impression of him was all wrong. Here, I thought he was the aloof, mysterious old-timer type, but it was increasingly clear to all concerned that he still had a bit of his youth in him. Too much youth. Playing the part of the brooding loner, I stuck to the sidelines, polishing the lenses on my beamcasters with a cloth before snapping the dust covers shut. My levitation had returned about halfway back to the base, along with a splitting headache.

“Figures,” I muttered. “Magic. Always works when you don’t actually need it.”

“A famous writer once said that violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.”

I whipped my head around to see Crookneck standing beside me, sipping a mug of coffee, his forelegs shaky.

“Damn, you people keep sneaking up on me,” I said. “Trying to give me a heart attack?”

Crookneck ignored my complaints. “You used to hear the anti-war types say it all the time. ‘Violence is the easy way out. Do better than that. Be stronger.’ But is it, really? Look all around you, Sergeant. Radar technicians, mechanics, artificial muscle experts, optics technicians, gunnery experts, officers, intel analysts, infantry, grenadiers, mortar crews, artillery crews, not to mention pilots like yourself. All these unique, diverse and specialized roles we’re divided into. War isn’t easy. Not at all. It’s hard fucking work.”

“Wow,” I grinned. “You actually swore.”

Crookneck laughed. “I have my moments.”

I let out a sigh. “It’s even harder to fight a war when you’ve already lost it.”

“Now, now, we’re not in as dire of straits as you think. Come into my office. I’d like to discuss a few things.”

I shrugged my shoulders, slinging my beamcaster over my withers before following the elderly scientist into the base’s depths. We went through passageway after passageway. The halls got darker. The concrete, grimier. The air turned thick and musty, with a tang of rust. We headed into the oldest, least-maintained section of the base. I glanced at my hooves and the filth that’d accumulated on the floor over the years, and after this momentary distraction, I looked up, and Crookneck was gone.

“Squash?” I said. “Hello?”

I peered around the corner of a concrete stanchion, through the open double doors. I was rewarded with a view of what appeared to be an uncharacteristically warm and inviting living room. The pillars supporting the vaulted ceiling were cladded in wood. Throw rugs were strewn about in sufficient numbers to form what was almost a patchwork carpeting over the concrete. The bohemian space reeked of that same heady booze-’n’-cigs aroma from back at the Regence Hotel. It was very much unlike the bare, utilitarian decor in the other regions of the base. There was a sofa and a coffee table littered with various magazines. Curious, I inspected the covers, and what I saw made my eyes go a-rolling. Lad mags and pop science, naturally. There was also a rather conspicuous pile of books next to the sofa.

“Squash?” I called out, looking over my shoulder.

A yellow form burst from the book pile, startling me. Squash’s face was one of sheer, unadulterated ecstasy. “Finally, the drugs are kicking in!”

The old stallion lunged. I looped a foreleg around his neck and gently wrestled him to the floor, like we learned in combatives training.

“What did you take?” I said.

“Acid. Mostly lysergic acid. And coffee! Lots and lots and lots of lovely coffee!”

“You trying to fuck yourself up, or what?”

“Yes, that’s precisely the idea!” he spoke, slobbering all over my foreleg in the process.

I let him stand and he immediately started pacing around the room, his eyes darting every which way.

“No, I don’t mean in a good way,” I said. “I mean the more permanent kind of fucked up. That combination sounds like a recipe for a heart attack. Both of those raise your heart rate and constrict your blood vessels. A kid can handle it, but someone your age? Come on, man.”

“I—“ The engineer blanched. “Damn, you’re right. I never thought about it that way. Ahh, whatever. I’ve been doing this since I was twenty. I’ve got a bit of resistance, else we wouldn’t be talking like this. Me and you and the colorful little gremlins dancing around your hooves, you beautiful mare, you.”

Hoof, meet face. “Uhh, why? Just why? Why do this to yourself?”

“Where do you think we got the inspiration for all these neat toys? It’s a messy enough business crafting cutting-edge weaponry while high. I can’t imagine what it’d be like to do it while sober!”

“Yeah, great. What the hell is this place?”

“I told you, my office.” He waved me over. “Come, come, there is much work to be done!”

Crookneck led me up the spiral stairs to a paper-strewn loft. There were a couple drafting tables in one corner. Astride the tables sat high stacks of books and binders. On the opposite wall, there was a counter with a hotplate that was heating a vacuum coffee maker. Hanging on the wall were propaganda posters from the war, along with a number of framed group photos. Upon closer inspection, the subjects of these photos were scientists, engineers, and Charger crews. Pilots wearing syncsuits, freshly returned from their test-runs and bearing the sort of shit-eating grin that can only come from putting a state-of-the-art war machine through its paces.

“Who are these ponies?” I said, pointing to one photo with a shifty, restless-looking pilot in the lineup. “I recognize Sierra in this one, but none of the rest.”

“Sergeant, you stand in Test Site 7, today known as Camp Crazy Horse. This very facility was where we designed the prototype Mirage units. Our manufacturing facilities and parts suppliers shipped us the components from abroad, but the final builds were all assembled and tested here, under the utmost secrecy. That includes yours, of course.” Crookneck waved a hoof over the photos, a sullen look descending over his face. “Test pilots. Engineers. I knew these ponies well. Regretfully, most of them will not be joining us today, or ever.”

“I’m sorry.” Pangs of contrition gripped my heart. These were my comrades, too. Even if I didn’t know them, I had once relied on them.

“Not to worry.” He sniffled. “I’m at least sixty percent confident that we’ll be able to find the Empress and free her from captivity with the forces we have. Or will soon have, I suppose.”

“So, I bet you know a thing or two about the history of Chargers.” I hoped to take Crookneck’s mind off of darker things. It was never a good idea to let someone who was high as a kite start ruminating on the bad times. They’d get over-emotional. “They never told us in training where the idea to build ‘em originally came from, except for the usual boilerplate about the unveiling of the very first Charger. They’ve been a mainstay of our forces for centuries, but no textbook I’ve ever read has ever explained where the original concept came from. I was hoping you might shed some light on that.”

Crookneck smiled. “You know of the first Charger, right? The example from which all others are derived.”

“In 1305 SSC, the Twilight Conclave presented the Sword Bayonet H4 to a crowd of cheering onlookers.” I recited it from memory, reverting to that same patronizing tone of voice my instructors had used. “The war had been going for a couple centuries at that point. We didn’t have anything that could counter the Confederacy’s assault walkers. We rushed them with tanks and had pegasus Stormtroopers entangle their legs with steel cable, but it wasn’t enough. We didn’t have anything that could go toe-to-toe with one on the ground. Back then, separate Charger weight classes didn’t exist. The Sword Bayonet would’ve been classed as a Rouncey or middleweight Charger, if there was such a category at the time.”

“Exactly right,” Crookneck said. “We took captured samples of superior Confederate technology and combined it with our knowledge of magic. The fusion of the two produced a magtech vehicle that exceeded the limitations of both. It took decades of research and considerable effort from the scientists of the time. There were major contributions from the Mother of Magtech herself, Twilight Sparkle.” Crookneck withdrew some folded, yellowed sheets of paper from a filing cabinet and set them out flat on a drafting table. “I had these printouts made from the old, archived files a few decades back when I was just starting out. It’s the drawings and technical data for the Sword Bayonet. Take a look!”

Gazing into the prints, I soon realized how little I knew about mechanical engineering. If one were to give me a wrench, I could fix a bicycle easily enough. If someone asked me the fine details about how a Charger actually worked, I wouldn’t be able to give them anything more substantial than a basic overview.

The cross-sectional views of each component revealed layers of complexity that I was completely unfamiliar with. There were wireways and bearings and structural members forming inscrutable arrays that crisscrossed the sheet. There were so many parts, no one engineer could hope to keep track of them all.

“It looks pretty advanced to me,” I said. “Almost like I could take one into combat today.” I smiled uneasily as Crookneck raised an eyebrow at that statement.

“Looks can be deceiving.” Crookneck flipped through the prints and pointed out various features of the ancient Charger. “The H4 had no Anima System. Every part of it was manually controlled. The actuators weren’t duostrand. Instead, hydraulic gear pumps provided motive power. As a result, the unit’s legs weren’t afforded the flexibility or range of motion of artificial muscle. Those early Chargers could adjust their gait for rough terrain but couldn’t handle too steep of grades or too uneven of surfaces. Modern-day Coursers like yours are much faster and more flexible.”

Squash snatched up a small controller in his hooves and clicked on a nearby holo-tank. A full-color image was projected in mid-air. Archive footage of the Sword Bayonet. As he said, its movements were more rigid and clumsier than any modern Charger. The dynamic gait system struggled on hills, the legs flexing and shifting the unit’s center of gravity as it scrambled to gain purchase. It looked more like a giant robot and less like a living thing.

I frowned. “Huh. What did it have for weapons?”

“Back then, infantry beamcasters were still rough around the edges. Vehicle-mounted models weren’t quite ready for primetime. The tech didn’t scale up as well as we thought it would.” The elderly engineer pointed to the head of the Charger on the diagram. “The Sword Bayonet was equipped with a Magforcer in the head, as the sole secondary armament. It was also outfitted with two back-mounted autoloading one-oh-five-millimeter guns.

“The big guns had a reload time of about three seconds, so with alternating fire, it could put a shell downrange every second and a half, but the burst limit was ten rounds a minute, to extend the barrel life. The tertiary weapons consisted of ordinary fifty-caliber machine guns in four turreted pods on the hull, providing 360-degree coverage against enemy infantry. Those had an early auto-targeting system which, while very accurate at tracking life signs, was responsible for some fairly infamous blue-on-blue incidents due to spotty IFF capabilities.”

“Magforcer?” I said. “What’s that?”

“They were before your time, and mine, for that matter. It was an early type of spell locus that greatly enhanced certain kinds of arcane-type magic. It required a lot of specialized training to handle. A skilled unicorn could use it to project powerful pulses of sheer levitation force. Enough to send armored men flying, or flip over a battle tank. An especially masterful pilot could even use it to manifest weapons of arcane force. Giant lances made from magic. Siege crossbows structured from congealed light with bolts made from the same. Things like that.”

“That sounds kick-ass!” I was giddy, grinning from ear to ear. “Why don’t we use ‘em anymore?”

A worried frown developed on Crookneck’s face. “Well, that’s because we found that if a pilot burned out while using one, the sudden arcane tidal forces could actually rip the head of a Charger clean off. That was the best-case scenario. Sometimes, it took the legs off, too. When that happened, usually, you had to call a cleanup crew to hose what was left of the pilot out of the interior of the cockpit. Magforcer feedback accidents turned good ponies, even veteran pilots, into a spray of tomato paste.”

I blanched. “Oh.”

“The descendants of the magforcer are still in use today; they’re the spell locuses found on every Charger. And before you ask, no, they don’t make unicorns explode.”

“Well, that’s good to hear.” I nodded, swallowing the lump of horror that had formed in my throat.

“You’re an Illusion expert, right? I would assume so, given that cloaking is your specialty, and your Charger is equipped with an Illusion spell locus.”

“That’s right.”

“As a unicorn, you should know of the six schools of magic in the Modern Craft,” Crookneck said.

“Arcane, Elemental, Light, Dark, Order, and Chaos,” I rattled off with practiced ease. “Three pairs of opposites. How did ol’ Cicatrice used to say it? Arcane magic’s how you get your credential, and Elemental arts are raw nature’s potential. Light forms the blessed power to heal, while Dark is the curse that conceals. Order makes a firm and stalwart companion, and Chaos leads one into wild abandon.”

Squash laughed. “What a sucky rhyme. Did Cicatrice torture all his students with that fourth-grader garbage, or just you?”

“All of us.” I blushed and scratched my head sheepishly.

“Wow. Well, as I’m sure you know even better than I do, Storm, Illusion magic is a combination of Order and Dark. Probably one of the least dangerous kinds of dark magic to use, actually. It won’t make you go mad, at least.”

“That’s what our teachers said, yeah.”

“Well, for each and every possible combination of two of the six schools of magic, there exists a spell locus. There are also six master types of locus for enhancing magic deriving purely from one of each school. Twenty-one permutations in all. What we found was that the failure of the Magforcer was due to our incomplete understanding of magic at the time.

“The Magforcer was very similar in some respects to a Pure Arcane Master Locus, but ponies were being trained to use it to summon constructs of light. Summoning is a discipline forged by the combination of Elemental and Order magic. In other words, the Magforcer was dangerously out of alignment with the operator’s magic signature, similar to an untuned locus. This is what created the feedback effects seen during spell failure.”

“Wait a minute, Squash. Are you saying that any modern spell locus can make your head blow up if it’s not tuned properly?”

“No, no, no.” Crookneck waved a hoof dismissively. “Have you been listening to a single word I’ve said? It’s impossible. Our predecessors worked with teams of skilled enchanters. They designed all sorts of safeties to prevent that from happening. In the event of spell failure, a modern locus would detect feedback precipitation within milliseconds. At that point, the micro-controller would trip an override and open the breaker, cutting power to the locus instantly. The worst you get is a splitting headache, or maybe a nosebleed. In short, a locus is somewhat like an artificial unicorn. It takes electrical power from a Charger’s reactor and converts it into raw magic that the pilot can direct with their own. It augments your spells.

“You see, unicorns are far more efficient at turning exertion, or work in a thermal energy sense, into magic. It takes many megawatts of electricity to accomplish with a locus, electro-magical transducer, or diagrammatic engine what takes a unicorn only some tens of joules and their own natural metabolism. However, the reactors found in Chargers have more than enough power to spare, efficiency be damned. What made ponies turn into a shower of steaming gore after experiencing spell failure while using a Magforcer was nothing more and nothing less than them playing magical tug-of-war with, well, a hundred-megawatt polywell reactor. Ker-splat.”

Crookneck’s casual description of it made me shudder and gag. That would have been a terrible fate for any Charger pilot. I silently gave thanks to my predecessors for the sacrifices they made to advance the tech to the point where it was safe to use.

Something in the corner of my eye caught my attention. On the other drafting table, there were blueprints for what looked like a new type of Destrier. I squinted at the scale and the dimensions for the machine and quickly realized that it was twice the size of any Destrier that ever existed.

“What the hell is that?” I said, pointing a hoof at the drawing.

“That?” Crookneck tilted his head quizzically. “Oh, it’s something I doodled a while back.”

I frowned. I could tell he wasn’t being sincere with me. This was no doodle. This was the result of months or even years of careful design work and re-iteration.

“No, seriously,” I said. “What is it?”

The engineer’s expression was grim. “Empress Sparkle and the Twelve Magisters put forth some specifications for a new type of Charger. We were undecided on what to call them; a Super-Destrier, or a Brabant. Two hundred metric tons or more. Too big and heavy to move with existing transport ships. We would’ve had to design new ones. It’s a super-heavy assault unit. Something for breaking Confederate siege lines and dealing with their Behemoths.”

I was slack-jawed. “How close were we to building these things?”

“First prototype’s scheduled date of completion was about a year ago. For obvious reasons, it was never finished. As you can see in the drawings, it was supposed to mount heavy rotary railguns that were impossible to fit on anything smaller. The biggest problem with railguns with a muzzle energy over ninety megajoules is dealing with the recoil. That’s doubly true for fully automatic examples. Our recoil mitigation tech based on a levitation-enchanted diagrammatic engine kept running into trouble. It ended up delaying the whole project.”

Squash monologued in great detail about his Chargers, but there was something quite off about his mannerisms, especially the way his eyes seemed to track things that weren’t there. I found it amazing how he could maintain his composure so well while hallucinating.

I frowned. “What’s the problem with the gun, exactly?”

“Well, Sergeant, sometimes, the recoil mitigation system would hold the guns and their components too steady. This would jam the feed mechanism.”

“That’s silly.” I pointed to my horn. “It’s like unicorn magic, right? Just restrict the field to the non-moving parts.”

“That’s the problem. Controlling the field precisely and having it grab onto the support frame itself was no issue. That is, it wasn’t a problem when the weapons were in their inert, disarmed state. As soon as they were armed and then discharged, the electromagnetic interference from the guns disrupted the extremely sensitive levitation field controller. The fields started to roam and seize whatever they wanted, including the linkless feed system.

“One stationary live-fire test went so poorly, the asymmetric forces of the warped levitation field caused the mount for the rotary railgun prototype to tear itself from the test stand. Luckily, it ripped the power cables out when the gun flew uprange. Before it stopped firing, it also put a few holes in the reinforced concrete ceiling of our test bunker. The projectiles came down in a populated area four hundred kilometers away.”

My eyes widened. “Oh. Shit.”

“Shit is right, Sergeant. Deep and especially fragrant shit. The newspaper clippings adorned our bulletin board for months afterward. One very surprised mare had the contents of her shopping cart scattered around the entire supermarket. She told the reporters that her eleven-month-old son had leapt out of the foal seat and she’d gone halfway across the store chasing after him. Then, an explosion shook the building.

“When she investigated, the roof had caved in and there was a crater where her cart was. No injuries or deaths resulted from this incident, but think about the mess it would’ve made if her kid was still in that cart.”

“A crater? Are you serious?”

“Very much so, I’m afraid. You have no idea what kind of a PR disaster that was for us. Rounds escaping a test range? Completely unacceptable. There was an internal investigation, and a few of my best technicians nearly lost their jobs over that one. A couple of them got transferred off the project, somewhere else, working on things less volatile.”

“That’s odd.” I tapped a hoof to my chin. “I thought railgun projectiles were non-explosive?”

“A tungsten dart traveling at seventeen times the speed of sound carries with it the energy of an anti-tank missile. An impact against solid matter releases that energy with a flash of light, heat, and a shockwave, like chemical explosives. If she’d been standing in the same aisle, the fragmentation alone would’ve killed her deader than a doornail. After that whole debacle, some joker spray-painted Grocery Getter on the receiver of the prototype gun.”

I laughed. “I know this probably sounds strange coming from a Charger pilot, but what’s the purpose of such a powerful weapon to begin with? It sounds like it belongs on a cruiser, if anything.”

“Straight to the point, eh?” Crookneck smirked. “We designed these guns to penetrate the armor of a Behemoth at a distance of a hundred kilometers. A burst from the rotary railguns would saturate an area the size of a hoofball field at that range. As long as we had precise coordinates to work with, a hit was practically guaranteed. It would only take a few coordinated volleys to put the target out of commission for good.”

It seemed bizarrely excessive to me, somehow. There should’ve been a simpler solution for dealing with our enemy’s largest walking machines.

“How about going with a standard, breech-loader railgun and closing in to take a precise, direct shot? Why bother with a multi-barrel, rotary design if it produces unmanageable recoil?”

“We thought of that, at first. Our simulations showed that counter-artillery fire from the average Behemoth would have crippled the Super-Destrier nine times out of ten, sometimes before they even had a chance to deploy the guns. No. We needed enough distance to evade early detection, and complete target saturation.”

“Airstrikes?”

“Impossible. Behemoths have long-range surface-to-air missiles, in-air SONAR, infrared warning systems, and anti-stealth radar using entangled photons. Our aircraft were always shot down long before they got close enough to bomb them. Only tasking ships with orbital beamcaster bombardment proved even remotely effective, but behemoth deployments are often paired with orbital fleet cover for that specific reason. Can’t quite knock ‘em out without getting through their ships, first.”

“Dude. Drone swarms.”

“Nope. Behemoths also have a very advanced ECM and anti-drone countermeasure system. They also have mortars that fire non-nuclear EMP charges into the air. The damn things airburst and wipe out the electronics on drones from hundreds of meters away. We had teams experimenting with hardened drones, but it was all tentative stuff.”

“Why not counteract the recoil with a pyrojet?” I offered with a chuckle.

Crookneck froze, dumbfounded. “What?”

“Put one or more pyrojets on the gun assembly, facing in the opposite direction and producing an equal counter-recoil thrust on the same axis as the railgun itself, and there you have it. Recoilless railguns. Maybe have the Charger’s own pyrojets chip in, too. Angle them up to provide downforce and keep the Charger’s feet on the ground when the gun array is level and in direct-fire mode. When the gun is elevated to hit distant targets, angle them down to prevent the recoil from overwhelming the joints and duostrand and crushing the legs flat.”

Crookneck’s eyes were wide as he worked his jaw silently. “Sergeant, has anyone told you that you’re a damned genius? That’s crazy. And it just might work, too. I’ll have to draw it up!”

A pyrojet-based counter-recoil device. I had no idea what the hell I was talking about, but it seemed like a good idea at the time, and in his semi-addled state, Crookneck seemed to like it. The more I stopped and thought about it, it was almost like something from a comic book. A rotary gun facing one way, and a rocket facing the other. No subtlety at all. Like an ADHD foal’s crayon drawing.

Equestrian Chargers came in three weight classes. The Courser, the Rouncey, and the Destrier. Coursers, like mine, were light, agile, twenty to forty-ton machines. They were designed for reconnaissance and penetrating deep behind enemy lines. Rounceys were the most common. Middleweight, fifty to seventy-ton Chargers that formed an army’s backbone, augmenting tank platoons with direct-fire support. Destriers were the largest, slowest and most heavily armed, for when you needed to call in the big guns. Monstrosities massing from eighty to a hundred tons, carrying heavy artillery like what you’d find on a starship.

None of them were as big, as heavy, or as slow, as a Confederate Behemoth; massive quadrupedal or hexapod spider tanks that towered over thirty meters high, massed hundreds or even thousands of metric tons, and bristled with guns and missiles of all shapes and sizes, with advanced targeting and detection suites that knew exactly where to direct them. The only way for a Charger to stop a Behemoth was with hit-and-run attacks. Otherwise, we spotted for the orbital artillery that would deal it the killing blow.

They had smaller, bipedal walkers, too. Goliaths, they called them. They came in various models. The Ifrit, with its sloping torso, plasma pulsecannon, and barrier-demolishing plasma sword, was the most common. Goliaths weren’t much of a threat to even the most basic Charger. A skilled enemy pilot could catch us unawares every now and then, but most of the time, they used numeric superiority to try and swamp us. Most Goliaths featured tracking pods and laser designators that allowed them to operate as glorified forward-observer units, their armaments serving to stall us just long enough for Confederate aircraft to carpet-bomb us.

Both Goliaths and Behemoths were classified by the Confederacy as Assault Walkers. The earliest Chargers were partly derived from captured and reverse-engineered examples of AWs. However, over the course of the past millennium, our technology had evolved along entirely different lines. In many ways, our tech surpassed theirs.

For what our Chargers lacked in armor and firepower compared to a Behemoth, they were almost supernaturally fast and agile, leaping through the air and sprinting across the plains with their pyrojet booster exhausts flaring like a pegasus’s wings. But here, right before me, was a design for a Charger that could have taken even a Behemoth in a stand-up fight. I shook my head. If only the war had gone on for a few more years, we would’ve had weapons that could have turned the tide. If only. The very idea made me restless.

“My Charger,” I muttered, gathering up a copy of the laminated parts list from a nearby table. “When can we go hunt down these parts? Because I don’t know about you guys, but I’m getting real fucking sick of hoofing it everywhere like some grunt.”

“There’s a lot more walking where that came from, Sergeant. You’ll have access to our captured vehicles and support from the Bull Runner for the insertion phase of most operations. The rest of the time, you’re going to be infiltrating and securing areas on the hoof before we can bring in our heavy equipment to haul the goods out of there.”

“Wait.” I paused. “If you guys have all these technical drawings here, why are the techs out there scanning bits of my Charger’s old armor plating? Why bother reverse-engineering them from scratch?”

Squash shook his head. “We have some old preliminary drawings here, but we don’t actually have the full, final blueprints for the Mirage. After the LRIP run, no copies of the full prints were kept here. Too sensitive. The Mirage has a lot of classified features. We wrote the prints to holocrystal cards and shipped them out under armed guard, to be kept under lock and key in the secure archives of the Twilight Tower.”

“So why don’t we go get them?” I shrugged.

“Nopony goes there anymore unless they have a death wish. CSF patrols comb the ruins for technology to ransack, and there are regular firefights between them and the Vandals. We’ve intercepted enemy reports that state that there are also automated defense systems at the base of the Twilight Tower and in its sublevels that have gone haywire and recognize everything and everyone as hostile. Even the cleomanni are having a hard time unlocking our secrets.”

“Hey, Squash!” a reedy voice of a mare issued from the entryway, the syllables drawn-out and drunken.

I peered over the balcony. Standing in the double-door entrance was a unicorn mare with a stringy auburn mane, a dark gray coat, a bright red scarf dangling from her neck and a green beanie atop her head. Her tattered, fleece-lined bomber jacket bore a dizzying array of pins and patches, some more obscene than others. She looked like a hobo.

I face-hoofed. “Oh no.”

“Oh yeah!” Sierra blew a bubble with her chewing gum and then popped it. “It’s me. The one and only. I heard you were still kicking, so I came to check up on ya’. See if the stories I’ve been hearing were really true. Did you assholes actually crash-land a Confederate patrol boat out in the desert? And you’re still alive after that? Wow.”

“Yes, Corporal.” I rolled my eyes. “They left me all alone, out in the middle of nowhere, with a broken leg. In a burning wreck. And the ponies who were with me are MIA. Still a little sore over that. Any other stupid questions?”

“Yeah. And as of today, it ain’t Corporal anymore. I’m back up to Sergeant. You must be on your ninth life by now. How long can your luck hold, Storm? If you still have some extra to spare, can you give me some?”

“Fuck you, I ain’t got any!” I held up the laminated card and pointed to the list. “Maybe if you can come up with some of these parts for my poor Dust Devil, I’ll see if I can send some good vibes your way, you filthy-ass gypsy.”

“Don’t be such a downer all the time, Storm. Geez. Too bad about Dust Devil, though. Maybe I could use her for parts.”

I was furious. “If you lay one hoof on my Charger, Sergeant Sierra, you’ll be entering a world of pain.”

“I was kidding, Stormy.” Sierra held up her hooves like she didn’t want any trouble. “Bellwether already gave me the rundown, and I’m ready and on-hoof to provide support for your salvage ops. I’ve got Scofflaw with me, and he’s as pumped as I am to rain hot death on some Confederate fuckballs.”

“Wonderful,” I said. “Maybe the Confederate troops will take one look at him and go blind.”

“That’s kinda the whole idea. Put their eyes out with some frag.” Sierra chewed idly. “You wanna hang, guys? I’ve got the good shit.”

“More contraband, Sierra?” I pinched the bridge of my snout with a fetlock. “Remember what happened last time?”

“Hey, do you wanna, or not?”

“I will!” Crookneck waved a hoof.

As he started down the stairs, I reached out and grabbed hold of his shoulder, lowering my voice to the level of a whisper. “Do you know how she got busted down to Corporal and almost kicked out of the Army?”

“How?”

“She was high on some kind of synthetic cleomanni drug cocktail that the Zinsar sell out on the frontier. Well, they’d cut it with something bad, catching her a little unprepared. She was also drunk off her ass, and after stumbling into our transport ship’s mess hall—“

“Galley,” Crookneck corrected.

“Right. The galley. After stumbling into the galley on our transport, swearing incoherently at the top of her lungs, she jumped up on a table, pulled off her uniform, and went.” I gestured for emphasis. “Right there. In full view of everyone. Numbers one and two. Both fucking barrels. Oh, and then she upchucked whatever off-brand floor cleaner she’d been drinking, too. Spewed from both ends simultaneously. I didn’t think it was possible for a pony to have that much fluid in their whole fucking body. I watched Barrage, who famously had an iron stomach, nearly lose his lunch from the smell.”

“I—uhh—too much information, maybe?” Crookneck’s face turned as red as a beet with embarrassment-by-proxy.

“And then, get this. The fucking Commander walks in, of all people, and he sees this shit, and he turns around and walks right out. Didn’t say anything. Hell, he didn’t even look perturbed or angry. Just, completely nonplussed, like he was expecting it to happen sooner or later. A few hours later, she’d come to her senses and had the chance to wash up. She was still shaking and crying like a nervous wreck after she realized how big of an ass she made of herself. The Commander called her into his quarters, and bam.” I clapped my hooves together. “Disciplinary action. Busted a rank, not to mention everything else they made her do. For one thing, cleaning all the toilets on the ship for the rest of her deployment. Oh, and running the fucking floor buffer. Everywhere.”

“Good grief.”

“She got a psych-eval, too. Came up clean, surprisingly, but they warned her that if she brought any more dope onboard, that’d be it for her. She’d be discharged from the Army. Pretty much the only reason why she stuck around is because Charger pilots are worth our weight in gold, especially with the Army’s dwindling numbers towards the end of the war. If we weren’t so desperate for skilled pilots, she would’ve gotten discharged on the spot. Hell, the whole damn military’s had a drug problem and lax policies for decades. There’s only so much shit a pony’s brain can take before they start seeking alternative methods of relief, but Sierra takes it a little too fucking far.”

“Well, she didn’t get booted out, and that’s good enough for me.”

I shook my head. “Squash, I’m warning you, right now. You do shit with her, you’re going down a dark path. Make sure it’s just cannabis, and not fucking cleomanni urinal cakes or whatever the fuck that bitch is crushing up and snorting now. I don’t want to come down there and see her chewing your face off.”

“I’m a grown adult, Storm. I can handle my mind-altering substances, thank you very much.”

“You see this?” I waved a hoof towards Sierra, where she was still swaying idly in the doorway on the lower floor, chewing her gum. “Do you see this little fucking nihilist? This is how far a pony can fall when they turn their back on their destiny. This is about as slumped as a pony can get.”

Crookneck shook off my grasp, sighing loudly. “Maybe it’s you who turned your back on her, Sergeant.”

“The way you talk about her, it’s almost like you’re in love. Wait a minute.” I broke into peals of nervous laughter. “Holy shit. Have you two been fucking?”

The wrinkly stallion grinned wider than I imagined possible for a pony’s head. “Maybe?”

“Oh, for the love of fuck.” I shook my head in mock-dismay. “I did not need that mental image.”

He wandered down after her while I pressed my lips into a thin, tight line and shook my head in disapproval. The pair trotted off eagerly, both ready to get stoned out of their minds and fool around. Sierra doubled back and waved, leaning so that only her forward half was visible through the door frame. “Byeee.” She dragged out the vowel to the point where I wanted to strangle her. “You’re no fun, Sarge.”

I raced down the stairs, shouting after them into the hall as they galloped off into the distance. “Don’t forget to use a rubber, Squash! Your dick’ll fall off!”

There was no reply. I huffed. The war had done this to us, towards the end. To hear my parents tell it, decades ago, before I was born, the majority of ponies had never touched a controlled substance in their life. But that was then. These days, many of us would rather retreat into chemical bliss than face reality. Our species was almost gone. Hanging by a tiny thread. The reality was painful. Immensely so. We’d practically allowed narcotics to consume our society. In some ways, the alternative—facing the end of all ponykind while sober and panicking—was so much worse.

Ponies were never hunter-gatherers. We were never that individualistic and prideful. It was our nature as herd-dwellers to flee from violence, not seek it out. We were maladapted to warfare, especially genocidal warfare where the noose tightened around our species’ neck daily. Since we were culturally and psychologically incapable of comprehending what was happening to us, we medicated away the fear, one way or another.

There was never a push for more law enforcement to tamp down on the rising drug crisis. Our state police, in all their utilitarian cynicism, figured out that the cost to society would be greater if they were busy stamping out empire-wide riots from panicking, terrified crowds who feared for their imminent doom, so they let ponies medicate themselves into a stupor. Cleomanni smugglers and opportunists took advantage of the deliberately lax policing. They flooded the market with heroin and fentanyl, among other things. The irony was palpable. I gritted my teeth with rage. Those satyr bastards sold us the very same drugs we needed to escape the pain of what they were doing to us. They lined their pockets with our suffering.

The cleomanni weren’t the sole participants in this seedy sort of economy, however. Out in the fringe colonies, back before the Confederacy wiped most of them out, lots of ponies grew fields of opium and coca. Nothing else offered a good enough value per hectare and the colonies would fail if they didn’t bring in the dough. Any food or supplies they needed, they could buy it from gray market traders while selling off their poppies and coca leaves to itinerant cleomanni for refinement and processing. It was only when our nobles sponsored a colony that they switched to things like cotton, or actual food crops.

And then, there was the matter of Sierra herself. Some ponies called her Hissy Fit, but not to her face. She earned that nickname from when she’d accidentally left her mic keyed in the middle of a battle. She blasted an open channel with a continuous string of profanity while slaughtering an entire Confederate mechanized infantry unit with her Charger’s unconventional ordnance. She insisted the button had become stuck after being gummed up with some kind of filth.

Sierra’s Rouncey was every Charger technician’s nightmare. Scofflaw was a cobbled-together, chimeric mishmash of parts from a half-dozen different Charger models, festooned with choice bits of Equestrian and Confederate vehicle wreckage. Its loadout included improvised weaponry like old mortars and volley guns. Fire control cables hung loosely from the Charger’s legs where they converged on the cockpit and entered the brain of the system. The Charger’s haphazard armaments were just as likely to explode as they were to launch anything downrange with any measure of success. Sierra had customized it herself, over the years, from stuff she’d taken from the battlefield.

They’d written Sierra up for her failure to follow regulations countless times, but the brass went easy on her. More often than not, her bizarre Charger worked, and it worked splendidly. At one point, the Twilight Conclave were even interested in dismantling Scofflaw to figure out why it worked, because as far as they could tell, it shouldn’t. Some theorized that some form of sympathetic magic was the only thing holding the fearsome contraption together. Sierra’s Charger was simultaneously a devastating war machine and also a walking memorial to the vehicle crews, both friend and foe alike, whose sundered machines contributed a tithe of spare parts to it.

What Scofflaw lacked in anti-armor firepower, he more than made up for with the assortment of 80mm mortars and 40mm grenade launchers Sierra had welded to the outside of her machine. Scofflaw could turn any battlefield into cheese with all the frag rounds it spat. Sierra kept the infantry too busy and too suppressed to even think to stop and lock on to us with shoulder-fired anti-tank guided missiles. She played an essential role in my squad. I hated to admit it, but she was an asset.

“What are you doing up here, all alone?”

I froze. I recognized that smooth, slick voice that would make any mare’s skin crawl. I had to still myself, after a moment. My heart was flopping around like a bucket of fish and I was shaking in my boots. The temperature of the room seemed to drop by a few degrees.

A bookcase shimmered and morphed, almost appearing to melt into the floor. In its place stood a suave, indigo-coated stallion. He flicked a hoof at his forelock, arranging it perfectly with the rest of his pink mane.

I saluted crisply. “Lieutenant, sir, I was gathering myself for the next op. Dust Devil’s in no shape to be deployed, yet. We’ve done all we can, but we need some spare parts. I was consulting with Professor Squash to see if we had a plan on how to source those parts. Before I could be suitably briefed, I was interrupted by the arrival of Sergeant Sierra.”

“Ahh, yes.” He grinned. “Don’t you just hate it, Sergeant?” He circled around behind me as I held the salute, before craning his neck over my shoulder. “Don’t you hate it when ponies have fun?”

“No, sir!” I tried not to flinch away from the intrusion on my personal space.

“Really? Define, fun, Sergeant.”

“Fun is priority number one, sir!” My hooves quavered with fear, but I held the salute.

Night Terror smiled in that serpentine way of his. “Very good. So, it seems you do remember. At ease. Walk with me for a bit. Bellwether and his scouts have narrowed down some intel on a possible salvage site. Briefing’s in five.”

I did as directed, falling into formation with him as we both strode out of the lab. I left Crookneck’s copy of the parts checklist behind, since I already had one in my footlocker back in my quarters.

The Lieutenant was a master of hypnosis. His Selene-class Destrier was designed to augment his powers with a spell locus attuned to his blighted magical signature. Night Terror’s magic, his spells—they were a perversion of everything that Equestrian magic stood for. His magic didn’t work the way mine did. I bent light to make myself invisible, even on the move. He fucked with people’s heads to make them see things that weren’t there. Illusion spells weren’t inherently evil, as long as they were used solely to conceal oneself or alter the appearance of objects. But manipulating minds? That crossed a boundary. Full-on dark magic, like the kind used in the Old Crystal Empire.

We all knew how to do it. We’d studied under the watchful eye of the Ninth Magister, Cicatrice. That ill-tempered coot withheld next to nothing from his curriculum. Cicatrice himself could perform the darkest and vilest of dark magic spells with contemptuous ease, but he never came across as crazy. Lecherous and cantankerous, yes, but not exactly evil. Nevertheless, most of his students consciously avoided delving too deep. Without tremendous self-control and emotional stability, dark magic slowly warped you into a monster. An egomaniac, toying with the lives of others without any guilt, and certainly without any remorse.

More than anything, I pitied the Lieutenant. Night Terror had sacrificed his equinity for an unquestioned edge in combat. Psychological warfare was his field of expertise, and fear was his most potent weapon. As for me, I much preferred to stick to chemical warfare. There were far, far worse ways to kill a person than with poison. With nerve gas bomblets, at least you didn’t have to worm your way into your victims’ minds as they died, or share directly in some measure of their fear and pain. Dark magic required both. If you practiced it regularly, you had to learn how to cope with its spell resonance effects, or you would go absolutely mad.

I pawed at the deck nervously. “Sir, if you don’t mind me asking, what’s the supply situation? How is it that Camp Crazy Horse is able to maintain its independence from the rest of the resistance network?”

“I dunno, you tell me, Sergeant. You’ve been here a whole month already. This is some really basic stuff you’re asking me about.”

“Yeah, a whole month confined to the medical ward.” I idly scratched the back of my head with my right hoof. “I feel like a mushroom. Kept in the dark and fed shit.”

“Very well, then. The base runs off a small fusion reactor and we have enough rations, munitions and spare parts stockpiled to keep the fight going for another year or so. We scavenge what we can, so we don’t have to dig into our reserves as much. Charger parts are a bit more specialized than the regular, run-of-the-mill spares, as you know.”

I nodded. “It was a bitch for the mechanics to requisition the stuff when we had intact supply lines, to say nothing of how things are now.”

“That changes tonight,” Night Terror said.

After a few minutes, we arrived at a sparsely appointed, dimly lit room with folding seats arrayed around a U-shaped table. There was a ceiling-mounted projector displaying presentation slides. A far cry from a proper holotank or scryer, but it’d do in a pinch. A few of the infantry team leaders and Charger technicians had already shown up, as did Agent Bellwether, who sighed and rolled his eyes at our tardiness.

“Good evening, ladies and gents,” Bellwether said. “You all know who I am. The gal who just walked into the room accompanied by Lieutenant Terror is Sergeant Desert Storm, who recently escaped from Ahriman Station after a failed raid by Captain Riverdance’s cell.”

“Fuckin’ hell,” one reddish-coated unicorn mare with a cutie mark of a meteor piped up. “You’re lucky to be alive, ma’am.”

“Stow it, Corporal. Sergeant Storm, starting from your left and going counterclockwise to your right are Corporal Shooting Star and Sergeants Sagebrush, Placid Gale and Cinderblock. You already know Wind Shear and the rest of the techs.”

I glanced to my right. The first one, an earth pony stallion, had his gaze fixed straight ahead, not meeting mine. His ruddy green coat was suggestive of a swamp creature. His oversized helmet seemed to sink over his eyes, and he was chewing on something which proved to be tobacco a spit later. Something about the way he carried himself, one could easily tell that he’d killed more than his fair share of satyrs. He probably turned a few of them into fish food with the combat knife he carried in a sheath on his shoulder.

Next was a pegasus mare with a delicate white coat, appearing almost translucent. In her haunted and enigmatic expression, I detected years of trauma and loss. She looked at me keenly, her eyes filled with distrust. She was a wisp of a thing, her limbs appearing thin and fragile at first. On closer inspection, her entire body was wrapped in whip-tight cords of tendon and muscle, ready to lash out and crush a cleomanni’s bones to dust. She looked mildly unstable. Perhaps a few missed doses away from snapping and rampaging through the base. If our situation weren’t so dire, she probably would’ve been medically discharged and sectioned.

Third was the grayish mountain of rippling muscle named Cinderblock. He had the buck-toothed, bespectacled face of a nerd, but a body like his namesake. I had never seen a fellow unicorn so powerfully built in my life. He looked almost uncomfortable and uncertain with himself, how he towered over the rest. He wore a customized communications helmet. He tapped it every now and then and twisted various dials to adjust the frequency, listening for any radio chatter that might rise above the static. A futile, obsessive gesture, given that we were technically underground, inside the canyon wall.

Sitting across from me were Wind Shear and his techs, kind of sitting back from the table, hunkered over in the shadows. I blinked a few times, confused with how they’d chosen to isolate themselves from the rest of us. Corporal Shooting Star, who sat to my left, was an average-sized unicorn mare like myself. There was something dangerous looking about her that I couldn’t quite put my hoof on. All of them looked like they’d kill without hesitation, but in this one’s eyes, I saw what might’ve been the characteristic glint of true bloodlust.

Bellwether cleared his throat. “Sergeant Storm here has a prototype Mirage A202 Courser-weight Charger. That asset could help us turn the tide. A machine and a pilot that can go invisible would allow us to conduct raids on targets where a frontal assault would never work. It would also allow us to expand our recon-in-force ops with extra firepower and mobility.

“Unfortunately, her machine has spent the past few years sunken in muddy water after the transport carrying it was shot down and crashed in a swamp. It needs a shit-ton of damaged parts to be replaced before it can be brought up to operational status. To all team leaders assembled here, I am forming a special task force, and you’re on it. From this day forth, I will be assigning you and your squads on high-risk salvage operations. When the Mirage is combat-ready, you can return to your normal duties.

“Today, at 0400 hours, our scouts happened upon some intel that could prove of use. After Commodore Cake’s commandeered patrol boat crashed in the desert a month ago, the Confederacy sent in salvage teams to recover the most valuable components. Fusion reactor parts and fuel, particle accelerators, communications hardware, computer components. Whatever they could get their grubby mitts on. These parts could be repurposed, modified, or used as scrap material by our techs to replace and possibly even upgrade damaged components on the Mirage.”

Bellwether advanced the slide, showing us a technical drawing of a Confederate ship. The same sort of ship that I’d almost met a fiery end in. The diagram showed detailed cutaways of the ship’s decks, both in profile and in plan view. Tiny symbols represented the locations of airlocks, bulkheads with airtight doors, firefighting gear, the bridge layout, and all the engineering spaces and their relevant equipment.

I hadn’t taken the opportunity to fully tour the interior of the one we’d hitched back to Equestria, but they were a lot larger on the inside than I’d previously thought. A pang of regret came over me. Perhaps they really were large enough to accommodate a rather substantial load of rescued prisoners. Then again, if we’d plowed into the desert with a full load of ponies in the back, the wreckage of the ship would’ve been a charnel house.

Bellwether tapped a hoof against the projection. “Cleomanni Vigilance-class patrol boats of the type used by the CSF are deliberately built under-spec, to reduce maintenance costs and to allow for lengthy counter-insurgency operations without breaking the bank. However, just because they’re relatively cheap to construct and maintain, that doesn’t mean that they’re absolutely dirt-cheap. Nothing on a starship ever is.

“Every single one of them represents an investment of three hundred million FTU credits. That’s thirty-eight million bits, or about the cost of two average Chargers, or between four and ten fighter craft, or a couple hundred main battle tanks. Included in their standard complement of equipment are a set of sophisticated phased-array radar systems. They’re as good as anything we use on our Chargers, and, as luck would have it, they’re right around the same size and output power level.”

“Convenient,” I muttered, crossing my forelegs. “I see we’re not even gonna bother digging around for the original parts.”

“Excuse me, Sergeant?” Bellwether raised an eyebrow.

“I don’t want foreign-made junk shoehorned into my rig, sir. I’m sure Hissy Fit would practically cream her uniform at the opportunity, but I’ll pass.”

Bellwether looked confused. “Hissy Fi—oh, you mean Sergeant Sierra. And no, you don’t have a choice in where we source the parts. You’ll take what you get and say ‘please, sir, I want some more’, like the raggedy-ass little orphan you are, because we’re all orphans here.

“There are no supply lines, no real chain of command. Just whatever we can scrounge up, and how many cleomanni scalps we can take with it. I don’t like it either, but times are hard. Besides, you’re the one who pitched a fit to Crookneck about scavving the patrol boat for parts, so I don’t get what you’re complaining about.”

My muzzle wrinkled with disgust at the idea of Dust Devil—my Dust Devil—being repaired with Confederate hardware. Their equipment was a security risk. They tagged their electronics with hidden GPS trackers, along with all sorts of hardware-level backdoors for hackers to exploit.

“I trust that our techs will go over them with a fine-tooth comb, then,” I said.

Wind Shear nodded. “We’ve got it handled. Like that contragrav drone you brought in, remember? After we met up with you and took it off your hooves, we had our field team strip the boards out of it and desolder the tracking beacons before we brought it back to the base, otherwise, Crazy Horse would be crawling with bad guys right about now.”

I shrugged and gave a hard sigh. “Whatever.”

Bellwether advanced to the next slide, this time displaying a topographical map with what looked like a military base in the center. Hills ringed the edges of the base, conforming with what looked like a railroad. The rail line passed alongside the base, with a loading platform of some kind. That was when it clicked for me. The place had been built around the ruins of a small train station. “This is CSF Outpost 17, about eighty klicks northeast of Ghastly Gorge, along the rail line between Rambling Rock Ridge and Foal Mountain. Our scouts say this is where the patrol boat’s most valuable remains now lie. We have multiple independent confirmations of a heap of spacecraft wreckage being delivered to the base in installments by locomotive. Work crews arrived shortly thereafter and started cutting it up for scrap.”

“Another supply depot raid, huh?” I muttered.

Bellwether laughed. “What you and I did was just a warm-up. Let me be up-front about this: there’s no chance we can just trot in there and waltz right out with what we need. It will take time to search the wreckage, and we don’t have the equipment to transport all of it. We only have one option, and that’s to clear out all hostiles and secure the facility. Infantry squad leaders? That’ll be your job. Your objective is to escort Sergeant Storm, along with Wind Shear and his technicians, to the wreckage of the patrol boat so they can discern what to salvage from it.

“Once the facility is clear, we’ll have a short time before they respond in force. They have a radio check-in with their central command every hour, so that’s our maximum time limit. Worst-case scenario, our team gets into an engagement on the perimeter, and then, we have under fifteen minutes before gunships are overhead, which is why we need to be discreet on the way in.”

Bellwether snatched up a pointer in his teeth, tapping a few points on the map before spitting it out and letting it clatter onto the table. “There are six guard towers and five security checkpoints. Two along each road approaching from either the east or the west, and one guarding the train station on the south side of the base. There are four large storage buildings, a motor pool, two vehicle bays for repairing and refitting Confederate battle tanks, and a dozen barracks.

“The facility is manned by roughly three hundred Confederate Security Force members. Mercenaries. Invaders. Scum. Kill them without hesitation and without remorse. We’re breaking out the OA-13 gas grenades for this op. It’s not every day we have to use them, but we’ve got little choice in the matter. We’re outnumbered five-to-one here.”

My heart skipped a beat. Every time I had bombarded an industrial park or laboratory with OA-13, it had been from kilometers away, in the comfort of my Charger’s cockpit. I never had to get close and examine the effects. All I had to do was press a button.

Bellwether leaned over the top of a folding chair and crossed his forelegs. “As of our scout team’s last report, the locomotive that delivered the scrap is still at the base, awaiting water. It’s a captured Equestrian type, an Everfree Line Excelsior-class combined freight and passenger engine. Now, I used to geek out about locos, so I know a thing or two about this model.”

The old stallion puffed up his chest, beaming with pride. “She’s got a nuclear fusion-powered boiler, steam turbine generator, electric drivetrain, enormous tractive power, and a top speed of over two hundred and fifty kilometers per hour. She can pull a couple hundred cars all the way up the mountain to Old Canterlot, unassisted.

“It goes without saying that this superior piece of Equestrian technology is a strategic resource that must be denied to the enemy. Our secondary objective is to blow the train on the way out. A damn shame, I know, but we can’t bring it with us, and we can’t leave it behind for them to keep using, so it’s gotta go. That is, if it’s still there.

“So, this is the plan. The op will take place at ‘night’ when the enemy is sleeping, but this region is in perpetual twilight due to the sun being immobilized, so we won’t be acting under the cover of complete darkness, unfortunately. We’re going to be using the Pursuer and the Bull Runner. I’m going to be on Eagle with Sergeant Sagebrush as my second. Sergeant Gale, you’re leading Raven team. Sergeant Cinderblock will lead Osprey team on demolitions and signals, and Corporal Star will lead Magpie, the recovery team.”

“Why Magpie?” Shooting Star whimpered. “So uncool.”

“We’re going to approach from the southern edge of the base, from the rail line.” Bellwether tapped the map with a forehoof. “Team Osprey will stay behind to secure the train and monitor enemy communications while holding down our escape route. At the same time, they’ll be prepping it for demolition. If the train is not present, then they are to secure the platform instead. The rest will advance and infiltrate the base.

“Magpie will stay behind Eagle and Raven as we move in, bringing up the rear with Sergeant Storm, Wind Shear and the techs. After we secure the train or the rail platform, our first order of business is to clear out the guardhouse near the rail platform without being detected. Knives and spellcraft only. Don’t go loud unless you’re fired upon. After that, Eagle will go west and Raven will go east, circling the camp and neutralizing checkpoints and guard towers along the way, before meeting in the middle at the north end of the base.

“At this point, you are to sabotage any communications equipment present at the site. There’s a small HQ building with a long-range antenna. Plant charges on that and get ready to blow it as soon as we go loud. Then, Eagle and Raven will don our masks, advance on the barracks structures and deploy the OA-13. Any hostile who flees the effects of the gas is to be shot. If you are engaged before you’ve cleared the perimeter, expect heavy resistance from the barracks and remaining guard towers. Organize a fighting retreat and disengage, because the mission is a failure.

“I expect them to panic and try rushing outside. You are to take cover and set up kill zones at the exits of each building. Don’t surround the buildings because that will put friendly units in each other’s lines of fire. Deploy some more gas grenades at the west ends of the barracks, then form an echelon left at the north end, a line in the middle, and a right echelon at the south end, on the east end of the barracks.

“Herd them towards you, but also envelop them and keep them away from the storage sheds to the east of your position. That’s where Magpie and the techs will be while Eagle and Raven clear the base. Pay attention to the direction of the wind! Pegasi are to manipulate the airflow, if need be. Keep our teams upwind of the gas at all fucking times. Understand?”

There rang out a chorus of Yes, Sir, except for me. The grenades weren’t my responsibility, but they would affect all of us if we weren’t careful. It made me more than a little nervous. I didn’t want to be less than two hundred yards from clouds of nerve gas, for crying out loud.

“Again, if we are detected during the approach, the mission is a failure,” Bellwether said. All squads are to fall back to the train platform and suppress the enemy while breaking contact and retreating south. If all goes according to plan, we’ll move up the Bull Runner, load the salvage, and depart. Eagle will board the Pursuer and form up with Raven, Osprey and Magpie on the Bull Runner. Once we’re a few klicks from the base, Sergeant Storm will use her magic to conceal us and the vehicles until the hostile air comes along, makes a pass or several, and then goes bingo fuel and returns to their HQ.

“They’ll probably have infantry sweep the area, but they’re not gonna find jack shit. Sergeant Storm, you are to conserve your magic and only cloak the vehicles when directed to. You are to release the spell when the coast is clear. Sergeant Cinderblock will be monitoring enemy comms and watching the skies for fast movers. We’ll have lookouts posted to keep an eye on our surroundings and help keep us concealed.”

“But sir,” I protested. “I can only cloak myself for thirteen minutes, tops, before experiencing magic burnout. If I cloak another pony, I can’t sustain the field as long. If I cloak something the size of the Bull Runner without the aid of a spell locus, that time limit drops to about two minutes.”

Bellwether seemed annoyed. “Again, in case you didn’t hear the first time, we’re employing a conservation strategy. Only cloak us if we’re close to being spotted. Otherwise, we use conventional concealment.”

“But what if the enemy loiters in the vicinity longer than I can cloak us? It seems like we’re hinging a lot on my abilities. You said we’re expecting gunships, sir? All it would take is one pass, and we’re all dead.”

“Wow, Sergeant,” Bellwether crossed his forelegs. “I didn’t take you for a fucking downer, but if that’s the way you want to play it, fine. I’m all ears, kid. What would you do differently?”

I worked my jaw in silence, shaking my head. “I don’t know.”

Corporal Shooting Star raised her hoof. “Sir, if I may.”

“Go ahead, Corporal.” Bellwether nodded.

The Corporal wore a mischievous smile, as though she knew something everyone else didn’t. “We have a ready-made distraction, if we play our cards right. If that loco is still there, and if it’s serviced and ready to go, instead of scuttlin’ it in place, we could rig it to blow and then send it down the line right as we exfil. Make it look like we stole it and planned on using it ourselves. Maybe pile some unwanted scrap on it to complete the illusion.

“After those dickheads chase it down for a while and try and have troops fast-rope down from the gyrodynes and see if they can retake it, the timer goes off and the whole shebang gets blown sky-high. They’ll assume we died in the blast and spend all day fiddle-fucking with the wreckage, givin’ us a perfect chance to escape.”

“Sounds risky,” Bellwether said. “I don’t like it. If things get hairy, we could use that tactic, but for now, it’s not even Plan C. More like Z. I’ll leave it on the table as an option for Osprey Team, to be used at their discretion, but we’re sticking to the current mission plan for now. And Corporal, stop watching so many action movies, kid. You’ll live longer.”

Shooting Star pouted. Judging by her expression, it sounded better in her head.

I scratched my chin with a hoof. “Will we have Charger support on this op? I’m noticing a conspicuous lack of Chargers in this plan. Nothing a couple Chargers can’t fix.”

Night Terror, who had remained silent throughout the briefing, snickered from the shadows. “That’s a negative, Sergeant. Sierra and I are already on a different assignment, for which we’ve already been briefed separately. I’m just here to watch you cavorting with the grunts, and to gloat at your misfortune.”

My shoulders sagged. My boss was such a dickbag.

“Both of our Chargers are deploying on a supply convoy interdiction mission sixty kilometers northwest of the AO,” Bellwether said. “That operation will take place about forty-five minutes after we infiltrate the base. It’s a diversion, timed to draw their air support off to deal with the Chargers around the same time the base’s sentries fail to perform their scheduled radio check-in.

“We must exercise caution, because we don’t expect them to commit all of their gyrodynes and attack planes to fending off the Charger Lance. They’re likely to leave some in reserve, and those are the ones we should be worried about. As soon as we start to exfil, the Chargers will bug out, drawing the enemy aircraft towards concealed anti-air emplacements we’ve set up. It shouldn’t take the Chargers more than five minutes to engage and destroy their targets.”

“Try three,” Night Terror laughed. “Three minutes, and that Confederate convoy will be a sea of fire.”

Bellwether smirked. “I’ll hold you to that, Lieutenant.” Then he turned, addressing the whole briefing room. “Alright, people. Mission starts in six hours. Rest up, check your gear, and be ready to move. Dismissed!”

// … end transmission …

Record 07//Raid

//HOL CRY ADV
//CHECKSUM READ
//CHECKSUM GOOD

// … decoding …

// … error - please re-enter password …

*************

// … password denied - 1 of 5 attempts used - please re-enter password …

*************

// … password denied - 2 of 5 attempts used - please re-enter password …

************

// … access granted …

Desert Storm

The barracks at Camp Crazy Horse was as sparse and dimly lit as could be. The bunks were as stiff and uncomfortable as the ones we’d slept in during basic. A few old propaganda posters, some scrawled over with mocking invective, littered the walls. Everypony had decorated their footlockers to set them apart. In the Army, that would’ve been a violation of regs, but in the ELF, such personalization was par for the course. A wireless speaker in the corner was playing some cheesy rock music.

“Hey, Sarge.” Corporal Shooting Star reclined on the bunk above mine, idly twirling a knife in her hooves. “What kind of parent names their kid ‘Night Terror’, anyway?”

I was mesmerized by her display of dexterity. She has a horn, why doesn’t she just levitate it?

“He changed it, I think,” I muttered, nervously running a hoof through my mane. “I dunno. Do I look like his mom to you?”

“No, ma’am. Just sayin’. Some o’ you Light Scouts’re mighty queer fellers.”

I rolled my eyes. “Oh, come on. Your accent isn’t thick enough for that Appleloosan hick shit, Corporal.”

A grin slowly split Shooting Star’s face. “Saw right through me, Sarge.”

I checked and re-checked my armor, finding everything satisfactory. I tacked up, securing my chest protector and its ballistic collar in place. I ran a cleaning cloth over the lenses of my beamcaster and snapped the dust covers shut before throwing the module over my withers and clipping the quick-release hooks on the harness together, making sure the emitters lined up correctly with the openings in the chest protector.

I looped the strap of my captured cleomanni flechette gun around my chest and slung the contraption over my back. Last, I lowered my helmet over my head and scanned left and right, allowing myself a satisfied smirk as the gimbals on the beamcaster silently tracked my head movements.

I glanced over my shoulder at the fiery-looking unicorn mare. “What do you think about the mission, Corporal?”

“Permission to speak freely?”

“Granted.”

“Mission,” Shooting Star huffed. “Babysitting you while you waltz directly into a cleomanni base and take whatever you want, you mean? Er, ma’am.”

“Hey, I can handle myself.”

“You wanna know what I think?” she said. “I think this is some special forces bullshit. Ordinarily, you’d send a few pegasus Dragoons to pull off something like this. Some dipshit is going to sneeze and wake the whole frickin’ barracks during the insertion phase, and then we’re all fucked.”

I winced. “Yeah, that sounds likely. It’d be nice if we had some heavy fire support, but we don’t. Our Chargers aren’t going to swing back around and make a beeline for us after hitting that convoy. They’re going to bug out and draw the enemy towards concealed SPAAG and SAM positions as soon as they’re done baiting enemy air cover. The main benefit of that is that it keeps their air assets occupied. The drawback is that if resistance ends up being heavier than expected, all we’ve got on our side is infantry.”

The Corporal shrugged. “That’s about the long and short of it.”

“Talk about harebrained schemes. Bellwether thought your plan to blow the train was crazy? Then what the hell are we doing intentionally drawing tank-busters towards our Chargers? That’s even nuttier. This whole thing is nuts. It’s like you said. If some idiot wakes the garrison, this is going to turn into a firefight, and then we are officially in the shit.”

“Geez, ma’am. Way to instill confidence.”

“Hey, you gave me your honest opinion, and I parroted it right back at you verbatim and now you disagree?” I shrugged. “Just shows the futility of wasting time jawing about it. Now let’s stop bitching and go get this shit done.”

I grabbed the rest of my gear, including the portable terminal I’d snatched from the corpse of the hacker who’d taken part in the ill-fated Ahriman Station raid. I checked the charge and flipped it around, inspecting it. Still had some battery left. Corporal Shooting Star saw it, a look of trepidation crossing her features.

“Hey, is that thing being tracked, ma’am?”

“I don’t know, Corporal. I don’t think so. Besides, it’s one of ours, not one of theirs.”

“You might want to show that to Cinderblock. We could be able to use it during this next raid, somehow.”

I levitated it over to Sergeant Cinderblock’s bunk. “Yo, Cinderblock. Portable terminal. What do you make of this thing? Could it help us get past these damn guard towers somehow?”

“Nope,” he said. “I went over that unit weeks ago. It had some stolen Confederate crypto on it, but they canceled the keys a couple hours after the Commodore’s team jacked that patrol boat.”

“Shit.” I put the portable terminal in my saddlebags. I’d find a use for it one way or another.

“I consider myself pretty damn good, but I don’t have the faintest idea how they spoofed the approach protocols to the station.” Cinderblock shrugged his massive shoulders. “I heard they had an elite hacker. What’s-her-face. Peach Cobbler. I’ve been meaning to get her number, if you get my drift.” He winked.

I shook my head. “Too late for that, buddy. She’s dead as a doornail. A bunch of cleomanni bioweapon critters got to her. Gored her right in the face through her helmet. Turned out to be a stroke of luck for me, since the only reason why I made it off that station alive is because I relieved her corpse of her EVA suit and found another dead pony with a breached suit but a still-intact helmet. I had to fucking spacewalk to make it to the patrol boat.”

Cinderblock frowned. “Motherfuckers. You serious?”

“Yes, I’m fucking serious. Didn’t Bellwether brief you assholes on the Karkadann? They’re the same damn things that broke my leg. Dude, you wouldn’t believe the mess they made of her. That fucking EVA suit was filled to the brim with Peach’s blood and brains. It was all squishy on the inside. I spent most of that prison break literally stewing in another pony’s juices while being chased by security guards and their pet monsters. It was the stuff of fucking nightmares.” I gestured towards my face. “In case you didn’t notice the bags under my eyes, Sergeant, I haven’t had a wink of sleep since I came off the meds. I’m all fucked up.”

“Is that gonna be a problem?”

I shrugged. “I dunno. You tell me. Do I look like the most sleep-deprived pony in the room?”

“You stow that bullshit right this minute,” Sergeant Sagebrush said, tromping over from his bunk and getting in my face. “Lemme make one thing perfectly clear; I don’t like you. Hell, half the squad thinks you’re a fuckin’ prima donna fuckin’ hotshot pilot piece of shit cunt. We’re sticking our neck out for you for a negligible gain in combat-readiness. We don’t need ponies like you to win wars. All you do is sit in that air-conditioned tin can and push an ‘I win’ button, and if that’s not good enough, you push another, bigger button labeled ‘Poison Gas’. My boys, the infantry, the tankers, we’re the ones who bleed and suffer. We’re the ones who make those incremental gains vital to the war effort. You assholes just drain the budget with your ornamental fucking wonder weapons.”

I clapped my hooves together in mock exultation. “Terrific! Another moron who doesn’t understand the first thing about Charger operations. It’s about psychological warfare. It’s about giving Equestria something to rally behind and the cleomanni something to fear. They have tanks, we have tanks. We all have tanks. I used to drive a fucking tank, myself. There’s nothing iconic about them. They’re as faceless as their operators. But if you’re a satyr and you see a dozen giant metal ponies come galloping over the next hill, well, that’s when it’s time to invest in a pair of brown pants.”

“Bullshit. We could’ve ordered a hundred Minotaur or thirty Basilisk tanks for what it costs to buy and maintain a single Courser like yours. Nothing puts the fear of Celestia in those assholes like seeing a wave of true Equestrian steel rumbling towards their position. D’you think you could take a hundred Minos in a stand-up fight with your silly, complicated, delicate walking machine? With its mile-high profile sticking out like a sore hoof on the battlefield? Please.”

I closed the gap between us. “Try two hundred.”

“The dick-waving must stop!” Sergeant Placid Gale interposed herself between us and shoved us apart with surprising force. “This is what those bastards want. The two-legged devils want ponykind divided and weak. Don’t do their job for them.”

Sagebrush glared at me, spitting his tobacco at the floor between my hooves, but he didn’t say another word as he turned and departed.

Cinderblock patted me on the withers. “Don’t worry, he’s like this to all the new blood.”

The great big unicorn and the other squad leaders followed Sagebrush out into the hall and towards the main cavern proper, leaving me alone with the pale pegasus, Placid Gale.

I sighed. “Let’s just go get those parts, okay? I don’t want this mission to turn into a bloodbath for our side, either. We do this clean and quick. No fuck-ups.”

“Easier said than done,” Gale said. “We’ve suffered some major defeats these past couple months. Lost a lot of good ponies. We need this to be a win, even if it means fighting dirty.”

I allowed myself a smirk. “You could say I know a thing or two about the art of dirty fighting.”

“Here,” Gale said, handing me a small metal vial with a cap on the end.

“What’s this?” I said.

“An autoinjector with one dose of Atropine. We’re passing them out to everypony on this mission. But just because you have the antidote, that doesn’t mean it’s safe to breathe the gas. I don’t have to tell you about what OA-13 does to people. I’m sure you already know. If the wind changes and blows the nerve gas towards your position and you think you might’ve accidentally inhaled some, don’t hesitate. Retrieve the injector, remove the cap and punch it into your neck where the fur’s the thinnest.”

“You know a lot about this sort of thing. Were you a medic?”

“I was,” Gale said. “Saw a lot of things I wish I could forget.”

“Medics don’t fight,” I scoffed.

Gale frowned. “Yeah, that’s why I had my specialization changed before the end of the war. Got beamcaster training and went infantry. I was sick of plugging holes in our guys. I wanted to make a few of my own, in the enemy. Even if that weren’t the case, this is an insurgency. We’re all grunts, now. Even you, if the need arises, pilot.”

“Fuck that noise.” I grinned. “Sounds to me like you should’ve gone pilot and joined up with us in the Eighth, instead. You’ve got the killer instinct. I can smell it on you. You’re not prey. You’re one of us. A predator. It’s a shame you’re a pegasus. Can’t quite work the controls of a Charger or sync up to its spell locus crystal without a horn. The Dragoons wouldn’t take you, either. I hear they train those freaks from birth. Test tube foals. I guess that leaves the Stormtroopers.”

“Negative.” Gale shook her head. “I want the enemy—the armed, uniformed enemy—to die. I don’t relish in the suffering of the innocent. Put me on the front lines, sure, but I want no part in any spec-ops skullduggery.”

“Well, see, that’s the thing you’re going to have understand one of these days,” I said. “No one’s innocent. Not in this war. We’re all pigs, dogs, and pig-dogs of some variety or another. This is a war for awful bastards, that’s what it is. The other bastards, the bigger bastards, they’re over there, smilin’ at us, watching us fail and fall. I intend to wipe that smug smirk off their faces and grind their heads face-down in a great big pile of horseapples, and I don’t care what anypony thinks of me for it. How about you, Gale? Do you think we’re heroes, yet? Because the way things are going, I just don’t fucking see it.”

There was a glint of insanity that shone in Gale’s eyes as she turned towards me, her gaze boring a hole into my very soul. A chill went down my spine. I almost regretted my words, right then.

“You think I don’t know that?” Sergeant Gale said. “You think me naïve? Some wide-eyed ingenue who doesn’t even know what sort of evil she’s fighting against?”

Placid Gale reared up and drew a hoof across her gut. That’s when I saw it. A great big jagged scar across her abdomen, where the fur had never grown back.

“What the hell?” My lips trembled.

“I was a prisoner, like you, held captive at one of the Confederacy’s terrestrial facilities. Some bunker out in the Badlands. The Liberation Front busted down the front door and rescued us, and then the Confederacy abandoned it. Did you know, Storm? Did you know that the Karkadann are too big to pass through a mare’s birth canal? Did you know that they have to cut them out of you surgically? Oh, but you wouldn’t know a thing about that, would you? I can see it in your eyes. You lucked out. They passed you up.”

“Fuck,” I muttered under my breath. A disgusted shiver ran through my bones. “That’s not something that anypony should ever have to endure.”

Gale had a faraway look in her eyes. “Those first few months of my newfound freedom, the resistance fighters kept a close watch on me while I healed from my ordeal. I tried to arm myself and sneak out. Go AWOL. They caught me and threw me in the brig. I was planning on heading straight back to the Badlands.

“There are some cleomanni freebooters with a settlement out there, where the Confederacy turns a blind eye to them and their violation of the blockade. They trade with ponies. They’ve got food, and our gold is as good as anyone else’s. I was going to steal into their tents and their prefab shelters and slit their throats while they were asleep.”

Well. “Yeah. I can see why. Can’t argue with that.”

“Every time I look in a mirror, I am reminded of what they did to me. How they used me. Storm, have you ever been ashamed of your own body? Have you ever spiraled so deep into the darkness that the only way out was over someone else’s corpse?”

“I can’t say that I have. Nope.”

“Me and Bellwether had a bit of a scuffle during my last escape attempt, a year ago. Put us both in the infirmary. The Resistance rehabilitated me. They taught me that I need to stay focused. No ponies, and no civilians. Only the enemy must die. If I didn’t have that sense of discipline, if I lost all self-control again, then I’d be of no use to the rebellion. If I went down that path? If I started? I’m not sure I could ever stop. I’d go join the Vandals, or just wither away in the wind and die.

“Let this be a warning to you, Storm. Don’t tempt me to unnecessary violence. I have more of it in me than you can possibly handle. I’m telling you this because I care about you.” She smiled wistfully, but there was deep wrongness in her eyes—a hollowness behind those shimmering pits. “You seem like a nice pony, and I don’t want you to get hurt on account of my problems.”

I backpedaled nervously. I had to get the hell out of here. Being alone with her didn’t feel even remotely safe at this juncture. “Right. Yeah. Sounds good.”

Gale shook her head, trembling softly, her eyes brimming with tears. “Storm, if only you knew. They’re trying to replace us. That’s what this war is all about. We’re not good enough for them the way we are. We never were. They will never stop, until we’re practically extinct and their twisted facsimiles are wearing our skins. It’s not about political power.”

“Then what is it about, Gale?” I whispered.

She was shaking like a leaf by this point. “They want our bodies. They want our souls. They want to dominate us from within and without! What did they do to me, Storm? How could a monster like that grow inside me? What else did they do? What did they twist and change?” She scratched and picked at herself with a hoof, anger seeping into her features. “I need out. I need out of this skin. It’s tainted. I’m tainted. How do I know that I’m not gonna turn into one of those things? Could I even have a normal foal anymore if I tried?”

This mare was fucking cracked. The Equestrian Liberation Front must’ve been pretty desperate if they were sending mental cases like her into combat, let alone giving her command of a squad. Upon reflection, it wasn’t so odd. In a way, we were all a little bit broken inside. This war had robbed us of everything. Our homes, our livelihoods, our essential dignity as a species. Maintaining one’s sanity under these conditions was a tall order. However, there was only so much trauma a pony could take, either mentally or bodily, before they were unfit for duty. She’d crossed that threshold long ago.

I rested a hoof on her withers, feeling her whole body jerk reflexively at my touch. “Sergeant, you went to medical school, right?” I smiled when I saw her nod in response. “Then you should know that’s impossible. Biology 101. Your genes are expressed, already. Your body is made up of adult cells that aren’t going to just shapeshift overnight. The only thing I know of that can do that is magic, and the satyrs don’t have that. You’re one hundred percent pony, and nothing will ever change that fact.”

Gale looked up at me, her teary, bloodshot eyes stricken with fear. “You don’t know that. Those filthy aliens. They’re killing us, Storm. This is a war of genocide. Our people have had so many losses these past months. So many dead. When is it enough? When will the Confederacy’s bloodthirst be sated? When we are all rotting in the ground?”

“A little fatalistic, don’t you think?” I said.

Gale ignored me. “Why couldn’t they just finish the job? Why didn’t they bombard our world into dust? It’s because they enjoy this. They’re toying with us. As soon as they’ve had their fill, they’ll deal the killing blow. In our place, they’ll raise ponies who don’t speak, don’t think, and don’t question them. Mindless abominations to do their bidding. What if our flesh is as malleable to them as clay? What if they discover some way to use our own latent magic against us? What are they planning to do with us?”

I drew the shaking mare into a hug, letting her sob pitifully into my shoulder. “You know, if you want to sit this one out, I’ll ask Bellwether and see if we can—”

With surprising strength, the pegasus reared up and slammed me into the wall, a cold rage in her eyes. In the blink of an eye, she had a piece of sharpened steel at my neck; an automatic knife, the kind that was built directly into a pair of spec-ops combat boots and flicked open like a deadly hind talon.

“You breathe a word of this to Bellwether, and I’ll slice you open from cunt to horn. Try me, Storm. Go on, do it. Go run your mouth in front of that fucking spook. I’ll feed you your eyelids, you little shit.”

I was quaking with fear. If I were back in the Army, a couple of MPs would’ve tackled her, and that would be the end of that. But this wasn’t the Army. “I won’t say a fucking word. Promise.”

Gale withdrew the knife and folded it into her boot. “That’s more like it.”

It was a very tense and awkward walk for the two of us as we linked up with the rest of the team out in the hangar. The Bull Runner pulled up alongside four neat lines of armed and body-armored resistance fighters, its turbine howling in the confined space, its fog lamps casting an uncomfortably bright pool of light. A few of the Raven team pegasi had heavy anti-tank missile launchers slung over their withers. Occasionally, they’d stretch their feathers and the twin Tatzlwurm launchers would extend like a second pair of wings, their twelve-centimeter bores yawning menacingly wide.

Bellwether clapped his hooves together. “Listen up. Eagle and Raven have twelve each. Eighteen each on Osprey and Magpie. They need the extra hooves to rig the train and sift salvage. We do this quick and clean, and everypony gets to come home alive. Let’s get a move on, people. Pile on!”

Those of us on Magpie and Osprey took up position in the extended cab, while Eagle and Raven elected to hang off both sides of the flatbed, their beamcasters at the ready. It wasn’t the most comfortable of personnel carriers, but it would do, in a pinch. We pulled the giant, multi-axled beast out of the hangar and past the motor pool. Eagle Team disembarked from the Bull Runner and then mounted up in the Pursuer, with Raven spreading out on the flatbed to take their place. Even though Bellwether was on Eagle, he was one of the few ponies in the formation qualified to operate the Bull Runner, so he stayed behind with us. The Pursuer was designed to transport eight cleomanni, but a dozen ponies could easily fit inside.

We drove along the canyon floor, Camp Crazy Horse fading off into the distance. One windblown rock face after another passed by the extended cab’s narrow viewing slits. Soon, we exited Ghastly Gorge and broke out onto level terrain, with the Pursuer in the lead. It would be hours of driving up pebble-strewn dirt roads, avoiding the highways, bypassing miles of ruined strip malls and depressingly dead forests before we finally approached the perimeter of Outpost 17. Bellwether switched the Bull Runner’s lights off as we neared the base, plunging us into the dusk.

“All squads, disembark,” Bellwether said.

I dismounted from the Bull Runner, following Corporal Star and the rest of Magpie as they filed out of the spacious rear cab. I checked my beamcaster again, just to be on the safe side. Bellwether had pulled us into a dense thicket, and Raven Team was already covering the giant vehicle in a camouflage tarp, four pegasi pulling the corners taut and setting it down over the entire truck in seconds with practiced zeal. It wouldn’t hide us from infrared during the exfiltration. We’d still need my magic to do that. I shook my head. This was a dangerous gambit.

Bellwether waved us forward, his beamcaster emitters following his gaze. “Eagle, Raven, form on me. Watch your spacing. Osprey, Magpie, form up on our six. Stay at least two hundred meters to our rear. Avoid contact with the enemy. Maintain radio silence unless directed otherwise. Move out!”

We stayed low, stalking like predators through the dried, decaying brush. We circled the ridge, keeping an eye out for enemy sentries or patrols. There was nothing. The forest was as silent and still as the grave. In time, we caught sight of the train tracks. Bellwether held up a hoof off in the distance, and Eagle and Raven came to a halt. Osprey and Magpie followed suit. That’s when I saw it. Confederate Security Forces. Three-man patrol, moving along the tracks, right towards our position.

We hunkered down low, remaining motionless. As soon as they were almost right on top of Bellwether’s position, a dozen ponies leapt from the bushes. The cleomanni fell like sacks of potatoes. Correction; they didn’t fall. They were dragged to the ground. With almost unnerving speed, Raven Team’s knives descended upon them. The struggle was brief and violent, and the satyrs didn’t even get off a shot. Aside from a couple strangled yelps of pain echoing across the scrubland, they barely made a peep. I saw a flash of white wings amidst the carnage, stained red moments later from a spray of arterial blood.

“I see Sergeant Gale’s getting some much-needed stress relief,” I muttered.

Raven Team swiftly dragged the bodies into the bushes, disappearing from sight. We got the signal to move up from Bellwether, lights flickering in our helmets’ heads-up displays. Our helmets had Aetheric Responders. They put out a superluminal magical signal that could not be intercepted or detected except by skilled unicorns with sensitive scientific apparatuses. However, they could only send a few bits of information at a time, enough for simple telegraphy. Voice transmission was out of the question.

We followed the tracks all the way to the perimeter of the base, circling the ridge until the fence came into view. The outpost had been constructed around an old, rural train station. We received the signal to hold position again. Bellwether signaled Osprey to move up and leave Magpie behind. We’d ran into a small snag. Motion sensors on the perimeter. I turned up the magnification on my helmet’s eyepiece, watching the scene unfold.

Placid Gale held up a hoof, signaling for Osprey to hold position until the guard in the tower turned their back. Cinderblock charged a grenade-sized device with his horn, before chucking it at the fence. There was a faint flash of light and a soft noise, static washing over my display briefly. It was a magic flux compression generator, a form of non-nuclear EMP device. I held my breath, waiting for any sign that we’d alerted the guards or triggered an alarm, but there was no response. Cinderblock deftly clipped through the chain-link fence with some wire cutters. A pair of mechanic pegasi in camo overalls peeled back part of the fence for the three squads to move through single file. Shortly after, we moved up and followed suit, careful not to get our uniforms caught on the ragged edges of the fence.

A spotlight swept over us and all four squads reflexively went prone, lying flat and perfectly still against the ground, our camouflage blending into the terrain. Still no alarm. So far, so good. As the dusk covered our movements yet again, we inched closer to the rail depot, where the Excelsior loomed in the darkness, venting puffs of steam like some manner of living, breathing creature. Placid and a few of Raven’s fleet-footed pegasi assaulters closed the distance to the first guard tower with alarming speed.

They wove their way up the core of the tower’s wooden supports, using their wings for a boost from ledge to ledge. It was almost surreal to watch. Then, they rounded the top of the railings and fell upon the two guards in the tower like a force of nature, kicking and stabbing them into puddles of reddish goo. Even from this distance, I could hear the wet thuds of their blades striking home and the soft patter of blood dripping through the floorboards. Osprey Team moved up and secured the train platform, fanning out and boarding the locomotive. There were a few muffled thuds and green flashes that could only be beamcaster fire inside the train, but it wasn’t loud or bright enough to draw any attention, or so I hoped.

Osprey stayed behind with the locomotive and kept their beamcasters trained to the north. Eagle went left, and Raven went right, clearing the checkpoints and guard towers. We moved right up the middle. Nervous tingles crept up my spine. Every instinct was screaming at me that we had to turn back, or we were going to be discovered. Still, we pressed on. After a few moments, we got pinged on our Aetheric Responders. The last of the guard towers had fallen and our own lookouts were occupying them instead. This was going close to plan. Too close.

Then, we all halted in our tracks as we received a few rapid pings. Incoming. Ground vehicles. Eight. Eight incoming ground vehicles. Armored cars and supply trucks, most likely. I heard the sound of approaching engines and started to panic.

One of the mechanics looped his legs around me and dragged me into a gap between the buildings. Headlights swept across the base, casting long shadows behind the prefab structures. I dared a peek around the corner of the nearest building. The vehicles had stopped at the western entrance, where Bellwether’s team was. My blood ran cold. That wasn’t a supply convoy. It was six armored cars and two tracked APCs. Power armor carriers.

“Oh fuck,” I whispered.

The checkpoint was out of action, having already been cleared out by Eagle Team. There was no one standing watch to open the gate. The lead vehicle began honking their horn. The alarm would be raised, and soon. It was now or never. There were a series of pings on the responder, the signal for all teams to go loud and for the Charger Lance to spring their distant ambush on the convoy. We were compromised.

There was a loud bang and a bright orange flash as an explosive charge took the roof off the command post, along with its communications aerials. A pair of guided Tatzlwurm missiles streaked from the western guard towers and impacted the lead vehicles in the convoy, leaving behind smoking craters.

Bellwether’s voice came in loud and frantic over the radio. “Eagle One to all units, weapons hot! I repeat, fire at will!”

Everything was going pear-shaped. The gas-masked pegasi of Raven Team swooped in low, dropping nerve gas grenades in the front and rear of the barracks buildings. They planted their hooves and flapped their wings, manipulating the air currents to draw a steady downdraft through the growing plumes of lethal gas and straight into the openings in the prefab structures. They fired their beamcasters, punching holes into the structure to make it easier for the gas to get inside.

A half-dressed cleomanni soldier stumbled out of the building, coughing and wheezing and waving his pistol around aimlessly, only to be cut down in a split-second. There weren’t many nerve gas-afflicted soldiers stumbling from the barracks buildings, nor was there anyone shooting from them, and that was, in itself, a snag, because it meant the buildings were practically unoccupied.

“Something’s not right,” I said. “Where are the enemy troops that were supposed to be in the barracks?” I tried moving towards the warehouse, but Corporal Shooting Star dragged me back.

“Wait, ma’am. It’s not safe! We haven’t received the all-clear from Bellwether to move up, yet!”

“Fuck it!” I said. “I’m going to get what I came for, come hell or high water!”

Against my own better judgment, I ran out into the open. The supersonic crackle of flechettes snapped through the air, right past my head, pockmarking the ground at my beating hooves. I broke into a dead sprint, galloping the last thirty yards to the warehouse. I turned and delivered a heavy buck with both rear hooves to the side door, busting the latch. A cleomanni soldier rounded the corner of the warehouse, leveling a long arm. I dropped low and drilled him in the knees with my beamcaster. The emitters realigned and locked on as he stumbled and fell, and I triggered another shot, piercing his torso center-mass. He went down hard, his armor filled with smoking holes.

Another of them took cover at the same corner of the building, crouching low and centering me in his sights. I gasped, rolling through the open doorway to my right in the very same instant that he opened fire, the deadly projectiles chipping holes in the doorjamb. The interior of the structure was hardly any safer. A cleomanni maintenance worker hefting a pipe wrench charged me while letting loose with a throaty war cry, fully intent on braining me with his makeshift weapon.

I charged my horn, quickly going invisible. I couldn’t see him, but he couldn’t see me, either. He let out a bewildered yelp, tripping and landing flat on his face. I dispelled my invisibility and pounced on his prone form. The guardsman outside had repositioned to the open doorway. I looped my forelegs under the mechanic’s arms and rolled such that I was using him as a living shield.

“Bidu aspare, maridnaehurridneken!” I screamed, the filthiest of language crossing my tongue.

It was just enough to make the guardsman hesitate. That was all I needed. I quickly looped a fetlock behind my back and around the pistol grip of my captured Confederate VB-10. I swung the hefty weapon around, safety off, then I squeezed a couple times. The smoothbore barked twice, bucking in my grip. I had cut the trigger guard off with a die grinder the day before to make it easier to manipulate without fingers. It worked like a charm. The bastard went down like a sack of potatoes as the sintered bimetal flechettes pierced his body armor and exploded in his flesh.

“Nighty night!” I stomped the cleomanni technician’s temple until he was very much unconscious, and then I stood and double-tapped him just to be sure he’d never be getting up again.

I checked my ammo. Sixteen rounds left in the flechette gun. There were still a few mags to spare, as well. My casters read ninety-five percent functional. It wouldn’t need servicing until it dropped below sixty percent, which could’ve been after thousands of cycles. Sophisticated self-diagnostic monitoring systems kept track of every aspect of a beamcaster’s condition, and if it sustained damage in combat that could lead to a catastrophic failure, it would warn the user before they attempted to fire the weapon and potentially harm themselves. A damaged beamcaster was basically a small bomb resting on your back.

“Barracks, clear!” Raven team radioed. “We’re moving to reinforce the western gate!”

I looked around at the interior of the warehouse, but it was empty. There wasn’t a single piece of patrol boat wreckage in sight. I had a feeling in my gut like I’d swallowed a lead sinker. This was not going according to plan.

“All squads, fall back to the train platform!” came Bellwether’s panicked voice over the radio. “I repeat, fall back towards the south immediately! Do you copy?”

“Copy that, on my way to the platform now,” I muttered into the radio. “Our intel was bad. The warehouse is empty. No salvage in sight.”

Upon closer inspection, it wasn’t empty. Stacked at the far end, in a dimly lit corner, were dozens, no, hundreds of cages. They appeared to be brand new, large enough to fit six stallions packed in like sardines, and of sufficiently sturdy stainless-steel construction that a pony could never break their way out. There was something eerie about it, like they were stockpiling for something in the near future.

“Magpie Two, haul ass out of that building right now! She’s—fuck. You’ve got hostiles coming in hot, and you don’t want to be there when they arrive!”

Bellwether sounded spooked. The staccato chatter of the firefight outside hadn’t abated, either. I wanted to comply with the order to retreat, but I wasn’t sure if it was safe to rush outside and cross the gap to the next structure over. As a matter of fact, I was positive that if I left the concealment of this building, I’d be cut down in very short order. I was going to have to go invisible, but I had to make sure not to waste my magic in case we needed it for the extraction.

“Understood, sir. I’m pulling back now.”

Bellwether radioed the other teams. “Raven Team, uh—Sergeant Gale, I’ve got eyes on Captain Granthis.”

Granthis. The name alone sent a chill down my spine. There was only one other Granthis I knew of, and he was the bastard chiefly responsible for the near extermination of all ponykind.

“Are you sure it’s her, Bell?” Placid’s voice over my earpiece trembled with nervousness.

“It’s her, all right. It’s the fucking president’s daughter! She’s headed right for Sergeant Storm’s position! Celestia’s tits, this was a fucking trap!”

I heard a loud bang that shook me to my core. Across the empty warehouse, a midnight-black blade, its edge aglow with blue plasmatic flame, split a metal fire door nearly in two, before a heavy, jack-booted stomp sent what was left of it flying inward.

I was frozen with fear at the clanking armored form that strutted through the open doorway, wielding a four-barreled shotgun with an integral plasma bayonet that ran down its entire length. The massive weapon was half artillery piece, half greatsword. As she marched inside and the dust around her settled, we made eye contact. The Dochnast woman was youthful-looking and pale as porcelain, her albino-white hair hanging in a pair of pigtails that bobbed about her neck. Her horns were polished to such an extent that they almost seemed to shine.

With the exception of her unhelmeted head, every part of her body was covered in a suit of heavy, obsidian-black power armor; it was like what GARG troopers wore, but far more decorative. Segmented faulds as black as midnight ran down to her knees, and under those faulds hung black tassels embroidered with elaborate designs in silver thread. From the spiky black sabatons all the way up to the spiky black vambraces, the whole ensemble was as knightly looking as it was gaudy, like something that belonged in a museum rather than stalking a modern battlefield. Every feature on it was chosen for intimidation over practicality and range of motion. However, as anachronistic as her armor seemed, underneath it all was the same force-amplifying technology you’d find in any exosuit, and that meant that I was outmatched in all respects.

Captain Granthis grinned, baring her sharp canines, her wide and hungry eyes filled with an all-consuming madness. “I spy with my little eye, something that begins with a dead pony slut, and ends with my boot halfway up your taxidermized ass!”

I yelped and did a stage dive off the concrete platform where I stood, just before a burst of explosive slugs pockmarked the corrugated metal siding of the wall behind me, blowing hoof-sized holes in them. That gun. It wasn’t just some break-action shotgun. It was a stacked-projectile volley gun. A Marbo Eliminator. Each of those four tubes had ten disc-shaped 23mm explosive slugs with an electrically ignited interstitial gunpowder charge between each one.

It wasn’t just four barrels and done. The damn thing could fire forty explosive slugs as fast as the operator could pull the trigger, or four simultaneously, or even spew all forty of them near-instantaneously with an adjustable fully-automatic rate of fire up to three thousand rounds per minute; a lethal spray of micro-grenades with a concomitant extreme recoil that could easily break a cleomanni’s arm and send the weapon flying over their shoulder. That is, if they weren’t wearing power armor.

“Shit!” I screamed. “Shit oh fuck!”

I rolled and stumbled to my hooves as the Captain’s Eliminator roared, sending chips and fragments of concrete into my legs. I leapt to one side as the floor exploded under my hooves, my limbs trailing smoke. The blast had knocked the wind out of me. She was toying with me. Deliberately aiming just off the mark.

“Dance, little pony!” she screamed. “Fucking dance, meat!”

I shivered, covering my face with my forelegs. I spat blood. A lump of flying flooring material had smacked me right in the jaw. I looked up to see the satyr hefting her weapon above her head, enemy troops streaming into the building behind her. She triggered a mechanism in the handle of her Eliminator’s massive plasma blade. The weapon flashed to life, its edge glowing blue and buzzing with a steady hum like an electric arc.

“Blue hair.” She could barely contain her glee. “I like. Your head is gonna look great on the wall of my daddy’s villa, pony!”

I cloaked myself, diving out of the way just in time as she brought the plasma sword down. I wished I could’ve seen the expression on her face, but all I heard was the clang of steel against concrete and her subsequent growl of disappointment. I brought my VB-10 around and let loose with a volley of flechettes to the general vicinity of her head, but my magic sonar indicated that she’d raised some sort of heavily armored bracer to cover her face.

“Face me, Equestrian coward!” she bellowed.

Granthis charged straight for my flechette gun’s muzzle flash. Unfortunately for her, I wasn’t standing anywhere near my gun anymore. I let the VB-10 clatter to the floor and I struck an overloaded shelf full of very heavy spare parts with a burst of levitation magic, knocking it over right onto her. I grinned as I heard a pained screech.

While peering out from behind a rolling tool cart, I dropped the camouflage to see what I’d done, scooping up my captured flechette gun with my levitation and slinging it over my back. She had been buried under a bunch of gears and pistons. Spare diesel engine parts. When she shakily rose to her hooves, shoving the cardboard boxes and plastic bins full of heavy cast and forged metal components aside with augmented strength, she was bleeding profusely from a head wound, her expression filled with venom.

I laughed. “Maybe next time, you’ll remember to wear a helmet instead of showing off those cute locks of yours, you silly bitch!”

Granthis flicked the Eliminator at me, aiming straight for me this time. “Die!”

Her weapon clicked on empty, and she screeched with dissatisfaction as she began the lengthy reload process. Her troops formed a firing line to take me out, their patience with their leader’s silly games having worn thin, but I was long gone. Cloaked and right out the side door of the warehouse, galloping harder than I ever had in my life.

Cleomanni society was plutocratic by nature. Each Guild not only oversaw all matters of commerce, industry and finance, but they also functioned as political parties. Every decade, they held one of their sham elections. The current reigning party was Guild Marbo, and the candidate they elected several years ago was Salzaon Granthis, a wealthy industrialist and renowned sportsman. An interplanetary hunter of dangerous game. The guy was a real playboy. He had rustic lodges on planets all over the Free Trade Union’s sphere, and those private retreats had numerous preserved and stuffed creatures on display. He used such apex-predator trappings to intimidate his guests during meetings. Again, ponies were never hunter-gatherers. Our culture could scarcely comprehend such obsessions.

Members of the high-ranking Guild families could, at any time, invoke the privilege of Guild Right, and after the councilors reviewed the applicant’s CV and cast their ballots, a promising young prospect could be sponsored as a champion of their respective guild. They would be allowed to bring their own sizable wealth to bear on the battlefield, wielding non-standard-issue weapons and armor. In exchange, they relinquished to their guild the right to use their likeness for propaganda and advertising purposes. It was a business deal, like everything else in their society. The process was inherently nepotistic, and very few of the so-called champions had prior military experience or were qualified to even be on a battlefield in the first place.

The power-armored freak that had come a hair’s breadth from cutting me down was the Guild Marbo champion. Mardissa Mavali Taffalstriak Granthis, Salzaon’s own daughter. A psychotic little runt who bought her way into the Confederate Army with daddy’s money. They called her the Demon-breaker, because that was the literal meaning of Taffalstriak, not because she was exceptionally experienced or deadly in combat. It was a thinly veiled insult.

Nevertheless, she had millions of credits worth of augmentations and power armor, and though she was no GARG trooper, she was a tangible threat to any infantry who crossed her path, provided that she could resist the urge to give her enemies a sporting chance. She was a hunter like her father, not a soldier. The Confederate Army barely tolerated her presence. Her lack of discipline was a detriment to unit cohesion.

I knew all this because, naturally, as special forces Charger pilots, we had been routinely briefed on all the major cleomanni high-value targets, and what to do when we encountered them. Back when I was still in the Army, ORACLE had come up with a deck of fifty-two playing cards with the Confederacy’s HVTs represented by the four different suits; Spades for the big-shots and their immediate family, Clubs for the bureaucrats, Hearts for important military brass, and Diamonds for the Mil-Int spooks and technologists. Salzaon himself was the Ace of Spades, and his daughter was the Queen of Spades.

Mardissa Granthis was on the capture-alive-if-possible list, as well. The possibility of a ransom or cease-fire conditional on her life was appealing. Contrariwise, her hypothetical death might have triggered punitive raids. Capture and interrogate, yes. Martyr her, no. Absolutely not. Whether or not that moratorium still applied when she was literally chasing after me with an energy sword with a shotgun mounted to it, I had absolutely no idea. I’d cross that bridge when I got there.

Far more worrying was the presence of the Confederate Army in general. That convoy wasn’t CSF. We were now engaged in a firefight with a regular Army platoon of equal or greater size to our own forces, and we were an irregular militia with a mixture of former military personnel and ill-trained civilian volunteers. In short, we were beyond fucked. We were mega-fucked. Ultra-fucked. In fact, there was no limit to how hyperbolic of an expression was appropriate to the degree of fuckedness we were now experiencing. If there was a dimension that consisted of nothing but glory holes and endless rows of turgid cocks waiting anxiously to enter them, we and our unfortunate orifices had just been flung headfirst into this blighted realm.

I had an idea—a half-formed, desperate plan. “Magpie Two to Eagle One, is there any way we could take Granthis alive?”

When Bellwether’s strained voice came over the radio, it was accompanied by the unmistakable sound of guns and beamcasters trading fire. As I neared the platform, the reports I could hear with my own ears began mirroring the ones in my headset. “Negative, negative! Are you fucking crazy? No! You have your orders, Sergeant. Fall back.”

“Sir, she’s wounded. I got her good! With her as a hostage, we could make a clean break.”

“Is she still up? Still moving?”

“That’s affirmative.”

“Then she’s not fucking wounded enough!” Bellwether was furious. “Do not play lone fucking wolf unless you want the last thing that goes into your cunt to be the flechette that runs straight up your barrel and blows your head up like an overripe watermelon! Get your ass back to the fucking train platform, pilot, or I’ll break your fucking neck myself, out!”

I quickened my pace, my muscles burning with exertion as I closed in on the train platform and the chatter of an intense firefight. I ducked low to avoid the crossfire, beamcaster fire snapping noisily right over my head as the air in the path of each beam was decomposed into a plasma by rapid heating. I sent out a magic sonar ping. Five enemy soldiers taking cover by the leaking 55-gallon drums. I had their flank, in more ways than one.

I retrieved a frag grenade from my vest, pulled the pin, and took cover by a prefab barracks, cooking the grenade for a couple seconds and cloaking it with my invisibility magic before slowly passing it their way with my levitation. They didn’t even notice as the damn thing went off in mid-air, right next to their heads. Five soldiers became three corpses and two floppers. I seized my flechette gun’s heat shield in my magic and whacked the two survivors in the head the same way a Yak would club a baby seal. They ceased their flopping.

I closed the last few meters to the firing line and leapt over the barricade, uncloaking myself. Bellwether was huddled behind the stack of crates, and he was so startled, he nearly fell over. “Fuck’s sake! Warn me next time before you do that. I almost shot your ass!”

“Sorry!”

“Nice job with the grenade, by the way. Shit, more of the bastards incoming!”

“Why aren’t they falling back?” One rebel militia mare stood up from her cover, only for the top of her head to be taken clean off by a flechette, her helmet clattering to the ground with frayed fibers where the round had punched all the way through both sides.

It hadn’t killed her. A stomach-churning scene unfolded as she stood, screaming, the top of her skull shattered by the flechette fragments, blood waterfalling down her cheeks. She let loose a burst of aimless beamcaster fire and stumbled towards the hostile contacts, before a couple more flechette salvos struck her in the neck. Her head flopped over, half-decapitated, hanging from a string of flesh, remnants of her cervical spine standing erect like a stalagmite in its place. She promptly collapsed in a twitching ball of death spasms.

I winced. “Yep, gonna have those good nightmares tonight. The ones where you wake up sweating, and—”

“All squads, keep your heads down and return fire!” Bellwether screamed over the radio.

The order was an oxymoron. Beamcaster emitters were shoulder-mounted. The only way to return fire was to expose one’s head and neck over the top of one’s cover. I, on the other hoof, had a flechette gun of my own, and as the Liberation Front members opened fire, I raised it above the barricade and blindly pelted the enemy with flechettes.

“Fire in the fucking hole!” I pulled a pin and chucked a frag with my levitation magic.

The Confederate troops yelled commands and scattered as they tried to flee. I rolled out of cover, staying low to the ground. I nailed two of them in the legs with a pair of accurate beamcaster bursts. They went down hard, clutching their knees and screeching in agony. I rolled back just in time before the grenade loosed a deadly spray of fragments, mulching anyone who couldn’t escape the kill radius in time.

Six ponies took this as an opportunity to charge straight from cover, picking off stragglers as they went.

“Eagle One to all squads, stay in fucking formation!” Bellwether shouted, his voice laced with desperation.

It was too late. A dozen Confederate soldiers and a very pissed-off Captain Granthis rounded the buildings at the end, firing as they advanced. The rebels were caught flat-footed. I watched a stallion become mist as a salvo of 23mm micro-grenades caught him dead center in the torso. Four others fell just as quickly to flechette fire, before the satyrs descended on them with bayonets, stabbing the life out of them. The last mare crawled backwards, dragging an injured hind leg, screaming and raising her forelegs above her head as Granthis brought her hissing plasma sword down like an executioner’s axe. The savage blow cleaved the mare into two steaming halves, body armor and all.

“We’re dropping like fucking flies!” I said. “These motherfuckers just keep coming!”

Bellwether shook his head. “I know. I know! We’ll get out of this alive, one way or another. While you were fucking around in that warehouse, you’d probably be pleased to know that Osprey got a lock on the shit we’re looking for. It’s on the train after all, organized all nice and neat.”

“What?” I was flabbergasted.

“Eagle, this is Osprey One. We are go for extraction!”

“Perfect timing,” Bellwether said, keying his mic. “All squads, pop smoke, fall back and board the train! Fucking double-time it!”

Right on cue, a half-dozen smoke grenades were tossed from behind the barricades and outbuildings closer to the platform. Bellwether tapped me on the shoulder, and the both of us made a run for it, flechettes snapping over our head as we dived into the obscurant smoke.

The stallion outpaced me with his big strides, disappearing into the gray murk. When I broke out of the cloud on the other side, he was hanging off the side of a freight car, frantically waving ponies over. A couple dozen of us filed inside as quickly as we could.

Bellwether slid the door shut right as a hail of enemy projectiles slammed into the far wall of the freight car. We shared the cramped space with some assorted materiel from the shipwreck, all stacked up in plastic bins. It seemed like they already did the hard work of sifting the wreckage for us, and then loaded the stuff back up on the train. Our intel was old and shoddy.

I did a quick head count; twenty-four. Judging by the moans and whimpers of pain, at least a third of them had some kind of injury. They weren’t the only ones, either. I tasted copper. I felt my swollen jaw, licking at all my teeth to make sure they were still there.

“I don’t see anyone from Raven or Osprey,” I said. “This is just plain fucked.”

“Osprey Team is up in the locomotive,” Bellwether said. “Last I saw Raven, they were still fucking engaged, by the guard towers on the western end of the base. Won’t respond on radio.”

“We just going to leave them behind, sir?” Corporal Shooting Star muttered.

“Get down!” Sergeant Sagebrush shouted.

Everypony pressed themselves flat against the floor of the rail car as a salvo of flechettes stapled their way across the thin sheet metal, the artificial lighting from the base casting rays through the bullet holes. There was a rising commotion outside as the Confederate troops shouted and advanced through the smoke. The rebels huddled together for protection, some clearly scared out of their wits. My breathing quickened. This was starting to get to me, too.

“They had the most pegasi out of the two assault teams,” Bellwether said. “Hell, they should just fly their asses over here. Shit, I’ll try them again.” Bellwether keyed his mic. “Raven Team, this is your last fucking chance. The rest of the teams are south of your position. Withdraw to the train immediately! I repeat, withdraw towards the south and board the locomotive. We are leaving. Do you copy?”

“Help us,” the radio crackled. “We’ve been engaged. We’ve got wounded! There are two GARG heavies on the perimeter! Rak suits! Oh fuck, incoming!”

I peered out one of the bullet holes in the side of the car and focused my vision on the guard towers a couple hundred meters away, just in time to catch the fearsome sight of a three-meter-tall suit of battleship-grey Rakshasa power armor leaping over three stories into the air and tackling the side of a guard tower with such force that the structure’s supports were uprooted and it tipped over and fell like timber.

Two pegasi scattered and took flight as the tower dropped from under their hooves, only to be immediately rendered into paste by airbursting autocannon fire from the second battlesuit, bits of them raining down like red confetti. Bellwether and I shared a look of terror.

“Osprey team,” Bellwether said over the radio. “Eagle and Magpie are aboard. Get this fucking train moving, pronto.”

“So, looks like we ended up doing the great rail heist after all, eh?” Shooting Star snickered.

“Stow it, Corporal,” I muttered.

“Eagle, this is Osprey,” the radio crackled. “We can’t just leave the other assault team behind, can we? What about Placid? We just gonna leave them to be captured by those bastards?”

“We don’t have a choice!” Bellwether was livid, foamy spittle flying from his mouth. “I shouldn’t have to fucking explain the purpose of your orders, but just in case you need a little additional motivation, two Rakshasas are moving in from the western entrance of the base. In about sixty seconds, we’re all going to die. If you don’t get this thing moving, so help me, I’ll come up there and find a way to drive this train by putting your mouth on the throttle and fucking you in the ass!”

There was a pause before Osprey came back in, sounding more than a little dismayed at the prospect of abandoning a whole squad. “Affirmative. Throttling up now.”

Bellwether keyed the long-range transmitter. “Eagle One to Falcon One Actual. We are being pursued by enemy forces. We’ve captured the loco and are heading west, speed approximately sixty, soon to be over a hundred. You are to ignore your previous orders and immediately divert course to our position and assist in clearing out these hostiles, over!”

I could hear Night Terror’s mocking sigh crackle through my earpiece. “Copy that, Eagle One. Our objectives are complete. The convoy is neutralized, and the ruse worked. Ack-ack boys bagged two drones, two gunships and a fast mover before the rest got wise and bugged out. We are diverting south as ordered. Will intercept your projected course in approximately forty minutes. Stay alive, boys and girls.”

Bellwether shook his head. “That fucking slow-ass Destrier of his. If the rest of those fucking gunships swing back around and hit the train or the tracks ahead of us before they go bingo fuel, we could all be dead in the next ten minutes!”

The loco’s giant steam turbine built to a steady hum as our conveyance cruised along the tracks, smooth as butter. I could scarcely believe it. We were actually doing this. We were liberating a locomotive from the enemy’s clutches. It would only be a temporary victory. As Bellwether intimated, all it’d take would be one airstrike on the tracks ahead of us, and we’d be stuck, or derailed.

“You were right,” I said. “This was a fucking trap.”

Bellwether shook his head. “It’s not that simple. We have a mole. Someone talked. Only way they could’ve known.”

“Fucking why?” My ears drooped. “Why would anypony sell us out to those pricks?”

“Brainwashed.” Bellwether nodded. “Or spiteful. Or just plain stupid. You can count greedy out. The Confederacy never honors a deal with a traitor, and most ponies are smart enough to know that.”

Bellwether’s sapphire eyes locked with mine, and I didn’t like the look in them. The way he studied me intently.

“Uhh, no,” I said. “I would never. Never fucking ever!”

“In retrospect, it’s a little strange how you walked away from that crash site to begin with.” Bellwether set his jaw. “Even stranger how you survived direct contact with a Guild Champion wielding a fucking Eliminator. Why would Captain Granthis, of all people, let you leave that hangar in anything other than a body bag?”

As the locomotive picked up speed, an unnerving silence descended over the rail car, punctuated by the rising hum of the heavy traction motors. All eyes were on me. Some bore fearful looks. Most looked like they wanted to kill me, especially Sagebrush.

“I’m not a fucking spy! I am loyal to Her Majesty, the Empress, and I am completely devoted to the cause of restoring the Empire and returning Twilight Sparkle to the throne!”

“That’s a pretty big turnaround from somepony who seemed so disinterested when we first picked her up,” Sagebrush said. “But I guess a mole would say just about anything to save their ass.”

My mouth opened and closed with shock as I scooted backwards while several members of Eagle Team advanced on me like they were fixing to beat me to a pulp.

“Guys, I killed over half a dozen of those sons of bitches!”

“You strayed from formation, disobeyed orders, went off on your fucking own, and you survived a confrontation with a power-armored goon that you should not have.” Bellwether rubbed his forehead. “You know very well how bad that looks, Sergeant.”

“She was toying with me,” I said. “She had me dead to rights. That sadistic freak deliberately shot wide, just to watch me squirm.”

“Wait, stop!” Shooting Star leaped between me and the advancing ponies. “I saw the Sergeant fighting. She’s one of us.” Shooting Star circled around behind me, putting a foreleg on my withers. “Now, I don’t mean to be insubordinate, but if you’re not one of us, pilot, if you’re working for the cocksuckin’ satyrs, I’m gonna stick my hoof all the way up your fuckin’ ass and your last moments will be spent as my own personal meat puppet, ma’am. We clear?”

I swallowed the lump that had formed in my throat. “Yes, Corporal.”

“Good,” she said. “Well, I guess that settles that, for now.”

The rest backed off, but they kept glaring unblinkingly at me. This was going to be a long, tense ride, and we weren’t even out of the woods yet.

Bellwether shook his head, biting his hoof in concentration. “If it’s not Storm, then it has to be somepony else. This isn’t over. I’m going to be running a full investigation after we return to base. If we make it back alive.”

I wasn’t too keen on Bellwether’s mole theory, anyhow. It could’ve been that the Confederacy simply noticed a pattern of raids and decided to use the salvage and the train as bait. The satyrs may have been assholes of the highest caliber, but they weren’t completely and utterly brain-dead.

“The radome from the ship,” I said. “Where is it?”

“A few cars back.” Bellwether pointed aft. “A few members of Magpie are already retrieving the Bull Runner. We’re gonna transfer it over, probably while on the move, and then get off this damn train.”

Bellwether threw open the far door to the freight car. The landscape whizzed by at over a hundred kilometers an hour, the base vanishing into the background. I saw something incoming. Pegasus mid-flight, a thousand yards behind us. The Raks were in hot pursuit, their legs in wheel-mode.

“Cinder, slow us down a bit!” Bellwether shouted over the radio.

He leaned out of the cab and yelled back at us. “What?”

“Just do it!”

As the Rakshasas and what appeared to be the leader of the ill-fated Raven Team closed in, I could see that it wasn’t just one pegasus, but three, and the Raks were firing on them. My jaw dropped. Sergeant Gale was carrying two wounded pegasi while dodging and weaving, flapping her wings hard. One was on her back and the other was cradled in her legs. That mare’s willowy appearance was deceptive. She had to be as strong as an ox. Another member of Eagle team threw open the other freight car door. There were a couple Pursuer armored cars trying to keep pace with the train, up on the ridge above the railway.

We took cover as machine gun fire tore through the center of the freight car, returning fire with our beamcasters. I let off a burst of pencil-thin green beams, watching as they bounced off of the armored car to no effect. I dived for cover as I was rewarded with a burst of heavy machine gun rounds.

“We need those fucking armored cars gone!” I screamed.

“We’re all out of missiles,” one stallion chimed in.

“Squad, set Casters to dispersion zero-seven-zero, full-power shots,” Sagebrush said. “Aim for the tires! Burn ‘em!”

Thick columns of green light lashed out at the APCs’ running gear, heating their tires until they bubbled up, melted and failed catastrophically, turning to whipping strands of rubber wrapped around a steel rim. Then, the run-flat cores disintegrated from the heat. The enemy vehicles promptly veered off the road and into a ditch.

“Yeah, get some, bitches!” Sagebrush hollered.

There was a blue glow at the back of one of the wrecked APCs, which soon took to the air. I peered through the eyepiece of my flechette gun’s ballistic computer, zooming in to get a better look. It was Captain Granthis, her armor suspended from a contragrav harness, its four emitters lit up and rattling like tin cans.

“Wait, she can fucking fly?” My jaw dropped. “That’s fucked up!”

“Who’s flying?” Bellwether said. “What are you talking about?

Corporal Star peeked out one of the freight car doors. “It’s Granthis! She’s pursuin’ us, alone!”

Bellwether was chagrined. “Fuck, fuck, fuck! We’re fish in a barrel!”

“Open fire on ‘er! Don’t let her close the distance!” Sagebrush waved the others to the freight car door.

Half a dozen beamcasters discharged skyward. The beams were too thick and unfocused to get the job done, only succeeding in ablating a millimeter of armor off the target’s exoskeleton with sparks and puffs of smoke.

“You idiots!” Sagebrush hollered. “Do I have to tell you how to do everything? Set beamcasters back to normal anti-infantry settings! You’ll burn up your fuckin’ emitters like that!”

They complied, but it was already too late. The power-armored cleomanni nutcase had already changed her flight path such that she was directly above the rail cars, outside our firing arcs. There was a loud bang and a flash of light, and then another. The sheet metal on the far end of the rail car peeled open like tinfoil as one explosive slug after another slammed into the roof.

“Send them to hell, my pretties!” came the Captain’s muffled voice from atop the rail car.

Four spider-bombs dropped in through the roof of the freight car, scurrying towards us, very much intent on latching onto our faces and turning us into puddles of mulched flesh and bone. Grown mares and stallions flailed and screeched in terror.

Shooting Star leapt between us and the skittering bots, scooping them up in her levitation. Their tiny legs kicked uselessly as they were suspended in mid-air. She crushed them all into a tight ball with her magic, casually walking up to the gaping rents in the roof of the freight car.

“Hey Confederate bitch, I got a present for you!”

She passed the compacted spider-bomb ball up through one of the holes, before frying it with pyrokinesis until it blew.

I dared a peek out the side, catching a glimpse of the Guild Marbo champion tumbling end over end and sending up great big rooster tails in the dirt, her contragrav harness wrecked by the sheer force of the impact. A cry of applause reverberated through the rail car.

“Yeah, Star!” one stallion hooted. “You did it! You got her!”

“So long, fuckface!” I shouted amidst nervous laughter from the others.

Before I knew it, I was face-to-face with Placid Gale, who’d flown in through the other rail car door. She was livid. After setting down the casualties, the pegasus mare turned and marched up to Bellwether before hauling off and socking him right in the snoot.

“Cocksucking spook, we pulled your asses out of the fire, and you fucking left us to die!” Placid rained blow after blow on him.

He caught one of her punches and reversed it, slipping behind her and putting her in a sleeper hold, her screams of rage giving way to alarmed choking noises. “Knock it the fuck off, Gale! It was either that, or let the Raks wreck the train, destroy the cargo we came for, and turn all of us into fucking chum! It was a tough decision, and I hate the outcome as much as you do, but it was better than the alternative. Now, ease up or I’m gonna put you to sleep.”

Gale stopped struggling and stood, flicking her tail and flaring her nostrils angrily. “I had to leave behind three wounded mares. They begged me to shoot them so they wouldn’t be taken alive, but I didn’t have the heart to do it.” She glared at me. “This shit we’re stealing for Storm’s Charger had better be fucking worth it. As in, you owe me a hundred dead satyrs for this, Storm. If you don’t pay up as soon as your machine’s fixed, I’m going to beat your ass, Sergeant.”

“No, no,” I said. “You don’t have anything to worry about from me. As soon as Dust Devil’s back in working order, I’ll be exceeding that number by an order of magnitude or more.”

Placid’s lips peeled back in a mirthless smile. “Good. Very good.”

I ran a hoof through my mane, lingering on my wounded jaw. I was tired of being threatened by my new crew. I had newfound resolve. I needed to get my Mirage up and running as soon as possible. That would give me some real value to the ELF and put all doubts about my allegiance to rest.

Sagebrush peered out the side. “Those Raks are getting closer. Can we speed this thing up?”

Bellwether keyed his mic. “Osprey, throttle up. The wounded members of Raven are aboard.”

The train shook with heavy thumps as autocannon rounds struck the rearmost cars, blowing them apart.

“They’re not gonna let us go,” I said. “We’re never gonna be able to make the fucking cargo transfer with two Raks on our tail. They’re gonna derail th—”

There was a loud boom and a grinding noise as the whole train lurched.

“Well, they did it.” I peeked out the side and saw sparks shooting from the trucks of the last rail car. “We’re dragging that last car behind us.”

“Our speed’s dropping fast!” Cinderblock radioed.

“Fuck it, I’m going,” Placid said.

Bellwether put a hoof on her withers. “What are you doing?”

“I’m gonna detach that last car,” Placid turned and eyed the rest of us disdainfully. “The rest of you oh-so-special hornskulls and mudponies can stay here and let the expendable pegasus do her fucking job.”

There were a few gasps at her choice of language, but I ignored the slurs, approaching her without hesitation. “I saw you lift those casualties. Take me with you.”

“What?” Placid narrowed her eyes. “Why the fuck would I do that? You’ll just slow me down.”

“If you gimme a lift, I can make you invisible,” I deadpanned. “You can’t dodge an electronically-fused airbursting round. All they have to do is set it to gated proximity mode, lock you, let loose a few rounds, and then scrape what’s left of you off those tracks and toss it in the stew pot. The guns on those things can be used to bring down gyrodynes. To them, you’re nothing but a tiny helicopter made of flesh and bone. So, what’s it gonna be, meat helicopter?”

I could see her doing the mental arithmetic, her eyes darting around before settling on me. “Deal. Let’s go.”

She crouched down by an open rail car door and I jumped onto her back, hugging her neck with my forelegs. With a burst of wingpower, we were propelled out the side of the car with surprising force, heading skyward at an alarming rate. I looked down and could see the two Rakshasas far below us, trundling alongside the tracks. The rearmost of a good twenty freight cars was in pieces, its damaged trucks shooting sparks.

“This is gonna be a little weird!” I yelled over the howling slipstream.

“What?” Placid said.

I cloaked us, and I could feel Sergeant Gale squirm and panic beneath me.

“What the fuck? Storm, I can’t see! I’m fucking blind!”

“Relax, that’s just how the spell works. I’m bending the light around us so we look transparent, but as a side effect, it can’t reach our eyes, either.”

“Well, how the hell do you see whenever you cloak?”

“With magic,” I said. “I’m gonna grab your ears for a sec. If I pull your right ear up, it means go right. Left ear up, go left. Both ears up and down means ascend and descend, respectively. Follow the sound of the train, and for the love of Celestia, don’t hit the fucking dirt.”

I steered my pegasus steed towards the moving rail cars, pinging our landing zone continuously with my magic. She obeyed my ear-inputs with surprising alacrity, which was a good thing, because if she didn’t, we’d both be pasted across the landscape.

“This is fucking humiliating!” Placid yelled. “I’d rather let those Raks blow me to fucking pieces than let you ride on my back and fly me like a hang glider.”

“Quit bitching, alright?” I said. “Slow down! We’re coming up on the second-to-last car.”

I had her pull a quick one-eighty, accelerate to match the train’s speed, and then set down. The squeal of the damaged trucks was deafening.

“Okay,” she said. “Detach the car, and let’s get out of here.”

“I can’t.”

“What the hell, Storm? What do you mean ‘I can’t?’ Can’t you just levitate that thing loose?”

“It’s too much force and too complex of an action. I can’t concentrate on keeping us cloaked and uncouple the car at the same time.”

“Figures,” Placid muttered. “Fucking hornheads, man.”

“Whatever you say, turkey.” I could feel Placid ruffle her feathers in aggravation at the insult. “Just because I’m a unicorn, that doesn’t mean that I’m omnipotent, nor does it mean that I’m the second coming of Starswirl the Bearded. I’m just doing the best I can, okay? Now, go. I’ll keep you invisible with my magic. Just get the fuck down there and decouple the car before we all fucking die.”

“They were my friends, and I had to leave them behind,” Placid said, her voice quavering. “I left them to be captured and experimented on by those sick motherfuckers!”

The Raks had sophisticated acoustic detection suites. If it weren’t for the squealing of the damaged car grinding against the tracks, we would’ve already been picked up on their scopes because of her emotional display. It was cynical of me, but I had to convince her to be quit of her unprofessional behavior and focus on the mission.

“No, Gale,” I said. “You’re stronger than this. You can do this.”

She sniffed, rubbing her muzzle with her forehoof. “Yeah, I know. I’m going. Cover me.”

Placid held a hoof out, walking blind towards the edge of the car while I gave her directions.

“Ladder, one meter ahead.”

The pegasus swung her legs over the edge with practiced ease, gripping the rails with her fetlocks and sliding down the ladder.

“Cut lever’s to your right!” I said. “Give it a yank, and the coupling should let go.”

Placid felt for the lever, grasping and groping in the pitch-black darkness of the invisibility cloak, finding it after several seconds and kicking it with all her might. Her grunts of exertion increased in pitch and forcefulness as she struck it a second time, then a third. Nothing. It wouldn’t budge.

“It won’t decouple!”

I keyed the mic on my headset. “Bellwether, we’re trying to decouple the car, but no dice. It won’t let go.”

“You have to take tension off, first!” Bellwether said.

“If we slow down, the Raks will get us!” I said. “I know what to do. Hold on to your asses, people, ‘cause here goes nothing.”

I felt for the rail car with my magic. The whole thing was a lot lighter than I expected, after the Raks had hosed it down with gunfire and taken chunks out of it, but it was by no means light. The trucks and the bed of the car were many metric tons, and my lifting capacity was a fraction of that.

I wrapped the entire thing in a levitation field, gritting my teeth as I strained to concentrate. There was no way I could’ve lifted the rail car. It was much too heavy. For the Empress, it would’ve been child’s play, but it was impossible for me. However, I could pull it towards the moving train just enough to slacken the coupling.

My invisibility magic guttered out, and I found myself practically face-to-face with two Confederate spec-ops mech-suits bearing the insignia of a black wolf with a yellow lightning bolt on its forehead. My heart skipped a beat. It was the mark of the Gafalze Arresgrippen. The Special Assault Squadron. The Confederacy’s lethal, emotionless, half-lobotomized killers.

“Gale, hit it!” I shouted.

The pegasus slammed her hoof into the cut lever, before pressing her whole body against the car she was standing on to avoid getting crushed. With a shriek of torn metal, the damaged car veered off the rails and rolled end over end with astounding violence. It caught one of the Rakshasas dead-center, sending it tumbling away and quite probably knocking the pilot unconscious.

The other dodged the oncoming car with an evasive sidelong burst of thrust from its deafeningly loud vectored rocket boosters. The expendable solid-fuel rocket canisters, little red cylinders on a rotary gimbal, ejected over the bipedal machine’s shoulders with a shower of sparks before new ones rotated into place.

I eyed the Rakshasa with more than a little envy, pulling the technical specs from memory. Three meters high, eight metric tons. A shrieking gas turbine powerplant with over five hundred kilowatts output, coupled to a reduction gear and hydraulic pump. It carried a twenty-five-millimeter linkless-feed autocannon in the right hand, and a plasma sword in the left for hacking away like a machete at tank traps and other obstacles. They were like an Ifrit, but less than half the size and a fraction the weight.

There were two autoloading mortars on the back for withering indirect fire support, which could be exchanged with four anti-tank guided missiles for when greater anti-armor punch was needed. The Rak was a broad-shouldered, headless beast of a power suit. I even liked the color. Bluish gray with bold yellow diagonal stripes.

Exoskeletons this size weren’t classified as a Stridsgrippen, or Assault Walker. The cleomanni called them Battlesuits. It was regrettable that the Conclave never developed a Charger-like exoskeleton in that size envelope. It would have been cheap and practical.

It was easy to admire such a fine piece of engineering, in spite of its origins. Except this thing and its remorseless operator were going to slaughter me, or Gale, in about two seconds.

After shaking myself out of my reverie, I turned and bolted with a fearful whimper. Two concussive thuds slammed into my body. My ears rang. Everything burned. I briefly saw white. When I regained awareness, it felt like my skin was on fire. I collapsed to my haunches, screaming my lungs out. There were droplets of blood pitter-pattering on the roof of the rail car underneath me. My blood.

It hurt just to inhale, but I drew in a ragged breath nonetheless. “Gale! Help me! Fucking help! Medic!”

After a moment’s delay, I felt a pair of warm, strong forelegs cradle me. Through the haze of my spiraling double-vision, the very concerned face of a pale pegasus resolved in my field of view.

“I got you, Storm! Hang on!”

Holding me in her forelegs, Placid Gale took flight, evading incoming fire with an array of aerobatic maneuvers and quick dodges. Dizziness and motion-sickness overtook me. I gagged, and then turned my head and unleashed a torrent of frothy, bloody puke that spiraled away in the slipstream. Not my proudest moment.

I sharply inhaled, releasing my breath with a moan. I did this over and over again. Nothing seemed to dull the pain in my back that came on in waves. It felt like somepony had taken a jackhammer to my spine.

I blinked and must’ve lost some time, because before I knew it, I was in the rail car with the rest, less my helmet, and Sergeant Gale was stripping my armor off with the help of trauma shears held in her wingtips while another medic tried to stabilize me. Bellwether was yelling over the radio for Cinderblock to speed up the train. Some of the other soldiers celebrated and shouted taunts out the side of the car as they watched the remaining Rakshasa recede into the distance, unable to keep up with Equestrian steel.

I let out a low, pained groan. “Ohohohoho fuck!”

“Quit whining, you baby,” Sagebrush snorted.

“Naw, Sage,” one of the medic stallions said. “She’s actually taking this pretty well. Looks like a wad of ball bearings took out her right fucking kidney, and I’m not sure about the other one. She needs to go on dialysis like, as soon as possible. May be some shrapnel in her right lung, too.”

“Wh—what?” I whined. “Where the fuck am I gonna get new kidneys?!”

I had bits of metal in my vital organs. It wasn’t the first time I’d been hit by fragments, but by Celestia, I wished it was the last. I wasn’t looking forward to pissing blood, either.

Bellwether stared at me unblinkingly. “New mission, people. We’re gonna have to find Storm a fresh pair of kidneys.”

“Are you kidding me?” Sagebrush roared, his expression unreadable below the brim of his helmet. “This prima donna bitch is gonna be the end of us, Bell! I say we cut our losses and quit trying to restore a fucking Courser that will only marginally add to the lethality of our cell.”

“Now, you listen here you son of a whore.” Bellwether got in Sagebrush’s face. “Placid and that quote unquote ‘prima donna bitch’ just saved all of us from becoming fish food, you donkey-fucking hillbilly prick! Sky down, son!”

Sagebrush sat down hard, looking slightly deflated, but he still had enough piss and vinegar in him to keep up with his posturing. “Don’t you Son me, Bell. You’re only what, five years older than me? You’re just jealous because I’m one hundred percent pure animal. Raw, uncut, Equestrian majesty, in the prime of my fuckin’ life. And you’re what, like two years from being just as creaky as ol’ Crook? Yeah, you got real quiet there, boss. I thought so. Can see your gray hairs from here.”

“Here we fucking go again.” Placid facehooved with both hooves.

“Oh fuck, oh no.” Every breath I drew was agony. “Celestia’s sake, this fucking hurts. My saddlebag. The terminal. Grab it. Quick.”

“What for?” the medic stallion said.

“Cable. Neck port. Neuro-salve. Please.”

He reached into my ruined saddlebags and pulled out the terminal. The stallion let out a low whistle, giggling a bit as he showed me the terminal. What was left of it, anyway. The whole thing was crumpled in half and filled with ball bearing frag. The damn thing had probably saved my life. The armor coverage in the saddle area of Bulwark suits was notoriously poor. If I’d taken that hit full-on without the portable terminal to absorb part of it, it would have obliterated my insides. My last moments would’ve been spent drowning in my own blood. If I hadn’t brought the stupid thing along, I’d be dead.

“You think this is funny, motherfucker?” I said.

“No, not all. Just, yeah. Obviously, we’re not doing the neuro-salve.” He tossed the ruined terminal out the side of the train.

“Hold still!” Placid said as she jammed a needle into my foreleg. “Here, some morphine.”

“Oh shit, oh fuck, oh—” Slowly, bit by bit, the pain melted away, and I regained a small measure of cogency.

Bellwether glanced at me, and then Placid. “Keep her alert and talking.”

“Roger, roger.” Placid saluted.

“Placid,” I began, swallowing the lump in my throat. “There were cages. Stacked two stories high.”

“What are you talking about? Stay with us, Sergeant. We’re losing you!”

“In the warehouse. Cages, everywhere. They’re gonn—” I yelped as a pang of agony shot through my back. “They’re gonna start rounding ponies up. They’re gonna use the continental rail network. They’re gonna start collecting us, and all they need is to clear those last few strands of red tape. We’re completely screwed!”

“Fuckin’ drama queen,” Sagebrush muttered. “They’ve tried building concentration camps. We’ve sabotaged their efforts before, and we’ll do it again.”

Bellwether tapped a forehoof to his chin. “Storm’s intel matches what some resistance cells already know. We’re going to have to up the operational tempo. The Liberation Front is reliant on popular support, on the logistics side of things. If they cut our legs out from under us by rounding up civilians, we’re as good as done.”

The sound of squealing brakes filled my ears as the rail cars lurched under hard deceleration. The reverberations from head to hoof made my back ache and my stomach turn.

Bellwether keyed his mic. “What the fuck is going on, Cinder? Why are we stopping?”

“Pegasus scouts say the track ahead is out!”

“We’re out of time.” Bellwether shook his head. “The gunships have swung back around. And now, that other Rak is going to catch up.”

Sagebrush was on edge. “Well, when the fuck are Night Terror and Sierra gonna regroup on our position?”

Bellwether checked his watch. “It’s only been ten minutes since I ordered them to link up with us, so another half-hour. Which we don’t fucking have.”

“Well, shit,” Sagebrush said. “The hell do we do now?”

I could hear the whine of approaching motors, and the rest of the squad ducked behind the walls of the rail car. The second Rak screeched to a halt beside the train, leveling its gun straight at us. I was lying prone, in full view of the thing and its pilot, covering my head and whimpering.

A tinny voice blared from its chest-mounted speaker. “Anzala Ekkestreuni! Arume Konfed hentet! Zis-tain nev hentet! Shikret kized, adzen nevmetze!”

He said we’d be unharmed if we came quietly. Somehow, I doubted his honesty, and the others mirrored my distrust.

“He’s just waiting for us to come out into the open so he can gun us down.” Sagebrush spat a wad of tobacco.

“Wait, you guys hear that?” Bellwether said.

There was a loud and obnoxious whine of a gas turbine coming from the field behind the Confederate mech. A pair of pegasi burst from the bushes, looping a steel cable around the Rak’s legs and pulling it tight, before diving back into the cover of the dead, dry foliage. The Rak turned and tracked them, its autocannon booming as it fired into the gloam of the twilit field.

The cable pulled taut as the Bull Runner’s winch reeled in. The Rak was jerked off its feet and dragged across the ground face-down as the recovery vehicle reversed and twelve motorized axles applied gargantuan torque. The Confederate power suit dug a furrow in the dirt as it was hauled across the field, kicking up dust in its wake, its legs twirling end over end like a leek dropped in a garbage disposal.

There were whoops and hollers from the injured militia ponies all around me, as well as every variation of Get some, motherfuckers! possible in our tongue. The crew on the Bull Runner brought the giant recovery vehicle to a halt. The two pegasi from earlier, one of whom I recognized as Wind Shear, performed quick, swooping passes, dropping bricks of what looked like plastic explosive charges. I closed my eyes and covered my ears, for what little good that did me.

There were two deafening bangs and a brief fireball as the charges were touched off manually, the shockwave kicking up dust and obscuring the Rakshasa from view. My ears rang, my hearing muffled like I had my head wrapped in cotton gauze. A few of the militia ponies swore, shaking off their disorientation.

When I peeked up at the burnt carcass of the Rak, surrounded by bits of debris, its deadly autocannon a shattered husk, I let a small grin split my face. My jubilation soon turned to horror, however, as the mailed fist of an obsidian-black exoskeleton punched the Rak’s access hatch off from the inside with augmented strength.

“Oh fuck, no,” I whispered. “No!”

The GARG Trooper’s motions were unnaturally sinuous as he extricated himself from the ruined Rak’s cockpit with a deftness that belied the sheer bulk of his armor. The faceless mask of his helmet had no visible visor, cameras or eye slits of any kind. The armored covers for his twin horns made him appear like some manner of demon from the depths of Tartarus. His armor was as black as the night, except for a thin yellow band on his left pauldron that designated his rank as a spec-ops leader.

Without hesitation, he yanked one of their trademark heavy riot shields from its stowage position behind the pilot’s seat and drew out his monomolecular saber, advancing on us menacingly with his near-impenetrable wall of energy-reflective metal held out in front of him.

My fur stood on end. This was no mere Guild Champion. This was a crack soldier who knew how to get the most out of his augs and armor. I was uncomfortable facing GARG troopers even with the protection of my Charger’s armor, active protection system and comprehensive sensor suite. Wounded and stripped of my body armor, I was literally naked before him.

“Shoot the son of a bitch!” Sagebrush roared.

Needle-thin lances of green beamcaster fire fell upon the GARG trooper in an angry barrage, but he wasn’t there. He’d stood in our field of fire for a split-second, the first few beams visibly reflecting off his shield. The next, he was gone. His motions were a blur, his speed preternatural. He charged the rail car, sword in hand, his armored boots kicking up puffs of dirt.

I couldn’t take it. I clamped my eyes shut. We were going to die. We had nothing that could reliably kill a GARG trooper short of an anti-tank missile, and not only were we fresh out of those, even if we had one, he would never stand still and take that hit. A GARG trooper was a fast-moving target that was difficult even for a Charger’s sophisticated fire control system to track. Doing it with hooves was impossible. We were finished. In seconds, he’d be on us, hacking away, dicing us up into griffon cuisine.

There was a loud metallic clang. I opened my eyes, and my jaw slackened with disbelief at the scene that unfolded before me. The GARG trooper stood stock-still, weapon at the ready. Opposite him, the object of his undivided attention, was one of Her Majesty’s esteemed Dragoons, her unblemished white armor seeming to promise the imminent banishment of evil. The heraldry was unmistakable.

“Commodore Cake!” I whispered.

The two super-soldiers began to circle each other, their faceless helmets hiding their expressions. The militia members all around me held their fire, trembling in their boots. Sagebrush looked between us and the field with the two combatants, as if he wasn’t sure whether or not to give the order to back up the Commodore, or to hold fire and avoid drawing attention.

The GARG trooper and the Dragoon charged at each other. Charged was the wrong word, really. Even lunged or catapulted seemed insufficient to describe the absurdity of what I witnessed. They shot at each other like each of them had been fired out of a cannon, their visages reduced to a wispy blur, punctuated by an earth-shaking boom as the Commodore’s lance clashed with the GARG trooper’s shield.

The impact released a bright flash and a shockwave that made the dust rise for ten meters in all directions, and then, without any fanfare or struggle, they parted just as quickly, returning to their original positions, slowly circling each other.

My heart pounded in abject fear, my breathing quickening, heedless of the pain shooting through my injured lung. The entire clash had taken no longer than a second, in spite of the good twenty meters between them. It had happened faster than anyone unaugmented could reasonably react. Some hundreds of milliseconds, bang, then some more hundreds of milliseconds, and they were back where they started.

It looked less like combat, and more like a stroboscopic image of an internal combustion engine in cross-section. Like a piston traveling from the top of a cylinder to the bottom and back. They didn’t so much move as they flickered from one place to the next. Impossible for the eye to follow, much less comprehend.

The tip of the Dragoon’s lance and the shield held at the ready by the GARG trooper both smoked as if heated by the impact to the point where they might’ve welded together, but neither had even a scratch on them. The forces involved would have reduced any ordinary pony to a pile of mush in an instant.

The two combatants kept circling each other, sizing each other up, looking for any holes in their opponent’s defenses that they could exploit, shifting their guard, feinting in anticipation of an incoming attack. Even with the sizable gap between them, their sheer speed meant they were basically face-to-face.

That was when the actual duel began in earnest. I could scarcely even describe what I saw, it happened so quickly. The two fighters closed the distance, their attacks blurred with impossible speed. Thrust, dodge, riposte, it all seemed to happen simultaneously, accompanied by the ferocious clanging of indestructible weapons and impregnable armor. The Dragoon’s lance missed the GARG trooper’s head by inches as he ducked, its pure white tip brushing across one of his gleaming black pauldrons. He tried swatting her away with the shield, only for her to backpedal as he advanced, cleaving the air with three mighty swings of his blade in less than a second.

The Commodore backflipped several times, twisted in mid-air with the help of her wings and landed on all four hooves with impossible grace, firing a blinding purple-white pulse from her overdriven beamcasters. The GARG trooper swatted it away with his shield, the deflected beam igniting a dried and dead shrub and setting it ablaze. Far overhead, I could hear the scream of jet engines and whirring rotors from a primitive gyrodyne gunship circling the combat zone.

“What in Tartarus are you doing, Bell?” Commodore Cake’s voice crackled over the radio, though she didn’t take her eyes off her opponent for a second. “That gunship is heading around for another pass. I can bring it down, but not if I’m busy occupying a bloody Gaff so he doesn’t chop you all to bits! You need to get the train moving, now! Have your boys mend the tracks while I keep this ponce busy.”

Bellwether nodded. “Osprey team, you heard the lady. Get that damn track fixed!”

A couple unicorns and an earth pony hefting a shovel jumped off the locomotive and ran out onto the tracks ahead of us at full tilt. The actual break in the track was a few hundred meters ahead of where the loco sat immobile. The GARG trooper could see what we were doing, and he moved to intercept the repair ponies, but the Dragoon impeded his path. The cleomanni super-soldier’s motions became more erratic and aggressive, as though he were perturbed by the prospect of us making a successful escape.

“Ekkestreuni besti matol!” he growled in a display of hatred that was rare for his kind.

Like the hairy spines of some terrible insect, micro-missile launchers stood erect on the back of his suit and spat dozens of guided explosive projectiles at the Dragoon. They detonated harmlessly against her armor’s enchanted bubble shield, shimmering off-white. She used the dust kicked up by the exploding micro-missiles as a distraction and lunged with a burst of wingpower, her lance striking the GARG trooper in the midsection. He went tumbling end over end, leaping to his feet after regaining control in mid-air, recovering from the crushing blow as though it had never happened.

The trooper staggered a bit, clearly wounded. The impact probably broke a few ribs. While maintaining his guard with the shield, he sheathed his sword, pulled a small white cylinder full of combat drugs from his vest, popped the cap off with his thumb and injected the contents into a port in the side of his neck, before casually discarding the vial. He leaned his head from side to side, cracking his neck, before drawing his sword, his movements showing renewed vigor.

“Bell!” Cinderblock shouted back at the rail car. “My guys say they’ve filled in the crater and paired up the track ahead. We’re gonna go slow, okay?”

White streaks from rocket pods scarred the horizon. There were a succession of bright flashes and a fireball off in the distance, followed by a series of muffled explosive thuds. The gunship had engaged and destroyed the Bull Runner. In an open field, the heat of their engine plainly visible on infrared, there had been nowhere for them to hide and camouflage themselves. I shook my head. So much for leaving the train. We were as good as married to the thing, now.

“I don’t care how slow you have to go,” Bellwether said, his tone verging on pleading. “Just get us the hell out of here!”

One of the pegasus mechanics from the Bull Runner, one of the ones who’d disabled the Rakshasa, leapt from the bushes, took wing and dived towards the GARG trooper, a brick of plastic explosive held in his mouth. The black-armored cleomanni super-soldier sprang into the air and sliced the unlucky pegasus stallion in half, the two chunks of what were once a pony tumbling away in two different directions, his entrails painting the side of a moving rail car.

The GARG trooper flicked the blood from his monomolecular blade, raising his shield and launching himself at the Dragoon with augmented speed. She raised her lance to block a vicious downward slash. He followed up by planting a hard-driven kick in her chest, and she rocketed away, her armored form tumbling across the dirt. The Dragoon and her lance parted ways. She fell in a heap, unmoving.

The train slowly started to pick up speed. The obsidian-armored monster lunged for the open door of the freight car, hauling himself through the opening until he stood right before me. Not a single pony in the car moved a muscle against him. Some raised their hooves in surrender. I was almost certain I smelled, and heard, one of our number fear-pissing. Could have been me, even. I couldn’t tell. I had lost most of my feeling from the midpoint of my barrel to my ass. I was utterly defenseless as he touched the tip of his sword to my chin.

“You were the one who helped your little winged friend decouple the car right in my squadmate’s face,” he said. “You fought with honor.” He drew back his sword. “Unlike the rest of these wretches who are destined for the cages, you’ve earned the right to a quick death.”

I squeezed my eyes shut, anticipating the end. Then, I heard a loud snap. I cracked an eye open and looked up. The Commodore’s forelegs were wrapped around the GARG trooper’s neck, his head bent at an unnatural angle. He dropped his weapon and shield and they thudded heavily against the deck, his shaking hands rising towards his neck.

The Dragoon simply wrenched harder, until there was a sickening crack that reverberated through the cramped space. She didn’t stop there, either. She reached around the other side of his head and twisted in the opposite direction with a wet popping noise, just to make sure his cervical spine was well and truly broken in more than one place. She tossed his corpse into the back of the freight car like it was a bag of garbage, before falling into a sitting position, her hind legs dangling off the edge of the moving rail car, her lance couched by her side.

A few of the stragglers from Magpie showed up, too. What was left of them. Wind Shear cradled a gravely wounded pegasus. Probably a survivor from the Runner. One of the medics attended to them in the back of the rail car.

The Commodore’s helmet split and retracted. Her mane was mussed and she was breathing heavily, her muzzle speckled with blood. She coughed a few times, wiping away the bloody sputum with an armored foreleg, scanning the terrain with her unfocused gaze. Seeing her so rattled was somehow unnerving in and of itself. The Dragoons represented the unshakable will of the Empress herself. I never wanted to make the acquaintance of anything or anyone that could actually hurt one of them in a fight.

“My Lady.” I tried sitting up to offer a bow of respect, but the Commodore shook her head.

“Don’t lean up,” she said. “You’re too gravely injured.”

To be a Commodore in the Dragoons was not a military rank. It meant that one was a commander in a chivalric order. Their ranks ran from Chevalier, to Officer, to Commodore, to Grand Commodore, to Star Cross, each more experienced and deadlier than the last. As knights, each and every one of them, from the lowliest to the greatest of them, possessed a noble title and technically outranked even a General in the army if said General was a commoner, but the less senior of the Dragoons knew better than to challenge the authority of an army officer with more experience.

They rode dragons, too. Cyberdragons, in fact. Over two stories tall and armed and armored to the teeth, their scales overlapped with titanium and composite plating permanently anchored into their flesh, their leathery wings fitted with rows of overdriven beamcasters and other nasty toys.

Once a Dragoon had demonstrated their worthiness through their deeds, they would be bonded to a dragon under a magical oath, sworn to protect each other until one or the other fell in battle. The first time I saw one riding their cyberdragon, I was too gobsmacked to do anything but stare, jaw hanging loose. It was like the age of ancient pony myths and legends had come alive before my very eyes.

“Say, Commodore,” I muttered, half-delirious. “Where’s your dragon?”

She frowned sharply, as if she detested hearing the topic brought up. “She was badly wounded during the fall of the capital. I released Obsidian from her oath and bid that she live among her own kind once more.”

“You make it look so easy,” Sagebrush said. “How do you fight a guy who doesn’t know fear? A soldier who shrugs off beamcaster fire like it’s nothing?”

“Lacking the capacity to experience strong emotions such as fear can be a disadvantage,” the Commodore muttered. “Fear begets caution, like the sort of healthy fear that keeps one from ignoring a Dragoon just because they assume they’re incapacitated. Some soldiers prevail in spite of their terror. I won because I’ve mastered mine.”

“Where have you been these past few weeks, Layer?” Bellwether said. “We could’ve used your help, earlier.”

“I was tying up some loose ends and securing valuable intel.”

“What sort of intel are we talking about, here?”

Layer Cake sighed heavily. “Scheherazade’s AI core has been placed in the custody of our top infotechs and we’re interrogating it right now. Our scouting parties have new updates for us, as well. The Confederacy has a new concentration camp in Dodge City. They’re processing thousands of us there and shipping us off-world, to be sold to their citizens and trading partners as pets, laborers, and livestock, or worse.”

“Why haven’t we moved to take it out?” Placid frowned.

“Expensive, in terms of ponies and materiel. The camp is also guarded by damarkind mercenaries, and we’ve intercepted and decoded reports stating that a few prisoners have disappeared over the past few days under dubious circumstances. If we want to save as many as we can, we need to move quickly on that objective, but we haven’t been able to drum up the necessary assets.”

I winced. Damarkinds were thoroughly disgusting creatures. Though they were not as much of a threat as a GARG trooper in a fight, they were still far more physically imposing than the average cleomanni. Much like the Vandals, they had no compunctions against devouring the meat of sentients.

If captive ponies were disappearing on their watch, that meant the damarkinds were eating, fucking, or killing them. Probably all of the above, and hopefully not in that specific order. The horrified looks on my compatriots’ faces showed that they understood this just as well as I did. One mare broke down in a fit of sobbing, burying her face in her shaking forehooves, while another looped a foreleg over the first one’s withers and hugged her close to her chest in response.

“Let’s see them try and put me on their dinner table,” Sagebrush said, spitting a wad of tobacco. “Gonna make myself extra bitter for them.” He opened another can of chew, chuckling darkly all the while.

“How are you holding up, Sergeant?” Layer said, ignoring Sagebrush’s remarks.

Placid returned to holding a blood-soaked compress against my back, while a unicorn medic started stitching me up with a needle and surgical thread after a quick once-over to make sure they didn’t leave any obvious shrapnel buried inside.

“Where’s Driving Band?” I said.

“I think he was captured by the enemy,” Layer said. “We got separated after the crash. I investigated the crash site, but you’d already moved on, and the AI core wasn’t there. I heard you’d been taken in by the Crazy Horse cell, but you didn’t have the core with you.

“So, I went plain-clothes and followed some leads on the Equestrian mercenaries who accompanied us to the surface, and while I was chatting with one of my contacts, describing the mercs and what the AI core looked like, she pointed behind me. I turned around and saw the damn thing for sale in an open-air market, just sitting on a table right there, with some bug-headed xicare git propping his elbows next to it. Three hundred gold bits. I haggled him down to two-fifty.”

“Uhh, the Bull Runner’s gone, ma’am,” I mumbled. “What are we gonna fucking do?”

“That’s our third this year,” she said. “We’ll manage. We have to. Our nation’s survival depends on us.”

“What about the fucking Pursuer?”

“The six-by-six?” Bellwether said. “Are you kidding, Storm? The whole area’s swarming with hostiles. It’s as good as theirs.”

The landscape around us was mostly a blur. We passed the charred remnants of a small town. There was an abandoned railway station covered in apocalyptic graffiti. In response to what the Commodore said, I couldn’t help but think What nation? However, I didn’t actually vocalize it. The Dragoon spread her wings and took flight, taking up position on the locomotive where she’d have a better vantage point to spot incoming gunships.

As for the gunship that impeded our progress earlier, it was likely that they’d simply run too low on fuel to continue their CAS mission, so they bugged out. Given that we had a Dragoon on our side, this was smart, since it would be trivial for her—or any Dragoon, really—to intercept a gyrodyne, kick through the canopy, rip the pilot out of his seat and feed him headfirst into his own rotors. Perhaps he’d spotted her and made the decision to immediately return to base right then and there. A wise decision.

The rail car doors were slid closed. Twenty minutes later, the Chargers linked up with us, announcing their presence by the unmistakable sound of whirring duostrand muscles and pumping hydraulics. I couldn’t see them, but I could hear and feel them. The engineers slowed the loco a bit so Night Terror’s great big Destrier could keep up. I was fading in and out of consciousness. I had lost so much blood. The pounding metal hooves of the Chargers made me feel safe, like a security blanket would for a foal. Placid Gale held me in her hooves, shaking me awake if she thought I was going to pass out.

I looked up at Placid. “I see you and Bell and the rest fighting and arguing a lot. Have you people ever got along?”

“Not particularly.” Placid Gale set her jaw. “I mean, I just had to leave three of my only real friends in this outfit to die, and this is what I’m left with? This sucks.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“For what?”

“For saving me. You could’ve just run, but you took a big risk to bring me back.”

Placid looked a little bit shocked at the compliment, and I thought I detected a hint of red in her cheeks. She smirked and ruffled my mane with her forehoof.

“Nah, I didn’t save you, kid. You see this, all around us? This is hell, and we’re all just waiting to wake up and walk the Summer Fields.”

I felt a warm tear drip from my eye. “You believe in the afterlife?”

“Of course I do.” She nodded. “I believe we’ll all be reunited with the Martyred Maiden in the great beyond. It’s what keeps me going. What the hell do I have to look forward to, otherwise?”

The Martyred Maiden. A spiritual aspect of Princess Celestia worshipped by the Star Cult. Some sects saw their grim iconography as blasphemous in nature. Their houses of worship were frequently adorned with images of the long-deceased alicorn princess weeping tears of blood, or holding her own heart in her hooves, or both.

“Oh gee,” I said, chuckling softly. “I didn’t take you for a Starrie.”

“Well, I didn’t take you for a faithless heathen, either.” Placid laughed as she applied a fresh dressing to my wounds.

“Placid?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m scared.” A wave of fresh, hot tears rolled down my face. “I don’t want to die.”

“You’re not the only one, Sergeant,” Sagebrush said. “We’re all scared. We all had something or someone we left behind. Suck it up.”

I saw Placid give him a nasty look, as if she were sizing him up for a coffin.

“I miss my family,” I said. “I miss my squadmates. My fiancé’s probably dead. I was going to get fucking married! We scrimped and bought a dress and everything. It’s all ashes, now. Everything I do feels like a waste without my friends and loved ones around to share the future with. I know, in my heart, that I’m never gonna see them again. What the fuck are we still fighting for? The right to feel lonely in peace? If that’s all we have to look forward to, then maybe we’re better off dead.”

Placid chuckled in that strange, clinking martini glass way of hers. “That’s silly. Everypony dies someday. How you die is what makes it count.” Placid reached down and caressed my cheek with a hoof. “And you’re only alone because you choose to be.”

// … end transmission …

Record 09//Gridiron

//HOL CRY SWT
//CHECKSUM READ
//READ FAIL

// … error - holocrystal alignment error …

//HOL CRY SWT
//CHECKSUM READ
//READ FAIL

// … error - holocrystal alignment error …

run tapper#xap

-=ThE TaPpER=-

[Don’t use this unless you know what you’re doing! -Jo]

//-h: help, -t: basic tap cycle, -tf [x]: fulltap [rate]

run tapper#xap -tf 1024

//============——————……………

//Stage 1 - 38%

//Stage 2 - 45%

//Stage 3 - 82%

//Stage 3 … Finalizing - 98%

-=CyCLe CoMpLEtE=-

………………………………………….

//HOL CRY SWT
//CHECKSUM READ
//CHECKSUM GOOD

//RES DAT SRM

Desert Storm

I rocked back and forth on my haunches, hissing through my teeth. The apocalyptic scenery racing past the open rail car door seemed way more exciting than usual. I’d just shot meth again, so I figured that had something to do with it. I was in that zombified region between sleep and wakefulness. Once again, I was doing that conscious breathing thing that I hated. My body felt heavy, my limbs like lead weights, but I was full of nervous energy. I wouldn’t dare vocalize it, but my commanding officer was an irresponsible son of a bitch. We were all riding straight into another meat grinder.

I thought of all the ways I would go down fighting. My brain ran in a loop. I foresaw my own failure. One misstep, one slip-up, one gruesome death after another. I scanned the sallow eyes and drooping faces of my compatriots, and though nopony said a word, I could tell they were all thinking the same exact thing. This was suicide, plain and simple. I grinned. I was fucking excited. I’d voided myself of all rationality as of a few minutes ago.

Lucky for us, our prayers were answered when the train came to a halt twenty klicks from our destination. I peered around the side of the rail car. There were some vehicles blocking the crossing ahead. Four five-ton trucks and six Centaur APCs. The Centaur 6x6 was the Equestrian answer to the Confederate Pursuer. Both of the front axles could steer, and the rear axle, spaced further to the rear than the other two axles, had a pair of great big mudders in the back.

The untamed roar of their high-strung twelve-cylinder synfuel engine was very distinctive, which was both a blessing and a curse. It made it easy for friend and foe alike to pick them out on the battlefield. They were fast as hell and armed and armored to the gills, but they were also difficult to maintain and guzzled gas. The engines would always break down every few hundred hours, but they were modular, so a small team of mechanics could quickly rip the whole power unit out and send it to be factory-reconditioned, and then slap in another engine that had already been refurbished. Unit-exchange.

“Reinforcements?” I muttered.

Bellwether peeked around the side of the rail car and squinted at them. “That must be them.”

Placid, Sagebrush, Star and I accompanied Bellwether as he jumped out of the rail car and moved to the head of the train. Standing at the crossing was a loose formation of troops. A good platoon-sized force of Equestrian soldiers. At the head of this group was a big, muscular, dusky-feathered griffon in full combat gear, along with her personal entourage of four similarly attired griffons. Her black beret bore the bars of a Captain. They were all kitted out with both beamcasters and the large-bore slug-throwers that griffons favored. Even from afar, I could see Bellwether break out in a sweat. He was expecting reinforcements, but he hadn’t expected his boss.

“Captain Garrida!” he said, offering a stiff salute that was not returned. “Perfect timing, ma’am. I’ve got—”

The big, intimidating griffon marched up to Bellwether’s face, her beak practically touching his muzzle. “You destroyed my fuckin’ Bull Runner, Bell.” She poked him in the chest with her claw for emphasis. “Half of your platoon is missing, dead, or wounded. You ran like a pussy and didn’t even recover the tags, let alone the bodies.”

“I—we—” Bellwether spluttered. “It wasn’t just CSF! The Confederate Army ambushed us with battlesuits! I—”

“No! No excuses!” Garrida headbutted him into the ground. “Stop wasting my assets, maggot!”

The big griffon put her claws in her beak and whistled, before making a few snappy gestures towards the rail cars. Like clockwork, her troops—disciplined and trained former military, not our militia dregs—raided the rail cars of anything of value, loading the captured materiel onto the trucks. Eight pegasi grabbed the heavy radome from the crashed Confederate patrol boat, spreading its weight among eight pairs of wings.

The transfer was completed in mere minutes. It was mesmerizing to watch. The most injured of us were placed on the trucks and sent home. A few others were doing even worse than I was. A dazed, infuriated Bellwether was escorted off to board one of the Centaurs.

Captain Garrida paced in front of us, eyeing us imperiously. “As of right now, Agent Bellwether is relieved of command of this operation. I’m taking charge. You will address me as ‘Sir’. You shitbirds will do exactly as I say, when I say it, or so help me, I will rip every one of your asses off. You won’t even know what happened. You’ll turn around and be like ‘where’s my ass?’ and it’ll be completely gone. Do I make myself clear?”

“Sir, yes sir!” the survivors and I chorused.

“Good.” Garrida nodded. “I don’t care what units or formations Bell had you in a moment ago. Anyone who’s got wings will join Raptor Team. Everyone else, Team Ostrich. We’re going to assault the Dodge City detention camp and free the captives, but we’re going to do it my way. Combat Engineers, you are to rig every inch of the locomotive with CH. We’re gonna start this bitch off with some big fireworks.

“Immediately afterward, ground and air teams are to begin the assault when I give the signal. This is not a rescue mission. This is a search and destroy op. We’re going to kill every last alien son of a bitch we see. We are not going to leave until they are all rat bait. Any ‘rescue’ of prisoners that happens will be a side effect of their captors being freshly deceased. Move out!”

“Yes, Sir!”

Brick after brick of CH was emplaced inside the engine and the remaining cars. If I had to guess, they probably used over half a ton of the stuff. Their transport trucks must have been filled to the gills with it. A dangerous prospect with enemy air lurking overhead. The secondaries would’ve taken out the whole convoy. Oh great, another nutjob, I mused. No shortage of those in this outfit.

CycloHex, or CH, was the standard explosive compound used in practically all Imperial ground ordnance. It was a 60/40 mixture of cyclonite and polymerized chains of hexanitrocubane with a plasticizer and stabilizer added. The mixture was also triply enchanted for enhanced heat, pressure, and detonation velocity. My father used to tell me this story all the time; in the old days, legions of unicorn factory mares, the so-called Boom Babes, would enchant each batch the old-fashioned way, working in shifts that barely gave them enough time to eat, sleep, shit, and piss.

A few decades ago, they’d switched over production to an automated process that used diagrammatic engines instead, like the one found in a beamcaster, to perform each enchantment on the mixture in sequence as batches moved across conveyors. CH packed a wallop like nothing else. Pound-for-pound, it had over four times the relative effectiveness of TNT. A small brick of the moldable plastique was enough to rip the face off a building. Several hundred pounds of it could level a city block.

The only time that the usage of CycloHex was inappropriate was for space-based ordnance. Anti-Starship Missiles, or ASSMs, along with things like the det-packs used by combat astronauts to sabotage space-based hardware, used an even more potent, more costly HMX-based formulation called LOVAP instead, so named for its much lower vapor pressure. CH, when exposed directly to vacuum outside of a hermetically sealed container, would undergo sublimation and degrade straight from a solid into a gas, limiting its usefulness in space.

When one of Captain Garrida’s pegasus Lieutenants ordered Cinderblock and his crew off the train, set the throttle to full, and accelerated at breakneck speed, the loco’s steam turbine and traction motors doppler-shifted as it roared off into the distance, one thing was made abundantly clear. We were, in fact, going with Bellwether’s plan to use the train as a battering ram.

“All squads, board the vehicles,” Garrida said. “We’re following that thing in. Go, go, go!”

We all hurriedly piled onto the Centaurs. There was hardly any room for all of us, but somehow, we managed to fit, packed into each APC like sardines. Like cat food. The big V12 came to life and the Centaur picked up speed, each bump and pothole in the road lightly jostling us in our combat harnesses. The space in the back of the vehicle was cramped and dark, and my shoulder protectors clanged against the ones of the ponies next to me.

Someone was blasting loud music from a boombox in the corner. The first track was from Neck Bolt, the Baltimare speed metal greats who needed no introduction. The second was by A-Fib, a hardcore punk band who were infamous both for their anti-authoritarian message and for the fact that their lineup had a unicorn front-mare for a vocalist, a cleomanni political asylum-seeker on bass, a linnaltan on drums, and a xicare on guitar.

Love you like a heart attack,
but I know you don’t love me back,
‘cuz I’m not shaped correct,
to get you all erect!

They were banned from numerous venues and loved by dissidents on both sides of the border for their raucous and subversive live shows. There was an infamous incident where they’d went on the run from the Confederate Constabulary across multiple systems both for smuggling their vocalist across the border and for playing an unauthorized gig with their amps and everything on a street corner in the financial district of Kar Hollinvost. The Confederate capital on Ard Doch. The heart of darkness itself.

One thing was certain; they had big stones. Great big ones. The idea that a pony and one or more members or associates of the Free Trade Union races could simply get together and do something as innocent as jointly creating works of art and culture was practically unheard-of, with a few protest groups being the sole exception. Even in the Empire, there were some who thought they were spies. There was simply too much bad blood there. They had to be some of the biggest xenophiles imaginable. People who saw themselves as above the conflict. Beyond it. Some resented them for their lack of patriotism. I, on the other hoof, envied their freedom.

The stallion to my left was cute. Hell, the stallion to my right was cute, too. All of us were musky and sweaty, and the crowded troop compartment reeked of that unmistakable pheromone stink. Cleomanni and the like had broken smellers when compared to ponies. I could smell everything. I could smell my compatriots’ fear, their bloodlust, how horny they were, how healthy they were. Everything.

I wanted to fuck. Badly. My hips were quivering. I wanted to rip off my armor and start blowing somepony right away. I shook my head. It’s just the meth. It enhances libido. Ignore it. My self-control was stronger than some puny chemical substance.

“Hey, guess what, you sons of bitches?” I said.

“What?” someone on the other end of the troop bay replied.

“I’m going home! Dodge is where I’m from! How ‘bout you?”

For a moment, there wasn’t a peep from anyone, the air heavy with a pregnant pause, and then, a soldier with a thick farm pony accent standing to my right piped up. “I’m from Appleloosa. Dodge is shit. Always has been. Was shit back then, and it’s even more shit now. Wha’d ya’ do before ya’ joined the Army? Shovel shit?”

“I waited tables at the Gridiron.”

The whole troop bay broke out in guffaws. The guy to my left was leaning on my shoulder and practically crying from laughter.

“What?” I said. “What’s so funny?”

“Aw, shit!” the Appleloosan soldier said. “Ya’ hear that? A titty waitress! She used ta’ be a dang titty waitress!”

“What’s the matter, hornskull?” another chimed in. “Were the whorehouses in Canterlot too fancy for the likes of you?”

I was fairly certain that I outranked over half of the ponies here. Their insubordination made my blood boil. The balls on these assholes. They knew they could get away with it, too. No tribunals, no MPs, nothing. No such luxuries in an insurrection. I wondered if we had a brig we could throw them in, at the very least. With my own lapses in judgment over the past two days, I also wondered if I was headed there, myself.

Fuck it. I thought. Fuck Bellwether. Fucking spook. He was going to get us all killed. I have no reason to take orders from a spy. This griffon seems to have more gumption than he does, unless she’s all talk.

“We’re coming up on an enemy checkpoint!” the driver shouted. “Get on the sponsons!”

Seven ponies jumped up and manned the six beamcaster ball-gimbals arrayed around the perimeter of the vehicle, along with the thirty-millimeter automatic cannon mounted to the roof. Each weapon was operated with its own, individual remote weapon station with its own screen and operating yoke. Hostiles without an IFF tag appeared as thermal signatures with a bounding box around them, and all one had to do was steer the turret into their general vicinity and pull the trigger. The computer would find a firing solution and do the rest.

Centaurs had four beamcasters broadside and two fore and aft, and a damn autocannon on top. They had substantially more firepower than a rinky-dink Pursuer. Which was a good thing, because as soon as we neared the checkpoint, anti-tank infantry were attempting to sight us in and fire upon us. Vehicle-mounted beamcasters had another neat trick. Without any operator intervention, they could detect incoming ordnance with an array of millimeter-wave radars that ringed the vehicle. The system tracked and locked onto rockets, ATGMs, mortars, artillery shells, tank shells, bombs, and anything else that could threaten us, and it shot them out of mid-air.

The radar warning chimed. “Rocket!” the driver screamed.

The beamcaster arrays instantly responded in kind, swatting it down with needle-thin streams of green arcane energy. I couldn’t see a damn thing through the hull of the vehicle, but if I could have, I would’ve undoubtedly seen the incoming projectile explode over an empty field before it could even get within a hundred meters of us.

The autocannon gave a few thumping reports, signaling that the guard post had been turned into splinters. A 30mm HE shell filled with CH had the same destructive power as a Confederate 57mm. A 40mm CT gun like on my Mirage was comparable to getting hit with a Confederate 76mm shell. Everything about our weapons was superior in every way to their Confederate counterparts. So why did we lose the fucking war? I thought.

A war is not won with wonder weapons alone. First, you needed a strong industry. We didn’t have that. We’d been worn down by centuries of warfare, our colonies plucked away from us one after another. So many defense and industrial corporations we relied on for our manufacturing base had been forced to shutter themselves due to bankruptcy, because their facilities had been reduced to rubble. Even with government subsidies, many of them had struggled to remain afloat.

We rammed through the checkpoint, which had been secured only with a chain-link fence and not bollards, or this would’ve been a very short mission indeed. Confederate guardsmen and regular soldiers alike peeked out of their holes to fire upon us in desperation, but they were put down almost instantly. Centaur sponson gunners didn’t have the information overload of a ring-turret gunner on a Pursuer. They had only their own firing arc to focus on, and that made them acutely aware of anything that entered their field of view. Any enemy foolish enough to leave concealment would be fired upon without delay.

Second, you needed allies to support you. We didn’t have that, either. Equestria had no friends, and the cleomanni forbade others from so much as trading amicably with us. Most of our corner of the galaxy is so afraid of the Confederacy’s wrath, they would comply with any demand of theirs, no matter how outlandish or downright evil. We had been isolated on purpose.

We came to a stop on a grassy hillock overlooking Dodge. “All squads, disembark!” came the command. The troop bay ramps dropped and we all filed out. The winds were picking up. The suburban housing development we found ourselves in was ruined and abandoned, with graffiti and smashed windows being the theme of the day. The dead trees were stripped of their leaves and swaying ominously.

Hundreds of years ago, all this was desert, but with the help of dams and agricultural irrigation projects, the whole valley had been greened years ago. Sadly, all that grass was dead or dying now. The stationary sun had affected the climate. I could see the locomotive off in the distance. A thin, silvery line, streaking into town, the sun glinting off of the loco’s polished metal exterior parts.

Third, you needed the motivation to win. Again, we didn’t have that. Some of us were vicious fighters on an individual basis, but if one were to zoom out and examine the bigger picture, they could plainly see that our collective will had been broken by what the Confederacy had done to us. What we did have were killing fields and bereaved mothers as far as the eye could see. The soul of all ponykind had been flayed and laid bare. We were an entire nation in agony. A gazelle in the crocodile’s jaws. Flopping. Spinning. Bloodied and torn. We weren’t fighting. We were just struggling to survive.

There was a faint speck off in the distance, flapping its wings. One of Garrida’s pegasus troops. The one who’d been driving the train. He’d abandoned it at the last moment, allowing it to run away, unpiloted.

The Excelsior-class engine and its remaining cars entered the switching yard and rolled into Dodge’s Central Station, where it struck the stopblock at the end of the track at full speed and promptly overran the end of the track.

The sheer violence of the event beggared belief. Enemy troops ran and scattered every which way as the heavy fusion-powered locomotive launched itself many meters skyward, landing on the pavement and skidding half a hoofball field while sending up a shower of sparks before finally plowing into the two-story main brick building, leaving a locomotive-shaped hole in the wall in the wall as it went.

Captain Garrida alighted on the roof of the nearest Centaur, flicking the safety cover on the detonator she held. “End of the line, motherfuckers!”

She clicked the detonator, and then, Central was no more. There was a blinding flash and a whole city block ceased to exist. Hundreds of tons of brick, rail, and locomotive parts had been instantly turned into a plume of debris hurtling over a hundred meters skyward. I reflexively covered my ears as I watched the shockwave approach, kicking up dust in its wake. The whip-crack of the blast punched me in the sternum and nearly knocked me off my hooves.

“Celestia’s sweet tits!” the Appleloosan soldier swore.

Captain Garrida lowered her binoculars, lighting up a cigar and taking a celebratory puff. “That explosion just took out over a hundred Confederate soldiers and guardsmen, a few dozen alien mercenaries, and a couple hundred of the staff running the detention camp. While they’re wondering what the fuck just happened to them, we are going to tear them a brand-new asshole! All squads, move in!”

With a battle cry, we formed up and charged down the hill towards the Confederate positions. A couple soldiers at the head of the stampede took flechette rounds to the chest and went down. The rest responded with steady streams of beamcaster fire, keeping the enemy too badly pinned to shoot back. The Centaurs moved up behind us, their guns set to auto-fire mode, letting the computer do all the work of target acquisition and elimination. One satyr after another fell, stacked like cordwood.

Dodge was as I remembered it. It was nowhere. A backwater town with some mid-level brick buildings, and little in the way of high-rise structures. My old apartment was several blocks from here, and my parents’ old house before they moved out was on the other side of town. It hurt my soul to see my city like this. I had a lot of bad memories, here, but also a lot of good ones.

I’d been issued a spare headset to replace the helmet I’d lost. It provided no ballistic protection, but it allowed me access to the local datasphere and the encrypted peer-to-peer data links that we used to relay vital information from one unit to another. The three squads of Ostrich Team followed the nav markers in our heads-up displays. Raptor Team’s squads did likewise, taking to the skies above us and settling down on rooftops to give them a height advantage over the enemy. They were also breaching into the top floors of buildings and clearing out any potential snipers and gun nests as they went. The air was thick with the sounds of rattling gunfire and sizzling beams.

Down below, our squad peeled off from the APCs, turned a street corner and ran headlong into every pony’s worst nightmare. Six damarkind mercenaries moved up the other end of the street in a loose formation, their weapons at the ready.

The tall, bulky bipeds had canine, digitigrade legs, wasp waists, a furred tail, broad shoulders, thick arms, clawed fingers, and practically no neck. They were almost comically top-heavy, like steroidal bodybuilders who’d skipped leg day. Their blunt, ursine muzzles concealed row after row of sharp, ripping, carnivorous teeth. Their noses were piggish and their faces bore whiskers and tusks. Their ears were long and pointy like a guard dog’s, swiveling to track our movements. Every inch of them that was exposed was furred, but their heads had additional prominences of fur that gave them a natural trident-shaped pattern of tufting, with hairs projecting from the sides of their necks and cheeks and straight up from the tops of their heads to form natural mohawks.

Damarkinds were one of the vilest client species of the Confederacy. They had one planet, and little interest in colonizing more. Politically, they were little more than a loose assortment of tribes squabbling over the one, lone world that they had. Many of them lived like paupers in great, stinking hives of brick and soot, like in Equestria’s old industrial era. Others lived in tribal wooden longhouses out in the sticks.

Patriarchal, chauvinistic, and psychotically aggressive, they lacked the domesticity needed for such things as space development. They had only one dilapidated spaceport, in the capital of their largest tribe, sponsored and maintained by their Confederate benefactors. Aside from the satyrs who maintained the spaceport, other species were forbidden to visit Damark of their own accord, unless they came in chains.

Most of what was said of the technologically backwards society on their homeworld was hearsay. However, some individuals who were in-the-know about such matters—members of their species who were patient enough to bother giving interviews to xenologists—had shed some light on their insular culture. What little we knew was the kind of thing you expected to see in a pulp serial horror magazine, not real life.

The most popular television and radio show on Damark centered on the art of woodworking and home improvement. So far, so innocuous. The second-most-popular show on their planet was a game show about releasing convicted criminals and captive sapients of other species into the unforgiving wilds of Damark, forced to brave carnivorous beasts and deadly toxic plant life. Then, they sent in hunters to stalk their terrified victims over the course of a few days or weeks, snare them in traps, bind them up and make gruesome trophies out of them. Only rich damarkinds owned televisions and the only indigenous models were black and white tubes with tiny screens that weighed as much as a bank vault, which was the best their scientists could muster. The rest had to make do with sound only.

Most damarkinds who took to the stars and owned their own spacecraft and other, similar examples of superior foreign technology were hired guns, assassins, and thugs of every stripe who lived a nomadic existence. Some damarkind tribes had forged themselves into mercenary bands that roamed the galaxy, getting fat and wealthy with filthy lucre from contracts with the Confederacy and organized crime bosses, along with the treasure they’d looted from their victims.

One could always tell how successful a particular damarkind pack was by how well armed and armored they were. The ones we now faced were plated from head to toe like living battle tanks, bits of fur peeking out under layers of armor. The helmets they wore were the piecemeal ballistic face masks typical of their kind, with vanity features like openings for their fur to make them look more frightening. All that armor meant they were rich. That, in turn, meant they were good in a fight, else they wouldn’t be getting such lucrative contracts.

I had all of two seconds to ponder all of this, when the lead damarkind snarled and pointed in our direction. We scattered. They scattered. Both sides moved into cover as beams and machine gun fire filled the air. I peeked out and launched a volley of green streams at one of them, only to watch them bounce off of the monstrous creature’s heavy plating. The return fire was swift in coming. I ducked out of sight to avoid having my skull ventilated.

Damarkinds were an entire race of half-witted, murderous, hillbilly space scum. Each and every one of them was born a bounty hunter, a mercenary, and a butcher, clutching a knife straight from his mother’s womb. Unlike the cleomanni, they had no fear of our kind. In fact, they regarded ponies as somewhere between a light snack and a living sex toy. In that respect, they weren’t much different from the vandals, really. The main difference, I supposed, was that damarkinds were a good two-plus meters tall, weighed over two hundred and fifty kilograms, were obligate carnivores, extremely violent and libidinous, and supposedly had cocks the size of redwood trunks. Being mounted by one would be a terrible ordeal, by any stretch of the imagination. Worse still was the prospect of being skinned and eaten alive by those monsters.

They did things like that to intimidate us. To fuck with our heads. To put us on edge. To remind us that we were prey. The best thing to do was to ignore their savagery and press onward. They didn’t scare me. They only motivated me to do everything in my power to avoid capture. It was difficult for me to tell how much of that bravery was the drugs coursing through my system, and how much was my own. If I were sober, I’d probably be terrified out of my wits. My heart raced a mile a minute. I’m not gonna become some mercenary bitch-boy’s personal cock-sock. I’d rather turn my levitation on my own head and break my own neck. They can fuck my corpse if that’s what they want, but I won’t be in my body to experience it.

I was trying to think of what their faces reminded me of. I hazarded another glance, only to duck back again from the crackle of supersonic projectiles snapping past my head.

A beaver. Not a dog, or a boar, or even a bear. A great big beaver that walks on two feet.

I pulled a grenade from a vest pouch, ripping the pin out with my teeth. “Everypony, fire in the hole!” I punched the grenade with my levitation magic, sending it flying down the street on a flat trajectory. The damarkinds ran, jumped and cannonballed through the nearest windows, using the structures’ bulk to escape the frag’s radius long before it went off. With a thunderous report, shrapnel spewed across the street, putting out the windows of abandoned cars and leaving them full of holes.

“They’re tryin’ to flank us!” the Appleloosan said.

True to his word, when the mercs re-emerged, they leaped from the third level of the high-rise structures at our three and nine o’clock, fell several meters, and landed right in our midst, rolling to absorb the impact of their massive bodies, slinging their crude automatic rifles over their backs and drawing their knives. If a damarkind with a gun was bad, a damarkind with a knife was even worse. They weren’t flashy about the way they used knives. They weren’t into any of that martial arts stuff. Their traditional method was more akin to a prison-shanking than anything else. Go straight for the vitals and pump a foot-long, serrated blade into the victim over and over, like fucking them with a sharp, steel prick.

I got a first-hoof demonstration when one of them sprinted in and snatched our very startled squad leader. The giant, snarling beast picked him up by the heat dissipator of his beamcaster—not even caring that his hand was singed in the process—and plunged a fixed-blade knife into his victim’s neck three times before we could even blink. He nonchalantly tossed the screaming, gurgling stallion aside like a bag of groceries, launching himself into a diving roll to avoid a volley of beamcaster fire, sheathing his blade and unslinging his rifle in a single motion. He let loose with a burst of fire at point-blank range that caught one mare in the chest, punching her right in the strongest part of her barding’s plates.

Angered, the big chartreuse earth pony mare roared and charged at the towering brown mass of fur and muscle, tackling his legs. He reflexively rolled with the force of the blow, coming out on top, pinning her with his bulk. He licked his lips demonically as he grabbed one of her forelegs, twisted it behind her back, and dislocated her shoulder with a yank and a wet pop. She let out a bloodcurdling scream as the monstrous alien wrenched her limb out of place while he dry-humped her ass.

“Your cunt is mine!” he roared.

A second damarkind and a third were pushed back by unrelenting streams of beamcaster fire. One found a chink in the first one’s thick, reflective body armor and drew blood. He hissed and backpedaled, suppressing us with a big, ugly, primitive-looking rifle the whole time. The other was trying to use the green-coated mare—who was flailing and screaming bloody murder—as a living shield, attempting to deter us from firing upon him. The situation had devolved into pure chaos. To put it bluntly, we were in deep shit. Six of the galaxy’s deadliest, most hideous predators were hunting us. Like game animals.

I’d hesitated. Frozen up. Horror and desperation crept into my veins. I needed my Charger. I needed more armor. More firepower. I needed something. Anything.

One of the damarkinds roared and charged at me, brandishing a knife. I had a rush of adrenaline. Magic power flowed into my body, supercharged by the fear I felt. The very air seemed to vibrate with the emotions of my comrades. I picked out their anger. Their yearning for justice. I channeled it. It was now or never. It was time to show them how unicorns fought.

I coalesced a levitation spell around the charging damarkind’s feet and forcibly immobilized them. He tipped over and fell flat on his face, letting out an explosive grunt. He snorted and howled as he flailed his arms and tried to right himself. I grabbed a corrugated metal garbage bin off the street between my forehooves, upturned it and brought it down on his head, rancid old trash and all.

“Inmenk grui anli wen siosarr!” I shouted. “Dohuta aspare ut sereinstobor gruire avecare turusa avespad!”

Keep trash off our streets! Throw your alien garbage in the proper receptacle!

While keeping the can in place and blinding him to his surroundings, I seized everything nearby in my levitation that looked nice and heavy and I stacked it upon him, topping it off with a good-size sedan that teetered atop a stack of dumpsters. Judging by the ascending pitch of his pained howls, the weight was simply too much, even for an armored damarkind. He went silent. Something in him popped, like a cockroach might, and he was done.

Before I could take any satisfaction in my victory, one of them charged me from behind, knocking me down. I tried rolling upright to give him a faceful of my casters, but he pinned me with his mass. A clawed hand seized upon my throat, razor-sharp points threatening to tear out my gullet. He straddled me and humped my back softly, right over my injured kidneys. I grit my teeth. It hurt. A lot.

“Every inch of you smells like pussy, pony slut.” His bestial vocal apparatus growled out every single word in surprisingly articulate Ardun. “Don’t fight it. We are what you crave.”

This was getting ridiculous. This was the second time in the past several hours that some freak of nature had expressed a desire to brutally fuck me, with or without my consent. I couldn’t comprehend how I could possibly be worth their attention. When I looked in the mirror every morning, a frumpy-looking, downright average unicorn with a mid-length blue mane stared back. I wasn’t particularly attractive. I was just about the most average-looking mare alive. I was also thirsty as fuck. Three years, no sex. Too many heats spent all alone in a damn shipping container with nothing but my hoof for company.

I couldn’t help it. I was immensely turned on. I hoped he didn’t notice I was quickly soaking through the crotch of my armor. Wait, no. That wasn’t mare juices. It was piss. I’d just fucking pissed myself. That meant one of my kidneys was still kinda-sorta working, at the very least. I squeezed my eyes shut and shook my head vigorously to clear the cobwebs. It’s the meth. Urinary incontinence is a known side effect. Ignore it!

“In your dreams, fucker!” I rolled and swung a hoof at him, catching him in the muzzle. “I’d never give it away to alien filth like you!”

He growled angrily over the matter of his barked nose. Without hesitation, he took a swing at me, full-force. Damarkinds didn’t hit with pansy-ass little love taps like cleomanni did. They hit like a freight train. When his fist connected with my face, my muzzle burst in a spray of blood. My whole head exploded with agony and I briefly saw white. Trails of red flowed freely from my nostrils and right down the back of my throat. I gurgled and choked on my own blood as he wrapped one of his big, meaty paws around my neck and squeezed like a hydraulic press. Darkness crept into the corners of my vision. I could see stars. With his other hand, he levered my hind legs apart and viciously ground his crotch into mine, the fabric of my uniform pinching my privates.

My mind was awash with terror when I realized that I could actually feel his throbbing bulge through two layers of clothing. He pushed his root against me so hard, he gave me a front wedgie. I felt every inch of him hip-thrusting against me, parting my pussy lips with his girthy shaft. He was no tree trunk, but he was at least as thick as a beer can. He could have easily put many stallions to shame. The hot, humid breath he exhaled against my face was a foul, stinking plume of rot and filth. When I tried scooting away from him, he simply grabbed my hind legs and used them like a pair of handlebars, yanking my crotch back onto his. He didn’t care much about the rest of me. For the time being, all he needed was the pelvis.

“I can feel your damp cunny, and it disagrees, you silly gash!” he roared. “You long for my cock!”

He flicked open a small switchblade and started undoing his belt buckle, keeping me in place by leaning his hips atop mine, pinning me with his sheer mass. The lunatic creature was actually planning on putting a hole in my uniform and raping me right there, not even caring one whit about the lethal beams of magic energy that were, at that very moment, bouncing off his armor.

I was really pissed off, now. Being strangled and sexually assaulted by a towering alien that smelled like a quarter-ton wet dog was pretty high up on the list of things I never wanted to experience in my whole life. I didn’t get paid enough for this bullshit. My magic surged. With a gurgling scream and a flash of tangerine spellpower, I struck him with a focused burst of telekinesis, sending him flying. He left a spread-eagle damarkind-shaped impression in a brick wall, before peeling off like a cartoon character and falling flat on his face. He lay still on the sidewalk, unmoving.

My teeth bared with incipient rage, I levitated the sedan from the top of the stack and turned it upside-down, fully intent on crushing the sick son of a bitch to death. Before I could finish the deed, I had a thunderclap of a migraine strike me and my magic guttered out. While I gripped my head in my forehooves, groaning in pain, I dropped the car on its roof and its windows shattered. I stumbled and fell flat on my ass. Everypony around me was engaged in a melee with the remaining mercenaries. They teamed up, two on one. Two ponies were more than the equal of one of those monsters for strength.

I watched a pair of mares seize a damarkind’s legs and drag him to the ground, before flicking open their boot-knives and stabbing him in the neck over and over again. It seemed to annoy him, more than anything. What were lethal, brutal blows when directed against a cleomanni soldier were mere acupuncture to a damarkind. Their flesh was thick, their arteries deep. The blades were only hitting muscle and soft tissue.

Corporal Shooting Star pulled on one of the fallen damarkinds’ knives with her levitation and ripped its sheath from his harness. “Nice knife, asshole! Mine now!”

She immediately charged one of them down and speared the point of the blade through a gap in his armor above one of his knees and twisted with her magic. Star’s horn lit and she rapidly heated both his rifle and the knife with pyrokinesis. He stumbled and dropped his glowing rifle, his hands smoking as he cried out in pain. He reached for the knife to pull it out, but it was too late. Star galloped up to him and launched herself into a flying kick, driving the blade hilt-deep and straight through his femoral artery with one of her hind-hooves, before backflipping off his thigh and landing gracefully on all four legs. A surprising feat in full body armor. The merc fell onto his back, bawling like a foal.

Corporal Star was laughing like a madmare as she ripped the twelve-inch, glowing, serrated camp knife out with her teeth, leaving behind a carbonized wound. She drove the blade into his neck and sawed with her levitation for several seconds while growling like a mad dog, before ripping off his severed head with her magic, coating her muzzle with a spray of blood. She was laughing dementedly the entire time.

“Hot potato!” She spiked the severed head at one of the damarkinds like a volleyball and he sidestepped it, a look of disgust and fear momentarily crossing his features.

I shook my head. It wasn’t just my imagination. She’s a bigger fuckin’ weirdo than the rest of us put together. She had the right idea, though. One of their knives was just about the right size and degree of lethality to use it on its owner to great effect, if you happened to get lucky enough to disarm one of them and turn their blade against them.

The remaining three, including the wounded one who’d been stabbed repeatedly, shrugged us off and beat a hasty retreat, their primitive slug-throwers barking as they went. One of them had taken one of us hostage. The greenish mare with the broken shoulder. She was screaming, flailing and babbling like a foal in her captor’s unyielding grip, begging us not to let them take her alive.

“Shoot me!” she screamed. “Fucking kill me! Please!”

While everyone else was freezing up, I was the only one who thought to take her up on that. I’d started the process of disabling my beamcaster’s IFF, but it was too late. The mercs rounded a corner into an alleyway and vanished from our sight, but not before letting off a few more rounds of aimed fire from cover. A round caught me in the shoulder protector, ripping it off. I fell face-first, grunting in pain, before rising to my hooves.

I felt my shoulder in a panic, but there was no blood. No penetration. Just the beginnings of a big bruise. My pauldron was ruined. A big splash of grayish metal and a deep indentation decorated the front of it. Large-caliber cast lead slugs. Their weapons were ill-suited for combat against armored opponents. No doubt they’d selected their ammunition for high expansion and limited penetration in order to do more damage to unarmored prisoners. Bastards.

That wasn’t a typical battle. That was a street brawl, and a nasty one. Neither party’s ranged weapons could reliably penetrate the other’s armor, so we had resorted to stabbing and crushing the life out of each other. Our squad leader was surrounded by a pool of his own blood and he wasn’t moving. They’d kidnapped one of us and we had several wounded. Two of ours for three of theirs. A stalemate.

The mercs would’ve had a better chance if they’d avoided a melee. Tangling with ponies in close-quarters combat when we had superior numbers was a guarantee of death. If they’d whittled us down to half, they could’ve taken us one-on-one in a melee, but outnumbered as they were, they didn’t stand a chance. They’d been too prideful and overextended themselves. They were well-equipped, but inexperienced. Probably the reserves in a wealthy mercenary company. Either that, or they were so accustomed to bullying their captives, they’d forgotten how to deal with ponies who actually fought back.

The squad’s medic was busy patching up the rest. She took her turn with me, looked me over, and then started about the process of setting my broken nose with her magic. I let out a soft, pained cry as she clicked something back into place. Then, after a quick appraisal of her work, she nodded tiredly and moved on to one of the others.

“Aw, dammit!” The hick threw his helmet on the pavement in a fit of anger. “They took Cloverleaf! We gotta go get her, or they’re gonna have her for supper!”

“She’s gone, Haybale,” a unicorn stallion shouted. “Forget about her!”

“Shut up, Carillon!”

“Oh, so we’re doing names, now?” I said. “Not calling each other fucker or cocksucker like usual?”

Several pairs of eyes fell on me, glaring. “And who’n the hell are you s’posed to be?” Haybale said.

“I’m Sergeant Desert Storm, Charger pilot. Does anypony here outrank me?” No one raised a hoof, to which I nodded. “Our squad leader is dead. That means the responsibility of command falls to me, now. I’m in charge.”

“Like hell you are, Pilot,” Carillon seethed. “I didn’t come all this way and survive all this time just to be ordered to my death by a fuckin’ mech jockey.”

“Oh yeah?” Haybale growled. “Well, are we just gonna stand around and let Clover die?”

“Enough!” I stamped my forehoof like a gavel. Garrida had saddled me with the exhausted rejects from Bellwether’s surviving militia forces and I couldn’t tell if it was intentional or not. The constant unit-shuffling was a disaster waiting to happen. “This bickering and unprofessional conduct is a shameful way for a soldier to behave! Back when I served, you would’ve all been court-martialed!”

Carillon glared at me. “Oh really? Well, too bad. Last I checked, we ain’t in the Army no more. There is no army. There’s nothing! We don’t have a country. It’s just us and these alien motherfuckers!”

The unicorn put a hoof through a car window for emphasis, drawing back a limb covered in blood and glass shards. He slumped against the rear quarter panel of the vehicle, letting out big, throaty sobs. He seemed to shrink in upon himself as he bawled like a foal. While the medic bandaged his foreleg, I walked up and wrapped my own forelegs around him, slowly running my hoof through his mane to try and comfort him.

“You guys haven’t seen what they do.” His voice was thick with emotion. “Those sick, deranged fuckers raped my wife and daughter and ate them. The damarkinds fucking flayed them alive. I came home and there was blood and cum everywhere. Pieces missing. Great big hunks of meat cut out of their asses. I’d been out of the military for years, but I joined the resistance soon after. With my wife and kid gone, I didn’t have a life anymore, and there was nowhere else for me to go. If Celestia is so powerful wherever she is in the great beyond, if Alicorns are so fucking special, why would they let this happen to us? Where is Twilight Sparkle in all of this? Why would she leave us all alone, just to suffer?”

I perked my ears at the din of far-off gunfire all around me. Of pony and cleomanni alike shouting and dying in screaming agony. Of roaring engines and the mechanical monsters we’d made in order to kill each other more efficiently. My hooves were shaking and my eyes pinned wide open from how drugged-up I was. It was a valid question.

I let go of the soldier. “We’re going after Cloverleaf.”

“Why?” Carillon whined. “Just so we can get killed?”

“Captain Garrida’s orders were to take out every alien son of a bitch in Dodge,” I said. “Some aliens went that-a-way, and we’re going to neutralize them, too. They’re going to use Clover as bait. Try and pull us into an ambush. We’re not going to take the bait.” I levitated up one of the fallen damarkinds’ combat knives; the damn thing weighed a couple pounds and had a spine over a quarter-inch thick, like it was made for hunting bears.

I paced back and forth, looking every one of the troops in the eye. “What we are going to do is we’re going to find them, cut their sacks off and feed them to ‘em. These monsters come to our worlds, they eat our sons and they rape our daughters, and are we gonna just roll over and take it? No! We’re going to strangle these motherfuckers with their own warm entrails!” I raised the knife high. “A garland of guts for every damarkind mercenary pig-dog son of a bitch! Who’s with me?”

The soldiers let out a cheer, pumping their hooves into the air. I stowed the knife and its sheath in my saddlebags. Even among this fractious group of ne’er-do-wells, I’d secured their loyalty for the time being. It was simple, really. I put my analytical mind in the back seat and let the amphetamines do the talking. I took the squad leader’s helmet with its integrated command and control system and lifted it gingerly off his head with my magic, tossing the headset in my saddlebags and donning the helmet and chinstrap. The fallen soldier’s eyes were frozen wide in a haunted stare.

I looked to the medic, but she shook her head. “No breath. No pulse.”

I silently nodded and swept my leg over his eyes, closing them for the final time, before pulling his tags and stowing them. I sifted through his saddlebags a bit and retrieved a commander’s multi-spectral binocular, like the one Garrida used. I whistled softly and put it in my saddlebags, as well. It might’ve come in handy.

“Squad leader, report,” came Garrida’s voice over the radio. “Ostrich Three-One, why haven’t you reached the next waypoint, yet? We are making preparations for the assault, get your asses to the front, over!”

“This is Sergeant Desert Storm, we read you. Our squad leader is KIA. Six damarkind mercenaries ambushed us. They took—” I paused to read off the rank tag in my heads-up display, “Corporal Cloverleaf. Her transponder is still transmitting, but if we don’t do something soon, those bastards are gonna go full-on EFK on her, over.”

“EFK?”

“Eat-fuck-kill.”

Garrida sighed loudly. “Copy that. Squad leader KIA, one MIA and presumed captive. I’m headed over there right now to crack some heads. Those turd blossoms are going to wish they’d never been born. Out.”

“Those fellers had some pretty serious armor on,” Private Haybale said. “I couldn’t scratch ‘em, an’ believe me, I tried.”

“That’s because they’re wearing four-centimeter-thick titanium plating that’s been neuterized by a nemrin priest.” Carillon demonstrated this by trying to levitate one of the enormous cuirasses one of the fallen mercs wore, only for his magic to slip right off the enchanted metal. “It’s a black-market item hot with mercs. They take their own armor and commission a priest to enchant it for them with magic-deflecting wards.

“Nemrin aren’t legally allowed to provide such services to other species, under FTU law. That’s why when you spell one of these bastards, you’ve got to aim for the body underneath the armor. Levitation will pass right through their armor and stick to their body. Arcane beams or beamcaster shots won’t.

“The armor they wear is heavy in the cuirass but weaker everywhere else, to save weight. It exploits a quirk of beamcaster targeting. The computers always aim for center-mass when the sensors get a lock, and most of a damarkind’s bulk is in his torso. Go full manual. Aim for the limbs. Arms, legs. Cripple them first, then finish them off.

“Damark’s loaded with titanium, apparently. More than those freaks could ever use. If we bombed those fuckers back to the stone age and took their world, we’d have enough titanium to build millions of Chargers and thousands of warships, and then some. I don’t think the galaxy would mourn the tragic loss of damarkind culture, either.”

I slowly shook my head; rapey, muscle-bound, knife-obsessed alien mercs were bad news on their own, but magic-deflecting armor made them a real nightmare. “Move out,” I said. “Don’t let them get the drop on us again. And switch to manual targeting, too.” I waved up the squad and we advanced up the street, keeping a close eye on the buildings around us as we moved. I saw movement in a window. A couple of civilian ponies huddling in the darkness, too scared to do anything but fidget where they stood.

“Keep your heads down,” I whispered to them. “We’re with the Liberation Front.”

They nodded silently and ducked into the shadows as we passed. We reached an intersection and I peeked around a corner and saw something that seared my fucking retinas. A big damarkind Pack Alpha with silver-fringed fur was standing atop a barricade, holding a naked Cloverleaf face-up by the barrel with one of his massive hands, ramming her whole body up and down his cock while she kicked and screamed and drooled, trying desperately to push him away with her one good foreleg.

I winced. His balls were slapping wetly against her ass, the sounds of violent copulation echoing off the maze of brick and concrete all around us. He was also leveling a very large belt-fed machine gun in our general direction, one-handed, proving that he could multi-task. Several others were hunched behind cover, their weapons ready to respond to our approach.

“Ge’ out here, ponies!” he laughed. “I need fresh pussy and thissun’s almost spent!”

“Please, stop!” Clover screeched.

The Alpha responded by proceeding to snake his thick, meaty fingers into her mouth until she gagged, and then extending his claws and ripping her cheek open. She let out shrieks and yelps of pain as she tried holding the wound shut with her hoof, to no avail.

“I hope ya’ don’t mind, boss.” One of the others hefted a knife.

“My pleasure, lad.” The Alpha nodded his assent, pulling her off of himself and handing her over.

While Cloverleaf screeched in agony, one of the damarkinds sawed off her limp, dislocated foreleg and then promptly cauterized the oozing wound with a blowtorch, sending her screams to bloodcurdling new heights of terror and despair. They weren’t staunching the bleeding for her sake, I mused. They were saving the rest of the meat for later, like closing up a fucking sandwich bag.

The damarkind who’d robbed her of her leg grinned like a hyena as he idly seared the meat with his torch, twirling the severed limb like a kebab in the blue flame before taking a big, crunchy bite. He grunted with disdain. “A bit furry. Better shaven.”

While Cloverleaf kicked and flailed with her three remaining legs and sobbed openly, tears and snot and blood streaking her face, the Alpha seized her by the barrel and resumed his earlier vileness.

I’d had enough of this. It was showtime. I silently waved a few orders to my squad, and then, I stepped out into the open, much to my comrades’ shock. “Release the hostage, you son of a bitch.”

After a brief pause and a few shared glances, the damarkinds broke out into peals of riotous, cruel laughter in response to my demand. One was so mirthful, he dropped his weapon and practically rolled around on the asphalt behind the barricade, guffawing all the while.

The Alpha snickered, rubbing a hand down his face while leaving Cloverleaf impaled in mid-air, her entire weight held up by the strength of his prick alone. “And who th’ blue fock are you, to tell me and the boys to do anything?”

“I am Sergeant Desert Storm, Charger pilot of the Light Scouts of the 8th Cavalry Division.” I was buying time, trying to keep them from killing Clover. “I’ve torched worlds. Deployed weapons of mass destruction. I’ve executed deserters and killed thousands of Confederate citizens with poison gas. I’ve stepped on cocksuckers like you for fun. Watched you burst under my machine’s hooves.

“You cannot rule me with fear. I am fear personified. I am the subject of every satyr’s worst nightmares. I am the reaper of the desert sands. When they hear the hoof-beats, thump-thump-thump-thump, they know that it means I’m coming for them, and no prayer, no incantation, no amount of begging will prevent me from taking their lives. You think yourselves the hunters, but you are my prey.”

If their growls and snorts of rage were any indication, that got them good and angry. In damarkind culture, to be prey was to occupy a subordinate role. They were obsessed with domination and submission in its purest, cruelest, most immature sense. The strong ate and fucked the weak. The weak got fucked and eaten. Being matriarchal, herbivorous, eusocial herd-dwellers made our species triply inferior in their eyes. For one of us to turn the tables and call them something as lowly as prey was an insult that cut deep indeed.

The Alpha snarled, eyeing me with a calculating gaze that betrayed a certain brutish intellect. “And where’s your Charger, now? All I see is tinned cunny, fresh for the taking.”

“Okay, okay, I’ll tell you where she is.” I smirked, watching the tags on my HUD closing rapidly. “She’s up your ass, bitch!”

I cloaked myself and shifted my position, and just in time, because it was at that very moment that all hell broke loose. The troops I’d sent to flank from an adjacent structure opened fire, enfilading the barricade. Though their beams didn’t do much at first, they were a hell of a light show. Soon, aimed fire started catching the mercs in the exposed joints of their armor, sending them stumbling as beamcaster emissions pierced their tissue and boiled their blood. They panicked and started shooting up at the open windows, hosing the structures down with bullets, their weapons rattling a deadly chorus.

Captain Garrida landed atop a car thirty meters to the front of the barricade. She was wielding a 30mm Grover Anti-Tank Rifle with the inscription Thumper stenciled on the side of the barrel in giant block print. She had a lit cigar hanging from her mouth as she reared up and, without a single word, leveled her fearsome weapon at the damarkind Alpha and put a round into him center-mass with a booming report that shattered windows. A hoof-sized hole was blown into his chest. The exit wound made the back of his cuirass spall fragments into the eyes of the mercs standing next to him, blinding them and making them drop their weapons and wail in agony at their popped eyeballs. As the Alpha collapsed and died, Cloverleaf fell from the monster’s failing erection with a wet plop.

The semi-automatic, shoulder-fired bullpup boomed again and again, the ATR’s barrel recoiling, its extractor sending a big, smoking brass casing flying over Garrida’s shoulder and its bolt picking up another round from the top-loaded box magazine. With each report, a damarkind fell. Limbs were severed with sprays of arterial blood. Chests were imploded by irresistible force. A few of the mercs made a haphazard attempt to fire upon the Captain with their squad’s machine guns, but they were quickly silenced.

The remaining few cowered behind cover, taking potshots now and then. One of the rounds caught Garrida in her body armor. She didn’t even flinch or make a sound. Instead, whilst grimacing with utter contempt, she took her giant rifle’s empty magazine, placed it back in her saddlebags, and replaced it with what appeared to be a solid, inert block of metal with spikes sticking out of it. The unusual device fit into the magazine well and was secured by the catch with an audible click.

“What the fuck?” I whispered.

Garrida took wing, somersaulting behind the barricade and landing with surprising grace for her massive frame. One of the damarkinds tried charging her with a knife, roaring a challenge. She grabbed Thumper by the spade handle that protruded under the barrel and swung the receiver end like a giant cudgel, so quickly that it looked like a blur. She struck the merc in the face with the spiked magazine and caved in his helmet. He whined and dropped his blade, scooting backwards across the ground and whimpering like a foal, his face dripping with blood. With a demonic glint in her eye, the griffon showed no mercy as she brought her ersatz war hammer down upon him again, and again, and again. She turned his head into a mulched slurry of brain, blood, and bone.

The last two of the mercs made a run for it, clearly spooked if their body language was any indication. They only made it a few paces before Garrida drew a sawed-off double-barrel 8-gauge shotgun from her chest holster. It had been loaded with what were presumably magnum armor-piercing sabot slugs, judging by their effects on target. The two shots sounded almost like a single report, both rounds striking the mercs dead center in the back. Her targets collapsed like puppets with their strings cut, paralyzed from the waist down. Their groans were pitiful as they tried crawling to safety, dragging their useless legs behind them, only for the Captain to calmly walk up to them and deliver the coup de grâce to each one with a rifle-hammer blow to the head.

I stood from cover and walked up to the Captain, grinning. “Where do I get one of those, Sir?”

Garrida sat down hard and took a puff from her cigar, letting out a satisfied sigh, leaning her weapon back and resting it against her shoulder. The Grover’s stock had been engineered with a padded, U-shaped faux-leather cushion that actually sat atop a griffon’s shoulder, rather than against it, like a rocket launcher. This was because with a long-recoil action, the weapon’s bolt popped out the ass-end of the rifle every single time it fired, and if the stock had been located there, it would punch the user in the face. The optics were on the weapon’s left side because of this unusual configuration.

“First, I have to like you, and I don’t like you,” Garrida said. “Second, it helps if you’re a griffon. The whole manual of arms and everything needs fingers. Unless you’re a unicorn, which means you can cheat.” She looked around to make sure no one else was looking, and then she smiled and plucked my helmet off my head momentarily to ruffle my mane. “I saw what you did. That was very brave of you. And stupid. Don’t do it again, you understand?”

“Yes, Sir!”

She sat down hard and regarded me skeptically with that strangely penetrating gaze of hers, taking another long drag from her cigar, before nodding and turning to the fallen Cloverleaf. The green mare crawled towards us pathetically with the stump of her missing foreleg scraping across the ground. Garrida sighed and pinched the bridge of her beak, before waving at the upper levels of the structure that I’d had my squad attack from.

“Medic!” she shouted. “Getcher asses down here!”

“Captain,” Cloverleaf sputtered, collapsing to the asphalt. “I’m shorry.”

Garrida took one look at me, and then pulled her double-barrel shotgun from her chest rig, broke the action open, reloaded a couple shells, and handed it over to me. I seized it in my levitation’s orange glow.

“What—what do you want me to do with this?” I said.

“What do you think?” Garrida looked down at Clover. “She’s going to be a drain on resources from here on out. She’s no good to me without a leg, and Crusher doesn’t have any prosthetics to spare. Even if he did, why would we waste a valuable medical device on a complete basket case?”

I stared at the griffon in abject horror. She’s not suggesting what I think she’s suggesting, is she? What made it worse was Clover’s reaction.

The green, heavy-set mare looked up at me, tears in her eyes and blood dripping off her chin. “Do it. Pleash.” Her torn cheek was making her slur her words, and she could see the hesitation on my face. “I can’t live like zhis. Do it before I shange my mind!”

I shakily positioned the shotgun so the muzzle was lined up with Clover’s head, slowly drawing back the hammer. Just one round was all it would take. One single shot. It was certain to end her suffering. It’d be just as easy as when I executed those vandals that attacked the Runner. Clover closed her eyes and let out a soft sigh. She was ready.

Something about all of this felt wrong. I couldn’t really put it into words, but it rubbed me the wrong way.

“No,” I said, my voice firm as I turned and glared at the griffon. “Do it yourself.”

I returned the Captain’s weapon to her, which she took and quickly holstered, smiling softly all the while.

“Well done,” she said. “If you looked like you were going to do it, I would have stopped you.”

“What, do you mean to tell me that was a test?” I glared at her.

“Yes, it was. You passed. See? You may be a volunteer Charger pilot, but you’re not the monster you think you are. You’re still just a pony. Don’t be so quick to throw that away.”

“I had to.” My eyes were brimming with tears. “I had to become a monster, just to cope. The things we did, Captain—I—I can’t—they weren’t good things. Not things any pony or griffon should do. They were the worst things imaginable.”

Garrida let out a dismissive grunt. “Bullshit.” She pointed at Clover. “Did you rape someone? Did you eat someone alive? No? Then obviously, you haven’t done the, quote unquote, ‘worst things imaginable’. What’s unthinkable barbarity to us is like an evening stroll in the park for these sick pieces of trash that we’re fighting. We haven’t even seen the worst of it. Sergeant, I guarantee you, somewhere around here, there’s a charnel house that you’d need a couple dozen barf bags to walk through. If you smell death, if you hear a few too many flies buzzing around, trust me, just turn around and walk away. Let the professionals handle it. You’ll thank me later, kid.”

Garrida took to the skies with a few flaps of her giant wings, leaving me to ponder her words. I hefted one of the damarkinds’ belt-fed machine guns in my levitation. I lifted the top cover and racked the action open.

The thing was astoundingly crude. It was operated by some sort of delayed-blowback mechanism with cams and grooves to keep the bolt in place until chamber pressures had dropped to a safe level for extraction. The receiver was made from stamped metal in places, with a few machined components where added strength was necessary. An indigenous damarkind design. It was surprisingly light, necessitating a very effective muzzle brake to keep it under control.

I sneered derisively as I inspected the thing a bit closer. The Alpha’s weapon had a meticulously engraved wooden stock with a silver inlay, depicting scenes of ponies being terrorized and herded like chattels, beaten and flogged and ravished by their masters, many of whom reclined leisurely on thrones decorated with skulls. It wasn’t an allegory. Damarkinds only engraved things in wood that actually happened. Each of their weapons bore a living record of the owner’s personal history and achievements.

The weapon bore other gruesome trophies. There was a band of pony teeth, drilled and secured to lengths of cord wrapped around the stock. The cheek rest was made of a patchwork of leather that smelled suspiciously like my own kind. There was even a zebra talisman for good luck hanging from one of the sling mounts, though obviously, it hadn’t done any of its previous owners any good.

All I knew was that our enemies were wearing neuterized armor, beamcasters were next to useless against them, and if we were defeated and they took us alive, we would soon wish that we were dead. Shortly thereafter, the rest of the squad caught up. While the medic looked after Clover, I levitated a few of the firearms and their ammunition over to my troops.

“Carillon, you and the rest of the unicorns take the machine guns and any spare ammo you can find on these fuckers. They think they’re clever with their spare-no-expense approach to warfare. I can’t wait to see the looks on their faces when we use their own shit on them.”

A couple of pegasi flew by to medevac Clover on a stretcher, carrying her back to the command post that had been set up on the edge of town. She wasn’t in a good way. Not after what had happened. I could see it in her eyes. She needed more than stitches to sew up her ruined face. A stiff drink and a long, long talk with a therapist wouldn’t even begin to scratch the surface. These were grievous wounds she’d carry forever.

That was when I realized where I was. I looked up at the street sign beside me. I was on the corner of Pinecone and Seventh. When I turned to my left, there it was. Same as it always was. My old apartment building.

“Squad, move up and enter the building. I need to investigate something. Keep posted by the entrances and raise hell if any more assholes show up.”

“Yes, Ma’am,” Haybale said.

They did as directed, following me into the lobby. The place had seen better days. The chandelier in the entry had fallen and there was graffiti everywhere. I made my way up the stairs, to the fifth floor. Unit five-oh-four. The lights were still on in the hall, oddly enough. I supposed the Confederacy brought in some containerized generators to power the town while they occupied it.

The place was dead quiet. Not a sound, other than the din of the battle a few blocks away. Not a soul in sight. It was downright eerie, just being here. There were always at least a couple ponies milling around, back when I lived here. I rapped on the door a few times. No response. I didn’t have my keys, either. I looked left and right. I swore the landlady was watching me, even now, and if I did anything untoward, she’d come out of a closet wielding a broom and smack me on the head and loudly berate me like the stereotype she was.

“Sorry, Miss Persimmon.” I turned around and bucked the door full-force, sending it rocketing open.

The room beyond was like a shadow of my old life. Everything still looked the same. Even smelled the same. All the posters were in the same place. My stereo and all my holodisks were right where I’d left them. The bookcase had been rummaged through, however, and the kitchen showed signs of recent use. Somepony had been in here in the intervening period. Someone other than me.

I expected this. I’d given my sister Hoodoo the key and let her stay at my place as long as she kept up on rent while I was on deployment. I paid half, and she paid half, and we got to keep our place. There was nowhere else for me to put all my shit, anyhow. She and Windy had gone off to be with mom and dad and taken a tour of the colonies, looking for inspiration, leaving the apartment vacant and essentially as storage, but I had a strange, creeping feeling that somehow, some way, they’d wound up back here. She was into the whole starving artist thing and had converted an unused corner into her studio, with an easel and everything.

There was a painting on the easel. Not one of her usual landscapes. It was the three of us. Me and my sisters. Smiling and thriving in spite of the ruins all around us. At some point, the background trailed off, and she’d scrawled the words We miss you, Stormy in calligraphic script.

I sniffled softly. “I miss me too, sis.”

Sitting on the floor at an odd angle was a leather-bound journal. I picked it up in my magic and started flipping through the pages. It was Hoodoo’s. I felt guilty, spying on her stuff without her permission, but I needed to know where she had gone. The journal entries stopped about three months ago. The dates were current. My breathing quickened as I read her final entry.

I don’t know what’s going on. The satyrs are marching down each block. Kicking in doors. Dear Celestia, they’re taking everypony. I saw heavily armed mercenaries accompanying them. It’s just me and Windy up here. We don’t have any weapons. Nothing to defend ourselves. Just me and my paintbrushes. Please, someone, anyone, help us. I’m so scared!

My lips curled back in anger and I threw the book across the room, crying out in utter frustration. They’d taken her. She’d been here as recently as a few months ago, and they’d taken her. If I’d come to Dodge earlier, she would be safe. Safe with us. She and Windy Mesa both.

“Fuck! Those fucking bastards!”

I needed to gather my things. I needed to leave. There was nothing left for me here. I went to my bedroom and lifted up the rug in the center of the room, moving a section of the floorboards away which I’d sawed into and modified into a hidden compartment without Persimmon’s knowledge. I punched in the combination and unlocked the low-profile floor safe underneath, retrieving my heavy stash of a thousand gold bits, and a further four thousand of the digital kind, stored on bit chips. The chips were probably useless. I doubted that the electronic banking network would validate them, given the ruined state of our planet’s infrastructure. I took them anyway, just in case.

I also retrieved my favorite multi-tool, which contained a folding set of pliers with hardened jaws, a knife, a saw, a can opener, and various other implements that were useful when magic did not suffice. Some unicorns preferred simply summoning tools when needed. Those unicorns were snobs. And they also studied magic more than I did. I also pulled out the spare keys to my motorcycle and a civilian Orbit covered in stickers of things like smiley faces and travel destinations.

Orbits needed some explanation. The short of it was that they were drones, but that didn’t quite cover it. They weren’t battery-operated. They were an enchanted, spheroidal, hoofball-shaped metal frame with a crystal focus in the middle and various electronics arrayed around the outside. A unicorn could pour some of their magic into it, and it could levitate itself and store the magic energy for later, to be discharged all at once. They were magic capacitors. With the help of a focus, like the one contained in an Orbit, unicorns could cast more powerful spells than we could without one, generally speaking.

Military-grade Orbits had things like built-in beamcasters, offensive focuses, and even their own power generation systems, but my Orbit, being a consumer-grade model, only had cameras, speakers, a holodisk drive, a magic holoprojector for running typical consumer applications, an all-spectrum focus with mild amplification, and a data relay. It could still be useful for things like spying around corners, or sending it a hundred meters straight up for an overview of the battlefield, or annoying my newfound friends with my stupid music.

Orbits were also autonomous and contained a very basic AI. This allowed them to be set to follow their user around automatically. Sustaining multiple Orbits took considerable magic power. The most the average unicorn could manage was around three, but an alicorn with magic power as prodigious as Twilight Sparkle’s could probably manage a couple dozen of the things.

No need to juice up this bad boy from a wall socket. As long as one could do magic, they could easily charge an Orbit. I gave it a quick jolt with my horn, and then spoke the command phrase. “Boot up, Lucky. Follow mode.”

The Meteor Juke 1300—a good mid-high range Orbit that cost eighteen hundred bits brand new, so-named for its Jukebox Mode—beeped a few times and then bobbed into the air, settling into position and hovering above me and to my right. My own personal shoulder parrot.

“Time to go. Not coming back here ever again. Fuck this rotten place.”

I threw a few holodisks from my favorite bands into my saddlebags, along with the contents of my hidden stash, slamming the door shut as I departed, only for it to drift back open a crack from the ruined latch mechanism.

“Do I care if scavvers get the rest of my shit?” I mused aloud to myself, peering over my shoulder. “No. They can have it. Enjoy, fuckers.”

I slipped out into the back alley, still strewn with trash and standing water as always. Surprisingly enough, my 650cc parallel-twin Stampeder with the big-bore kit, big carb and rephased crank was still where I’d left it.

I’d had this bike since I was a kid. I did some of the basic maintenance work on it, but my father, who used to run a muffler shop on the other end of town before moving on for greener pastures, was the one who’d dismantled the whole thing, repainted it and built it up to my specifications, after much begging and pleading and puppy-dog eyes and all that.

I’ll buy the parts and everything if you’ll just put together this—

No.

But Dad!

I don’t do charity, Storm.

“Gee, that’s a sight for sore eyes.” I put the key in and tried starting her up. Nothing. I pulled the gas cap and peered into the tank. “Motherfucker, some prick actually siphoned the gas but left the bike. As if my day could get any worse!”

I wheeled my motorcycle out of the alley and onto the sidewalk. My troops saw me and exited the building, a couple of them shaking their heads and giving me blank stares.

“Oh, so that’s what this was all about,” Carillon said. “You actually had us hold position so you could go grab your shit in the middle of a firefight. You know what? You’re an asshole, Pilot.”

I clicked my tongue. “Oh, get stuffed, you—”

That was when the brick facade of the Rarity’s across the street from my apartment exploded outward and a clanking, riveted steel monstrosity drove out of the rubble, its tracks screeching and debris clattering off of its armor. Their fog lamps were turned up full-blast and were blindingly bright, like the eyes of some terrible beast. The turret of the tank slowly turned towards us.

“Ravager!” Carillon shouted. “Damarkind Ravager tank!”

A plasma blast lanced from the vehicle’s main gun turret with a thunderous report and a flash of blue that smelled of ozone. Carillon didn’t even have the time to scream. He simply exploded, his body turning into an omni-directional spray of atomized gore centered on a steaming crater in the street.

I was pelted with the fragments of his armor and splattered from head to hoof with his blood and innards. It dripped off my muzzle. It was in my eyes. My mouth. All over the seat of my Stampeder. He tasted like copper and burnt hair and smelled like bile and shit and everything else that was in his gastrointestinal tract a few moments ago. He’d been utterly obliterated right before my very eyes. A good quarter of him was now draped over my helmet and my withers.

I screamed and fell back onto my haunches, dropping my motorcycle. The armored vehicle was turning its turret towards me. The message was clear. If I didn’t do something, I was going to be vaporized next. We were all next.

“Fall back!” I shouted. “Everypony, get to cover, now!”

I turned myself invisible and sprinted for cover. Just in time, too. The street behind me was cratered by another plasma impact. Lucky bobbed and dived as it struggled to keep up with my movements. The Ravager crew opened fire with their coaxial guns and a mare fell, screaming and bleeding from the neck, her helmet rolling away from her as she struggled to staunch the wound with her hoof.

The bastards veered off the street and deliberately ran her over, flattening her instantly. Even over its roaring engines and clattering tracks, I could hear a chorus of muffled laughing reverberate through the vehicle’s hull. Me and the remaining squad members bolted, sprinting down a side street as fast as our legs would carry us.

“Where’n the hell are the damn Centaurs?!” Haybale yelled.

Another wall collapsed in front of us, a storefront falling to pieces as a tank simply drove through it from the inside of the structure, likely from having penetrated into the structure from the other side of the block. It was a second Ravager, configured much the same as the first. They had us cornered.

I came to a skidding halt. “Oh no, oh shit, oh fuck.”

Me and my remaining squad members dived into an alley and galloped as fast as our legs would take us.

“Captain!” I shouted into the radio. “Ostrich Three-Six to Raptor One-One actual. We’ve been engaged! Two enemy Ravager tanks in the AO! Sending grid coordinates now, over!” I punched one of the four shrouded buttons on my helmet, pinging Captain Garrida with our location.

After a brief pause, there was a response. “Sergeant, have you and your squad make your way four blocks east, one block south. Just follow the nav marker on your heads-up display. We’re holed up in the Gridiron Bar.”

Because of fucking course they were. “Copy that, we’re on our way—to the Gridiron. Shit.”

We made our way there with all possible haste, avoiding contact with the enemy. The other two Ostrich squads arrived around the same time we did. We stepped over the corpses of over a dozen cleomanni troops outside the squat, truncated pyramid of the Gridiron and made our way inside, past the Raptor guys who were accompanied by Garrida and her griffons. The Captain nodded when she saw me.

The Gridiron was exactly as I had remembered it, with dark, moody lighting and a musty-smelling floor. Aside from drinks, when I worked here, we’d served the usual fare. Grilled vegetables, hayburgers, onion rings, all the greasy, artery-clogging shit our patrons could possibly want. All the liquor had been cleared out, sadly, but at least the looters had left the other amenities intact. The pool tables, pinball machines, arcade cabinets and the rest of the cool stuff was still there.

The place was built like a bunker with these stupid stuccoed insulated concrete walls that the owners made us pressure-wash every summer because the two of them were too cheap to hire a real cleaning service. Apparently, the spacious two-story building had been some tech startup’s office that had been foreclosed on when they went out of business and then bought up on the cheap.

The owners, Grease Fire and his wife Coriander, were trailer trash to the bone. Ol’ Greasy used to get drunk and stumble around wearing a pit-stained wife-beater over his portly frame and feel me and the other waitresses up, right in front of the customers. Give our rumps a little tweak with his hoof and then chuckle with that bassy voice of his. Hur, hur, hur, just checkin’ the firmness.

Coriander seemed to have a deep and abiding hatred for anyone and anything that wasn’t her. The cockroaches in the back. The patrons. The glasses. Even the glasses were wrong. This is chipped! It wasn’t chipped. She threw it on the floor in a fit of anger. Now it was chipped. Chips. Plural. Every time I saw her gray beehive mane poking up from behind a countertop, I knew we were officially in the shit.

The patrons were all very loud and very bro, and I hated their fucking guts. Their constant whistling and catcalls. Their leering eyes. What, was I not clear enough when I said I had a boyfriend?

“Listen up, people,” Garrida said. “We’re only regrouping here temporarily before moving on to assault the detention camp. Unfortunately, the mercs are counterattacking while the Confederate survivors are trying to evacuate. We’ll have to repel them before we can initiate the next phase. Get to your posts and secure the perimeter! They’ll be on us any second, now. Me and the rest of Raptor are headed to the roof. Good luck and Celestia’s protection to you all!”

While Garrida, Placid Gale and the rest of the winged soldiers headed for the stairs, what few unicorns were left on my squad, including myself, smashed the butts of our purloined damarkind machine guns through a few windows and set up firing positions, using the sturdy walls of the structure for cover and the deep windowsills as a place to set up in a bipod-supported position. The medic tossed me a kerchief, and I used it to wipe the blood and mess off my face and my armor, before tossing the saturated cloth aside and getting into position behind my weapon. I wrapped my hooves around the pistol grip and the buttstock to keep it steady and ensconced the trigger in my levitation’s orange glow.

Marching down the street, weapons at the ready, were two squads of twelve damarkind mercs each. They weren’t even using cover. They had full faith in their body armor to resist our beams. What they didn’t realize was that we weren’t exclusively using beamcasters.

“Here they come!” I shouted. “Squad, weapons free!”

I pulled the trigger on my weapon, the staccato racket of our machine guns filling the air as we released short, controlled bursts of fire into the enemy. Three of them were struck immediately and fell dead on the spot. The rest scattered with unbelievable quickness, disappearing into cover. That was when we started taking accurate fire.

The stallion to my left took a round in the face and slumped over, a pool of blood spreading around his head, his weapon going fallow. Another unicorn simply shoved him aside and took his place while another squad’s medic checked to see if he was still breathing or not.

A bullet slammed into my chest protector, punching right through the first plate and embedding into the synthetic fiber backing. I rolled backwards and fell away from my weapon and onto the floor, lying on my back, clutching my chest in pain. The back face deformation felt like it broke one of my ribs.

I slowly sat up and felt a strange heat spreading through my chest, and then, I noticed a smoky smell and a faint glow. The burn got more intense with each passing second. I looked down to see that I’d literally been set aflame. An armor-piercing incendiary round had punctured my plating in a bad area and the laminated composite weave underneath had started smoldering.

“Shit!” My eyes widened. “Isn’t this supposed to be fireproof? Shit, shit, shit!”

I ripped on the quick-release and ditched the armor, finding that I now sported a small second-degree burn and a big contusion on my chest. I then resumed my position, sans armor, letting off bursts of suppressive fire that were quickly joined by tracer rounds and green beams lancing out from our positions. Firearms weren’t like beamcasters. Not clean. Not recoilless. It was a visceral experience. My whole world vibrated. The ammo belt of my weapon shook like a thing possessed as it snaked into the action, spitting out links and brass on the other side. The air was filled with the acrid stink of gunpowder.

I heard a loud boom from the rooftop above. Garrida’s Thumper, no doubt. I saw one of the mercenary positions go silent. Griffon rifles started opening up and I could see puffs of dust from the rounds impacting the enemy’s cover. After popping the top covers and slamming fresh belts into our weapons, we waited until there was a lull from the griffons and then we opened fire again.

“Eat shit, motherfuckers!” Haybale yelled, blasting away with his casters. “Eat shit, motherfuckers!”

Bellwether was behind the bar, fiddling with some blocks of CycloHex, smoking an ill-advised cigar and ducking when the occasional incoming round sailed into his area. Corporal Shooting Star was a natural with her machine gun, laser-focused on the enemy, not a word of protest emerging from her lips. Cinderblock and Sagebrush, the latter of whom I’d taken to calling Swampy because of his demeanor and coloration, were both crewing a Tatzlwurm launcher, with Sage firing missiles at the enemy positions and Cinder and his big frame quickly reloading the heavy tubes by hoof. It was a good thing Tatzlwurms were soft-launched by design, otherwise, the overpressure from the backblast would’ve blown our eardrums out.

I gave my Orbit a boost with my horn, topping off its charge. “Lucky, on my eyepiece. I wanna see what you’re seeing.” The Orbit beeped twice and a picture-in-picture image appeared in my heads-up display over wireless video link. “Lucky, go high!”

The Orbit flew outside the building and then jumped a hundred meters straight up, giving me an overview of the area. There were still a good fifteen or more of the mercs plugging away at our positions, and those Ravager tanks were coming down a side street, hoping to get the jump on us.

Ravagers were an indigenous damarkind design that I’d encountered—and engaged and destroyed with my Charger’s weapons—plenty of times before. Riveted steel, not welded steel. Rivets. Like an old boiler. Their tracks lacked skirts and were completely exposed on top, like something from a museum. The prime mover was typically an underpowered radial engine, and the main gun was a weak seventy-six-millimeter piece. A breech-loader, not an autocannon. It was not even fit for the battlefield. That was, however, in their standard, factory configuration. Mercenaries always customized their tanks extensively, incorporating all kinds of scabbed-in alien tech.

If these were anything like the ones I’d fought during the war, not only had the main gun been replaced with a big plasma pulsecannon, it probably had electric motors and a Confederate diesel genset for propulsion. These modifications would just barely bring a Ravager up to par with a Conqueror tank, and even then, they were no match for one in a stand-up fight. To employ a vehicle so primitive in an effective manner, one needed a superior grasp of tactics, and tactics required patience, something damarkinds were severely lacking in.

“Captain,” I spoke over the radio. “We’ve got enemy tanks at our two o’clock. They’re going to be on us in a few moments.”

“You have an Orbit?” Garrida sounded surprised as her voice crackled over my headset. “Wait one. Yeah, good eye. I see ‘em. Good job, Sergeant. I’m sending the Tatzlwurm teams to the adjacent rooftop. Those assholes are in for a little surprise.”

About twenty seconds later, over Lucky’s feed, I witnessed one of the most beautiful things I’d ever seen. A pair of white trails streaked from the roof of an 18-story tenement building, striking the Ravagers. One of the missiles was blown out of the air by an active protection system that activated at the last moment, blasting it with a spray of shrapnel before it could contact the tank’s armor. The second tank didn’t have one, perhaps because they couldn’t afford it. Their failure to equip themselves properly for the modern battlefield would prove a fatal error.

A split-second after the bright flash of the missile impact, their pulsecannon capacitors turned into bombs. They didn’t even have a chance. The secondaries blew their turret clear off the hull, leaving a sparking bonfire coming from the turret ring. Before our ATGM crews could reload, the other tank peeled off and sped away from our position as fast as they could. At the same time, the mercs that had formed firing lines in front of the Gridiron got up, turned tail and ran, letting off strings of suppressive fire as they went.

“That’s right, fuckers!” Haybale hooted. “You ain’t takin’ us!”

I had Lucky pan east, over the detention camp, approximately six hundred meters from our position. The other Ravager was pulling back to that location at top speed. They were going a paltry thirty or forty kilometers an hour. They might’ve had upgraded propulsion tech and were a good three times faster than a stock Ravager, but the tracks could only handle so much.

Dodge’s railway yard had been converted into a concentration camp with a sand-filled gabion blast wall that had been topped in razor wire surrounding the whole facility. I could see a few Confederate troops running around in a panic, as well as the assets they had in the main yard. Containerized generators, a medium-range anti-air missile system and radar, and various other pieces of equipment were lying around, unmanned and unguarded. Enemy infantry were bracing themselves for a desperate defense.

Garrida and the rest of Raptor ambled down the stairs. The big griffon’s armor was covered in blood. She cradled a wounded griffon in her forelegs, setting him on one of the larger tables so the medics could see to his injuries. She walked up to Bellwether with an unlit cigar in her beak, and the two touched cigars to ignite hers. I was sweating bullets. There was enough explosive material on top of the bar to turn the Gridiron into a rising cloud of concrete dust.

Bellwether gathered up the explosives and passed them out to our squads, handing me a few bricks and a detonator with a scowl on his face, as if he’d rather be planting them himself. I stowed the CycloHex charges and walked up to one of our dead and relieved him of his chest piece, and one of his pauldrons, strapping it onto my armor. The fit was a little loose, as it was sized for a stallion, but a quick adjustment of the straps cured that problem.

“So, on to the next phase of the operation.” Garrida turned back to us. “We’re advancing with the Centaurs and assaulting the detention camp directly. The Centaurs will ram the main gate and take on any infantry and armor they see, and the ATGM teams will back them up. The frontal assault is a diversion. Air teams will also assault from above, and ground teams will breach through the compound walls in the locations I’ve marked in the datasphere. Check your sight lines, watch the crossfire.

“Eliminate all hostile targets. Any cleomanni you see, any mercenaries, anyone who raises a weapon in defense of that place, they are to be shot on sight. Enemy non-combat personnel are discretionary targets, but focus on the armed ones. They’re the real threat. We don’t have the transports or the facilities for large numbers of prisoners.

“As soon as the fighting dies down, you are to round up any enemy personnel who haven’t escaped and execute them on the spot. If you don’t feel comfortable doing that, herd them into a sealed building and throw in OA-13 or some incendiary grenades, or whatever you have handy. Let’s get this shit done and go home, people.”

The Centaurs pulled up to the outside of the Gridiron. Our units poured out of the structure like ants, mounting the ladders on the sides of the vehicles and getting up on their roofs. As the vehicles sped off, we rode them tank desant, unprotected on their exterior, our weapons arrayed outward and ready to respond to any threat that emerged. Lucky kept pace overhead, giving me a bird’s-eye view of our surroundings, only coming down to ground level when it needed me to top off the charge with my horn. When we neared the walls of the compound, we dismounted the vehicles.

“Go, go, go!” Garrida shouted. “Breach in!”

The Captain took wing and sighted in the facility’s generators. With a few shots from Thumper, she put their fancy containerized fusion gensets out of commission. The lights on every block went out. The buildings on the inside of the compound were plunged into darkness. With Lucky’s directional microphone, I could hear the satyrs guarding the base collectively yelp in fright before getting into what sounded like heated arguments amongst themselves. Then, the battery-operated backup diode lighting kicked in.

The lead Centaur rammed the main gate, all according to plan, opening fire immediately after breaching inside. It sounded like they’d come under heavy fire, their active protection systems taxed to the limit while shooting down enemy missiles. Whether or not they’d engaged the other Ravager was unclear. I’d lost sight of the damned thing.

The incoming fire helped our guys locate their missile teams, however. Tatzlwurm missiles streaked from the rooftops of the buildings overlooking the compound, blasting into the enemy fortifications and wounding and killing the defenders. The aerial guided missile teams struck relentlessly and without mercy. Me and my squad made our way to the marked nav point, planting bricks of CH on the blast walls. We moved back. Way back. Even blast walls weren’t capable of resisting a charge this size.

“Fire in the hole!” I hit the detonator.

With an ear-shattering blast, tons of sand, razor wire, and shredded gabion baskets were launched skyward. The windows of all the businesses and residences nearby were shattered. Car alarms on abandoned vehicles started blaring. My squad poured in through the hole. We’d caught the defenders with their pants down. Several cleomanni guards, dazed from the blast, stumbled around in the open. They were stunned when they saw us. Completely unprepared. Our beamcasters went through them like a scythe through wheat.

We kept up the tempo, surging past them as they fell. We leapt into the dark, yawning maw of the shattered windows of the railway line’s offices. The buildings were partly lit on the inside by strings of work lights running off backup power, but the halls were mostly bathed in shadow. There were Confederate rear-line personnel and civilian contractors, huddling together in the darkness. Instruments of our oppressors. Khaki-wearing devils. They whimpered and cowered in fear when they saw us. We were the reapers, come to take their lives.

“Kill them all,” I said.

Haybale scratched his head. “But, Sarge, didn’t Garrida say to focus on—”

I wheeled on Haybale. “I don’t give a fuck! If they didn’t want to die, they wouldn’t be here, on our planet, kidnapping our people! Waste these assholes!”

On my orders, my squad and I mowed them all down, heedless of their screams of terror, advancing in a slow march as all of us emptied our beams into the crowd. The room flickered green in the darkness. When we were done, there was nothing but a steaming pile of corpses, flash-cooked from the inside out. We left none alive.

We kept moving through the structure, clearing rooms. Doors would open. An unarmed cleomanni would try making a run for it, begging for their lives, only to be beamed in the back.

One of their stalli—no, men, was huddled in a corner, mumbling to himself. “Please! We tried to stop them, I swear! We tried telling them not to!”

I marched up to him. “Not what?” I spoke in broken Ardun interspersed with my native tongue. “Who? To not what, hemekenna? Bastard, answer!”

He was too scared to speak, his whole jaw shaking. I ended his jaw problems personally when I liberated it from the rest of his face with a point-blank beamcaster blast.

When we’d ascertained that the structure was clear, we exited the other side of the building into a great courtyard with brick pavers. Diagonally across from us and to our nine o’clock was a skybridge connecting one office building to a strange structure with a corrugated metal exterior. At our twelve o’clock was another large office building.

Under the skybridge, in the gap between the structures, I could see the main railway station, or what was left of it. The whole building had been reduced to an unrecognizable pile of rubble centered on a crater the size of a hoofball field. The air assault teams were specks off in the distance, attacking enemy positions from above. We were fairly isolated from the rest of the units.

To our direct front, I glanced upward at a crashing noise right as the upper-floor windows of the structure were broken out by rifle-butts. It was the damarkinds. They opened fire on our positions with armor-piercing incendiary rounds. We quickly scattered and moved into cover behind a number of planters in the courtyard, which had sturdy concrete block walls. My troops returned fire with their beamcasters, but it was useless. No way to target their extremities from down here.

“Squad, hold position here and keep the pressure on them, I’m going to see if I can flank ‘em! If you can’t hold position, draw back into the offices we just cleared and see if you can hold them back from there.”

“Aye, Sergeant!”

I cloaked myself and my Orbit and moved out, heading straight for our attackers. They couldn’t see me at all as I entered the lower levels of the structure, Lucky in tow. I had to know what was in that building. The one at the other end of the skybridge. It looked like a prison with all the windows and exits barred and access via the skybridge only.

The lower level of this office building was completely abandoned. I made my way up the stairs to the second story. The skybridge itself was on the level above this one. There was no one around. No cleomanni. Nobody in sight. I let out a sigh and uncloaked myself, walking down a dimly lit hall, past a vaulted atrium and towards a staircase that would take me to the third level.

A big damarkind—one of the biggest I’d ever seen—draped from head to toe in more armor than a battle tank and great big belts of ammunition, slipped out from behind the corner at the end of the hall. I gasped. He was grinning. Grinning and wielding a Confederate fifty-caliber machine gun that he’d apparently modified with a pistol grip and stock. Another Alpha. A veteran who clearly outranked the one we’d encountered earlier. He leveled his weapon at me and opened fire, the sound deafening in the enclosed space.

I cloaked myself and Lucky and bolted through an open door and into an office, even as the walls around me were ripped to pieces by armor-piercing rounds. If I took even one single hit, I was done. A hit to a leg would take that leg right off. A hit to the torso would pulverize my innards. A hit to my head would pop it like an overripe tomato. The low cubicles typical of pony offices had been replaced with cleomanni-height ones. This helped conceal my position a little bit, but the damarkind who was stalking me was a good eight feet tall and could see right over them. He was a giant. He had to hunch over and blade his massive body sideways to get through the doorway.

I could hear the tromping of his plated boots as he chuckled darkly to himself, following me into the space. “So, ye wanna play hide and seek, pony? Good. I like it when they resist. Makes me hard as a fookin’ diamon’.” His accent was so thick, he was almost unintelligible. “I’m straining at my trousers just thinkin’ about all the fun we gonna have together. ‘Urry up and get caught. Your holes are as good as mine, anyway. I’m so pent up, I could fuck the exhaust pipe of a tank while the motor’s still runnin’!”

As he crept around, peering over the tops of the cubicles, I slowly snuck around him, trying to stay in concealment the entire time even though I was cloaked. He had a strange headpiece on that was emitting a faint clicking noise that intensified when he faced me.

“Fuck,” I whispered to myself. An in-air sonar. He could see me even while I was cloaked.

“Ye think your spellery and parlor tricks will keep ye hidden from me?” he muttered. “It’s useless. Surrender, pony. I promise I’ll let ye finish first. I got a big tongue. Works wonders.”

I cracked a small, wicked smile. I’d saved an audio file on Lucky’s internal storage, one that I might’ve used if anyone had ever attempted to break into my apartment while I was inside. Now was the time to use it.

“Lucky, hold position and play taunting-dot-vox,” I whispered.

The Orbit immediately started playing the voice recording. “You think you can come into my place and fuck with my stuff? You’re in for it now, pal. I’ve been trained by elite BASKAF operatives and I can kill you in any of a hundred different ways, and that’s just with my bare hooves.”

Trying to avoid giggling, I snuck away and left my Orbit in a stationary position, watching as the damarkind tromped up to the source of the sound, expecting me to be there. He swept his weapon around, finding nothing. He had his back to me. It was now or never. I sprinted towards him from behind, leaping and clambering up onto his back, onto the plates of his crimson armor. While he cried out in shock, I drew out the big damarkind camp knife I’d looted earlier, gripped it in a fetlock and drove it downward into his neck, between his cuirass and his helmet.

On a reflex, he reached back and grabbed me, throwing me away full-force in a panic. Me and my armor crashed through several cubicle walls, knocking them over, sending computer monitors, staplers, and rotary business card files clattering to the floor. With a groan, I clambered to my hooves and galloped away as fast as I could. He swept the office with booming heavy machine gun fire, setting the cubicles aflame with incendiary rounds.

“We coulda had so much fun together.” He pulled the knife out of his neck, tossing it aside, before slapping a quick-clotting bandage in its place. “Now, it’s over. I’m gonna pluck your beatin’ heart from your chest and devour it right in fronna ya’. The only fookin’ you’re gonna ge’ is when I widen your sphincter with my blade and then fist ye to the hilt until ye split like a hot dog left in the microwave too long! You’re dead, pony! Dead!”

After that pronouncement, he hosed down the office with more machine gun fire. Bits of cubicle material and drywall formed a cloud of particulates that hung in the air. It took everything I had to stay well to the side of him, avoiding being struck by fragments or, Celestia forbid, the actual bullets themselves.

I couldn’t take this guy. He was too prepared. Too well-armed. I had to run.

“Lucky, on me!” I shouted.

The Orbit zipped after me as I fled the office, making for the stairs leading up to the third level. I placed a brick of CH on the stairway as I went, and when I got to the top, I ran to a safe distance before blowing it. Pacing back, I peered over the third-story balcony into the atrium and examined the stairwell below. The whole thing had completely collapsed. The veteran Alpha was milling around down below, his weathered crimson armor gleaming in the light that streamed in through the windows.

He stamped his feet angrily. “Pony coward! Flee! Flee for your worthless little life!” He turned and swept his weapon over the balcony. “There you are!”

I yelped and fled as the glass panels on the balcony practically exploded from being struck by the fifty. I made for the skybridge. I couldn’t let that son of a bitch find me, or it would all be over. I noticed movement beyond an open window in the adjacent office building. I mounted an end table next to a couch and peered through the glass, pulling my binocular out of my saddlebags. I set the microphone on the thing to sound-enhance, trying to pick up the conversation the two figures held. The veteran was still stalking me, so I had to make the most of what little time I had. The intel would be worth it, I hoped.

“Lucky,” I said. “Record everything.”

Every pack of damarkinds had a supreme leader, the Alpha-Superior. The big boss. The Seg’jakha. This one could easily be picked out by how well-dressed he was. Unlike his scruffy underlings, his snow-white fur was neatly slicked. His brass-buttoned uniform of deep crimson with golden stripes was adorned with a fancy embroidered white cape and gold-fringed epaulets. He paced back and forth in the command center, his fists clenching and unclenching, clearly furious. His employers were none too happy, either.

“What the fuck are you doing, Broggas?” The cleomanni bitch of an officer standing next to him screamed and berated him, adjusting her square-rimmed glasses, a pencil propped in her ear, her shaking left hand clutching a clipboard to her chest. “They’re inside the fucking perimeter! They’re killing everyone! We didn’t pay you guys for protection because you were good, but because you’re cheap! It’s just some fucking ponies! They’re just animals! What’s the big deal? Why can’t you keep the situation under control?” She gesticulated madly, sweeping her hand in our general direction.

“What do you know about fighting the tonnanen, you sheltered Confederate whore?” Broggas roared, wheeling on her. “I’ve watched those little demons drag my boys away and slit their throats. I’ve seen them work witchcraft that would chill your bones! The contract was for securing your pissant concentration camp from breakouts, not incursions like this. Now, may I please speak to your commander? Where is Colonel Degyetoch?”

I was surprised. He’d actually deigned to use the formal name of our species, in our own language. Not the Ardun Ekkestreuni. He’d actually said tonnanen. That was a sign of either grudging respect or fear, and damarkinds rarely felt either one of those things.

The Confederate Lieutenant didn’t say anything. She just stood there with her lips trembling, staring off into space, mumbling quietly to herself.

“Stupid bitch, answer the question!” Broggas snapped his fingers in front of her face.

“Degyetoch is dead!” the cleomanni woman whined. “Are you a complete moron? Did you not hear? Did you not see? They rammed a train filled with explosives into the station and it killed everyone. Why couldn’t you stop them? What the hell are we paying you goons for?”

This Broggas fellow looked like he’d had just about enough. He grabbed her by the neck and lifted her off her feet with one outstretched arm. She dropped her clipboard, gagging and clutching for her throat.

Broggas seethed, his eyes like fiery coals. “If I’d known we were about to be attacked by a fucking bomb-laden locomotive, and then stormed by three armored personnel carriers backed up by an entire platoon of heavily-armed rebels, I would’ve put derailers on the lines heading in and out of this gods-forsaken city and set up machine gun and guided missile nests in every fucking building and landmines on every fucking street! I also would have asked for more money so I could, at the very least, cover the cost of the munitions it would take to fight such a battle.

“This, all of this, happened because you satyrs love to keep your precious little secrets. You didn’t share even a single piece of intelligence from your air assets, or the earlier attack on your outpost where insurgent forces seized a train and spent all morning eluding your supposedly elite Gafalze Arresgrippen super-soldiers. I had to get the report by word-of-mouth from one of your grunts half an hour ago! I would be well within my rights to squeeze the fucking life out of you, you ignorant, useless female!”

He tossed her aside like a sack of potatoes, leaving her to gasp and choke on the floor. “My brother—” she gasped and wheezed. “They buried him—in rubble!”

“I don’t give a shit about your brother!” He threw in a savage kick to her midsection for good measure, knocking the wind out of her, leaning down patronizingly with his hands on his knees like he was speaking to a child. “The tonnanen have slain dozens of my kin, on this occasion and others, but you don’t care at all about us, do you? No, you think we’re your convenient little army of interchangeable wind-up toy thugs and our lives don’t matter. You dare make demands of me, even as my boys, my own son among them, are fighting and dying in the streets? What will you have me do next, your esteemed ladyship?” He clasped his hands together mockingly. “Run down a fucking Imperial battle tank with my sword in hand? Do you not understand that I fight for money? I can’t spend it if I’m dead, you stupid cunt!”

Even the most erudite and sophisticated damarkinds were still nasty brutes, through and through, but he had a point. The cleomanni were probably just about the worst employers in the galaxy. If I were in his place and had knowledge of our earlier attacks withheld from me, I would’ve been just as virulently angry.

He bared his teeth as he leaned down to address her. “Now, you’re going to pay extra for the damages my company has incurred, if you want me to repel thi—” He turned, sniffing hard. “I can smell them. They’re watching, the stinking little cunts!” He marched up to a cubicle and snatched up his rifle, shouldering it and aiming it directly at me. “I can see you, Equestrian!”

“Oh shit!” I stowed the binos and ducked below the window just in time, shards of glass flying over my head as he opened fire.

I ran for the adjacent building, panting hard as I picked up speed. Bullets penetrated the wall beside me as I passed. He was trying to estimate my position as I ran and shoot through my concealment. I cloaked myself as I ran across the skybridge, uncloaking to conserve my energy once I was behind cover again. The doors at the end were chained. I ripped the padlock off with my levitation and pounded them open. As I crossed the threshold, a smell hit my nostrils such that I’d never before experienced the like. There were cages. Cages stacked one atop the other, all the way to the ceiling, such that the occupants above were forced to relieve themselves on the ones below.

I walked out onto the steel catwalk, my jaw going slack with horror and disgust. Garrida had tried to warn me. It was worse than I could have possibly imagined. The place was a slaughterhouse. A vision of Tartarus itself. There were spatters of dried blood on the floor in the expansive warehouse space below.

The flayed bodies of several ponies hung on chains and hooks on a rusty steel rack, some still dripping. They swung and rotated slightly, like wind chimes blown by a nonexistent breeze, their chains clinking, the red of their muscles exposed to the air. They’d been skinned alive and left to bleed out all over the floor.

A writhing mare was bound to a table, moaning softly, her hindquarters stained with blood. I scanned the miserable faces of the caged prisoners all around me. They stared back in silence. Not a single one of them spoke. They were too broken. Too beaten to do so much as cheer their would-be rescuers on.

That was around the time I realized what I just saw. I did a double-take at the sandy-coated mare, her limbs strapped down to the table, her lips and her nether regions encrusted in blood and filth. A pang of fear gripped my heart.

“Hoodoo,” I whispered.

I broke into a sprint, bounding down the steel stairway to the floor below, panting harder and harder, my breaths interspersed with sobs. Not my sister. Not my fucking sister.

The cleomanni’s words echoed in my head. We tried to stop them, I swear! We tried telling them not to!

I ran up to the table. It was so tall. I felt like a foal next to the steel slab. I couldn’t see her. I shrieked in frustration as I tried clambering up the side, to no avail. My hooves could find no purchase. I turned and saw a white step ladder next to one of the cages. Without a word, a mare stuck her hooves through the bars and rolled it on its casters in my direction. I nodded to her and took it, climbing up and taking in the ruin that was my older sister’s body with a startled gasp.

Her limbs had been secured to the slab with leather straps that were pulled so tight they dug into her flesh. Signs of hideous abuse and torture, both past and recent, physical and sexual, covered her entire body. Taking inventory of them felt like a knife in my guts.

There were so many. So many wounds. She had patches of fur missing, infected bite marks, burn marks, and little cuts and bruises all over. One of her eyes was blackened. Her face was swollen like a tomato and her lips split from where she’d been savagely beaten. My eyes traced downward. That was a mistake.

I was hyperventilating, consumed by panic. I couldn’t bear to look at her. My horror and disgust were absolute. Scenes of unparalleled sadism coalesced in my mind’s eye, and no matter how hard I tried to banish them, they persisted in tormenting me.

Cruelty. Pure, childlike cruelty. Cruelty for its own sake, and nothing more.

More urgently, she also had a knife sticking out of her chest, buried very nearly to the hilt in her sternum and surrounded by a puddle of blood. She’d been moving, earlier. Why isn’t she moving now? Don’t do this. Come on. Don’t do this to me!

I put my ear to her chest, listening for a heartbeat. That was when she gasped awake, her eyes wide open, dried blood encrusting her chin.

“S—Stormy?” she croaked.

“Where’s Windy?” I said. “Stay still, Hood! I’m gonna get you out of here, but I need to know where Windy is!”

“Gone,” Hoodoo breathed, every word making her wince in pain. “Auctioned.”

My heart practically skipped a beat. “Who took her?”

“Damarkind. Ship. Captain. Week ago.”

The worst possible answer. My little sister. My dear Windy. A slave to such filth. Probably used up and then murdered. A bit of temporary fun. A disposable implement. Basted in seed until she was too broken to scream, and then barbecued for supper. It was too much. I leaned onto the slab and screamed. And then, I screamed some more. I sobbed into my sister’s blood-stained belly. So cold. Colder by the minute.

“Medic,” I muttered into the radio. “Medic! I need a medic over here!”

Static and gunfire were the only response. They were still pinned down in the courtyard.

“Dammit!” I ripped off the communications helmet and threw it across the room, watching it clang against a cage, its pony occupants huddling together protectively.

Hoodoo grimaced. “Don’t—bother.”

“I’m gonna get you out of here. Hang on, sis!”

I tore her straps off with my levitation, cradling her in my forelegs.

“No—no, you’re not,” she said.

“There’s so much I wanted to say,” I whispered through my tears. “I thought you hated me. I thought you all did.”

She smiled wistfully. “No—Stormy. No. Can’t. Speak for the others. But I? I—” She broke into a coughing fit, speckling my muzzle with blood.

“Stay with me!” I begged. “Please!”

“I never—hated you. I hated what you chose to do—with your life. You were always my little Stormy. My brave little sis. I always—knew—you’d come looking for me.” She coughed, her lips tinged bright red, her eyes misted with tears. “I just—I just wish you’d come sooner.”

Hoodoo’s eyes rolled into the back of her head, her body going limp in my grasp. I cradled her in my forehooves, sobbing as I nuzzled her neck. She was so light from malnutrition. The Hoodoo I knew was a well-built pony. She used to wrestle me, and she’d always win. It didn’t feel like I was cradling a full-grown mare’s body, but a foal’s. Her legs were so thin. So thin and still. I set her down on the floor and closed her eyes with a gentle sweep of my hoof, my head hanging low.

Five damarkinds burst into the other end of the room, leveling weapons. “There she is, the little cunt!”

It would be the last mistake of their lives. I wheeled on them, my teeth bared with rage. I ripped the knife out of my sister’s chest, cloaking both it and myself with invisibility, breaking into a full gallop straight at their position, stumbling and half-crawling a few steps. My movements had been rendered bestial with raw anger, like I’d been possessed by the soul of a lion. With a roar, I punched the blade into the side of one damarkind’s knee, and he fell. Then, I punctured his neck. Right in the carotid. He collapsed hard, blood fountaining from his wounds.

I’d never driven my levitation so hard. It was a skill, thrusting a knife with telekinesis instead of merely floating it around. It took a mind filled with sheer, unbridled hatred to impart that much magical force over such a short span of time, which was just as well, because I was literally seeing red. I felt like an animal. Not a person. If I had the capacity to reason at that moment in time, I would’ve been ashamed of myself. It’s the meth. Irrational, extreme mood swings are a known side effect. Stay focused and ignore it!

The drugs in my system, combined with my mental state, were affecting my magic. I couldn’t cohere a proper invisibility spell anymore. Instead of cloaking my whole body, I phased in and out of sight, patches of my armor briefly exposing themselves. The others turned and opened fire wildly, hoping to hit my ghostly form with a stray round. The prisoners screamed and ducked, narrowly avoiding being shot. I seized one of the mercs’ weapons in a magic field, tilting the barrel into its owner’s mouth and forcing him to pull the trigger with his own finger. His brains painted the ceiling.

They got wise. “Back out! Frag the place!”

They backpedaled into the hall and tossed a grenade into the room. Not so smart. I simply grabbed it with my levitation and tossed it back. They only had a split-second to scream before two of them were pulverized with a loud bang, the last one leaping back into the room into the prone position and covering his head before he could be mulched like the others. I stood before him, uncloaked, my eyes filled with death, my heart hammering in my chest at two hundred beats per minute.

He slowly stood, drew a knife out and charged. I slipped between his legs and lashed out at the side of his knee with a vicious buck, breaking it. He stumbled a few paces and then collapsed, his knife skidding across the concrete floor.

He rose to his knee, groaning in pain. “Dirty slag! Pony fuck-meat! I’ll get my finger in you and rip you open from the cunt forward!”

I charged him again and he laid into me with a punch that sent me flying. I slammed into one of the cages, dribbling blood from my head. This only enraged me more. With a defiant roar, I seized the step ladder in my levitation and charged at him again, rearing up and raising my forehooves just in time for the flying step ladder to intercept my grasp.

With all the power my back muscles could muster, I brought it down upon his head with a sickening thud, hard enough to bend the sheet metal steps. I brought it down a second time with an explosive grunt of exertion. A third. Its all-metal construction became a twisted wreck. I tossed it aside and it clattered and skidded across the floor like a shopping cart.

As he lay there wailing in pain, he tried pulling a handgun. Some great big seventy-caliber doom cock of a revolver. A garish, nickel-plated, engraved thing of obvious damarkind make. I thought of the bones in his hand, and how fragile they could be, and how I regularly did things like applying hundreds of pounds of force with my levitation. I focused all that energy into his sausage-like fingers, bending them over backwards, hyperextending and dislocating them. Simultaneously, I also twisted his weapon such that the trigger guard wrapped his index finger around it a couple times.

He dropped the revolver before he could even get off a single shot, screaming over and over again and clutching his hand. I ran up and punched him in the jaw. A great big haymaker. I could feel his lower mandible snap under my hoof. Then, I was on him, mounting his massive chest while gripping his collar with a fetlock and raining blow after blow upon him.

“You.” I struck him. “Mother.” I broke his nose. “Fuckers!” I shattered the orbit of one of his eyes. He gurgled, his eyeball hanging loose down his cheek. “Why?” I muttered. “My family, you cocksuckers! You fucked with my family!”

He just sat there, shaking and moaning, saying nothing, occasionally coughing and retching between pants. I needed his full attention. I needed him focused. I grabbed his eyeball with my fetlock and ripped what was left of his dangling optic nerve out of his head. He yelped and yelped. They were these short, pathetic little yips that sounded like they’d come from a creature much smaller.

“Where is she?” I pummeled him again. “Where’s Windy you piece of fucking desiccated dog shit?” I roared into his face, my spittle dotting his brow. “Pray! Pray to whatever heathen gods you worship, because if you don’t tell me where my sister is in the next three seconds, I’m going send you to meet them, bitchfuck!” I wound up my blood-drenched hoof to hit him again, but it was too late. He’d passed out.

I heard the sound of a pair of big hands clapping behind me. I turned and steered my gaze upon the source of the unlikely applause. It was the Alpha-Superior. He was standing there, leaning casually against the door frame, grinning. Grinning and clapping. He was apparently unarmed except for the big saber he carried in an ornate jeweled sheath.

“One pony. Five of my boys. Impressive. You know, for all your talk of family, you don’t seem to care so much about anyone else’s. That’s my own son you’ve got there.”

I was mildly shocked. He was speaking my language, and not Ardun, the lingua franca of interstellar trade. No translator. He knew how to speak Equestrian. I sized up his kin. Everyone was someone’s family. It mattered little to me, at that moment.

“You don’t seem too broken up about it,” I said.

Broggas shrugged. “He was weak and stupid if he let one such as you pluck his eye. Weak, like his mother.”

“Why aren’t you attacking me?” I said. “Isn’t violence what your kind specializes in?”

“Please. You flatter me too much. Besides, ponies are more than capable of inflicting grievous harm when they get a little hair up their cunt. Case in point, you and these five morons here. As for your silly question, we’ve canceled. As of right now, hostilities have ceased. I saw you eavesdropping, so you probably got a good half of it, but you didn’t get the other half. The important half.”

“And what was that?” I glared at him.

“We had a deal, us and the Confederate Colonial Authority. An intel-sharing clause right in our contract, stipulating that the Army was to divulge all they knew about insurgent movements. Can you believe the nerve of the satyrs? They didn’t honor it. They kept their incompetence secret from me. It’s like they all wanted to die. So, I suppose congratulations are in order. You little shits actually won this round. I thank you for the entertainment, by the way.”

“What?” I said. “What do you mean, ‘entertainment?’ Nothing about any of this is entertaining. I have never seen anything as barbaric as what I’ve witnessed today!” I looked at my bloodstained hooves. “I’ve never done anything as barbaric, either!”

“Nonsense!” His black lips worked up and down, his eyes glowing with a sort of incomprehensible cruelty. “The train! Oh, the train! It was glorious. Like something from a movie. Did you know that I had this big argument with Colonel Degyetoch the hour before, where I expressed my disappointment over the lack of intelligence-sharing, and he completely stonewalled me? I said to that patronizing fool, I kid you not, ‘If you don’t tell us what the Liberation Front are up to, one of these days, they’re going to drive a whole train so far up your ass, you’ll look like a scarecrow’.

“Well, an hour later, I was sitting there, in a top-floor apartment a few blocks from the station, and I got a front-row seat to the carnage. I’ve never laughed so hard in my life. I’d assumed you lot would commandeer one and use it as a troop transport while masquerading as a shipment. I never thought you’d do anything as audacious as converting one into an ad-hoc cruise missile!” He broke into peals of laughter. “The power was out after the blast and it blew out all the windows in the building, so I got a little propane camp stove and sat there on the balcony eating my sausages and laughing while the dumb cunts tried putting out the fire and digging through the rubble looking for their officers. It was a completely pointless exercise in futility. The stupid twats were all dead! Oh, you ponies put on the best shows!”

“Enough of this twaddle,” I said. “Even if the satyrs deserved it, I’m not interested in how you get a great big chubby from watching our handiwork, you fucking ghoul. If I wanted a recap, I would’ve squeezed your big fat head for it. Where is she? Where’s Windy?”

He grinned like a shark-toothed devil, his eyes wide with interest. “Windy? Windy Mesa? What business have you with her?”

“My sister. And so was she.” I pointed to Hoodoo’s corpse.

“Ahh, I can see why you’re angry.” He put a hand on his hip and stroked his chin. “Hmm, Windy. Ah, yes. Sold. About a week ago. I placed a bid on that one myself. I liked her blue eyes. I liked the childlike fear in them. So much unlike yours. You reek of hatred. Your eyes are filled with killing intent. I’ve only smelled and seen that on one other tonnanen. A former Charger pilot.” He grinned. “You wouldn’t happen to be one, would you?”

“No,” I said. “You’re right. I piloted a Charger during the war. And almost everypony I know thinks I’m a freak because of it.”

I had no idea how I could so easily settle into a conversation with this monster. My sister’s body was lying right behind me, not even fully cold. He was partly responsible.

I didn’t think it possible for anyone to smile so wide, but he managed. “So that’s what it takes for a pathetic four-legged herbivore female to pilot such a fearsome killing machine. They’ve got to be a mutant like you. Fascinating.”

“Where. Is. She?” I growled, not taking my eyes off him for a moment.

He smiled, holding out his hand. “Pay up.”

My jaw hung slack. “Are you kidding me?”

His lip curled with anger. “Well, do you want to know where she is, or not? I’m in this business for money, not sport or honor or whatever these other cretins do it for. Running a mercenary company isn’t cheap. I have a Ravager tank and numerous sets of expensive body armor to replace. You want to know where your sister is? Empty your pockets, pony.”

I sized him up. Somehow, I doubted I could take him. He didn’t carry himself like the others. He wasn’t an expendable amateur equipped by a wealthy bastard of a merc boss. Broggas was the rich merc boss. That sword looked long. And it was probably quite sharp. And he looked like he knew how to use it. He wasn’t a ‘roid rager like the rest. His proportions were more normal for his kind, with a slight wizened hunch from advanced age. There was a scar on his brow that parted his otherwise pristine white fur. He looked like the kind of guy who got it from dueling. Could I go for the revolver? Put him down before he could get close with that toothpick?

“Did you preside over all this?” I pointed a hoof over my shoulder. “The torture? The murders?”

He scoffed and waved a hand. “I don’t give a damn what the boys do for fun. I don’t eat or fuck ponies myself if that’s what you’re asking. I think your kind makes for better servants. Good, strong and loyal laborers and attendants. Easy to train. Easy to keep in line with false hope. Not enough meat on the bones, anyway. A little too lean for my tastes. I am a being of culture. I hunt proper game. The kind that yields a good quantity of meat and hides. Go big, or go home, as my father always used to say.”

“Why the fuck are you assholes enslaving us?” My eyes welled up with tears. “How in the fucking fuck is any of this legal?”

“Completely legal,” Broggas sighed. “The FTU does not recognize the personhood of Equestrians. Also, I resent your accusation. I may own slaves and treat them well, but I’m not in the business of slaving. Not here, not now. That’s the satyrs’ gig. As of late, stallions are wanted as menial laborers. Asteroid miners and whatnot. High-risk, high-workload tasks. They collar ‘em, so they don’t have much of a choice in the matter. Send them into places no cowardly satyr would dare go. Let them suffer and die in their place. Mares? Hah. Frankly, it’s awful. You’re in high demand all over the place, but mostly for sex.

“Though I have abstained, myself, it is whispered among those who traffic in such things that there is no creature in the galaxy more erotic, more satisfying, more pleasing than a pony female. Fur like a soft mink coat. A warm, round ass like a cushion. A wet vice grip of a cunt, one with no equal in the universe. To put it bluntly, you’re the living fuck-pillows upon which a portion of the galaxy has chosen to rest its head, feet, cock, whatever. When someone wants their nerve endings stimulated until sweet, sweet release, they reach for a mare.

“It’s the latest fad among the elite, both in the underworld and so-called polite society. Their wives are jealous of you lot, you know, because of all the time their husbands spend buried dick-deep in their warm, tight little pony whores instead of their own rotten flaps. You? You’re money.” He rubbed his fingers together. “Big money. That’s why they haven’t killed you all. That’s why they haven’t dropped the hammer on this world and left it a cratered desert. They need a stable breeding population so they can farm Equestrians, the Confederacy’s latest premium biological robot and fuck-toy. Whether it’s heavy lifting one needs, or simply a place to keep their ejaculate, there’s no better alternative than a pony.”

Throughout his little spiel about the degrading treatment my kind had suffered, my jaw had gone progressively more slack with each despicable word that passed his lips, but by the time he’d finished, I was gritting my teeth so hard, I felt like I was fixing to bite straight through them. My hooves felt tight. If I had fingers, I’d be making fists.

To say that I was angry would be putting it mildly. I was livid. Shaking with rage. My cheeks were aflame with raw shame and embarrassment. My legs were trembling. Broggas didn’t have to put it that way. Any of it. I could see his wicked smile. He enjoyed twisting the knife. Watching me squirm. I had to fight the typical pony impulse to collapse in a bawling, neurotic fit. I had to stand tall before this vile alien, as a champion of my species. Nevertheless, it took me a few moments to gather myself before I could speak.

“How. Fucking. Dare you.”

“Easily. You see all of them, back there?” He pointed his finger at the prisoners behind me. “Over a hundred million credits of product. I could buy eighty Conqueror tanks with the proceeds of such a sale. Instead, I’m stuck with a couple beat-up Ravagers, taking a loss on a bullshit protection contract on this deplorable shithole of a planet. These Confederate twats are fucking me even harder than they’ve fucked the lot of you, and I’m not gonna take it any longer. I’m going home, and the first thing I’m gonna do is get me and the boys a round of drinks and rashers of bacon. They deserve it for putting up with this baloney.”

I slowly shook my head in disbelief. “Why do the cleomanni forbid ponies from representation and legal recognition on the galactic stage, but they give sick fucking monsters and deviants like you free rein to roam all over the place as you please?”

Broggas got a faraway look in his eyes. “Ahh, the million-credit question. The simple answer to that is that, well, I don’t know. I’ve asked the same question, believe me. They always get evasive about it. It’s complete poppycock. You are obviously, transparently sapient. There was a time when Damark was regarded as too savage to be allowed contact with the wider galaxy. My kind, most of us, we can’t help what we are. Our bodies produce such concentrated hormones, it drives us insane with lust and madness. A terrible adaptation for an untamable world. On Damark, you breed fast and you fight faster, or you die a horrid death. Sadly, this maxim doesn’t apply to civilizations with modern technology.”

“You seem personable enough, to me,” I said. “Obviously, some of you can choose not to be complete assholes all of the time.”

He frowned, leaning down and touching his neck. “I have a regulator implant. Reabsorbs and breaks down the excess chemicals. That’s why I’m talking to you and not bending you over. Sadly, that doesn’t change the fact that the majority of us are dirt-poor and pegged as savages, forced to take the crummiest, shadiest jobs just to get by. I’m an outcast even among my own kind. I could never go into politics on my world. They regard damarkinds with augs to help moderate behavior as ‘not damarkind enough’, and then they go right back to licking the meat of sapients off their bones.”

“What do I care?” I muttered. “What makes you think you can come to our planet and lecture us about your stupid problems, even as you torture and murder us? I’ve met some ballsy motherfuckers in my time, but you? You take the fucking cake.”

Broggas huffed. “I am alone among my associates in thinking that the galaxy would be enriched by the presence of Equestrians among us, perhaps even as equals. Some of you are exceptional fighters, but I can’t even legally employ you. What’s a businessman to do, when a perfectly good asset is sitting right in front of him, and he can’t even pay them a wage?” He checked his pocket watch. “Sorry, but we’re going to have to cut this mutual philosophizing short. Do you want to know where your sister is, or not?”

I reluctantly fished through my saddlebags, and there it was. My stipend. I wasn’t about to give this son of a bitch any of my own money that I’d earned waitressing, just the Liberation Front’s. I’d stuffed the baggie partly with styrofoam so the coins didn’t clink. “Are you sure you aren’t a cleomanni in a damarkind suit?”

“You wound me, madam,” he said, plucking the small drawstring coin purse out of the air. “You really do.”

He inspected the gold bits, giving one a bite and even weighing it on a pocket digital scale and zapping it with a portable terahertz scanner just to be sure they were of a high enough purity that they could be legally exchanged for the FTU’s credits. Any coins or bullion below 23 karat were outlawed in the Confederacy as too adulterated to exchange, legal only as scrap.

“Yes, this is enough.” He grinned. “Smart. You sound-dampened them, like a proper smuggler. Well, I suppose there’s no harm in telling you, since I doubt you can do anything about it, and, quite honestly, I wish you luck finding and killing the fetid sack of redundant protoplasm who bought her.”

“Who?” I said, narrowing my eyes.

“She went to an old rival of mine with deep pockets. Gormos Ralfas, that big, fat oaf. An addition to his little harem, I presume. I tried rescuing the fair maiden from his grasp, I tell you. Alas, he went a bit beyond my budget with his final bid. You know, I hear he’s got a cock the size of my arm. My whole arm!” He held out his fist and waved up and down his arm with his other hand for emphasis. “Apparently, he likes to get high as a kite and then rail ponies with it until they snap so badly that they can’t speak, only babble like newborns. His twisted appetites are completely, utterly insatiable. She’s probably halfway across the galaxy by now, suffocating beneath his undulating rolls of lard. Did that answer suffice?”

I snarled at him. “Perfectly.”

“Now, if you’ll excuse me.” There was a rush of wind, and suddenly, he had his injured son slung over his shoulders. “I have a ship to catch out of this pathetic backwater.” He offered a mocking little wave goodbye. “Have fun with your crusade, Charger-Girl. May we meet again under better circumstances.”

I was too flabbergasted to speak. I hadn’t seen him move. He’d stopped time somehow, or my perception of it. It had to be some black market nemrin magtech bauble of some kind. Some sort of foreign magic. The residual signature was distinctly non-Equestrian. If I’d attacked him, he would’ve slit my throat without hesitation, and there would have been nothing I could have done to stop him. Even as it was, I was surprised he hadn’t retaliated right there in revenge for his subordinates that I’d felled. He had a personal code of honor, unlike many of his species. Regrettably, it didn’t seem to extend to the ones in his employ.

There was something tucked in the neck of my armor, its corners scratching my skin. I pulled it out, staring at it in mild shock. It was a business card. I couldn’t read the Ardun script on the front, but it had Broggas’s picture on it. I turned it over. He’d written something on the back with a marker, in Equestrian. If you want a real killer’s job with real killer pay, we’re hiring. For you, I’d be willing to go under the table. -Emlan Broggas, Tarrasque Security Solutions

I huffed. “So he is a cleomanni in a damarkind suit.”

I turned back to the room, to the disapproving glares of the captives, watching me let an enemy of our species walk away unscathed. To the flayed corpses of several ponies, hanging in chains. To the lifeless body of my sister. No amount of whimsy or mystery Broggas exuded could have excused these atrocities. I’d made a deal with a literal devil. A pact with a beast whose soulless hirelings had raped and murdered my elder sister in cold blood and sold my younger sister to be the concubine of a monster.

The smell of rot and maggot-ridden flesh was too much. Above all, the overwhelming guilt of having paid that son of a bitch for information was more than I could bear. I stood and leaned against the wall as I threw up all over the floor. My guts spasmed again and again, streams of projectile-vomit splattering at my hooves. I could recognize bits of the barely edible rations I’d eaten earlier, on the ride over from Everfree. My bones ached. I felt sick to my stomach. Sick and dehydrated. I didn’t have time to mope. That would come later. For now, there was work to do. Like a member of the undead, I silently went around in a trance and unlocked all the cages, ripping the padlocks and their shackles off with my magic. I passed around the cup-and-pin pliers so suppression rings could be removed. Soon, a few more unicorns joined me in my task, setting the rest free.

Eventually, the survivors from my squad arrived, beaten and ragged, many of them sporting fresh wounds and gunshot marks on their armor. They gave a quick report. The battle had ended abruptly when the mercs on the fourth floor of the second office building had suddenly ceased fire and pulled back, landing a pair of heavy dropships on the other end of town to evac their remaining forces, leaving their employers to rot. Garrida was already directing the firing squads, the rhythmic beamcaster fire in the distance unmistakable.

Based on the altercation I’d seen between Broggas and the Confederate officer, as well as his own account, they’d been unable to renegotiate the contract, convincing Tarrasque and their motley assortment of circus freaks to run off with their tails between their legs. It was just in time, too. They could have overrun our fireteams.

After my squadmates caught a whiff of the cocktail of death and excrement that permeated the torture chamber, a few of them took a moment to empty the contents of their stomachs all over the floor out in the hall, just as I’d done.

One mare kept hurling and hurling so hard, I thought she’d never stop, and when her stomach was empty, she gagged and dry-heaved some more, for at least a good four minutes. Our team’s medic patted her on the back and asked if she was okay, prompting the sickened mare to collapse to her haunches, sobbing loudly.

I held Hoodoo’s body in my hooves, stroking her mane in silence, tears running down my cheeks. A big yellow claw came down on my shoulder, breaking me from my trance. I looked up at Captain Garrida’s concerned face. I didn’t know what she saw in my expression at that moment, numb as I was, but the slight curl of her beak told me all I needed to know.

“Family?” she said, her voice quavering.

I nodded silently, hugging my sister’s body closer.

“Dammit.” Garrida let out a sigh. “Do you need a minute?”

“Yeah.”

Slowly, the prisoners and my team filed out of that horrible place. Captain Garrida was the last, holding the door as she spoke. “Make it quick, Sergeant. We got enemy gunships on the way.”

When she shut it behind her, allowing me some small measure of privacy, I screamed harder than I had in my entire life.

I screamed my throat raw.

// … // … // … // … // … //

On the lonely hilltop overlooking the town, we hastily dug holes with our entrenching tools. After the battle was over, there was only one thing left to do. Bury our dead.

The gunships would be overhead in under half an hour. We had to move quickly, or they’d spot us.

My limbs were trembling as I lowered Hoodoo’s body into one of the shallow graves, her forelegs crossed over her chest. She looked so peaceful. For her, the struggle was over.

I levitated the bloodstained knife that had been used to murder her. I used the point of the blade to carve over the gaudy and insulting engravings in the stock of one of the light machine guns the mercs had brought to the battle. It was slow going, and the text looked ragged as hell.

“No, no, you’re doing it wrong,” Shooting Star said. “Allow me, Sarge.”

The Corporal heated the knife with pyrokinesis, turning the tip of it into a hot soldering iron. I nodded and returned to my work with the glowing red implement, burning my marks into the wood as I went. Hoodoo, 2152-2181. Died for nothing, like many others. Deserved a real headstone instead of this piece of shit. Then, I buried the end of the barrel at the head of her grave, standing the weapon up vertically.

I stepped back, exhausted from the terrible task of heaping dirt atop my sister’s body. I saluted. It wasn’t proper decorum. She was never in the military, but she had suffered and died in one of the worst ways imaginable while we were in combat with the enemy. I didn’t know what else to do, or any other way to honor her the way she deserved. I held that posture for some time, my lips trembling, before my leg went slack and I moved to join the others in boarding the Centaurs.

Hundreds of captive ponies crammed themselves into the backs of the unarmed cargo trucks, taking shelter under their canvas tops while the soldiers guided them in. I got in the rear bay of the lead Centaur with the rest of the troops, the hydraulics of the ramp whining as it retracted behind me. I sat down hard in one of the bucket seats and buried my face in my hooves, which were still smeared with dirt and blood.

This was a victory, but in so many ways, it felt like a defeat. We didn’t have enough trucks for all of them. Only fifteen casualties on our side, in exchange for hundreds of dead satyrs and their merc buddies. Sadly, there weren’t as many Equestrian prisoners as we thought there would be. Four hundred captives retrieved, hundreds of others liberated. Some, we had to let loose to go find their own transport out of the city or flee for the hills on the hoof in all directions, evading enemy air. I’d convinced Garrida to strap my old motorcycle to the tail of one of the cargo trucks. Took some finagling, but when I told her about its sentimental value and potential usefulness for scouting, she caved.

We had been too late. The horrid fate of my sisters notwithstanding, they’d already shipped two-thirds of the prisoners off-world. To be their slaves. To be their meat. To take the superior traits of our species—our strength, our cunning, our eroticism—and selfishly, cruelly turn them towards their own economic advantage while leaving us with nothing but toil and humiliation. We lived and loved harder than they did, and those soulless, unfeeling, empty, limp-dicked satyr sons of bitches were taking that strength and making it their property.

My little homecoming had given me nothing but heartache. I was never going back again. I couldn’t. Not after today. Getting Dust Devil back together was my first and only real priority.

I was going to make those fucking monsters pay dearly for what they had done.

// … // … // … // … // … //

The drugs were wearing off. I was starting to get the shakes all over. I felt feverish. Not a soul riding in the back of the Centaur said a single word as we trundled along the bumpy dirt road. By the looks on their faces, they’d seen a lot of things they wished they could quickly forget, and so had I.

“S—stim,” I muttered. “I need a stim. Please.”

Garrida shook her head. “That’s a negative, Sergeant. We’re not going into combat. We’re going home. Stims are under lock and key. Besides, you look like you’re about to fall over.”

“Captain, Sir—I—I’ll never ask you for anything like this ever again. I just—I need it. Now.”

“The answer’s no. If you ask again, the next thing you’re gonna feel is my leg around your neck when I put you to sleep.”

I didn’t want to be insubordinate. I didn’t. I wasn’t in my right mind, at that moment in time. “Don’t you understand?” I growled. “I don’t wanna feel like this! Gimme the fuckin’ meth!”

“Naptime, Sergeant.” Garrida did exactly what she said she would. She shot up from her seat, the others quickly parting to allow her passage in the cramped space. Though I briefly tried fending her off, she was skilled and sober, while I was injured and addled. One of her powerful legs snaked around my neck in a textbook choke. I saw stars, and then, darkness.

// … // … // … // … // … //

When my eyes flickered open, I felt like hell. I was on a hospital bed in a white room that looked like an indistinct blur. Ponies around me were shouting things, but it sounded like they were underwater.

“Get her on dialysis immediately!” Argent Tincture yelled. “Her blood pressure’s crashing! And get me the fucking implantable auto-dialysis unit!”

“Multiple drug toxicity,” somepony else muttered. “Serum metabolite levels are way, way too high. Are those—are those marks on her neck? Who did that?”

Argent shook her head. “We’re going to have to cut out her good kidney for this thing to fit. Dammit.”

I looked to my left and watched them open an olive drab polymer hard case with stickers with matrix barcodes on the outside. They lifted a shiny, Y-shaped chunk of titanium and plastic out of the case’s shock-absorbent foam liner and started tinkering with it.

My eyes fluttered shut, and when they reopened, the hands of the wall clock had advanced by several hours. I was in bed, and almost too weak to sit up. I groaned in pain. My back burned. It felt stiff and hard on the inside, somehow. Heavy, like there was a big chunk of rock in it. I could smell antiseptic and feel the stitches, the shaved patch on my back drawing a slight chill.

Bellwether was sitting in the chair across from me, hoofing through a magazine, like he usually did when I was laid up. I was his asset. He was always watching me like a hawk. Making sure his little make-work project didn’t go dying on him, at which point he wouldn’t have anything to justify his participation in all this.

“What’s the damage this time, Bell?” I said.

“This one’s gratis, surprisingly enough. Turns out, Crusher’s guys have got a whole bunch of these auto-dialysis implants sitting around in crates and very few kidney injury patients. Just so you know, that thing’s power supply is good for ten years, after which it needs to be serviced. It’ll ping you if there’s something wrong with it, though.”

“So, did they replace just the damaged kidney, or what did they do?” I said.

“Both your kidneys have been replaced, and it’s a permanent replacement. The operation takes about five years off your life expectancy, on average, but a lot of ponies live a normal lifespan with ‘em. You were really fucked up, by the way. All that shit you were taking was backing up in your system with no way out. Also, you’d ripped open your stitches from all that running around. I know it probably sounds trite at this point, but you’re very lucky to be alive, Storm.”

I collapsed against the pillow, hard. “Fuck.”

// … // … // … // … // … //

I sat all alone in the corner of the infirmary at Camp Crazy Horse, my eyes wide. I didn’t feel comfortable in the bed, somehow, so I’d chosen the floor as a place to sit. I was shaking. Shaking from head to hoof. The stims had long since worn off and I was experiencing the withdrawal. Any shred of confidence or bravado I’d had was long gone. I kept seeing it all. All of it. Stuck on replay. Playing over and over in my head. Granthis, cutting a mare in half with her plasma bayonet. The Karkadann, killing and liquefying our comrades. The damarkind mercenary grinding into me, holding me down with his massive body. Clover being raped and dismembered. Carillon exploding, showering me with his innards. Our squad massacring the cleomanni. My sister’s lifeless form on a cold concrete floor. My hooves coming down on one of those monster’s faces over and over until his eye fell from its socket. My teeth chattered, my eyes misted with tears.

“No.” I muttered softly, over and over. “No. No. No. No!”

Hoodoo wasn’t a soldier. She was a painter. She had been completely innocent and powerless to defend herself from the armed thugs who dragged her away and did those wretched things to her. With the flick of a wrist, they’d extinguished the little candle that was her life, with so much of the wick left to go. She’d expected me to come save her, but I was too preoccupied. Too obsessed with my own glory to do something as basic as going looking for my family when they needed me the most. I had failed her. Completely and utterly.

There weren’t words for the violation I felt. I didn’t want to be in my body. I didn’t want to be in my head. I didn’t want to be here. I wished I could leap into another dimension. One where such suffering did not exist. But the pain was real. It could not be ignored. The figments of that pain and fear took the form of damarkinds who kept gripping me by the shoulders and rubbing their huge bodies against me. As I lay helpless in a daydream I couldn’t escape, imaginary ponies suffered and died all around me. I could hear their screams. Their hateful accusations of treachery. I didn’t fight the enemy. I just paid him off. A bribe to get my way. An insult to our dead and mutilated. A reward for unthinkable brutality. I curled up into a ball. Made myself smaller.

I felt fragile, somehow. Like my sense of equilibrium just wasn’t there. The room was spinning. I wished it would all just go away. I wished I was young again. A young mare, frolicking on the grounds of my old high school. The specter of normalcy loomed over my past. A reality that was torn from me and replaced with this hell. And somewhere, me and my sisters were a part of that memory, and we were happy and healthy, too. Not broken. Not sent adrift. Whole. Alive.

Hoodoo! Windy!

// … end transmission …

Record 10//Penitence

//HOL CRY SWT
//CHECKSUM READ
//CHECKSUM GOOD

// … decoding …

Desert Storm

Hoodoo chuckled happily and grinned at me. All pearly white teeth. Somehow, the teeth stuck out in my mind’s eye. I couldn’t make out much more of her than that. Just twisting shadows. She turned back to her work, lifting a paintbrush in her lovely cerulean magic. From behind her, I couldn’t see what she was working on. I was so sure it was something beautiful. It had to be. She had supreme talent. Her paintings were a cut above what most ponies could muster.

I ambled up to her easel. She’d perched herself on an emerald-green hilltop overlooking Dodge, using the cityscape for reference. Hey, whatcha workin’ on, Hoodoo?

My smile fell from my face when I got closer and saw the painting. It was Windy Mesa, her countenance a mask of pain and humiliation. Dodge vanished, replaced by a black void. When Hoodoo turned back to me, her eyes slipped out of her head like egg yolks and maggots crawled out of the empty sockets. Hoodoo’s vengeful ghost slapped her hooves down atop my shoulders, forcing me to the ground with otherworldly strength. The spine-chilling sound that issued forth from her gaping maw was like the buzzing of a great swarm of flies.

I gasped awake, my heart pounding in my chest. I stared wide-eyed at the infirmary around me, that faint antiseptic scent crawling up my nostrils. For a brief moment, nothing felt real. I didn’t know what had happened to me, or where I was, or even who I was. At that moment, if somepony had asked me, I wouldn’t have been able to tell them something as basic as my own name. Reality came flooding back as a patchwork of painful truths. Memories I didn’t want. Guilt I couldn’t accept.

I took a deep breath. I shoved it down. There were more important things to do than sit around feeling sorry for myself. For one thing, I had to pee. Very badly.

I threw the sheets off, my legs briefly getting tangled and prompting me to growl in frustration. Finally succeeding, I swung my legs off the bed, my hooves clicking against the hard floor. My back ached, my stitches pinching and itching my skin, the air cold against the shaven patch above my flanks. My muzzle hurt from where my nose had been broken and then magically set. I’d cast very nearly to the point of burnout, and as a result, my head felt like someone had stuck it in a vice and tightened the jaws until my brain wanted to pop out of my skull. My chest felt like two stallions had taken turns bucking it like a hoofball kickoff, just to see how far they could launch me. The burn from the incendiary round had taken a small patch of fur off my chest and left behind a nasty blister. I had bruises all over my body from being shot, punched, body-slammed, and thrown through cubicle walls.

I stumbled into the infirmary’s bathroom, avoiding looking at myself in the mirror—what little I saw looked like hell, and I wasn’t sure I was in the mood to be melodramatically smashing mirrors just yet. I climbed up onto the toilet, sat my ass down and strained, my back throbbing in time with my pulse. I let out a soft little groan as I started to release, first as a trickle of watery blood, and then running clear. My back felt like knives. I could faintly perceive the soft whirr of machinery, the pumps in the auto-dialysis implant filtering my blood and quickly refilling my bladder from the backlog. My limbs shivered as I took another long, achy piss, only to have the cycle repeat a second and then a third time. The ordeal left me a shaking, whimpering mess.

“I’m not even fully pony, anymore,” I muttered. “Can’t have kids. Can’t even pee right. I’m just a half-robot piece of shit. Why not go all the way? Make me into an Anima and stuff my soul in a Charger? This fucking body has almost had it.”

I pulled out my toothbrush and swept the taste of vomit and blood and filth out of my mouth, spitting in the sink, rinsing and gargling a couple times with an old bottle of mint mouthwash that had been diluted to stretch it out. Argent had told me not to take a bath. My stitches weren’t up to it. A light rinse was allowable, however. I stepped into the shower and turned it on, letting the warm, pure water wash the stench of copper out of my coat. I sighed softly as I let it soak in, soothing my aches and pains. I still had bits of Carillon stuck in my fur and my mane. I felt something hard in my hair, sweeping it out and inspecting it only to find that it was one of his teeth. I tossed it in the trash, sneering with disgust.

You’re an asshole, Pilot.

He was right. I was an asshole. My senseless delay had gotten him killed. It had paid off later, however. I had my money, my Orbit, and my motorcycle. It wasn’t worth a life or two, but it was something. I also had a vague clue as to where Windy Mesa was. I’d never be able to follow up on that lead. Not here. Not while working for the ELF. I would practically have to go AWOL to even begin looking for her. I had no means of transport off-world, no connections, and no resources that would allow me to track down a member of the underworld and his victims in Confederate-controlled space.

Emlan’s words reverberated through my consciousness. She’s probably halfway across the galaxy by now, suffocating beneath his undulating rolls of lard. Did that answer suffice?

While I dumped a couple ounces of shampoo into my hooves and lathered up my whole body, I reviewed what I knew about Windy’s kidnapper. Gormos Ralfas. Damarkind. An Alpha-Superior, like Broggas. Has his own ship. His own tribe. Wealthy. Obscenely overweight. Drug addict. Collects mares like toy dolls as a hobby. He also fucks them. It wasn’t much to go on. Could I trace his drug purchases? No, everyone does drugs. Someone buying case after case of plus-sized condoms? No. Why would he even wear one at all? He can’t get his victims pregnant anyway. Probably spends all day raw-dogging them, the swine.

My thoughts went to that, and then on to darker places. I shook my head. “The more I tempt fate, the worse everything seems to get. Can’t one fucking thing look up for me? Just one?” I quit rinsing my mane, blinking a few times. “Aw, shit. I just did it again, didn’t I? Today’s gonna be like shotgunning a broken sewer line now, isn’t it?”

Someone started banging on the bathroom door, very nearly hard enough to knock it off its hinges. I huffed with indignation. “Yeah, yeah, gimme a minute.” I turned the water off and stepped out of the shower, my head wrapped in a towel. When I opened the door, Captain Garrida’s immense frame towered over me, with Argent Tincture right behind her. My eyes slowly traced upward to the expression that she wore. She didn’t look very pleased at all.

“Uhh, Sir?” I offered. “Is there a problem?”

I wasn’t too sure what happened, because a split-second later, I saw stars, then little birdies floating around my head. She’d slapped the shit out of me, hard enough to send me sprawling. I scooted back against the bathroom sink cabinet, holding my cheek and looking up at her fearfully.

“Don’t rough up the patient!” Argent shouted, only for Garrida to look back at her with a death glare that silenced her immediately.

“You thought you could get away with it.” Garrida pointed at me accusingly with one of her claws. “You stupid little fuck.”

“Am I in trouble?” I mumbled.

“You broke formation. Disobeyed Bellwether’s orders. Murdered a scavver in Everfree South.”

“I was looking for the damn salvage! And that scavver was a case of self-defense!”

I shrieked as she slapped me again.

“You shut your cunt mouth. You open it again, I’m gonna hit you again, you understand?”

“Yes, Sir!”

“You fuckin’ dilly-dallied and went scavving unauthorized instead of getting to your assigned nav point. You cost the lives of members of your squad.”

“Sir, it was my apartment and they were my things. My Orbit helped in the battle that followed!”

Slap.

My sister was dead. My Charger was in pieces. My commanding officer was treating me like a criminal. My world was falling apart all around me. There was nowhere to escape. I’d fucked up. I was going to face the music. My breathing quickened and my blood pressure shot through the roof from the stress and the panic.

I was a perfectionist, at times. Things like this were the topic of some of my worst nightmares. Getting chewed out by Captain Garrida, someone who I’d come to respect and look up to in the brief time we’d known each other, was like one of those dreams where I was a foal again and I’d shat my diapers in a shopping mall, screaming and crying while all the patrons stared at me and my shit-stained ass. That was what every excruciating second of this felt like.

“That’s not why I’m here,” Garrida said. “If it were just that, I might’ve been able to let it go. But no. I have eyewitness testimony from numerous sources that you bribed Emlan fucking Broggas, that disgusting creep. Have you no fucking shame at all? Was I wrong about you, Pilot?”

I was crying, now. Leaning up against the cabinet and crying. “It wasn’t a bribe. Those freaks kidnapped my sister. He was offering information about the fucker who took her! How could I let the opportunity slip away? My sister, Cap! My fucking sister!”

Garrida had wound up her almighty pimp hand to strike me again, but her leg went a little slack, her eyes widening in newfound understanding. “What?”

“It’s all on Lucky. My Orbit. I had that fucker record everything.”

While Garrida eyed me suspiciously, we stepped outside the bathroom and I pulled the Juke 1300 from under the bed, gripping its metal frame between my hooves as I charged up my horn and gave my Orbit some juice. “Boot up, Lucky. Playback mode.”

I fast-forwarded until I arrived at the exact spot where Broggas went on his little spiel, offering information in exchange for money. We sat and reviewed the recording in silence. The entire time, Captain Garrida regarded the projected holoscreen with an unnerving, unblinking stare.

We all watched as Emlan walked up to me and tucked his business card into the neckline of my armor while I stood frozen in place, unable to respond in any meaningful way. Somehow, I’d had the presence of mind to keep Lucky cloaked the entire time, or else Broggas probably would’ve smashed my Orbit to keep his secrets.

“Mindstop,” Argent Tincture whispered. “Probably coming from that round thing on his belt.”

“Nemrin magic?” I said. “Some sort of talisman?”

“No,” Argent said. “No magic. It’s completely technological. The xicares make them. They’re manufactured exclusively by underworld roguetech consortiums, like the Kiki’turruk Collective. Very expensive and very illegal. Interferes with consciousness by direct wireless transcranial stimulation. Makes you enter a trance-like state and not remember even a second of it. Perfect for kidnappers, slavers and other scum. Some of those devices are powerful enough to cause lethal seizures.”

Roguetech. It was what the FTU member races colloquially called outlawed technological artifacts that violated either the Stellar Code or the Confederate Guild Charter. Technically, all magtech was also considered roguetech by its very nature.

“That doesn’t make any sense, Doc.” I knit my brow in confusion. “I sensed a magic signature. It wasn’t mine. Wasn’t pony, either. I didn’t recognize it at all.”

“Were you casting continuously when you got hit, Sergeant?”

“Yeah, I was cloaking Lucky. I left the lens uncloaked so the camera could still see. Kinda hard to do that selectively with eyes. Magic just naturally tries to stick to and cover living things. Easier with cameras and the like. What does that have to do with anything?”

“That was your own residual signature.” Argent shook her head. “A Mindstop does weird things to a unicorn’s magic. You might keep casting as normal, even while in a trance, but on a thaummeter, the magic will look like it came from something without a brain. The signature would be almost completely blank.”

I stared at her, wide-eyed. “Fucking weird.”

Argent turned to the big griffon. “Captain, if the Sergeant had attacked Broggas, he would’ve killed her, and there would’ve been nothing she could’ve done to prevent it. He could have slit her throat while she stood there, helpless. Or, he could’ve simply turned up the mindstop puck until her brain shut down permanently.”

“I can see that.” Garrida was biting her claws in idle concentration, not taking her eyes off the footage.

“I gave him a couple hundred bits for the info,” I said. “I caught him on video slapping around a Confederate officer and then spilling the beans about how he canceled the contract and left them all to die at our hooves. I also caught him on camera using highly illegal roguetech. Do you realize, Sir, you can blackmail the fuck out of Emlan with this footage? If we spread this around, that son of a bitch would never get another contract ever again. He’d be lucky to find a career as Emlan Broggas, traveling gigolo and man of mystery.”

“Nicely done, Sergeant.” Garrida chuckled. “Heck, you’re almost a better spy than ol’ Bell, at this rate.”

“Well, I don’t know about that.” I scratched my head. “But I do try.”

“Fun fact, Sergeant.” Garrida looked me straight in the eye. “Did you know that Percheron Solutions once tried to sue Tarrasque Security Solutions because they both had Solutions in their name? Yeah, that didn’t get far. Turns out, mother of all surprises, ‘animals’ can’t file lawsuits in Confederate space. Not even for trademark violations. Not even if the defendants in the suit are the real animals.”

I laughed. “Don’t, like, half of all those damn PMCs have something harmless-sounding like ‘solutions’ in the name that makes them sound like traveling space plumbers or some shit?”

“Who says they’re not?” Garrida laughed. “They sure know how to lay pipe!” When she saw my scowl, she peeked through her claws, her hand dropping down and covering her beak in horror when she realized the full implications of what she’d just said. “Sorry.”

“Sir, Broggas told me that some fucker named Gormos Ralfas has my younger sister,” I said. “She’s all I’ve got, Cap. I don’t think my parents survived the fall of Meadowgleam.”

“If Gormos has her, you’ll never find her, or him.” Garrida shook her head. “There are over a hundred damarkind Condottieri that ply the stars, and he is one of the richest and most secretive.”

“Condottieri?”

Garrida waved a claw. “Contractors. Mercenaries. The words the damarkinds use for titles don’t translate exactly into Equestrian. The word Jakh means something like ‘machismo’ or ‘valor’. A Jakha, what we call an Alpha, could also be translated as something along the lines of ‘follower of Jakh’, ‘bossman’, or ‘big cheese’. A Seg’Jakha is literally a ‘supreme Jakha’. In other words, an ‘overboss’ or ‘alpha-superior’. Not all Seg’Jakha are what the satyrs would call Arume Accontrodati. The leaders of Contractor Armies. The vast majority of the Seg’Jakha are politicians and councilors on their world who answer only to the oldest and wisest of chieftains. The ones who lead mercenary armies are the dregs and vagabonds of their society.”

“Oh, I see.”

“Fuck.” Garrida exasperatedly slapped her forehead. “Gormos, of all the motherfuckers. Wow, you sure know how to pick ‘em, Storm. That guy is one sick puppy.”

“Dammit,” I muttered.

“I know what you’re thinking. Don’t even think about going off the reservation to go looking for her, or you’ll be in bigger trouble than you already are. It’s not safe out there for lone, traveling mares, anyway. They’ll just grab you like the rest, and then, you’re fucked. Literally. Safety in numbers, Sergeant. We need each other more than ever. It’s a lesson you could stand to learn. If I see your hot-dogging ass playing lone wolf or negotiating with the enemy again, you’re fucked. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Sir!” I said, saluting. “Does—does this mean I’m off the hook?”

“No,” Garrida muttered, giving me a nasty look. “It means you get one month brig. If you hadn’t been able to prove your innocence of the charge of conspiracy with the enemy, you would have gotten six months brig and been cut out of all further salvage missions. In addition, you would’ve been busted to Corporal and then undergone a short trial that would have invariably ended in you being caned until your ass looked like a cherry tomato. If we were still in the Army, rather than caning, you would’ve been convicted of treason and then dragged out back and shot. Good thing you had the presence of mind to bring a camcorder, eh, Sergeant?”

I was shivering from head to hoof. “Uh, yeah! Yeah, that’s right!”

Captain Garrida let out a heavy sigh. “I don’t like doing this. Not after the shit you’ve been through, kid. But let’s face it, you need at least a month to heal up, anyway. Our cells are more spacious and hygienic than the barracks, and we need the infirmary unoccupied. It’s partly for your protection, too. There are some ponies who really don’t like you, Sergeant. Not after the shit you pulled. Sagebrush sounded like he was gearing up for you to have a blanket party, and I’m not going to have one of my pilots beaten up while she’s recovering from surgery. He needs some time to cool off, and so do you.

“I’m going to send some ponies by to drop off reading material so you don’t go nuts in there. Use that time wisely. That’s right. You’re going to study. You’re going to kneel and ritually unfuck yourself, Sergeant. You’re going to stop being an obstacle and start being the team player Bell thinks you are. Do I make myself clear?”

I hung my head. “Yes, Sir.”

Garrida rested her claw on my shoulder. “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry about your sisters, Storm. I really am. I can’t imagine what you must be going through, right now. It’s hard for me to get a fix on you. You have acted with equal parts valor and foolishness. You know how to become one with the chaos of the battlefield. How to make that chaos yours. However, we are a paramilitary organization, and as such, we require some measure of order. I hope you appreciate that fact on your next mission.”

“Next mission?” I said.

“We’re getting something lined up for you, Sierra, and Bell. It’s going to be a bit more covert than you’re used to, at least for the insertion phase. The details are kinda sketchy right now, but rest assured, you’ll be briefed in detail when the time comes.” Garrida nodded to the two griffons that seemed to materialize out of thin air at either side of me. “You two, escort the Sergeant to her cell.”

Argent Tincture shook her head angrily. “She needs to be checked on periodically to make sure there aren’t any complications with the implant.” She turned towards me. “Did you produce any urine this morning?”

“Yes,” I said. “Lots. Actually, like, three bladders worth. It hurt, too.”

Argent facehooved. “See? Already having issues. The filtration rate needs adjustment. I also need to come by and do blood draws and urine collection to make sure the damn thing is doing its job. This is going to take at least a couple weeks before I’m comfortable with letting her return to duty.” Argent produced a portable computer and ran a link cable from it to the port above my cervical spine, linking into my neural lace—apparently, it been connected to my new implant. “Thirty milliliters per kilogram per hour? What brainiac set it to that? No wonder why her back teeth were floating. It needs to be less than half that.” She fiddled with the remote a little bit more. “There we go. Tell me or Gauze Patch if anything weird happens, okay, Sergeant?”

I smirked. “Well, if my rear half explodes in a shower of blood and piss like some poor schmuck in a splatter flick and paints the inside of my cell every color of the rainbow, you’ll be the first to know, Doc.”

Argent gave me a stern expression like she didn’t find me particularly funny. “That can’t happen. The implant has safety measures so you don’t get lethal embolisms. If it detects that any part of the loop is over-pressurized, guess what? It has a relief valve. There are data ports and other access ports in your skin that you need to be mindful of, too. They’re lined with rings of enchanted silver to keep bacteria away, but those won’t do anything if you go wallowing in feces. Keep those areas clean and dry so they don’t get infected, okay?”

“Where?” I tried craning my neck over my shoulder, but I couldn’t see them. Argent hoofed over a mirror, which I lifted in my magic to look at my back. There they were, just as described. Two shaved patches on both sides of my spine, with multiple circular titanium ports sticking out of them, each rising a couple millimeters out of the skin.

I blinked a few times, having a hard time adjusting to the new realities of my body. “So, Doc, what you mean to tell me is that if this thing malfunctions, I have a blowhole on my back that shoots a spray of atomized piss?”

“Yeah, pretty much.”

“Wow.” I grinned. “Cool! Just what I always wanted!”

“Uh-huh,” Argent Tincture snickered. “Just try not to be standing next to me if you feel like a water balloon about to pop, okay? Nopony wants your germs in their mouth, Sergeant.” Argent unplugged me and turned to Garrida. “She’s all yours, Cap.”

One of the two sneering griffon males nudged me in the side with the butt of his rifle. “Let’s go, high-roller.”

Without a word, I followed them to the base’s detention area and sheepishly walked to my cell. The hall was sparsely lit and ill-maintained, the floor a mosaic of old stains. When we got to my cell, they gave me a stiff push inside and then slammed and locked the door behind me. I had flashbacks to the shipping container on Ahriman Station. I hyperventilated a little from a mild panic attack, only to clutch my chest and take a few deep breaths.

“Fuck,” I muttered. “They coulda at least given me my fuckin’ Orbit. No tunes? No movies? This fucking blows.”

They knew I didn’t know how to teleport, so they hadn’t bothered suppressing my magic. The accommodations were sparse, but the cell was very roomy and spotlessly clean, in sharp contrast to the hall outside. There was a canvas cot in the corner, a toilet, a sink with no mirror, and a small desk with a chair and a diode wall sconce above it, and that was about it.

I leapt into the hard, uncomfortable cot and sprawled my legs out, sighing softly. It felt good to be unclothed. To not have a uniform rubbing and pinching my fur. This wasn’t a punishment. This was a much-deserved vacation. That was how I chose to perceive it. I knew that if I closed my eyes for any length of time, I’d see some shit in the back of my eyelids, but I felt completely exhausted. A little nightmare or two was nothing.

// … // … // … // … // … //

It wasn’t nothing. After five hours of non-sleep, waking up with a start every hour, I resolved to stare at the ceiling instead. I grit my teeth, my lip curled with undying anger.

You’re money. Big money. That’s why they haven’t killed you all.

“Slaving bastards,” I whispered. “So, that’s all this was ever about, huh? That’s all they ever wanted from us?” My lips trembled. Equestria had so much to offer to the galaxy. Scholars. Poets. Visionaries. They didn’t care. They wanted our meat, muscles, and orifices. That was all. They were willing to settle for something so basic. So primitive.

Even with as greedy and grasping as the satyrs were, reducing ponies to livestock didn’t make good business sense. Emlan was right. We ponies didn’t have much meat on us. Carnivores and omnivores preferred eating large herbivores not for their taste alone, but for the simple fact that they converted a greater portion of the calories they ate into edible tissue. Ponies were small, highly energetic herbivores. We downed the calories, but we also burned most of them with our hyperactive metabolisms, staying roughly the same weight regardless of what we stuffed our craws with. Not ideal when raising creatures for meat. It meant one needed more crops to feed them with. Simple physics. The very idea of pony meat was an unnecessary, insane extravagance that bordered on paving streets with gold and wearing purple silk for every occasion.

As for using us as laborers, it stood to reason that robots were more economical for asteroid mining duties than stallions in space suits. For one thing, machines didn’t need edible rations or breathable air. They didn’t get sick, or tired, or go stir-crazy and start pounding on the walls of their cramped dormitories with their hooves. Industrial robots and drones were predictable. If something went wrong, they simply broke. Spare parts were shipped in, the machine was serviced, and it went right back into action. They didn’t need pep talk or head-shrinkers. They didn’t try sneaky shit like sabotaging airlocks or mysteriously misplacing valuable tools to try and undermine their captors. Machines just worked.

If the cleomanni had annexed us and let us live out our lives in peace, they would’ve had exclusive control over the distribution and sale of our magtech. They would’ve made a killing. They would never do that, though. The FTU had banned magic for thousands of years, long before we made first contact with them. They only made exceptions for the nemrin, and even then, mostly for anti-magic; suppression rings, large-area dispelling devices, and other such things—most were entirely of nemrin manufacture, with few exceptions. Why are they so afraid of magic? What the hell is there to be afraid of? We can’t help it. It’s just what we are.

What they used stallions for was an eyebrow-raiser, but there was no excuse for what they did with mares. Sex slavery. Using us as hosts for the Karkadann. My mind would twist into knots just thinking about it. I tried to rationalize it. Tried to find an explanation, a reason why anyone would do anything so fundamentally warped, and each time, I ended up at a logical dead-end, being taunted by the figment of a laughing, mustache-twirling, tie-the-damsel-to-the-train-tracks villain. It was incomprehensible evil. Evil so profound as to be alien in itself.

Bit by bit, drop by drop, years and years of guilt were dissolving out of me like brine. I was beginning to feel like the things I’d done during the war were entirely justified. I didn’t want to feel that way. There should have been absolutely no excuse for those things, either. There should have been a special place in Tartarus for all of us. But there it was, staring me in the face. A reason to not feel like shit all the time. I was damned if I took it.

There was a soft click as my cell door was unlocked. Wind Shear, the pegasus stallion and Charger mechanic, was holding a veritable crapload of binders in one of his forelegs, his other leg shaking from the sheer weight. I shot up from bed. “Whoa, buddy! Lemme give you a hoof!”

I snared most of them in my levitation just before his other foreleg gave out, making him faceplant on the concrete and sending a few binders skidding across the floor.

“Ow,” he croaked.

“What is all this stuff?” I said.

Wind Shear didn’t appear to be all that angry at me. He mostly looked tired, if anything. “Charger manuals. Mechanical shit. Military stuff. Magic textbooks. Captain Garrida told me to bring you these, with explicit instructions to read them all cover-to-cover, or else. So, enjoy. I’ve got some work to do. See you around, Sergeant.” As he turned to leave, he looked over his shoulder. “And, honestly, I thought you fought pretty good out there, for a pilot. It’s always a fucking shitshow. They just needed a scapegoat, this time.”

As Wind Shear vacated the cell, shutting and locking the door behind him and leaving me to ponder his words, I stared at the pile before me, levitating up the glossy book on top.

Mirage A202 Pilot’s Manual.

TOP SECRET - CODE EPSILON

I flipped to the first few pages. The preamble was a bright red sheet indicating special handling information under Code Epsilon. How the manual was to be kept in a safe when not in use, with the combination known only by authorized personnel. How any copying of any part of the document was strictly forbidden. How any violation of the rules could lead to prosecution and prison time. I rolled my eyes and hoofed through the fine print until I got to the meat of things. The introductory part of the manual was a basic primer on how Chargers functioned.

First, there was the frame. The chassis of the unit. The frame of every Charger was made up of solid titanium alloy pieces constructed using powder bed additive manufacturing techniques in giant magtech beamwelder machines. These house-sized devices used a principle similar to a beamcaster, only instead of shooting thin streams of arcane energy and piercing body armor and soft tissue, they fired focused, millimeter-thin streams of pyrokinesis to melt powdered metal alloys into solid parts. This unique construction allowed Charger frames to have hidden, weight-reducing voids that would be impossible to make with traditional casting methods.

For added strength, many of these voids were filled with a kind of titanium foam during the manufacturing process. Marrow for the bones. The rough parts were then milled out with computer numerical control to very precise tolerances and then coated to protect them from wear and oxidation. The standard Charger frame coatings were typically a titanium nitride ceramic material bonded directly to the metal in giant sputtering machines, leaving behind a super-thin, diamond-hard finish in either black or gold.

The voids in every Charger’s frame were filled with a substance called Tetrafluid. In olden times, magic was thought to be innate, or perhaps drawn from the world around us. In time, our science had disproven every single one of the old theories that sought to describe the source from which our magic came. In truth, the reality was somehow more mundane, but no less fascinating.

All magical creatures secreted a substance from our amygdala which our science referred to as quintessence.

Quintessence was a fluid suspension of calcareous crystals which possessed bizarre non-Euclidean properties. There were regions of topologically warped space within them. The special properties of these crystals allowed for the probabilities of events to be altered directly when the crystals were exposed to energy and the resulting emanations guided towards a course of action. The amygdala secreted quintessence as a stress response. The more stressed a pony was, the more powerful our magic would temporarily become. Like being dry-humped and menaced with a knife by a 250-kilo alien with sharp tusks until you blast him with telekinesis hard enough to dent a brick wall, I mused, shaking my head in disgust.

This substance coursed through practically every single pony’s bodily fluids. Every pony alive, aside from those with congenital disorders of the magic-insufficiency sort, had a few grams of quintessence in their system at any given time.

In earth ponies, it was concentrated in the blood and the frogs of one’s hooves, taking residence in the many blood vessels located there. It allowed them to channel their energies into the rock and soil beneath them, making plant life grow faster, or breaking boulders with but a touch.

In pegasi, it was found in the highest concentrations in the lymph, in nodes at the bases of the wings, giving them additional lift and the ability to manipulate the weather as they desired.

In unicorns, it was found in the highest quantities in our cerebrospinal fluid, surrounding our brains and spinal cords. A unicorn’s brain tissue actually extended ever-so-slightly into the bases of our horns. Unicorn horns were a natural all-spectrum spell locus, allowing us to cast a wide range of spells with very precise and specific effects. If a unicorn’s horn were broken off in the middle, we would not lose our magic. Rather, it would become unfocused, raw, and imprecise.

The energy to perform magic came directly from a pony’s metabolism, from the breakdown of adenosine triphosphate, like the other natural processes in the body which required a potent chemical energy source to sustain life. Quintessence was less like a reservoir of magic and more like a muscle that could be flexed to exert arcane power. The more a pony exerted themselves, the more likely they would burn out, and it was exactly the same sort of burnout a weightlifter might experience, with copious sweating and panting involved. Casting spells burned calories exactly like aerobic exercise. The best way to recharge one’s magic was to simply eat something. Scratch that, a lot of things.

Tetrafluid was synthetic quintessence, a toxic, greenish-metallic, highly conductive substance that was far less efficient at converting energy into magic than the natural equivalent. That was why a very skilled unicorn exerting only a few hundred watts of metabolic effort could level an entire city block with their spells. Quintessence—the real thing—could convert even small quantities of energy into many thaums of magic power. Ponies were capable of exerting outsized effects on our environment despite the intrinsic limits on the wattage our bodies could exert.

However, when Tetrafluid was fed with several kilowatts—or even megawatts—of electrical energy, it could emanate a magic field just as powerful as the ones that the most powerful unicorns could produce, if not more so, in spite of its inefficiency. If this field was then directed with a spell locus or diagrammatic engine, it could radiate thousands of thaums of deadly energy across the battlefield. Summoned forces of nature, focused arcane beams, nightmarish hallucinations, or whatever was required to neutralize a specific threat.

This was the principle behind the electro-magical transducer, a device which consisted of a junction box feeding electrodes into a Tetrafluid reservoir, producing raw, shapeless arcane power by running a current through the liquid. Practically every magtech device in existence, aside from those powered by enchantments or other passive means, used what was called a thaumatic chain. An electrical power source was coupled to an electro-magical transducer feeding energy into a Tetrafluid reservoir, which, in turn, released the amorphous thaumatic field which was then shaped and directed by a diagrammatic engine or spell locus.

The source of power could be anything. A diesel generator. A gas turbine generator. A fusion reactor. A nuclear bomb. It didn’t have to be electrical. Thermal energy, kinetic energy, or ionizing radiation could be used to energize tetrafluid, just as with a pulse of electricity. The energizing process could be destructive—like a brick of explosive wrapped in a tetrafluid reservoir—and yet still release an omni-directional thaumatic field, much like an electromagnetic pulse. Tetrafluid reacted to physical blows by solidifying much in the same way a mixture of corn starch and water might. Even holding a torch against the stuff or hitting it with a hammer would make it glow with a thaumatic field, same as the glow from a unicorn’s lit horn.

Diagrammatic engines were much like spell locuses, but configured to operate according to a magical blueprint of sorts. They were artificial unicorns. Instead of having a mind to direct the magic, they had patterns etched into enchanted holocrystal. Locuses were simply magic mirroring devices; a diagrammatic engine, but without the diagrams. One simply attuned their magic to the locus and the thaumatic field produced by the energized Tetrafluid would multiply their own spellpower, like a powered exoskeleton for one’s magic. Locuses were tuned to function only with specific wavelengths—or spectra—of magic, corresponding either to one of the six schools in the Modern Craft, or a combination of any two of them, which were fifteen sub-schools in their own right.

With the magic properties of Tetrafluid, EMTs, Diagrammatic Engines, and Spell Locuses aside, the chassis of a Charger had other attributes, as well. The leg frame components were connected to each other and to the torso by powerful levitation bearings which were enchanted to prevent metal-to-metal contact, gliding on a field of magic, instead. As a result, they required no lubrication to function, but most techs gave them a shot or two of grease just in case, to prevent any shavings from accumulating if they temporarily exceeded their load limits.

Depending on the model of Charger, these bearings were either the simple, circular kind, allowing a single axis of motion, or they were ball-jointed, spherical bearings that could move in any direction like the skeleton of a living creature. Ball-joints were more common on Coursers and Rounceys, while most Destriers used plain bearings instead, due to the reduced flexibility requirements and higher load capacities.

The limbs of a Charger were sheathed in Duostrand, layers of artificial muscle composed of alternating rows of electro-active polymer muscles and twined carbon nanotube ones. They rested in a gelatinous polymer matrix that was vaguely like silicone but with greater tensile strength, surrounded by conductive pathways and filled with vascularized micro-fluidic channels that allowed the electro-active polymers to be triggered by electricity and the twined carbon nanotubes to be contracted by the presence of rapidly heated and snap-cooled synthetic oil. Focused pulses of electricity, pyrokinesis, and cryokinesis were what activated the muscles of a Charger, and electro-magical transducers and diagrammatic engines placed at key positions throughout the frame were what made that possible.

The process for manufacturing duostrand was very complicated. In short, they were woven together on great robotic looms and then embedded in a shock-absorbent matrix. The vascularized polymer matrix was created essentially by casting channels into the polymer by molding them around cords of a special compound with a low melting point and then removing those cords by heating and melting them out, leaving behind veins and arteries in the polymer, like a living thing. Lastly, superconducting wires were added to the outermost layer, to activate the electro-active components.

The muscles were bespoke. They were different for every single model of Charger. As a result, replacing them often involved setting up fabrication labs with duostrand looms in the field, to produce spares and replace damaged ones, or re-tune the muscle setup for different loadouts. The different muscle groups had to be created according to exacting specifications and then attached to the underlying frame in key locations.

Atop the muscles went the cloth covers—a heavy-duty, fire-retardant, waterproofed canvas material that protected the Charger’s internals from moisture intrusion. The outermost armor plating of a Charger was made of LAMIBLESS, a laminated composite that, true to its name, had been blessed. It was a very simple material consisting of layers of graphene impregnated with a highly stable low-volatility resin based on a synthetic version of changeling secretions. The uncured rolls of the material were then given benedictions with protection against dark magic. The blessing was mostly so that the battlefield could be saturated with allied dark magic without inflicting friendly fire on our own vehicle crews and embarked troops, something that had considerable tactical advantages. After that, they were enchanted for additional stiffness and fireproofing before being sent to factories and fabrication labs to turn them into armor pieces by pressing them into molds and curing them.

The resulting composite material was a shiny black carapace-like substance that could be further coated to alter its appearance. On military vehicles, it was typical for it to receive a two-part matte polyurethane finish in camouflage colors. The composite was much stronger than steel for a given thickness and many times lighter, outperforming aramid weaves for tensile strength and carbon fiber for ductility. The stuff was ubiquitous, too. Most Equestrian armored vehicles, aircraft, and spacecraft were completely covered in LAMIBLESS paneling. It enabled our craft to be lighter and faster than their cleomanni equivalents without compromising on armor in the slightest. The material generally wasn’t used for body armor, however, because the changeling-derived resin was mildly neurotoxic. LAMIBLESS plates were a persistent environmental contaminant and not only unsafe to handle bare-hooved if frayed or damaged, but also had to be disposed of in specialized recycling facilities.

The glacis armor of a Charger—the chest piece on the torso, often found bearing the sword-in-horseshoe insignia of the Imperial Army—was constructed of something a bit tougher than LAMIBLESS. Mithrium armor, enchanted by the Empress herself.

Titanium, even non-neuterized titanium, was highly magic-resistant. It channeled magic away from itself. These properties, ironically enough, made it highly useful in the construction of magtech devices. It acted akin to the control rods in a nuclear fission reactor, as a magic moderator capable of altering the thaumatic field flux. Devices consisting of hollow titanium vessels acted like magic resonator cavities, amplifying and directing the flow of raw magic.

That was why Mithrium consisted of alternating, sandwiched layers of enchanted synthetic ruby, graphene, and high-purity monocrystalline titanium. It was the magic properties of the material that gave it its incredible stiffness, tensile strength, and resistance to kinetic energy. Mithrium worked by magically decrementing the force of projectiles that struck it, like reactive armor. It often did this with such spectacular efficiency that not only did long-rod penetrators fired by tank cannons not penetrate, they simply exploded in a shower of molten metal without even leaving so much as a scratch. A mere hundred and ten millimeters of the stuff was equal in kinetic energy resistance to over two meters of steel, while possessing an average density of only about four-point-three grams per cubic centimeter.

Mithrium was light. It was incredibly strong. It was highly scarce. Only the Empress knew the secrets of its creation, and she guarded them jealously. Twilight Sparkle had produced every single batch of the material herself, with her own magic. That was why it was only to be found in the glacis plates of Charger torsos or high-end battle tanks, protecting the most critical components from frontal penetration. It was also why pilots were advised to keep the fronts of our machines facing the enemy at all times. Not only did it present a narrower profile, it also presented the strongest armor. The presence of Mithrium in our vehicles meant that a little piece of the Empress’s will was carried with us onto the battlefield every time our lances sortied, and that, in itself, was a boon to morale.

The torso armor of a Charger was, with a few exceptions, rigidly attached to the frame, but the limb armor was attached through flexible struts protruding from the frame and through the duostrand, using the artificial muscle itself as a kind of flexible padding. Chargers could actually tighten their muscles in anticipation of a hit, like a pugilist stiffening up to receive a blow. It allowed them to absorb more kinetic energy than they would otherwise.

The basic layout of every Charger consisted of a head, torso, and legs, with various pieces of equipment mounted on the interior or exterior of those components.

On a Courser, the legs held the pyrojet boosters. Most Destriers had auxiliary torso thrusters to help spread the load. A pyrojet was, to put it bluntly, a type of jet engine with magic as both the impeller and heat source instead of a turbine and combustion chamber. Being powered by electro-magical transducers and diagrammatic engines, they were entirely electrical and needed no combustible fuel to operate, giving pyrojet-powered atmospheric fighter-bombers with fusion reactors virtually unlimited range. However, they needed air as a working fluid. They did not function in outer space or a thin atmosphere. Under those conditions, Chargers would have to carry their own reaction masses for their pyrojets to eject, essentially converting them into closed-cycle rockets. Usually, this mass came in the form of heavy tanks filled with powdered beryllium.

These reaction mass tanks were large, easy targets and threw off one’s center of mass, but could be quickly jettisoned when no longer needed. Pyrojets also gave away one’s position something fierce every time we used beryllium propellant, creating massive, directional plumes of metallic powder that arced high into the sky and created sizable radar returns; pilots derogatorily called it Glitter-Bombing. The hooves of every Charger were reinforced and weighted both for stability and to cause extra damage in a melee. It was an entirely acceptable practice for a Charger pilot to simply kick, buck, or stomp enemy vehicles into piles of debris.

My Courser had eight pyrojets. Four large boosters at the apex of each leg, and four small gimbaled thrusters in the shoulders and hips. This was a fairly typical configuration for a Courser, allowing for both high-speed dashes and rapid lateral movement to the tune of several gees of acceleration. Rounceys had a similar configuration, although the boosters tended to be smaller, lower-output and better-armored than on Coursers, while Destriers had additional pyrojets because of their sheer mass.

The torso was—just like with an actual pony—where most of the real fun happened. The hump behind a Charger’s neck was where the upper entryway of the cockpit was located, extending down into the torso, with the pilot seated above and behind the glacis, such that it would intercept rounds fired from tanks in front and below, shooting at an upward angle. Direct shots from enemies of equal height, like an Ifrit, had to get through the head to get to the pilot, and the head was also well-armored. What it lacked in resilience compared to Mithrium, it made up for in sheer thickness.

Most Chargers had a fighter-like cockpit with a central saddle, hoof controls, panels with toggle switches for the various systems of the vehicle, an array of multi-function displays to monitor the equipment statuses and respond accordingly, and a holotank where one could consult with a visual representation of the Charger’s Anima. Some of the largest Destriers had such amenities as a pilot’s quarters with a cramped bunk, food preparation area, and lavatory, along with a med station that doubled as an emergency crew transport area, for rescuing ejected pilots and such. Behind the cockpit, roughly where the stomach would be located on a pony, were the reactor, cooling systems, oil pumps, auxiliary power unit, computer core and Anima systems, and all the redundant backup systems that made up every Charger’s basic power generation and life support equipment.

The reactor traditionally used in Chargers—as well as some tanks and aircraft—was a hundred-megawatt polywell. A proton-boron polywell was a type of aneutronic electrostatic confinement fusion reactor of a fairly common design. Weighing only a few tons and occupying a relatively small area, the device produced a hundred megawatts of electrical power by ionizing and accelerating gases to fusion conditions in a vacuum chamber through the use of electron guns and a magnetic confinement grid, or magrid. A typical magrid was made up of six donut-shaped coils arranged in a cubic configuration, creating an ideal flow of particles. These reactors had no heat cycle. No steam turbines, no condensers, no water, nothing. Instead, gas was puffed into the reactor and ionized and then power was produced by direct conversion from the energy of the ions straight to electricity, producing a current that was drawn straight from the reactor with no intermediate steps and then fed into a network of breakers, voltage regulators, and busbars that provided power for the Charger’s electrical loads.

Because there was an optimal size for polywell magrids, it was typical for Chargers to be designed with additional hundred-megawatt reactors if more power was needed. Most Coursers, including mine, had one polywell. Rounceys had two, and Destriers had three or more. More electrical power meant a Charger could support more electro-magical transducers, more powerful muscles, higher yield beamcasters, and other such toys. Heavy beamcasters of the type mounted to Chargers and used as primary anti-armor weapons were very power-hungry, sucking down many megawatts of juice. Since the energy in question had to be pulsed, it was usually stored in large capacitor banks before it could be used, with the cycle time of the weapons limited by the size and capacity of the banks and the rate of recharge.

Heat was another concern. Chargers weren’t walking barbecues like most Goliaths. Under ordinary conditions, on a world with a normal, breathable atmosphere, there was no chance a Charger could cook its operator alive, even with all the stops pulled out. Operating in a vacuum—say, on a moon or planetoid—was a different story. Vacuum was an excellent insulator. Heat management under such conditions was crucial. One couldn’t simply blast away with their heavy beamcasters without ending up dripping with sweat from head to hoof as cockpit temperatures soared over forty degrees Celsius. That was why on vacuum or low-atmo missions, we typically carried ammunition-based weaponry instead of the heavy casters. Autoloading cannons and the like.

In addition to the head-mounted secondary and tertiary armaments, almost all Chargers had back-mounted primary torso weapons that would unfurl like pegasus wings, with a stowage position nestled against the shoulders and an active position where they extended and provided slight azimuth and elevation. The head of a Charger was like a turret with limited traverse and elevation. Aiming the back-mounted weapons often required turning the whole vehicle to face the target, however. Missile racks tended to be mounted in upward-angled hip-boxes attached to the hindquarters, which were disposable and designed to be jettisoned once fired, shifting the Charger’s whole center of gravity closer to the vehicle’s actual center, enabling the rear side-thrusters and improving the balance. They were used in opening salvos. Before any assault, one would typically dump the missiles into their targets, jettison the racks, and then advance, not engage in close combat with vulnerable and highly explosive missile racks hanging off their hips.

The crown jewel of the entire system was the Charger’s head. Multi-spectral sensors, phased-array radars, encrypted radio and satellite communications systems, anti-infantry casters, autocannons—it was all located in the head. The spell locus was situated up there, as well, right behind the upper armor plating, along with the main radome. Any time the locus amplified the pilot’s magic, a literal glowing halo of thaumatic energy would materialize over a Charger’s head, between the twin radio antennae. It was from that location that any ranged magic attacks would emerge, often with extreme violence.

After reading the overall outline of the basics, I hoofed through a few pages until I got to the specifics of my particular Charger.

The Mirage A202 was an assault-reconnaissance model. Too heavy and well-armed and armored for pure recon. It was an all-rounder, almost more of a small Rouncey than a Courser. A purpose-built harasser, slipping into gaps and cracks in the enemy lines and knifing them in the back. As if its anti-armor suite wasn’t enough, the Mirage was also a fantastic self-propelled anti-aircraft gun system, capable of spitting out dozens of proximity-fused forty-millimeter shells in the blink of an eye. If air power was the bane of mechs, then my Charger was the antidote, swatting flies from the sky with contemptuous ease.

The Mirage was no tool of an honest warrior. It was an evil machine. A cloaked assassin. All of the pilots selected to test the prototypes were skilled at Illusion magic, and almost every pre-production Mirage was equipped with an Illusion locus to help us camouflage ourselves. Invisibility wasn’t all we could do. We could appear as an entire army, charging relentlessly towards our foes. We could even assume the guise of an enemy unit, mimicking a Confederate assault walker’s appearance only to suddenly drop the magic disguise and slay the satyrs on our right and left.

It was for this, and other reasons—such as our usual loadout including nerve gas artillery rockets—that the pilots for the Mirage prototype program were selected specifically for our anti-social personality traits. We all took tests with results that stated, in no uncertain terms, that we were as twisted and malevolent as the Chargers we were due to pilot. I’d looked at my score, and I couldn’t believe it. I was shaken to my very core. There had to have been some sort of mistake.

I’d dropped my mask. I’d answered honestly. I’d outscored every other pilot on every single metric. Manipulativeness. Narcissism. Sociopathy. I’d broken the scale. The examiners had eyed me with hateful glares. In their eyes, I wasn’t even a pony. I was more of a machine than a Charger. Not a pilot. A component. A missing bundle of industrial-grade nerves that went in the cockpit, was affixed there permanently by bolts pasted with thread-locker, and, ideally, did not come loose and fall out, lest it pollute everything with its toxins.

My every action, my every waking moment since the day of that exam, was filled with doubt. How could someone like me ever love someone else? Was I even capable of love? As I sat in silence, my tears dotted the paper of the manual sitting on the table before me. I closed the book and buried my head in my hooves. There had to have been some sort of mistake. I wasn’t that mare. I couldn’t be. There were ponies I’d loved very much. It wasn’t my fault that this world kept taking them from me.

I looked up at the wall of my cell, and there, beyond the drab concrete, I saw the rising fires of war, the flames licking up and threatening to consume all.

If all that was left for a wretch like me was hatred, then so be it.

// … // … // … // … // … //

There was a commotion outside my cell. I peered through the slot in the door. A pair of griffon hens were laughing and tittering as they ran through the cell block, looking over their shoulders like they were playing hide and seek. Not long after they passed on by, Garrida showed up, hot on their heels. She was wielding a pair of vibrating wands like a couple maracas, wearing a sombrero instead of her trademark beret and belching like a hippopotamus. If her movements were any indication, she was extremely, unbelievably drunk. She was also wearing a glistening pink strap-on that was about the same length and girth as one of my forelegs.

“Two pussshy!” Garrida slurred, shaking the wands suggestively. “Two pussy!”

She went chasing after the other two griffons in a weird, dancing, bipedal run that was half-sprint, half pirate jig. I stood there, rearing up against the door, jaw agape, the corners of my mouth curling upward with mirth as I watched her round the corner at the end of the hall and disappear. “What the fuck?”

Bellwether stumbled along next, taking swig after swig straight from a bottle of tequila. He was absolutely plastered. I heard the swipe of a keycard and the click of my cell door unlocking. He came inside and shut and locked the door behind him.

“Storm, I—” he began. “Shit. The fuck am I doing?”

“What’s this about, Bell?” I said.

“I miss—hic—I miss my dad.”

My eyes widened. Just when I thought I’d seen all of him, he found new things to surprise me with.

“Well, if it’s any consolation, I do, too,” I said. “I mean, don’t we all?”

Bellwether looked me straight in the eye, his gaze lidded, his jaw slightly slack. “Can we fuck?”

I sharply drew in a breath, my cheeks flushing hot with embarrassment. The question was so abrupt, I didn’t even know how to respond. For a few seconds, I simply worked my lips up and down in silence. I didn’t know how to feel about it, but after a moment, I settled on gratitude. After all, he had the decency to ask nicely, unlike the last two people who wanted to fuck me. Third time’s the charm.

I had been reduced to a stammering mess. “Oh! So—uhh—so that’s what this is about. I mean, wow. Just—wow, Bell. I had no idea you were even interested. I mean, you’re way older than I am, dude.”

“Saw the footage,” he mumbled. “Saw what you did.”

“What footage?”

“Ya left your Orbit unlocked. Five damarkinds. Five. Just one of you. With a fuckin’ knife. I’m pretty good, but I dunno—hic—if I coulda done that.”

“Oh geez.” I rolled my eyes. “It’s not—it wasn’t anything heroic. I was mad. Drugged up on stims. I was out of my damn mind. I don’t even know how the fuck I pulled that off.”

“Bullshit,” Bellwether declared. “You’re cute. You’re strong. I respect you more’n most. You don’t take shit from anyone, not even me. If I had an army of you, I could win the damn war.”

“You don’t know me too well, then,” I said. “I’m just a soldier, Bell. Just one soldier. There’s only so much any one of us can do.”

“Do you wanna, or not?” he said. “I’m so fuckin’ lonely, Storm. I’m so tired of all this shit. I’m tired of this fuckin’ place. This whole fuckin’ world, too. Nopony knows how to treat anyone right, anymore. Makes me sick.”

“I—” I bit my lip. It hurt to see him like this, somehow. Bell was a self-absorbed dickhead, but I knew suffering when I saw it. What should I tell him? I was scared. I was hurting. I’d just had a member of my family die in my legs, and now, I was being hit on by my boss. This was altogether too much. It wasn’t the right time, for me. If I could’ve eased his pain and maybe got a little something out of it myself, I would have, but I had other obligations.

“I can’t.” I averted my eyes sheepishly, rubbing one foreleg with the other. “I have—I was engaged. I was supposed to be married.”

“You know he’s dead.” Bellwether drew in a big, snotty sniff. “Like everypony else.”

“No,” I said. “I don’t know that. I’m not giving up hope just yet. I owe that much to Barley.”

“You know he’s dead,” Bellwether repeated, mumbling incoherently as he stumbled forward, falling face-first into my forelegs’ embrace.

“Bell?!” I held him for a moment, checking him to see if he was okay. He was snoring. Fast asleep.

I gingerly dragged him over and placed him on top of my cot, tucking him in like a young colt. It took some doing. He was heavier than he looked, dense with earth pony muscle. I glanced around to make sure no one was looking, and then I planted a small, motherly peck on Bell’s forehead. Honestly, he smelled nice. A hint of near-elderly male musk beneath a vague waft of peppermint oil. I couldn’t decide if it was disgusting or amazing, so I settled on nice. He wasn’t too bad-looking, either, for an older guy.

There was a slight stirring of temptation in my loins, but I refrained. No way I could jump his bones on such short notice. Not only had I not confirmed Barley’s survival or his whereabouts, Bell hadn’t taken me out to dinner even once, unless one counted the kind of stomach-turning feasts damarkinds put on. Having trysts in the brig must’ve violated all kinds of protocol. I smirked. The lengths Bell would go to for pussy were mildly impressive.

Aside from mister super-spy prancing around and barking orders at me, I had no idea if we had anything in common or not. There was no chemistry there that I was aware of, other than the drunken kind. There was, however, that dirty little voice in the back of my head, trying to convince me to cheat on my fiancé. A cock is a cock is a cock. Get you some. “Nah,” I whispered to myself. “Not today, it ain’t.”

I lifted my magnifying glass in my magic and returned to my studies, quietly flipping through a binder on Charger engineering basics while Bellwether snored away in the background.

// … // … // … // … // … //

Chargers were assembled with thousands upon thousands of bolts and fasteners of all shapes and sizes. Any Charger lab would be filled to the brim with all kinds of specialized tools for inspection and repair work, and many of them were specific to Chargers alone. For one thing, they required special torque wrenches and torque multipliers to put together. These tools were rare and expensive. Going over the manual, I pored over all sorts of diagrams pertaining to the Mirage and each of its pieces, as well as the torque specs for each one.

There were procedures for all manner of maintenance operations. One of the first ones listed was the standard method for suspending the body and removing the legs, a tricky process that required a sizable crane for the torso and great big chain hoists for the legs. Other chapters went into things like dismantling the torso to remove the reactor module, and then taking the reactor apart for servicing. Every part of a Charger’s polywell had to be sealed for a very hard vacuum. Any part that penetrated into the vacuum chamber, like the electron guns, needed to be re-gasketed and torqued down to exacting specifications every single time it was dismantled.

It was around the time that I started mentally equating the electron guns to dicks and the gaskets to rubbers that I realized I was insanely sex-deprived.

// … // … // … // … // … //

Several hours later, Bellwether shot bolt upright in my cot. I set my studies aside, turned around and eyed him with a sly grin. He looked like he’d seen a ghost. Wide-eyed and haunted as hell.

“All sober, now, eh?” I said.

“This never happened,” he said. “I wasn’t here.”

I giggled as I watched him throw the covers off and march to the door. “Sure, whatever you say, Bell.”

Without another word, he slammed the door shut behind him, leaving me all alone. And very much un-fucked. I looked down at myself and pouted a little bit with disappointment. Fidelity was a bitch sometimes.

// … // … // … // … // … //

The opportunity to fuck my boss had come and gone. I lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, my jaw set in anger. That last detail had been a defining aspect of my imprisonment. Anger came more easily to me. The enemy was out there. I was in here. Being useless. Being punished. I wanted to make a difference. No, I wanted to get even.

I could feel a heat coming on. It was around that time of year. I wasn’t fully immersed in its depths, as yet, but I was still much, much hornier than usual. I ached and throbbed between my hind legs.

There was no helping it. I needed release. I started calling up fantasies. An army of laughing, smiling studs with big, glistening erections. Maybe a mare or two, just for some variety. It was an incontrovertible fact that I mostly liked dick, but before I’d met Barleywine, I wasn’t particularly opposed to the occasional sampling of pussy, either. Perhaps I could’ve eaten some cutie out while getting mounted. Getting plowed. Tasted her sweet honey while being pleasantly stretched and filled.

I sighed and spread my hind legs a bit, reaching down and working over my rapidly engorging clit. My head felt light. My breathing quickened and deepened. The air felt colder and more refreshing, somehow, filling every nook and cranny of my lungs. There was a slight pinch in my diaphragm from where they’d dug shrapnel out of me. I ignored it. It felt so good to feel myself. To breathe so deep. To feel alive, for a change.

I arched my back slightly, growing very slick and puffy down below. I shut out everything else. I let my whole world become my pussy. My slit. My needy cunt. I tried stifling a soft moan, but as I started working myself over a bit harder, I abandoned every pretense of concealing what I was doing. I spread my hind legs even further and cried out in pleasure. I didn’t care if ponies thought I was the biggest slut in the universe. Their opinion didn’t matter. Only pleasure mattered. There was no reason to be alive, unless living was bliss. To deny oneself was the same as death.

Some ponies got that wrong. Some members of the Star Cult lived as hermits, abstaining from every vice, engaging in ritual ablutions, and venerating Celestia every day of their lives, all in the hopes that they would be rewarded by escaping the misery of this existence and joining her in the afterlife when they passed on. Those ponies were delusional. It was no wonder they worshiped the dead. They lived like denizens of the grave.

Spirituality was an illusion. Guilt was a lie. Life was pleasure. Life was pain. There was nothing else.

I’d tried avoiding it. Tried denying it. I’d found a new, unwanted visitor in my inventory of lewd fantasies. Hoodoo. The damarkinds. My morbid curiosity was insatiable. I wondered what it must have felt like. Being strapped to that table. Screaming. Begging. Pleading. Humping, sweaty, drooling, grunting, stinking bodies closing in on me over and over again. The smell of their fetid breath. The feeling of their tongues dragging across my fur like iron rasps. Their sheer massiveness pinning me down, crushing my ribcage. Hands pawing, squeezing, groping, pinching, twisting. Contorting my body and trying to escape the inevitable, only to be blasted full of their cream, over and over and over again.

The way I envisioned it, it was a strangely, terrifyingly erotic and primal affair. I let out a naughty squeak as I pictured being dominated so utterly. Prey. I am prey. They are predators. I am nothing. I thought I had a right to my own life, my own body, my own future. I thought I had a right to live for myself. I was wrong. I was born to be consumed. I was panting and gushing all over my hoof, my pussy winking like crazy.

They’re gettin’ close, boys! Cut that whore and let’s go have ourselves some real fun!

No! Please!

There was a glint of steel. The knife came down. My sternum split. My aorta was pierced. Only the love I had for my little sister could keep me alive long enough to even say goodbye.

I had to stop. Had to re-orient myself. “That’s so fucked,” I muttered. “I’m such a sick freak.”

If I didn’t stop thinking about it, I was going to burst into tears, and then, my lovely endorphin high would’ve been ruined. I settled into a rhythm with other, more normal fantasies. I was in a sweet, grassy meadow. With lots of horny guys in it. Horny stallions with oddly perfect teeth.

My imaginary lovers lapped at me hungrily, caressing me up and down my limbs with their hooves. They pushed their cocks into me with wet squelching noises and masculine groans of pleasure. They gave me ample room to splay my limbs. To experience total relaxation. To reach the heavens. I bit my lip, almost hard enough to draw blood.

I was so close. So close. “Oh, fuck! Oh shit, I’m gonna—”

When I came, I got to experience what it was like for the muscles of my back and pelvis to clamp down on what felt like a hunk of jagged metal. The auto-dialysis implant. My very own internal spiked chastity belt. “Ow! Ow!” I cried out in pain over and over again, every spasm like a scalpel plunged into my spine. Every ounce of pleasure, overridden by agony. The pain was soon replaced with rage.

“Fuck this!” I got up, grabbed my cot and threw it across the cell. “Fuck it! Fuck it all! Son of a bitch!”

Sexuality was a fairly fundamental aspect of most mammals, and mine had been crippled by surgery. I’d been robbed of my right to a proper orgasm. To say I was mad would be the understatement of the century.

I galloped up to the slot in the door, rearing up and shouting at the top of my lungs through the narrow opening. “Argent, you piece of shit! You fix this fucking shit right now, or I’m going to hold you down and piss in your fucking mouth! Argent!”

There was nopony there to hear me, or so I thought.

“Shut up, you silly bitch!” some stallion shouted back. Whether he was a prisoner or a guard, I couldn’t tell. Wherever the voice came from, I couldn’t see the source.

After washing my hoof off in the sink, I ambled over and grabbed my overturned cot, setting it down right-side-up and throwing myself atop it with an angry huff. I resumed staring at the ceiling, shaking my head with disgust.

// … // … // … // … // … //

It was a day later when I had a follow-up with Argent Tincture. She tinkered with the settings on my implant, reviewing the data from the past week of usage. It felt kinda funny to sit there while Argent had a cable running from the back of my head to a portable computer that she was punching data into with a look of stern concentration on her face. Gotta program the meat robot.

“You’re looking good,” Argent said. “This data shows that there aren’t any major red flags. Everything okay with the implant so far?”

“Uhh, no,” I said.

Argent looked up at me, a concerned expression on her face. “What do you mean?”

I looked over my shoulder, as if someone might be listening in, but the two of us were completely alone in my cell. To hell with my earlier delusions of libertinism that I’d used to enhance my fantasies. I felt guilty just talking about it. Just thinking about it. I looked up at Argent’s piercing gaze and worried that she might somehow discover how I fantasized by plucking the memory out of my head against my wishes, and then, she’d forever see me as that unimaginably sick fuck who beat clitty to the idea of taking her dead sister’s place as a kidnap victim.

“I don’t really know how to put this delicately, but, well—” I coughed. “I did the thing.”

Argent sat there, blinking at me in confusion. “What thing?”

I started talking out of the side of my mouth. “The thing mares do when we’re almost in heat and there aren’t any stallions nearby. You know. The thing.”

A few more blinks of incomprehension from her, and then, it finally clicked, causing her to blush furiously. “Oh! Well, how did that go?”

“Badly.” I rubbed the back of my head with my hoof, averting my eyes from her judging gaze. “I had pain radiating through my back and hips when I climaxed. Like a nine out of ten. Like, seriously bad pain.”

“That’s normal. You just had a very invasive procedure done. There’s all sorts of tissue we had to cut through to get into the space with the kidneys, and you’re still full of stitches. Avoid masturbation for the time being. Say, a month or two. The pain should go away. If it doesn’t, we have things for that. Don’t hesitate to report how you’re feeling, okay? We want you to have a healthy sex life, too. That’s kind of important. For any patient.” She smiled.

I had tears in my eyes. Two months. No sticky hooves for two whole months. When I was locked up in Ahriman, I couldn’t go two days without touching myself. Scheherazade and those bastards running the CCTV system got an eyeful the whole damn time I was there.

I broke down crying, wrapping my forelegs around Argent and weeping into her shoulder. It was too much. There were too many things that were indescribably fucked about the course my life had taken as of late.

“Hey,” Argent said, returning my embrace despite the impropriety of it all. “It’s okay, Sergeant. Let it all out. I’m going to schedule you to see the therapist. Is that okay with you?”

“Yes. Please. Oh gosh, why? Why did they have to kill her? She never did anything wrong!”

Hoodoo and Windy had just been trying to live, scavenging what food they could and waiting to see if I’d ever come back to Dodge. In a sane world, the unconscionable things that happened to them would never occur. Argent held me like that for several minutes. I cried until my eyes were red and puffy. Until I could hardly see straight. Hoodoo deserved more than my tears. She deserved to live.

Her murderers deserved worse than death.

// … // … // … // … // … //

Argent had shown up a few days afterward to remove my stitches. My relief was palpable. The itchiness went down immediately. I had an infection from the surgery, so she’d given me an antibiotic shot, as well. The redness had cleared up overnight.

Some of the other books that Wind Shear had brought were tomes on such topics as small unit tactics, soldiering, mechanical engineering, treatises on practical magic, and all manner of things that a polymath might enjoy. Some of it was so dry and boring, I passed out on top of it and left strings of drool on the paper. Other parts contained math that was way too advanced for me. I took one look at the algebraic formulae and started to go cross-eyed. The next time Wind Shear showed up, I asked if he had a remedial algebra textbook. He gave me a funny look, but he knew better than to give me any lip about it.

A few hours after he’d plunked that on my desk, I was drooling idiotically over that, too. “I was a waitress! I tended bars! I’m not a fucking particle physicist, dammit!”

I heard another commotion outside, and what sounded like a fucking guitar. When I hazarded a peek through the slot in the door, I saw Garrida, once again wearing that giant sombrero and sloshed as shit, leading a dance through the cell blocks, a very drunken Bellwether and several revelers in tow. Thankfully, she wasn’t wielding sex toys this time. Instead, she was strumming away on an acoustic, swaying around and singing a slurred, tuneless shanty.

Oh there once was a satyr and I bashed in his head,
cut off his junk and I threw him in my bed,
fucked the hole in his taint with a stale piece o’ bread,
and then I made him eat a couple ounces of pooorridge!

I was giggling my ass off. “The fuck?”

Maybe she was trying to cheer me up. Maybe they were so drunk, they didn’t realize where the hell they were going and just happened to stumble through this part of the base. Either way, it was working.

// … // … // … // … // … //

Then, just like that, it wasn’t working. It wasn’t working because I’d started blaming myself for what had happened. Again.

I leaned against the wall, propped up by my forehooves, muttering curses under my breath. “Fuck. I was with the Liberation Front for weeks. Months. She was still alive. She and Windy were both free mares. Then, those bastards snatched them up. Right out of my fucking apartment!”

The cot was already showing signs of abuse, the frame dented slightly from me throwing it all over the place. This time was no different. It had a few new scars already.

“I could’ve gone down to Dodge, picked them up. Had them join us here, where it’s safe. They could’ve piddled around doing odd jobs for Bell or Garrida. They wouldn’t have had to fight. They could’ve signed up as logistics personnel and shuffled cargo around or something. Instead, I let those fuckers take my fucking sisters and fucking fuck them to death!”

I bashed the cot against the wall. I fell backwards against the frigid concrete of the cell and slid down to my haunches. I buried my head in my forehooves. I’d been doing a lot of that, too, as of late. I didn’t cry. Didn’t sob. Didn’t make a sound. I had shed my tears. I’d run dry. All I felt was a cold emptiness in the pit of my stomach.

// … // … // … // … // … //

I paged through a manual on magic, trying to distract myself from how I felt utterly dead inside after a month of near-solitary confinement that mainly reminded me of my captivity in the Confederacy’s hands. In order to understand how to use magic, it was necessary for one to appreciate the sheer variety of spell types, as well as their varying thaumatic signatures and frequencies, much akin to the different wavelengths of visible light.

Arcane magic dealt with raw magical energy in non-elemental form. Pure magic, in other words. It was one of the most basic kinds, covering such disciplines as levitation, arcane blasts, the manipulation of gravity, kinetic energy, and the fundamental forces of nature. Beamcasters fired pencil-thin streams of arcane magic. A unicorn could perform the same exact spell with their horn, but unless they had an implausible amount of training and discipline, the resulting emanation would be blunt and unfocused, capable of breaking bones, causing contusions, and toppling brick walls, but not piercing armor and flesh and boiling the tissues with rapid heating like an infantry-scale beamcaster did. Beamcasters were not lasers. The beams were kinetic and had apparent mass, but with little to no inertia or recoil. They heated things simply by transferring large amounts of kinetic energy into them over very short timescales.

Elemental magic represented the natural elements, like Fire, Water, Air, and Earth. Innate earth pony and pegasus magics were generally attuned to the elemental wavelengths, and the most skilled and distinguished of unicorn sages knew how to do things like channel Earth magic into their hooves and break boulders like an earth pony, or give themselves wings of fine gossamer or control the weather like a pegasus by channeling Air. In many ways, the uniqueness of earth ponies and pegasi was superficial, but we unicorns pretended that it wasn’t in order to humor them.

Light magic covered things such as illumination, healing, the removal of curses and placement of blessings, the discovery of evildoers by tracking the signs of their misdeeds, and other such things. It was a relatively esoteric discipline, practiced by Celestia-worshipers and healing practitioners more than anyone else. Some said that they felt a stronger connection to Celestia and the realm of the divine when they practiced channeling the spectrum of Light.

Dark magic represented the sphere of spells once considered evil and forbidden to use, such as those that concealed objects, manipulated minds, raised the dead, inflicted curses, tampered with thaumatic emanations—or souls, as some might call them—and defiled the laws of nature. In modern times, Dark magic was simply taught as a fairly standard discipline, within reason, to those few who could temper its power with pragmatism and self-control. My own invisibility magic borrowed from the Spectrum Vile, and it was said that the darker one’s personality was, the more powerful the illusions they could cast and hallucinations they could inflict upon others. The most depraved and skillful practitioners of Dark magic could dominate a pony’s mind completely and force them to do their bidding.

Order magic governed such things as anti-magic, dispelling, silencing, binding the energies of other magics and restraining them, the thaumatic field gestalt, the scrying of the threads of fate that bound souls together, divination, golemancy and so on. In olden times, when blended with the power of Celestia’s Light, it was called Harmony magic, but over the centuries, like many things in our society, all the joy had been sucked entirely out of it and replaced with cynicism. Rather than being a central facet of our society, as Harmony magic was said to have been, Order magic was just a tool. The magic practiced by the nemrin bore a striking resemblance to Order magic on a thaummeter.

Chaos magic was the exact opposite. It was a raw and untamed kind of magic that dealt with such matters as transmutation, charming minds to subtly influence them, removing harmful or beneficial enchantments from objects by scrambling them, and affecting the entropy of objects, like making water grow hot over time and other such improbabilities. There were outlawed weapons called Warpers that replaced the standard Arcane-based matrices of an ordinary beamcaster with a Chaos-based one. When fired upon a person, the eldritch energy inflicted terrible sores and perverted the flesh, mutating it over and over into undifferentiated masses of cells.

These six aspects of magic formed the six primary spectra from which fifteen different combinations were derived.

Arcane and Elemental magic was Torrential magic, where the elements ran wild with viciousness and fury, summoning firestorms, lightning storms, tornadoes, hurricanes and other such powers to scourge one’s foes.

Arcane and Light magic combined were Benedictions, shielding one from the influence of darkness, undeath, and abominable magic.

Arcane and Dark magics were Hex magic, the reverse of Benediction magic, and covered such things as cursing objects with ill luck, or placing magical traps and seals that would swallow the unwary whole.

Arcane and Order magic was Enchanting, used on many everyday items, magtech or not, to enhance their usefulness.

Arcane and Chaos magic was Unbinding, or the removal of enchantments, a tricky process usually performed to prepare objects to receive a different or superior enchantment.

Elemental and Light magic was Celestial magic; weaponized starlight, attuned to the powers of our sun and strengthened in the presence of the stars in general.

Elemental and Dark magic was Umbral magic, the power of the moon and of the night, the power to swallow and consume one’s enemies in choking smoke and unnatural darkness.

Elemental and Order magic was Summoning, the conjuration of objects made out of congealed elemental force that seemed to have form and solidity while possessing neither in reality. With summoning, one could create weapons and tools from nothing that were just as good as the real thing, in theory.

Elemental and Chaos magic was Sundering, the acceleration of entropy and decay and the stripping of atoms and molecules from objects—or people. In traditional Equestrian science, there was no distinction between elements and chemical compounds. Molecules, atoms, and subatomic particles were treated as the same general category of thing. All matter was materia. Those principles, though somewhat outdated, were still useful when it came to enchanting or dissolving matter.

Light and Dark magic was Displacement magic, a mysterious discipline that few understood, one which allegedly had to do with warping spacetime directly. Apparently, it was practiced as a means of attaining enlightenment by a cult of mountain sages who disappeared hundreds of years ago.

Light and Order magic was Harmony magic, the more pleasant counterpart to raw Order magic, binding the thaumatic emanations of multiple individuals together such that their concentrated power could overwhelm even the mightiest of foes.

Light and Chaos magic combined was Charm magic, which dealt with such things as affecting ponies’ decision-making and cognitive processes on a level more subtle and indirect than outright plowing into their mind with Dark magic and hypnotizing or mind-controlling them. If Dark magic manipulated the brain, then Charm magic manipulated the soul.

Dark and Order was Illusion, my own field of expertise, and naturally, it covered the art of turning invisible or creating visible apparitions by quite literally bullying the electromagnetic radiation around oneself into submission.

Dark and Chaos magic was Void magic, some of the darkest, evilest magic there was, involving such things as ripping souls out of ponies and introducing them into decaying flesh or inanimate objects. It was also critical in the creation of a Charger’s Anima, since their artificial intelligences were soul-imbued in dark and secretive rituals led by that old, creepy codger, Cicatrice, the Conclave Magister who’d taught us Dark Magic and was a master of that particular spectrum. Golemancy in general often involved Void magic in addition to Order magic for the basic seals, and golems were viewed with suspicion at the best of times, even if, technically, a Charger itself was a very advanced kind of golem.

Order and Chaos combined were Divination, which dealt exclusively with observing the flow of causality and attempting to predict the future.

Twenty-one spectra. Twenty-one different kinds of spell locuses. If one cast the wrong kind of magic through one, they’d get headaches and nosebleeds from the feedback effect. They had to be tuned and calibrated with the help of a thaummeter wielded by an expert on spectra. In certain tomes from the old Kingdom, it was said that all six of the primary spectra of magic combined formed a very powerful all-spectrum emanation art called Rainbow Magic, but hardly anyone in the modern era understood how to unlock its unfathomable power.

There were other disciplines outside the Modern Craft, as well. Earth pony druids hidden in the wilds. Witches and hedge mages of every stripe, who concocted bizarre and unknowable sorceries. There was alchemy of the Canterlotian kind that focused on the isolation of pure materia, and alchemy of the Zebrican sort, which was more concerned with potion creation from natural, organic materials. There were those who practiced empathic magic of wavelengths outside the conception of the Modern Craft, as well as traditional Golemancy practitioners who tamed and used wild spirits—free-floating thaumatic emanations—to power their creations. Many such arts had waned with the introduction of modern technology and modern medicine, but in some circles, especially in the more rural regions of the galaxy where advanced tech was in short supply, they continued to thrive.

In olden times, it was fairly typical for unicorns to cast without the aid of incantations, arias, or seals of any kind. We simply imagined the shapes of the magic we wished to cast, lit our horns, and performed the spells in question. That was still the standard method for the vast majority of casters in the modern era, but those well-acquainted with the Modern Craft—the Magisters and their Battlemages and such—were versed in a range of incantations, seals, and diagrams that could enhance and focus one’s power.

There were even devices called Grimoires that stored diagrams and seals so complex that one could never hope to memorize all their aspects. These consisted of a Tetrafluid-based neural interface connected to a holocrystal holding the relevant information. To use them, Battlemages of Grandmaster-grade would connect the Grimoire directly to their neural laces and use the device to synchronize their spellcraft, acting as though they were one, immensely powerful unicorn. These Grimoires were some of the most dangerous items in the whole Empire, kept in spell-locked briefcases akin to the ones that would be used for the codes to a nuclear weapon. The reason for this was simple.

When properly utilized by highly trained magic practitioners, the yield of a Grimoire was enough to flatten an entire metropolis and instantly kill millions of people.

The method to achieve this varied depending on the Grimoire and the spells it contained. Sometimes, it was a hurricane with unnaturally strong winds. Sometimes, it was configured to teleport the whole target area into space, or summon a meteor to smash everything to dust. Occasionally, it was enough pyrokinesis magic to create a mushroom cloud, like an actual nuke, but most ponies found that too boringly practical to send a proper message to our enemies. Whatever manner of spell it was, the intensity of a Grimoire’s spells would increase by the power of two depending on how many ponies were hooked into it. Two ponies was twice the power. Three was four times. Four was eight. Five was sixteen, and so on. The increase in thaums was not linear, but exponential. That was how a dozen unicorns were all it took to obliterate a city.

There was also the matter of the thaumatic field gestalt effect. Any time ponies bonded with one another on an emotional level and remained in close proximity, their quintessence quality and magic power was greatly enhanced. Emotions affected magic spectra on a more fundamental level, as well. Feelings like love, happiness, fear, and hatred would shift one’s magic closer to those emotions’ respective domains, and unicorn magic was rendered more potent both by the mastery of one’s own emotions and by maintaining strong relationships with others. In addition, pony emotional states were, in many ways, transmissible in an extrasensory fashion, even through walls of solid concrete.

The kidnapped ponies. I could feel their raw misery in the air before I even opened that damn door. It was like eating a cupcake filled with broken glass.

// … // … // … // … // … //

A few days later, Garrida showed up in the doorway to my cell, that same stern expression on her face as always. The one she wore when she wasn’t partying or trying to console someone who’d just lost everything.

“Month’s up, Sergeant,” she said. “Come on, let’s ditch this stupid place and get you some chow.”

Remaining silent, I followed her outside. In the blink of an eye, my world had gone from four walls in a dark cell to the wider, better-lit spaces of the base. I breathed a sigh of relief. I was free at last. We paced a couple hundred yards to the mess hall, where Bellwether was playing darts and being taunted by Sierra and Night Terror for his shitty score.

“Fuck this game!” Bellwether shouted. “You unicorns are cheaters! Cheaters!”

My eyes widened at the spread on the table. It was a far cry from the stale rations I’d been choking down for the past month. There was a toasted bagel with alfalfa sprouts and cream cheese that made my eyes water with gratitude.

“Oh my gosh!” I dived headfirst into my meal.

Garrida didn’t even have a chance to say anything. She lifted a finger as if to speak, and I’d already inhaled the whole bagel, panting happily like a dog and very nearly barking for more.

“Damn, you were hungry,” the big griffon said. “More where that came from.”

Garrida snapped her claws and Crookneck Squash rolled up a cart laden with delicious eats. He was wearing a chef’s hat and grinning wide. Apparently, he had talents other than engineering. For Garrida, there was a whole roast chicken and skewers with deep-fried squirrels. I cringed a little bit, but hey, Griffons gonna Griffon. Bell and the base’s two other Charger pilots sat down to eat, as well.

“So, Sergeant,” Garrida began. “Things have been proceeding as planned, as regards the restoration work on your Charger. For the past month, the techs have been working overtime on dismantling that salvaged Confederate patrol boat radar for its components. I hear it wasn’t exactly a proper fit for a Charger, so they’re scavenging the parts and fabricating a whole new housing for the arrays.”

I nodded. “Sounds about right. The radome in a Mirage’s head only has so much room.”

“I see you’ve been studying.” Garrida smirked. “What else did you learn about Chargers?”

“Well, for one thing, they weren’t a straight-across reverse-engineering of Confederate Goliaths. There were things about those that we didn’t have the tech to copy, back when the Sword Bayonet was brand new. The Conclave had to come up with all kinds of kludges. Ways to fill the gaps in technology with magic. Those principles became a substantial part of the foundation of modern Magtech.”

Garrida shook her head. “That’s all well and good, but technology doesn’t win wars.”

I blinked a few times, somewhat shocked. “Excuse me?”

The Captain shrugged a bit, picking her teeth. “Let me rephrase that. Technology is vitally important to warfare, but technology alone is useless without tactical and strategic supremacy, and that part of warfare begins and ends inside all our heads.

“What do we know about the enemy? What are their weaknesses we can exploit? What sorts of material advantages or disadvantages do they have? What about their friends? Can we turn their allies against them? Can we sow the seeds of doubt in their own population and get them to mistrust their leadership? Can we mislead them with misinformation and get them to overestimate our strength? Those are the questions we should be asking.

“Then, at the battlefield level, it’s all about keeping your head in the game. Don’t falter, don’t hesitate. Be flexible enough to respond to changing conditions, but consistent enough to act upon your orders. As an NCO, you need the trust of your squad. You need ponies who’ll follow you into hell and back. To be a winner, you have to think like one. Don’t be afraid to pull back if you’re dealt a losing hand, but be bold and press the advantage when you sense it.

“If you let your mind go, if you let defeatism creep in, you’ll start finding yourself making mistakes over and over again. Little mistakes that pile together and become big ones. It happens in private industry, it happens in state bureaucracy, and it happens in the military. Now, we’re not in the Army anymore. The Liberation Front is a whole lot less formal, but that doesn’t mean the risks aren’t the same. This may not look it, but this is a job, what you’re doing. It has the same kinds of occupational risks as any other job, and then some.

“In the capital, back during the war, there were stiffs who’d spend all day tabulating casualties, and these figures included not only civilian deaths and soldiers who were killed by enemy action, but also ponies who’d incurred injuries in training, or simply cracked and gone off the deep end. Fighting is stressful, difficult work. Your most valuable resource in any battle sits atop your neck and it’s called your damn head. If your head comes apart in the middle of a fight, you’re going to lose. In this fight, you and I both know damn well what the consequences of losing are.”

“This is about the shrink, isn’t it?” I rolled my eyes. “The one Argent recommended.”

Garrida nodded as she took a bite of skewered squirrel. “Weathervane. She’s an expert on combat trauma, or so I hear.”

I nodded. “And then what, Sir? When I return to duty, what do we have on the menu?”

Garrida smirked. “You’re pretty eager to get back out there, even after your first little taste of what it’s like to fight a rebellion against an occupying force. That’s good. Well, do you like snow, Storm?”

My eye twitched. “About as much as I like herpes. Why?”

“You’re in for a lot of it. We’re sending you and these two idiots here to the Crystal Mountains. There’s an old base up there that hasn’t been raided yet, but the Confederacy have their eyes on it. They’re going to try and scrap all that hardware so we can’t get our paws on it. Your team is to perform recon. Find ways of penetrating into the base and getting around the automated defenses. There might be a real nice haul in there, and we can’t afford to let the opportunity slip away.

“The Camp Crazy Horse cell is a logistics unit. Our primary operations involve salvaging equipment vital to the resistance and distributing it to the other cells. We don’t know what the exact strength of the other cells are, due to compartmentalization, and I’m not sure what the hell Bell here’s been telling you, but I can tell you right now that we’ve reconditioned and shipped out over half a dozen Chargers since we started this shindig a few years ago. When it comes to troops, we mostly get the bottom-of-the-barrel washouts. A considerable portion of our personnel are technicians and mechanics. That doesn’t mean our job is any less important, however.”

“What are we expecting to find at the base?” I said.

“We’re not exactly sure.” Bellwether shrugged, chewing on a bit of celery. “Might be something good. Might just be crap. The armory and motor pool could be stocked to the gills, and who would even know if we didn’t go looking? Everything we do is a gamble in this outfit, Sergeant. That’s just how salvage jobs are. Sometimes you win big, and other times, you get nothing.”

I nodded along silently, my mouth too stuffed to reply. I was halfway through a plate of hayburgers and onion rings when I noticed the fully stocked bar at the back. I’d been in the mess hall before, but I’d never quite paid much attention to my surroundings, since I was still settling in. It was as if it had materialized out of thin air.

I grinned and glanced from one of my compatriots to the next, and then I shuffled over to the bar. “You guys ever had a Dragon Shot?”

I levitated Bellwether’s lighter out of his coat pocket. He seemed none too pleased about that.

“Hey, give it back!”

I ignored him, grinning as I gathered up my ingredients. “Watch this, guys!”

A small crowd of base personnel gathered around the front of the bar. They stood back a safe distance and watched with amazement as I set out a couple dozen shot glasses and mixed 190-proof grain alcohol with rum, bitters, and a tiny touch of orange juice in several cocktail mixers which I proceeded to juggle and spin in my levitation magic’s grip like some showmare. I emptied the mixers into the shot glasses, put a swig of the near-pure grain alcohol in my mouth, flicked the lighter, contemplated my life choices, and then blew a perfect gout of flame over two dozen shots with a sweep of my head, lighting them all.

A riotous cheer went up, ponies grabbing the flaming shots off the bar, blowing them out and then downing them one after another. Bell exchanged a surprised glance with the rest, a genuinely excited smile creeping onto his face. While he and the others offered a round of applause, stomping their hooves on the floor, I levitated one of the shots over to him, along with his lighter.

I held up one of the shots. “A toast, to freedom!”

“Freedom!” the cheer went up.

I downed the shot and grabbed another. “To the Empress!”

“To the Empress!”

I slugged that one back and grabbed a third. “And to my—to my—” I sniffled a bit. “To my sister, Hoodoo. Rest in peace, sis.”

The tone became a bit more somber after that. No one said a word. I saw them all share a look. We’d all lost someone. We all knew what that felt like. I stared into the bottom of my shot glass, before downing it.

“Rest in peace,” the bar chorused.

Things picked back up after I almost killed the mood. Ponies started partying. Captain Garrida played something folksy on the guitar while a bunch of soldiers sang along with her. Bell and Sierra were having a little contest in a darkened corner of the mess hall, apparently to see who could snort the most cocaine. Bell waved me over, grunting energetically. I joined them. Whatever, fuck it. I stuck a straw in my nose and sucked up a whole line, and then stuck it in my other nostril and did another.

Hard narcotics that the rest of the galaxy balked at and outlawed were deemed socially acceptable in the Empire, largely because ponies had a very hardy constitution and experienced fewer negative side effects. As a result, it wasn’t unusual to see opium, cannabis, cocaine, amphetamines and other such substances being enjoyed openly in bars and lounges the world over. Some jurisdictions outlawed certain recreational substances, especially the potent and dangerous synthetic opioids the Confederacy favored, while others were more lax. In the Army, it was conditionally allowed in the form of stims and such. Shooting methamphetamine before going into combat was par for the course in some outfits. The Resistance had a more libertine attitude regarding substance use and fraternization and so forth, but morphine and meth were limited-access because they were in short supply and needed for reasons practical rather than recreational. With that in mind, until recently, I wasn’t really a fan of that sort of thing, myself.

After a few hits of the ol’ white, I was talking a mile a minute, and every bit of it sounded dopey as fuck. My buzz from the liquor had vanished completely. I honestly preferred being drunk to being coked up, if I had to choose between the two. It wasn’t long before I started whining about Hoodoo again, only this time, I sounded stupid even to myself. I was being a killjoy piece of shit to ponies who wanted to hear none of it. They didn’t care about my problems. They just wanted to party. While I bawled idiotically into a table, Sierra gave me a back rub. Then she licked my ear. Why the fuck did she lick my ear? Dumb, trashy lot lizard slut.

“Don’t lick me with a mouth that’s blown long-haul truckers, Sierra,” I muttered.

“Why not?” she pouted. “It’s just a little bit of cum.”

“There’s no such thing as just a little bit.” I let out a huge burp. “Truckers, Sierra. It doesn’t dilute. Any amount—’s too much.”

About ten shots later, after watching Garrida and the rest of the Griffons engage in a bout of ill-advised drunken line-dancing, the coke had started to wear off and I was seeing double. I excused myself to the restrooms, where I was given strange looks by the blurred forms around me. I immediately stumbled into one of the stalls, gripped a toilet bowl with both of my hooves and hurled violently into it. My throat burned with acidic juices. Gosh, I was so sick and tired of throwing up.

“Hey.” Bellwether tapped my shoulder.

I jerked awake, slowly lifting my head to make eye contact with him. “Huh? Wha—”

I’d passed out face-down in the bowl, my mane and muzzle completely covered in toilet water. Also, this was the room for colts.

// … // … // … // … // … //

A few days after we drank ourselves silly, I found myself pacing back and forth in front of the therapist’s office. Apparently, she’d been trucked all the way down from Vanhoover to come see us. Some specialist of a pegasus named Weathervane. I couldn’t see or hear what was going on in her office, only muffled voices and drawn blinds.

I let out a soft gasp when her other patient stepped out of the office right in front of me several minutes later. It was Corporal Cloverleaf, her prosthetic hoof clicking loudly against the concrete every fourth step. She had a bionic replacement limb in place of her missing right foreleg, all shining chrome, contrasting heavily with her green coat. Either Garrida had lied about the shortage of limbs, or the situation had changed in the intervening time. Clover also had a nasty, ragged scar running across her left cheek from where her mouth had been ripped open. The stitches had left behind a pattern like a zipper. She looked up at me with a lidded, tired gaze.

“Oh, it’s you. Hey, Sarge.”

I smiled a little. “You doing okay, Corporal?”

She stared straight down at the floor for a few seconds, smirking and shaking her head and letting out a disdainful snort, before looking up at me and fixing me with a hateful glare. “Why couldn’t you just—you know—pull the damn trigger?”

My smile fell from my face. I didn’t say a word or even turn to look as she walked right past me and down the hall.

“Shit,” I muttered.

I shook off the feeling of dread that had come over me. I’d worked up the courage to enter the office over the past several minutes, and my little encounter with Clover had my nerves frayed again.

With a shaking hoof, I pushed the door open, walking inside. The room had warm, cozy lighting relative to the rest of the base, courtesy of a floor lamp with a glass mosaic shade. Seated across from me in one of two plush-looking recliners was a pegasus mare with a medium-grayish coat and puffy, silvery mane. She had a cutie mark of an old-timey bronze weathervane. No surprise there. Her eyes were lidded and her brows arched, and she had dark circles beneath her tired gaze. She looked like the very personification of a rain cloud.

I felt a shiver of trepidation run down my spine. I didn’t know what it was about pegasi. In their judging, reproachful stares, I felt something of the essence of my father, and that always put me on edge. In truth, this almost scared me more than combat.

“Come on in and have a seat,” Weathervane said.

I shoved my fears aside and did as directed, sinking into the plush chair with a sigh.

“I’m Weathervane.” Her cold gaze melted into a beaming smile that didn’t look entirely sincere. “And you?”

“Sergeant Desert Storm, Charger pilot.”

“Sergeant, I hear you’ve been through a difficult time, recently. Would you like to talk about it?”

“Yes, I would.”

I held my breath. We had a tense staredown for a few seconds until Weathervane chose to break the silence.

“So, you were one of the ones involved in the raid on Dodge City?”

“It’s not just that. I was formerly a resident of Dodge. Before I enlisted. My former place of employment was one of the buildings we fought from. And, to top it all off, I found out that my sisters, Windy Mesa and Hoodoo, had been living in Dodge, in my own damn apartment. That is, they were living there, until a few months ago, when they were kidnapped and taken to the concentration camp the Confederacy had set up in town, at the train station. Upon further investigation, I discovered that Windy was sold into slavery. Hoodoo had been tortured for days or weeks and then mortally wounded in the course of the fighting. She died right in front of me. I was minutes too late to save her. Minutes.”

The way I said it, so clinical and detached, it didn’t sound real. It sounded like something I’d read in a book somewhere. I sounded like a liar even to myself. I almost worried I wouldn’t be believed. It’s her job to believe me, isn’t it?

Weathervane showed the first real emotion I’d seen since I walked into her makeshift office. She gasped a little and her eyes got a tad misty. Whether it was out of any sympathy for me or simply general despair over ponykind’s lot as of late, I couldn’t tell.

“I’m very sorry to hear that,” the gray pegasus said. “Were you three close?”

I smirked, shaking my head and pinching my brow. “You know, to tell you the truth, not really. When I said I was joining the Army, my dad was all like ‘I thought I raised you better than this’, and then both my parents left for the colonies. My sisters, who’d been rooming with me, agreed with them, or so I thought. They left me all alone. All alone with my guilt over my decision to go to war.

“After they’d practically disowned me, I left my empty apartment behind and went to basic training, and that was that.” I looked up at Weathervane with a sneer of disgust. “But even so, they were family. I don’t have to tell you what these freaks do when they get their hands on mares. I can see it in your eyes. You already know. It’s not something I’d wish on anypony, least of all my fucking sisters.”

“Obviously not.” Weathervane nodded.

“It’s weird,” I said. “I could go weeks or months without thinking about my sisters. Shit, I thought they were dead. Now, they’re all I can think about. Windy’s still alive. Some bastard has her. Some alien who collects mares like toys. It’s exactly as bad as it sounds.”

“I’m guessing you’ve been told about the consequences of abandoning your post to go looking for her?”

“Yes, I have,” I muttered. “Still pissed about that.”

“Good. There are other ponies who need you.”

I looked up at her, my face slowly warping into a scowl. “What?”

“Some of them are ponies you talk to every day, right here in this base,” Weathervane continued. “They’re depending on you to be a leader. Maybe you just don’t realize how valuable they are to you, yet?”

I bared my teeth at her, my ears pinned back. “What the fuck do you know about me, asshole? Almost everypony here hates my fucking guts.”

She could see this was backfiring, and so, she tried salvaging it. “No, they don’t. That’s catastrophic thinking. You’re assuming a worst-case scenario where none exists. Some may dislike you, yes, but others do not. The key is to approach them rationally and see if you can strengthen your bond with those among them whose personality suits yours.”

I glared at her. “Do you think you’re talking to a foal? Someone so ill that I’ve regressed to a fucking pre-teen mental age? Were you a high school guidance counselor in a past life, and you’re only moonlighting as a real therapist now that civilization as we know it is dead and gone and accreditation is a thing of the past?”

Weathervane bristled at the insult. “I’m only trying to make this easier on you. If you want me to start swearing like a sailor and expressing base hostility, I’m sure I could accommodate you.”

I huffed and crossed my forelegs, looking exactly like the petulant child I insisted I wasn’t.

“The things I’ve seen recently, well—I don’t quite know how to say it,” I muttered. “It’s like, all that guilt I used to feel over what I did in the war? About using weapons of mass destruction? About hunting deserters or taking part in suppression missions? It’s like it doesn’t affect me anymore. Why doesn’t it affect me? What the hell am I supposed to be feeling?”

“Suppression missions?”

“It’s classified, I’m not supposed to be talking about it, but—ah, fuck it. It wasn’t just deserters we hunted down. There were protests and riots, okay? Halfway to the frontier. Ponies who wanted the war to end. Ponies who didn’t understand what we were facing, or the horrors the Confederacy were inflicting on us. Heck, there were things we soldiers were kept in the dark about, too. We knew about the mass graves, the massacres, that sort of thing, but nopony told us anything about slavery or experimentation.

“Anyway, when there was nothing more important for us to do, they had us out there on riot control duty, out in the colonies. In our fucking Chargers. Holding back millions of ponies. Tear gas, electroshock shit, spells, dark magic, we—fuck, you know what? I don’t want to talk about this shit anymore. There’s so much shit I’ll never be able to get out of my head.”

“Like what?”

I licked my dry lips a bit before looking squarely at Weathervane. “You ever see a pepper ball bust right through a mare’s eye? You ever see her lying screaming on the ground while her kid’s crying over her and begging someone to help them? Not even a rioter. A fucking bystander. Stupid cops missed! No one would help her, so I had to call an ambulance myself.”

“So, you feel somehow responsible for police misconduct.” Weathervane shook her head. “It wasn’t your fault. You did everything you could.”

“No, I didn’t! Those ponies, they just wanted the same fucking thing I was fighting for. Peace! Except I did it by killing the enemy in the hopes they would be intimidated enough to back down, and they did it with hoof-painted signs and sit-down strikes. We all wanted the same thing. There was no reason for us to be fighting one another!”

“That’s not true, you were just—”

“Following orders?” I growled, finishing her sentence for her. “Let me tell you what ‘following orders’ looks like. It looks like ponies in impermeable overalls hosing the blood, gore, and residual nerve gas off your mech in a great big decontamination airlock! I stepped on people, every damn day! I stepped on Confederate troops like they were fucking bugs! Why don’t I fucking feel bad about that? Why don’t I feel a Celestia-fucking thing?

“Were the satyrs really these fucking monsters all along? Was that what we were fighting? Slavers? Rapists? Why didn’t they fucking tell us? I know a hoofful of my own fucking shipmates who blew their own fucking brains out because they couldn’t take the fucking guilt anymore! If the higher-ups had told us the truth, those ponies might still be alive! Those rioters might’ve gone to their local recruiter’s office, instead of getting their skulls cracked open by the cops!”

“Storm, you—”

“Incompetence!” I screamed. “Incompetence is what put us here! Incompetence and cowardice! I’m fucking through! If you sons of bitches won’t do what needs to be done, then I’m going to go out there and strangle every motherfucking satyr piece of shit with my bare fucking hooves!”

Weathervane looked shocked at my outburst. I could tell her report wasn’t going to be a very sunny one.

I took a few deep breaths, calming myself down. “Uhh, Miss Weathervane? There was one other thing I wanted to talk about.”

The pegasus nodded. “Go ahead.”

My eyes widened. “It’s Cloverleaf. I think she’s gonna try and off herself.” I drew a hoof across my neck while making a croaking noise. “I’ve seen this shit before. Way, way too many times.”

“I can’t discuss the other patients.” Weathervane frowned. “We have confidentiality rules. For the time being, let’s focus on y—”

“For fuck’s sake. She’s gonna wind up hanging herself or putting a caster in her mouth, and you’re gonna just let that happen? Is that what you’re telling me?”

“I can’t talk about it,” she said.

I stood angrily, making for the door, turning and looking over my shoulder as I departed. “Schedule me for another session when you’ve grown a fucking brain.”

I slammed the door to Weathervane’s office as I left, marching down the hall. I was mad as hell, but my eyes were filled with remorseful tears. I wasn’t going to let another one die. Not on my watch.

As I walked down the hall, I encountered Sagebrush. He didn’t even look at me, his eyes hidden by the brim of his tanker’s helmet as always. He acted like I wasn’t even there at all. The feeling was mutual.

I huffed. “With friends like these, anyone would wanna off themselves.”

I was alone among strangers. I missed my transport ship. I missed my unit. I missed everyone so fucking much.

// … // … // … // … // … //

It happened just as I said it would. In a fucking janitorial closet, of all places. At least we caught it right after it began. At least she was still struggling. That was a good sign.

“Help me get her down from here, dammit!” I shouted, trying to hold up Clover’s dangling, kicking hind legs on my shoulders while balancing with my hind legs on the edge of a mop sink. “Somepony, gimme a fucking knife!”

One of the Charger techs hoofed over a multi-tool. My multi-tool, actually. The one from my stash, with my name engraved on it. I frowned at him and shook my head. At the very least, my stash of bits, my Orbit and my other stuff had remained largely unmolested, but I’d wondered where the hell my Leathermare had gone. I wished they wouldn’t touch my shit, but this time, I was glad at least one of them had the presence of mind to bring it with him.

With my magic’s orange glow, I flicked open the saw and cut the rope that Cloverleaf had used to hang herself. I caught her surprisingly heavy body on my withers and gingerly set her down, feeling for a pulse. She was still breathing and she still had a heartbeat. That was better than the alternative.

“Get fucking Argent Tincture or Gauze Patch or one of the damn medics and a stretcher over here, now!” I shouted.

The two stallions nodded and ran full tilt to the infirmary. I gasped, startled, when a metal hoof reached up and gripped one of my forelegs.

“You did it again, Sarge,” Clover rasped, her voice scratchy from having just strangled herself half to death. “You fucking did it again, damn you. You stupid bitch. Why can’t you just let me die? Just let me die, dammit. It’s what I want. It’s my life, not yours!”

I pulled her into a hug, squeezing her tight. “It’s okay, Corporal. I got you.”

She started squirming, trying to push me away. “Let go of me! I don’t want anyone touching me! I can’t—I—” She started sobbing, hitting me lamely with her forehooves, alternating between her soft natural one and the relatively harder, heavier, and more painful metal one.

I didn’t let up my grip. Perhaps I should have, but I didn’t want her going anywhere in this state. I knew exactly what manner of demon was rifling through her head. I was a mare, too, after all. I hoped that would be enough to make this close contact tolerable for her.

“You’re safe, Clover,” I said. “I won’t let anyone hurt you. I promise.”

There was no intelligible reply, at first, but she’d stopped fighting me, leaving only crying and incomprehensible babbling to resonate in the cramped space.

“Don’t let them take me, please!” Clover screamed to no one in particular. “Please!”

I could see the distant look in her glassy eyes. She wasn’t here. She was back there. In Dodge. Suffering in the grip of evil. I softly shushed her and slowly rocked her from side to side like a foal. It was working. She was still sobbing, but she was quickly calming down.

When Argent Tincture showed up with a stretcher, her form casting a shadow into the room, she was confused as hell. “What’s going on here?”

I didn’t say a word. I simply pressed my lips into a straight line and pointed above my head, where a thick, braided rope had been looped over an exposed drainpipe. Argent Tincture was chagrined, to say the least.

“Mother of Celestia,” she muttered.

“I fucking told Weathervane.” I shook my head. “I told her this would happen. She wouldn’t listen to me.”

“She can’t talk to you about it,” Argent said. “There are rules. Now, let me handle this. I got her.”

Argent gathered up Clover and put her in the stretcher, before wheeling her back to the infirmary.

As she disappeared down the hall, I sat there on my haunches in a dirty closet full of mops and cleaning supplies. I felt like shit for acting against Clover’s wishes. In a way, she deserved the peace she sought. We all did.

// … // … // … // … // … //

The cherry red paint would have to go. The gloss was too high. It’d give away my position. I let out a heavy sigh as I worked the sandblasting nozzle back and forth over the tank of my Stampeder 650, erasing my father’s handiwork. It felt like I was blasting the last vestiges of my old life away.

“Sorry, dad,” I muttered. “It needs a new coat of paint.”

After spending hours masking off and meticulously re-priming my bike, I mixed up a batch of some military-grade olive drab polyurethane two-component paint that would leave a nice matte finish. After making sure the lid on the can wouldn’t come loose and send paint flying everywhere, I started the shaker.

I filled an HVLP sprayer with the mix and started to coat the tank, the seat trim, the rounded tail, and everywhere else that needed it. While waiting between coats, I turned away from the paint booth, pulled up a seat and watched with rapt attention as the techs hoisted the new radar system up onto the head of my Mirage and aligned it with the mounting studs. Occasionally, one of them would scream profanity and order the hoist operator to stop lowering a component, presumably because one of the studs wasn’t aligned with the hole properly and they were dropping all that weight on top of the stud.

“Don’t fuck it up,” I whispered to myself. “They don’t make these things anymore.”

The new finish on my motorcycle had turned out surprisingly even and smudge-free. Bellwether walked up, sipping from a mug of black coffee held in one hoof.

“Lookin’ good, there, Sergeant.” He smirked. “You planning on taking that baby out for a spin?”

I shook my head. “I need to do something about the muffler, too. This bitch is way, way too loud. It’ll give away my position.”

“I’m sure one of the mechanics can do something about that.” Bellwether nodded.

I got an idea while I was sitting there, admiring my work. I moved my goggles up onto my forehead and turned to look straight at him. “Hey, Bell. Do you guys have any more prosthetic forelegs of the same exact model as Clover’s?”

“Yeah, just got in the shipment a few weeks ago.” He raised an eyebrow. “Why do you ask?”

I smiled. “Can you bring me one?”

// … // … // … // … // … //

I visited the infirmary and, as luck would have it, Clover was still convalescing from her failed suicide attempt. I held the package behind my back, looking to the mechanics at my left and right. They’d worked in a hot rod shop back in the day, and they’d helped me out with some of the detail work. They nodded to me as I rapped a few times on the door. Gauze Patch was the one who responded. She looked like the living dead. She was wheeling around a cart with a plastic bin full of various instruments and tools.

“Oh, hello, Sergeant,” she said. “Argent has me suicide-proofing the infirmary. That means no scalpels, nothing that can be turned into rope, nothing.”

“Can we see the patient?”

“Absolutely out of the question!” Gauze Patch frowned. “She’s in a very fragile state, emotionally-speaking. No visitors are allowed!”

I held out a long, gift-wrapped cardboard box with green wrapping paper and a pink ribbon tied into a bow on top. “We have a present for Clover, ma’am. I think she’s going to like it very much.”

Gauze made a few faces, but then, she finally relented. “All right, come in. But be quick about it. If Argent catches you guys, she’ll wring both your necks and mine.”

I walked up to Cloverleaf’s bedside and she slowly looked up at me with an apprehensive frown. “What do you want?” Clover muttered.

“Corporal, uhh—” I blushed a little bit. “Me and the boys came up with a little something for you. We thought you’d like it.”

She gave us a deadpan expression before snatching up the package and starting to undo the wrapping. When she opened the box and pulled out the contents, sending a mess of packing material everywhere, her eyes widened with surprise.

It was a bionic foreleg, like the one she wore, only we’d done a custom job on it. It had been painted green to match her coat color, with floral pinstriping in yellow. Down the outer side, it bore the word Unbroken in pale yellow paint, and when she rotated it so that the inside faced up, the inscription on the other side read Unbowed.

Clover started to cry. First as little sniffles, and then, full-blown sobbing. She held the leg close to her chest like it was a security blanket. “Th—Thank you, Sarge!”

“Get well, Corporal,” I said. “If we want to give those bastards some payback, we’re going to need all hooves on deck.”

“Yes, Ma’am!” Clover saluted.

Gauze Patch was almost too shocked to speak. I patted her on the shoulder as we left, whispering in her ear, “Sometimes, the best medicine doesn’t come in a bottle.”

The mechanics filed out, and I followed them, only to encounter Sagebrush leaning against the wall beside the doorway.

While the mechanics hurried off, getting back to work, I turned to look straight at Sagebrush’s expressionless face, watching as he dropped to his hooves. He spat a wad of tobacco and pushed up the brim of his helmet, and for the first time, I saw the pain in his eyes. The pain of years and years of constant fighting.

I raised my hoof as a peace offering, and he slapped his hoof into mine, holding it in his iron grip.

“This doesn’t mean I like you, Storm,” he said. “But it’s a start.”

I didn’t say anything. I simply smiled and nodded.

It was a small victory, but I’d take it.

// … end transmission …

Record 11//Arsenal

//HOL CRY ADV
//CHECKSUM READ
//CHECKSUM GOOD

// … decoding …

// … error - operation timeout with unknown error …

// … please reinsert media to continue …

Desert Storm

I needed a refresher on Beamcaster full-manual aiming. It was an art form in its own right. One had to fix their gaze directly upon whatever they wanted to shoot, centering their target in their field of vision. Manual mode locked the turrets’ motion to the user’s eyeballs, using sophisticated eye-tracking tech. One couldn’t just let their eyes dart around willy-nilly and expect to hit anything.

I slapped my hoof down on the big red button in my lane and a loud buzzer in the firing range’s ceiling sounded. Holographic representations of aggrieved cleomanni started streaming towards me. I would score more points the faster I could engage and eliminate them. A target that was allowed to close the distance was worth substantially less. If any were allowed to reach the line, it was game over. I’d set my Phoenix Fire 27 to training mode, firing non-lethal, low-power pulses that were just enough to actuate the targets. This prevented wear and tear on the caster itself and avoided damaging the range or hurting careless bystanders. Not that anyone else was present. It was just me, practicing by my lonesome.

We didn’t really have an armorer on the base, unless one counted the Charger techs; just an armory and a bunch of random weapons that we could help ourselves to, once we were entered into the base’s biometric scanner system. The caster I was wearing was no exception. The lack of proper inventory control was something I despised, and I took out my anger on the simulacra of several Confederate jackasses who charged the firing line. One after another, I struck the targets center-mass, their images vanishing and the targets resetting themselves automatically.

Though I’d never admit it out loud, I secretly loved it. No fucking around waiting for the armorers to issue me a piece. I just walked right in, grabbed what I wanted, and went, and just like that, I was armed. Fantastic idea, what with all the psychos and drunks and druggies and suicidal shell shock victims having free run of the place. No way anything bad could’ve happened, there. Nope. Not in a million years.

Occasionally, I’d get sloppy and let one of my targets get too close. I grit my teeth. I had to push myself harder. It was an unavoidable fact that the battlefield favored species with hands over those with hooves. Fingers and opposable thumbs were used for more than just gripping weapons, but also for mundane tasks that were difficult or exhausting to perform with hooves. Digging trenches, cleaning and maintaining one’s kit, emplacing barricades, climbing ladders, moving supplies around, tidying one’s spaces, and so on. Magic was a crutch. One would think that spells were enough to offset the difference, but their use was so exhausting for the untrained that they weren’t nearly as useful, on average, as actually having a few good sets of hands. I couldn’t let my relative lack of fingers become an obstacle to victory. I am no cripple. I am an Equestrian. I am whole.

Hands were also used for grappling in close combat. My enemies saw every part of my body as a handle waiting to happen. My ears were a handle. My horn was a handle. My mane, if not tucked away properly, was a handle. My legs were each a handle. My tail and my dock were also handles. If one was facing a damarkind, one could add the rearmost holes to that tally. I allowed myself a sardonic smirk. I figured they saw my pussy and asshole as being kind of like the finger holes on a bowling ball. All they had to do was pick me up by the keister and then bowl a strike, with my squadmates as the pins. Every part of my body was a liability in a melee, if I was stupid enough to put myself within easy reach without a struggle.

I thought of how easily Clover had been taken out, shaking my head angrily as I engaged one simulated threat after another. She’d charged towards one of the mercs and tried knocking him over with her raw, undisciplined pony strength and mass, but he was bigger, heavier, and stronger. A walking slab of implacable xeno muscle. He’d prepared for the blow, recovered, and then got a leglock on her, breaking her shoulder like a twig. I could still hear the disgusting thwock in my head. He’d broken her fucking shoulder. That sort of shit just didn’t happen when somepony was fighting a satyr, unless said satyr was wearing power armor. A damarkind didn’t need to wear power armor. A damarkind was power armor.

Then, as soon as she was too crippled to continue resisting, they took her and they raped and dismembered her right in front of me while she begged them to stop. They took her to pieces. I couldn’t get it out of my head. I imagined what it would’ve been like if it had been me. If they’d taken me, instead. If I’d been slow, weak, and stupid and allowed myself to be taken. I’d come inches from having it happen to me, too. None of the squad liked me very well, and they probably wouldn’t have stuck their neck out to try and save me from those freaks. Not like I did for Clover, anyway.

The mercs might’ve gone much further than one leg. Maybe two, or three, or all four. Maybe they’d have left me a worm with four bloody stumps, mocked and scorned by their snarling faces, screaming and crying and squirming and struggling to inch away from them with my neck and barrel alone, only for their leader to snatch me up and pleasure himself with my maimed and tormented body even as his underlings feasted greedily upon my legs.

The things our enemies did to us were horror itself. I needed to be sharper. I needed to be stronger. Faster. Complacency meant that I would get to experience overwhelming pain, humiliation, and despair, followed by a drawn-out, dramatic, and very messy death. None of us wanted that to happen to any of us, but sometimes, it couldn’t be avoided. If the only thing I could do for a comrade was a mercy killing, I would’ve hated to be the one to pull the trigger.

I fired my weapon at target after target, my acute hatred animating my movements. I was using the pull-rings, simulating what I’d have to do if my magic burned out. The trigger cables reeled out of the front of the caster unit like the cable on the back of a pull-string doll, magnetically clamping to my armored boots. When the rings were released, the reels were spring-loaded to snap them back in place, hanging at one’s shoulders. One could seamlessly switch from one trigger method to another without interruption, from the shrouded lev-triggers on the back of the power unit, to the pull-rings. Some unicorns liked to remove the rings entirely, but I preferred to keep them as a backup.

The standard technique was to reel out the pull-rings, stand on them, and then use one’s whole body to shoot, simply by straightening one’s forelegs a little bit, but that disrupted one’s aim in manual mode. It was also possible to rear up and actuate them by simply giving each one a tug, with a kicking motion. The left ring fired the left emitter, and the right one fired the right. PF-27s were more than capable of full-auto fire; pulling one of the rings out all the way and holding it past the trigger point would unleash a continuous burst of lethal arcane energy pulses. If one slightly staggered their trigger pulls, they could even double their effective fire rate. Nevertheless, I practiced with semi-auto fire as well. I alternated shots, zipping out several at a time while keeping my head rock-steady, felling one target after another.

A simulated damarkind charged at me with a knife. The first in the simulation. I gasped. The flashback was impossible for me to resist. Two rough, callused hands were choking me so hard, I was blacking out. A clothed crotch was grinding painfully into my helpless body, pinching and abrading my most sensitive parts. I shrieked and stumbled backwards, the approaching holo-emitter’s speakers letting out a canned monster roar sound effect as the hologram brought the knife down. The entire figure faded to nonexistence with a static fizz the second it struck the firing line. A loud buzzer sounded, punctuating my failure. My final results for the round were displayed as a floating scoreboard in the air. 4,780 points. Enough to get me to eighth place out of ten on the list of all time high-scorers. I thought I’d done worse than that. My hesitation had cost me dearly.

Someone behind me clicked their tongue. “Looks like that dingo merc got you, Sergeant.” Captain Garrida blew a short raspberry and gave me a thumbs-down. “That means you’re his personal cock sleeve. You’re gonna be living in a kennel and eating nothing but jism for the next few weeks until he gets bored of fucking you and spits you over a fire for din-din. Try again, and don’t get raped this time.”

I turned and spotted the big, dusky griffon who led our resistance cell, watching as she strutted up to the firing line. She was hefting her personal cannon, of all things. I snapped off a quick salute to the Captain and then smashed the red button to get the holograms going again.

Damarkinds were referred to by a number of jocular slurs that seemed to blunt the sheer horror of what they were and how they comported themselves on the battlefield. Just as cleomanni were called satyrs, imps, devils, hoof-men, greed goblins, and sideburns, damarkinds were variously called things like dingoes, dildos, dogheads, dorks, dicks, dick-dudes, dimbulbs, dummykins, and so forth. Low on intellect, high on aggression. No grasp of tactics or strategy, but a firm grasp of wanton brutality. Easy to outmaneuver. Difficult to overpower.

We may have joked about how slow-witted they were, but there was nothing particularly humorous about them. I’d had my fair share of nightmares regarding the horrible creatures, and that was years and years before Dodge. Hell, before high school, even. Hoodoo’s death had dredged up memories I’d tried to suppress. When I was nine, I’d happened upon some magazines that weren’t exactly age-appropriate, with accounts of the conflict and interviews conducted by war reporters with the traumatized survivors of damarkind attacks.

The brutality of their actions was beyond despicable. It was absolutely abominable. Stallions were flayed and gutted, their entrails strewn all over, their meat cooked and eaten, their skins and skulls taken as gruesome trophies. Mares suffered even worse humiliations, their legs tied to their own bedposts as dozens of the monsters took turns ravishing them. Even foals weren’t spared. They liked to eat fillies like me alive, right in front of our parents, savoring the adults’ terror as they stripped morsels of flesh from our screaming little bodies. They strung our little hooves into necklaces when they were finished devouring the rest of us.

I was a tearful wreck. I inquired of my mother as to what, exactly, the word rape meant. I knew what war meant. Armed conflict, obviously. Even at that age, I’d studied the history of Equestria’s ancient wars intently. The concept of war rape, on the other hand, eluded my understanding. It was such an odd-looking word, almost violent and suggestive by its own nature. She turned as pale as sheet. She demanded to know where I even heard such a vile word. When I showed her the magazine, she broke down sobbing and explained a few unpleasant facts about the world to me. Mom had to repeat herself a few times because I asked her to drop the euphemisms and be honest. I was precocious that way. My curiosity was insatiable.

Mom sat me down and explained the birds and the bees and how sometimes, violence came into the picture. She was even brave enough to impart painful memories of an encounter from her youth that turned foul when her date wanted to go all the way and she didn’t, and she framed it as a cautionary tale. As she spoke, my anger and confusion had deepened. I couldn't comprehend it. Everlasting trauma inflicted on somepony else, just for a little temporary pleasure. My newfound knowledge made my whole world seem somehow darker and more hostile.

My mother implored me to find a responsible stallion like my father, and not to make the same mistakes that she did. All the while, I tried reassuring her that she didn’t do anything to deserve what was done to her. Turning the lecture back upon her had felt strange, at the time, like something that I was much too little to be doing. It felt very adult, consoling someone more than twice my size. She tearfully accepted my youthful wisdom, calling me her little treasure, not caring one whit about the attachment issues she was unwittingly causing. I had no anchor. I had no one to rely on but myself. I craved guidance and nurturing but was given platitudes and meaningless praise instead. I needed someone to relate my own problems to. I needed a real authority figure in my life. And yet, I realized the truth while far too young. My parents were just as lost and adrift as I was.

After that little talk, all throughout the rest of middle school, I was paranoid around colts. Before, I never paid the shape of my reproductive organs much heed. Afterward, I felt vulnerable. Exposed. It felt like I could be mounted at any time, without warning, for no good reason at all. My self-esteem went into the toilet. My grades suffered. Anxiety became the defining condition of my life. When I started having my big, sloppy heats, that changed. Big time. I started pursuing the opposite sex, and hell, even the same sex. I’d already bedded five colts and one filly by my sophomore year of high school, and the fucking only intensified the year after. Everypony in school thought I was the proverbial town bike, but it wasn't like I gave a damn that they were having less fun than I was.

It was all fun and games, of course, until I got knocked up.

My father and I had an argument over it. It was contraceptive failure. The condom broke, that was all. I was just a dumb teen. I didn’t know any spells that could’ve prevented my pregnancy. That sort of magic was out of my league, at the time. After it happened, I got a test kit, and my suspicions were confirmed. I wasn’t very far along, but I did have a foal on the way. My father was furious. He screamed that I was a dumb slut who loved getting mounted bareback by colts I’d only just met, so I could feel it when they nutted in me. He pushed me down the stairs. My world tumbled end over end. I could see the shock on his face when it dawned on him what he’d just done, and then darkness. When I woke up, he was crying beside my hospital bed and apologizing profusely and begging me to forgive him over and over.

I could somehow find it in me to forgive that stallion, but not that other one. Not the one that he turned into sometimes. Not the drunken lunatic with the wild, hellish eyes with the whites on top. I loved my father. I practically worshiped him. My thoughts at the time were a jumble, like a crossword puzzle I couldn’t piece together. Like a bad refrigerator magnet poem that clung to every inch of me. Why would he hurt me like that? Why would he hurt my foal, why was I empty inside, why was I bleeding, why was I hurting, why—

What did I do that was wrong?

Somehow, he managed to talk his way out of it. Somehow, he managed to talk me out of accusing him, too. Together, we made it look like an accident. I didn’t want him to go to prison. In spite of what he’d done, I didn’t want him to suffer for it. That was how much I loved him. I didn’t want to tear the family apart and leave my mom and my sisters penniless, either. It wasn’t them that he was shitting all over. He loved them. It was just me. Just the black sheep.

I could take it. I could take the pain, for their sake. I figured, hell, he’d just expedited things. Except he hadn’t. It wasn’t his choice to make. It was mine. Even now, just thinking about it made me nauseous. I took my seething rage out on the nearest holo, gritting my teeth as I choked back tears. I couldn’t reach back into the past. My magic wasn’t that powerful. I couldn’t erase my own personal hell. Just kill. Kill my problems away, one beamcaster pulse at a time.

When I recovered from my ordeal, it wouldn’t be long before I was asking him for things again. I wanted this, and I wanted that, and I was daddy’s great big spoiled brat. It gave me a sense of control. Of belonging. When he wasn’t getting drunk and beating the piss out of me, he was like a carnival claw. All I had to do was push the right buttons in the right sequence, and out popped my prizes. That lasted until he got sick and tired of me and practically booted me out of the house.

It happened more than once. I’d put in some bullshit résumé, a job offer would fall through, I’d move back in, he’d start drinking again, and then, I’d wave goodbye, get on a bus to Baltimare, and come crawling back through the pouring rain when that one turned out to be a bust, too. Eventually, I gave up and got a job at the Gridiron, which was one step above fucking stripping. Never got the point of stripping, anyway. Ponies didn’t need clothing, so taking it off in a sexy way was like trading one outfit for another. Stupid aliens and their stupid imported cultural artifacts.

In my adulthood, while falling into the routine drudgery of my job—not much of a career, really, just a job—I’d forgotten much of what I’d learned in my youth, spending my days bombarded by news and propaganda and datasphere access bills and taxes and dating and fucking worthless, awkward, under-sexed stallions, living in my ratty apartment in Dodge and trying to accommodate my jobless vagabond sisters. They’d walk out and shop for clothes in the evening, and I’d walk in and fuck some poor, toothless dumbass who had trouble paying his half of dinner. It was the usual stream of nonsense.

Eventually, Hoodoo got some steady income and figured out how to pay her portion of the rent, and Windy bounced around a bit, but before that, dad let them mooch off of me for months and months. Not that I didn’t mind the company. They were always pleasant to be around. Until they weren’t. Until my father filled their ears with lies, that I wanted to sign up for the war because I was a killer at heart. I’d somehow forgotten it all. Things didn’t settle down for me until I found Barley, and even then, it wasn’t long after that I had a war to fight. My unit had become my new family. My real family. The brothers Barricade and Barrage, and their stupid pratfalls. Sunnyvale, the thrill-seeker. Comet, the quiet one. Terror, that despicable asshole. Yes, even Sierra, the unkempt bum. They helped me forget. My duty helped me forget.

Somewhere, deep down inside me, sitting at the very tip-top of the mountain of corpses of all the people I’d slain over the years, there was a little purple chest with a heart-shaped lock. It was where I kept my emotions. If I shoved it all down and focused on the present, then I didn’t have to think about any of it. I could stick it back in the little lockbox and throw away the key. Just like Hoodoo and Windy.

Learning of the scope of our enemies’ atrocities was what convinced me to enlist to begin with, even if none of us had the full picture. They told us about the mass graves, but no one told us a damn thing about slavery, trafficking, or experimentation. They figured it was too demoralizing, apparently. I was wasting myself in that stupid bar, anyhow. That bastard Emlan Broggas said it himself. I did have a knack for killing. That, in itself, I found a tad unusual. Charger pilots and tank crews weren’t trained the same as front-line infantry. I should’ve been all but useless outside a cockpit, and yet, I wasn’t doing half-bad.

We all went through basic, along with our pilot training for the vehicles we were meant to crew, of course, but the rest of our training focused on how to survive if, for instance, we had to crawl from the wrecks of our burning vehicles and escape on the hoof. We were trained in basic martial arts and close-quarters defense, because logic dictated that if the enemy discovered us away from our vehicles, the resulting battle would likely be an ambush at close range.

Escaping the enemy and breaking contact was always a priority in such circumstances. I never had a particularly difficult time with that, what with my magic. Nevertheless, we were all trained as if we didn’t have access to magic all the time, just in case. Escape was an art form in and of itself. One had to be mindful to avoid basic things like light sources at night, but also, the not-so-obvious things, like staying in terrain depressions and avoiding silhouetting one’s body against the sky, and using natural concealment that matched the color of one’s camouflage, or one’s actual coat if they happened to not be wearing anything.

However, we were never put through Advanced Caster Markspony or any gunnery training that wasn’t necessary for crewing a vehicle. I wasn’t trained as a grunt. I was trained as crew. And yet, for months, I’d been doing grunt duty. Aside from occasionally getting tunnel vision and failing to maintain formation, I’d found that I wasn’t as bad of a shot as I thought I was. I wanted to take my training further. I never knew when I’d be trapped behind enemy lines with nothing but my caster and my Orbit to keep me company. When and if that happened, avoiding capture was of the utmost importance.

In my three years of captivity, I had not been severely maltreated, and I chalked that up more to luck than anything. Down here, on the ground, all bets were off, and the consequences of being apprehended on the battlefield by the Confederacy or abducted by mercenaries were of the most dire sort. I needed something with which to end my own life if capture was inevitable.

Captain Garrida stepped up to one of the adjacent lanes, racked the charging handle on Thumper, and started the practice sequence. Her first shot in the enclosed space almost bowled me over. Every single time she fired that monstrous rifle of hers, my eyes instinctively squeezed shut and my teeth were rattled from the overpressure. She was launching inert 30mm rounds downrange, striking one target after another with alarming precision and speed. Her freakishly huge rifle was sending gouts of shredded tires from the backstop flying into the air with each shot.

I decided I wouldn’t bitch about it. I took it as a realistic challenge, trying to stay alert and aware of the incoming simulated hostiles even when the outgoing fire was so distracting. One after another, I blasted the Confederate soldier holograms, double-tapping the armored ones in the chest and then going for the head. When the damarkinds started showing up, I didn’t freak out. I swept my beams over them and punched several holes through their weak spots. The simulation accurately represented how difficult their armor was to pierce with a PF-27. It took multiple precise hits to put each one down.

I wished I had an Ultima Arcanum Mark-14 Rex. A true large-bore pulsecaster, like what pegasus Stormtroopers used. They packed a much bigger wallop at the cost of reduced fire rate and faster power pack depletion. Due to their high output, their range and barrier penetration capabilities were considerable, but they required patience and skill to use correctly, hence why they were issued mostly to elite troops. They were very handy as damarkind-killers. Streamcasters worked wonders, too. One didn’t have to be nearly as precise with a streamcaster as they did with a pulsecaster. Even the slightest hit to an exposed joint could sear ligaments black in a split-second, turning a determined adversary into a stumbling, screaming mess.

Dragoons used non-standard casters which had housings that superficially resembled a Rex, but had neither a recognizable model number nor anything like stock internals, and their output was so great—almost on-par with a medium caster—it would certainly flash-fry any ordinary emitter. The firepower of the average Dragoon was more on-par with an infantry fighting vehicle or battlesuit than an ordinary soldier.

Even with a Rex, there was no getting through neuterized armor unless one used projectile weaponry, and even then, the torso plating most dingo mercs wore was too thick for most bullets or flechettes to pierce. Even with the benefit of a belt-fed machine gun, unless I had a vehicle-mounted fifty-cal, I’d basically be praying that the suppressive fire and the risk that a round might find a chink in their armor would be enough to dissuade them from charging our position and simply foalnapping us right out of our own gun nests so they could snack on us later.

Damarkinds were always a problem. They were never an easy opponent. Some of the worst bloodbaths imaginable occurred whenever damarkinds and cleomanni teamed up in a combined-arms strategy. The Confederacy frequently used damarkind mercs to repel our charges and to keep us at bay while their own, more disciplined troops picked us off one by one at range.

That was how the invasion of Meadowgleam turned into hell itself. Thus denied our close-quarters advantage, we were forced to fight the satyrs on their own terms, at a great distance. They were more than happy to sit behind layers of tank traps and barbed wire and kill us from a thousand meters away with orbital strikes and close air support, with damarkind cannon fodder piling up in front of them to keep us out of their midst. If we were bogged down and denied our ability to conduct lightning raids, we were as good as dead. Maneuver warfare and rapid assaults were central to Equestrian combat doctrine.

Eventually, the simulated GARG troopers started showing up in my lane. Each one was largely impervious to my fire and extremely fast. Only the thinnest slivers of their armor at the joints were vulnerable, and only the parts not covered by their handheld ballistic shields. I managed to bring down two of the simulated targets, but the other three were already too close. The holograms thrust their swords across the firing line. The buzzer sounded. 7,550 points. It was enough to notch me up to second place on the scoreboard.

My eyes tracked up to the name beside the first-place score, and it was Corporal Shooting Star. She had an impossible 11,540 points, ahead of my score by a very large margin. That particular course followed the same program every single time. That would have meant that she’d brought down all five of the simulated GARG troopers before they could reach the firing line, and then continued to engage and destroy more of the targets, perhaps even surviving a full thirty seconds longer. That required more than precision. One needed to be almost supernaturally fast to do it. I made a mental note to ask her about it later.

It was a good thing they weren’t real Gaffs, because none of us, save for an equal number of Dragoons, had a hope in hell of taking them in a fight. The simulation’s depiction of the Gafalze Arresgrippen was propagandistic nonsense, calculated to give trainees the impression that they stood a fighting chance against a GARG trooper so they would stand and fight rather than doing the sensible thing and fleeing for their lives. The reality was that even one GARG trooper would find it trivial to close the distance and cut a pony’s head clean off her shoulders, and that was the case even if the encounter began with both combatants a hundred meters apart and the pony was screaming and firing her weapon the entire time.

Garrida had just about finished up, too. “Dang, that’s a nice score, Sergeant. Good shooting.”

“Permission to speak freely, Sir?” I said.

“Never needed it before,” Garrida muttered under her breath. “Granted.”

“Is Cloverleaf former Army, or one of the militia?”

“The latter. Can’t you tell?”

I nodded. “I figured that might be the case. Does she know that you’re technically not supposed to salute NCOs?”

Garrida gave me a surprised look, like I’d caught her claw in a cookie jar. “Hmm, probably not. Are you gonna give her the talk, Sergeant?”

I shook my head. “Sir, with all due respect, I’m not about to reprimand a mare in an infirmary bed who came inches from taking her own life because of what those fucking animals did to her. I can’t be mad at Clover for something that isn’t her fault. We’re taking ponies who had no prior military experience and sticking casters on their backs and using them as cannon fodder. That won’t bode well for us in the future. Not when we could’ve empowered them with the knowledge and self-confidence to survive, instead. Experienced troops don’t grow on trees.”

“So, what are you gonna do about her, then?” Garrida said.

“As far as I’m concerned, Clover can salute whoever she damn-well-pleases. Only a fucking anal-retentive would give a shit about how an injured warrior chooses to show respect to her superiors. I’m not about to pull that ‘I work for a living’ shit on her. Ponies like her shouldn’t have to be fighting. They should be living their lives in peace. We are their shield. We should be protecting them. To tell you the truth, I’m angrier with whoever promoted her to a junior NCO rank without even teaching her what her actual responsibilities are.”

Captain Garrida sighed, shaking her head, a remorseful look on her face. Apparently, she didn’t mind that I’d thrown some shade on her whole operation. Perhaps it was because she resembled the remark. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed yet, Sergeant, but we’re having a hard enough time just surviving. We do what training we can, but our time and resources are limited. There’s only so much we can do.”

“Of course, Sir. There were a few other things I thought I’d ask, however.”

“Go ahead.”

“First off, do we have any liquid altrenogest?”

Garrida laughed. “Heat suppressors? Nope. All out. I mean, I think we’re all out. You’d have to ask Argent. Why, is it pony breeding season again?”

I blushed severely, but rather than clamming up, I held nothing back; if ever there was a time for honesty, it was now. “I’m on my estrus, yes. It could make me combat-ineffective. I have uterine dysfunction due to an old war wound, and the combination of those two factors is making me nauseous. To be honest, I feel like shit either way, but at least with the hormones, I feel a little less shitty.”

Garrida wasn’t laughing anymore. “Oh. Sorry to hear that. It’d be nice if we could dig some up, but I can’t make any promises. That shit’s getting harder to come by.”

I breathed a heavy sigh. “Second on my list, do we have any cyanide pills?”

“Why would you want one of those?” The Captain gave me the side-eye something fierce.

“In case capture is unavoidable,” I said. “If I had a choice between being tortured or being poisoned, I think I’d choose poison.”

“Cyanide isn’t a good way to go, either.” The big griffon shook her head slowly. “I’ve seen it, up close and personal. Agonal respirations. Pig-snorting and all that. In any case, no, we don’t have anything like that.”

To say I was disappointed would be putting it mildly.

“There was one last thing,” I said.

“Yeah, what?” Garrida kept eyeing me suspiciously, like I was about to call in a favor.

I was sick of the unit-shuffling. I needed ponies I knew. Ponies I could trust with my life. Ponies who would have my back when the fire got thick and the shit hit the proverbial fan, just like old times. The way the Camp Crazy Horse cell of the Liberation Front did things, units were dissolved and formed at the drop of a hat, and squad assignments often occurred on-the-spot, right after mission briefings. This gave them a lot of flexibility in assigning personnel, but it also meant that one would never see any friendly faces when going into combat. That was a recipe for disaster.

I regarded Garrida with my best pleading expression. “I need a unit of my own. Hoof-picked. At least seven. I can’t get anything done if we keep shuffling ponies. With your permission, I would take full responsibility for training and honing them into an effective fighting force. Put them through Basic Caster Markspony, Combatives, Escape and Evasion, that sort of thing.”

Garrida let out a hearty belly-laugh. “A pilot? Putting infantry through drills? That’s rich.”

“They’re not infantry yet,” I said. “They’re poorly-trained militia. Even my own self-defense training for stranded pilots is a big step up for them. Once I’ve got them up to speed, we can have one of our advanced instructors—if we’ve got any—sharpen them up some more, but after that, they’ll be assigned to me. They’ll be my squad. My unit, and mine alone. Ponies I can actually work with. Ponies who can keep up with me in a fight.”

“An interesting concept.” Garrida nodded. “And what, exactly, do you plan to do with this squad?”

I walked over to the big map poster of Equestria taped on the rear wall of the firing range and smacked it with my hoof for emphasis. “We’re going to put the hurt on the Confederacy in a big way. With your permission and support, we would jointly conduct raids on high-value facilities. Cripple the ability of the Confederate Army and CSF to deploy troops and air support in the region.”

The Captain scratched her head, her gaze skeptical. “Huh, that’s a nice idea you’ve got there, Sergeant. It’s not really our job, though. We’re supposed to be keeping our heads down, especially with the heat turned up as high as it’s been lately. You’re probably going to be transferred out of here, anyway, as soon as your Charger is back in action. And then, what use would you have for infantry under your command?”

“Support,” I said. “I need ponies to help mark targets and spot enemies for me. They’d ride in a Centaur and back me up with recon duty. They would also assault and make entry into buildings as needed, to set up forward observation posts.”

Garrida rubbed her chin with a claw. “I like the way you think, Sergeant. That sounds like a fantastic idea. Except, y’know, if things get too hot, you’d basically be stuck escorting them.”

“It’s worth the tradeoff.” I nodded. “I need more eyes, and since we don’t have air superiority, I can’t send up anything except maybe the occasional Orbit. Besides, if I’m close enough, I can always use my locus to hide them.”

“Who do you want for this?” Garrida sighed.

“Private Haybale, Private Jury Rig, Private Ginger Snap, Private Hexhead, Specialist Wind Shear, Corporal Shooting Star, and Corporal Cloverleaf.”

“Wind Shear is one of my better technicians.” Garrida frowned, crossing her forelegs and leaning back, giving me an imperious look. “What reason do you have for wanting to distract him from his other duties?”

“We’re going to be scavving out there, too. We need a tech who can spot the valuable hardware and help us tag it for salvage teams. I also need somepony who’s handy at field repairs, slicing into security systems, sabotaging enemy hardware, that sort of thing.”

“Well, he’s no hacker, but he does know his way around a wrench and a voltmeter.” Garrida shrugged. “He’s a smart kid.”

“We could have Cinderblock train him on security penetration,” I said. “Bring him up to speed.”

“Possible,” Garrida said. “However, it would also be time-consuming. Those are skills you don’t just learn overnight.”

“Doesn’t matter. I’m going to be putting all of them through hell, first. With your permission, Sir, I’m gonna make real soldiers out of them.”

“You’re a tenacious one.” Garrida beamed proudly. “I like that. Okay, if you think you can do it, then when you get back from this mission, you can have them.”

“Thank you, Sir!” I grinned, pleased with the progress I’d made. “I won’t let you down. That reminds me of something, though. You sure we won’t need a hacker on this op? Automated base security is probably going to be a real nuisance for us.”

Garrida shook her head. “You kidding me? We don’t have a hacker who’s enough of a wiz to even touch that shit. We’re talking high-level quantum crypto you couldn’t crack in a million billion years. Even Celestia herself wouldn’t be able to spell her way through that shit. If you guys encounter automated security, the only way you’re getting through is if Bell plants brick after brick of CH on whatever the fuck it is and sends it to Tartarus.”

“Oh. Well then, I guess it’s just the three of us.”

“That’s right.” Garrida sighed. “Besides, I’m pretty sure only three of you can fit on the Skimmer, anyway.”

I gave her a puzzled look. “The what?”

// … // … // … // … // … //

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” I muttered.

Electrokinetic repulsors—the centerpiece of all contragrav lifters—were an oddly advanced piece of Confederate tech which apparently used Q-vacuum interactions and generated and accelerated packets of virtual mass through some unspecified energy conversion method.

They gobbled juice like nobody’s business, which was why they tended to be restricted to small, lightweight platforms no heavier than the average commuter car, and even then, those were typically of composite monocoque construction to save weight. Scale effects meant that micro-fusion reactors became excessively large and cumbersome for contragrav aircraft weighing more than a few tons. That was why Confederate gunships and most of their larger vertical-flight assets were compound helicopters, and the much smaller Confederate drones and personal transports were contragravs.

The techs had a little surprise for us, something they’d been building off in a far corner of the hangar. Something that made me question the sanity of this entire organization.

The salvaged contragrav drone from back when Bell and I had gone raiding for medical supplies had been converted into a three-meter-long hoverbike, all TIG-welded aluminum tube-frames and thin layers of fresh LAMIBLESS, with the four electrokinetic contragrav repulsors positioned on moving arms at the four corners of the vehicle and the reactor in the center, tucked under the faux leather seat. It possessed what appeared to be a pair of small pyrojet engines in the aft section, presumably for high-speed forward flight.

The 20mm autocannon had been moved to a pintle mount in a tailgunner position and the nose of the death-defying contraption had been fitted with a searchlight and quad-beamcaster array. The camo job they’d done was countershaded such that it was the light blue of a clear sky from below, and the speckled white of a snowy mountain from above. Apparently, it was operated with an inscrutable array of handlebars, pedals and levers by its single pilot, with just enough room for a passenger in the middle and a tailgunner at the rear.

What the techs called a Skimmer was a contragrav drone meant for ponies to sit on and ride. Exposed. To the open air.

I kept looking back at the Captain, and then at the vehicle, my jaw slack, making these little squeaks of utter dismay.

“Sierra’s flying it,” Garrida said.

I fell to my haunches. “Oh, Celestia, why? Why have you forsaken me?”

“That’s ‘cause you touch yourself at night, Sergeant.” Garrida chuckled.

I hoped she was just guessing about that. “I like being alive, not pasted across the damn countryside!”

“Don’t be melodramatic about it. Just enjoy the ride, Storm. And maybe bring a barf bag. Make that three.”

// … // … // … // … // … //

The Briefing Room was quiet and empty, except for the four of us huddled in the corner. The lights were dimmed and the projector was off. None of us had the time or the patience for slideshows. Instead, me, Bellwether, Sierra, and Garrida pored over printouts of the layout of the base while I helpfully held up the mote of a basic illumination spell in our midst.

“Pur Sang Arsenal.” Garrida’s claw landed on the facility proper, nestled in a pass in the Crystal Mountains. “A combined Charger base and airfield, hidden away in the mountains north of Everfree, at Pur Sang Peak. The runway and hangars at this facility were mainly intended for launching interceptors in case enemy bombers took an interest in the base. The facilities for aircraft are very limited and primarily intended to service transport aircraft coming and going on an as-needed basis.” Her claw passed over a few squarish buildings. “Those old bunkers are sure to have some good shit in them, if anything valuable was left behind. Our scout reports state that the base’s automated defense systems are still active, so that means scavvers are unlikely to have picked everything clean.”

For the next couple hours, we discussed the best way to get through base security, and after some deliberation, it seemed we’d settled on a plan.

“Why can’t we just walk right in?” I said. “It’s an Imperial Army base. We look like Army on IFF, don’t we?”

Garrida sighed, shaking her head. “We have no idea if our IFF codes are still valid, because the planetary datasphere network is down. If you three approach, the automated defenses could see you as friendly, or they could blow your heads clean off. We’re not gonna take that chance. Assume they’re hostile and use caution on the approach. Sergeant Storm, that’s where your magic comes in. You’re going to have to cloak the Skimmer and remain undetected.

“The Skimmer is equipped with audible heading indicators to help with navigating correctly while blinded by Storm’s magic. Sierra has already been trained in their use. You are to penetrate the base defenses at the southern end, the area with the fewest turrets. Once you’ve done this, you are to advance north until you reach the command center.”

Garrida touched the map with her claw, pointing at one of the largest structures. “This structure, here, with the aerials on top. That’s your objective. That facility houses the base’s Core. Breach in, as quickly as you can, using the rooftop access. Gain control of the Core, and you control the base. If you can’t cut the power gently, plant explosives on the core electronics and server machines and knock the whole damn thing out. Then, head down below to the backup core and reactor and knock those out, too.

“Be careful. If you take out the base power completely, even the backups, then the electric automated doors will be stuck, and the hydraulic ones will be limited to emergency accumulator power only, so you may have to blast your way through some of them, or otherwise find a way to breach their locking mechanisms and crank them open manually.

“From that point, assess the base’s inventory and make the call over aetheric for recovery ops to commence, if necessary. If nothing of value remains, then withdraw and return to base. Otherwise, take the Skimmer back up and stay on-station. Wait for me and my recovery teams to link up with you. Keep us informed if the situation changes and we need to be ready for hostile contacts when we arrive. Everyone clear on what your role is, here?”

We all nodded in unison. “Don’t have to tell us twice,” I said. “I’m bringing Lucky along for recon. Sounds like we’re gonna need eyes on the backs of our heads for this one.”

“Then get to it,” Garrida said. “Try and be back home in time for some well-earned chow. Dismissed!”

// … // … // … // … // … //

I held a hoof over my mouth, my stomach lurching and cramping over and over. I leaned up against the autocannon’s receiver as the dead, empty plains on the outskirts of Everfree City sped past me.

“Please, Sierra,” I mumbled. “I’m—I’m gonna throw up.”

I was so sick of throwing up.

“What was that?” Sierra shouted back at me over the whipping winds. “Can’t hear you, Storm!”

She was in love. I could tell. Who am I to question her devotion to raw, breakneck speed and cobbled-together shit-piles?

“Never mind,” I muttered.

Riding on top of the Skimmer—the three of us sitting in tandem, with me facing backwards—felt nothing like being in a Charger, even one engaging in hard maneuvers. It was absolutely nauseating. We were going a good four hundred kilometers an hour while suspended only a few meters off the ground. Occasionally, Sierra would pull up hard and raise us a few meters to surmount the taller obstacles. The rattling contragrav drives churned my guts. The terrain was a blur, rocks and bushes stretching into thin black lines. Streams and flickers of blue phase-shifted energy snapped and crackled in the corners of my field of vision like electric arcs. The only thing keeping us from plummeting to our deaths were the fall-protection harnesses we wore, clipped to eyes that had been welded to the frame.

It was a maniac machine, built from scavenged junk by stressed-out Charger mechanics working under time constraints, for only the most unhinged of rebels to pilot.

My only solace was that I, like my companions, was wearing a heavy winter coat over my armor, goggles to keep the wind out of my eyes, and a balaclava to keep the chill off my fur. I tried closing my eyes and tuning the world out. Tried stilling my cramping stomach. The noise of the Skimmer seemed to fade away.

After a few minutes of silent meditation, that was when I heard it. The faint yet unmistakable whop-whop-whop of rotor blades. Gyrodyne. My eyes snapped open and I scanned the sky, and sure enough. There was a speck in the distance at our six o’clock.

I keyed my radio. “Sierra! We got a Con-fed gunship on our tail, about two klicks out! He’s within gun range! Can we go faster?”

“Four hundred’s all I can do!” Sierra said. “It’s electronically limited! Without the damn limiter, the techs tell me we can go twice as fast, but with nothing but this dinky little windshield in front of me, it’d get real uncomfortable real fuckin’ quick.”

A Marbo Aeronautics MA-986 Black Mamba gyrodyne could do five hundred. They had both coaxial rigid rotors and thrust turbofans and were armed to the teeth with a cannon, rocket pods, anti-tank guided missiles, heat-seekers, and other nasty gadgets like targeting pods, electronic countermeasures, and long-range detection suites.

I saw flashes from the bastard’s wing pylons that couldn’t be anything other than FFARs being launched in our general direction. My heart leaped into my fucking throat.

“Oh fuck!” I screamed into the radio. “Evade!”

Sierra pulled hard right, sending us drifting over a hundred meters sideways. There was a ripple of bright flashes and deafening explosions. The ground erupted with pillars of dirt and clouds of flying metal fragments where we’d been just seconds before. The blasts rattled my teeth.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck!” My vocabulary tended to be very limited in situations such as these. I knew nothing but utter panic.

“Hang on!” Sierra shouted. “I’m taking us up!”

She cut the altitude restrictor and angled the Skimmer skyward, sending us rocketing upward at a considerable rate of ascent. In spite of the name, the Skimmer was not limited to hovering only a few meters off the surface. We took to the heavens, the ground departing from below us. I clamped my hoof over my muzzle. It was so different from seeing it through a Charger’s cameras. It was visceral and raw, like how a pegasus must have felt. I looked down with breathless wonder at the ground far below. There was nothing between me and a fall of a thousand meters besides two braided nylon straps at my haunches.

Sierra swung us around so we faced the incoming hostile air contact. “Let’s say hello to these motherfuckers!” She opened up with the beamcasters, four pulsating streams of green lancing out at the enemy gunship. They responded by banking hard to the left.

“Where’s his buddy at, Storm?” Sierra shouted.

I scanned the horizon, looking for the gunship’s wingman. That was when I heard the scream of jets. I looked up, and there was a second gunship diving directly at us, letting off a heat-seeker from the tip of one of their pylons. The missile streaked directly at us.

“Above us!” I shouted. “Flares, flares!”

Sierra slammed her hoof down on the flare deployment button in response. I shrieked as golden orbs rocketed out from right under my ass and to either side of me. For some reason, the flare launchers were located underneath my seat. They’d singed the tip of my tail. I winced as I looked down and rubbed my burnt ass. Did those sons of bitches put them there on purpose?

As we juked hard, the missile meandered off-course towards one of the decoys. Sierra pulled us into a high-gee half-loop, firing her casters at our pursuer while inverted, before rolling us level in a picture-perfect Immelmann. We were vastly more maneuverable than our foes.

As we streaked past the gunship and they entered my arc, I carefully adjusted my aim. I depressed the firing lever and my twenty-millimeter cannon joined the battle with a staccato, booming chorus. The spade grips rattled in my hooves. The whole Skimmer bucked violently from the recoil. After a few seconds of walking my fire onto the target, bright flashes rippled across the enemy gyrodyne gunship’s shark-like black hull. Their tail boom snapped off.

“Yeah!” I screamed. “Fucker! That’s what you get, you rat bastard!”

A gyrodyne wasn’t like a conventional helo, where the loss of a tail rotor would send one plummeting straight to the ground. Coaxial choppers had no tail rotor to speak of. The tail empennage provided critical directional stability, however, and after they began lazily drifting in a circle, it wasn’t long before they realized their only option was to shed all their airspeed and descend vertically to the ground. That, in turn, made them a sitting duck. It was all over for them.

Sierra whipped us into a sliding turn, possible only because our craft lacked any airfoils to speak of. We rocketed towards the crippled gunship at a breakneck pace, our beamcasters flaring. With her precision marksponyship, Sierra hit them right in the rotor mast and plucked their main rotors off the top of their fuselage like a sadistic unicorn foal methodically ripping the wings off a fly with her magic. The thing dropped like a stone.

The Mamba pilots punched out right then and there, firing their ejection seats. The explosive bolts that would have ordinarily severed the rotors to allow the crew to safely eject instead chucked the remainder of the rotor mast high into the air, and in what must’ve been one of the unluckiest events I’d ever witnessed in any battle, I watched in stunned silence as the stump of the rotor mast beaned the gunner in the head on the way back down.

The impact made a thunk loud enough to be heard over the din of the electrokinetics and was hard enough to knock his helmet off. As much as I despised the enemy, I winced in sympathy. That had to have hurt like a son of a bitch. The pilot was alert and flailing his limbs, but the gunner hung limply from the cords of his parachute. One down, one to go.

The other gunship launched both of its infrared missiles at us in a single salvo. They weren’t taking any chances. Sierra launched more flares, pulling us into a loop. My tail was actually on fire, this time.

“My fucking tail!” I whined.

We pulled into a dive and I frantically patted at my ass, the air currents putting the fire out. However, there was still something smoking in the depleted flare launcher.

As the smoke rapidly increased in volume, my eyes widened with horror. “Fire! We’re on fucking fire!”

Using my levitation magic, I pulled out the fire extinguisher stowed along the vehicle’s frame, placed the nozzle in the flare launcher and let loose with a blast of halon. The smoke began to subside.

Bellwether, who’d been silent as a ghost the entire time, chose that moment to voice his displeasure. “You crazy bitches had better get us there in one piece!”

“Shut up, Bell!” Sierra said. “We’re doin’ the best we can!”

“That’s insubordinate! Insubordinate!”

Sierra glared back at him. “Do I look like I give a fuck? Bell, you’re gonna shut that ass you call a face and lemme pilot this piece of shit, or we’re all gonna get turned into fucking cat food, you dumbass! You can take it out of my hide later, if we’re still alive!”

“If we’re still alive in the next few minutes, you’re gettin’ a fuckin’ medal!” Bell shouted. “Pull us up underneath this son of a bitch, I got a little something for him!”

Sierra pulled a drifting one-eighty that would be impossible with anything other than a contragrav, following the gunship’s movements as it tried evading us. She poured on the speed, our pyrojet engines burning red-hot, catching up with them before they could lose us. We ascended through a cloud layer, the world briefly going white all around us. As Bell instructed, she pulled us in close to the underside of the gunship’s fuselage. I could feel the rotor downwash whipping against my jacket as I looked up at the gunship’s belly. We were right underneath them.

Bell reached up and slapped a lump of plastique on the underside of the Mamba. I clamped my eyes shut, whispering profanity under my breath. Sierra peeled off, and once we had a good twenty-five meters between us and them, she raised us level with the gunship’s bubble canopy.

The gunship pilot and gunner both did a horrified double-take. Sierra waved her hooves beside her head and stuck out her tongue mockingly, and I gave them the Leg of Honor, slapping one foreleg into the crook of the other, upraised one. As Sierra banked hard, Bell set off the explosives. The gunship’s fuselage was split in half, right under the engines. An instant later, aerodynamic forces tore the rest into tiny little pieces of confetti. There was no walking away from that one.

Sierra reared up and stood as far as the restraints would allow, letting out a jubilant cheer. Her tail flicked back and forth across Bellwether’s muzzle.

“Getcher fuckin’ flyswatter out of my fuckin’ face!” he said.

“Hey!” I shouted. “I changed my mind! I love this thi—”

I turned my head over the edge of the Skimmer, pulled my balaclava down and vacated my stomach.

I’d spoken a little too soon.

// … // … // … // … // … //

I shivered, shaking from head to hoof. It wasn’t so much the wind chill that made me feel cold inside, but combination of that, the overall climate, dehydration, and hunger. I’d thrown up a couple more times on the way over. Facing backwards on a flying platform without an enclosed cockpit was one of the most nauseating things I’d ever experienced.

I didn’t get motion-sick while piloting my Mirage, even when taking it to the limit. This was different. I wasn’t desensitized enough to whatever the hell this was. I had to admit, the techs had outdone themselves. The Skimmer was a beast in combat, and Sierra piloted the damn thing like she’d been doing it all her life. Nevertheless, I would’ve preferred to ride my motorcycle, even if it would’ve taken much longer to get to my destination.

Being on my heat without any suppressors and a fucky, shrapnel-wounded foal-oven certainly wasn’t helping matters, nor did the fact that I was so horny that even after mustering every ounce of my self-control and professionalism, and even after getting sick and losing my lunch over the side of the Skimmer, I still couldn’t fucking help myself.

For the past several minutes, I’d taken advantage of the noise and the fact that Sierra and Bell were looking the other way, and without so much as making a single squeak of pleasure, I humped the damn seat until I left a sticky mess in my uniform. I licked my lips and crossed my eyes a little as I came, but other than that, I didn’t make a damn sound. I allowed myself a wry smirk. As it turned out, invisibility magic wasn’t the only thing I could do that was stealthy. I could also stealthsturbate.

I was immensely proud of my accomplishment for all of two minutes, until we came to a stop for a quick map check, and then Bellwether ruined everything.

“Everypony can smell it, Storm,” the old stallion muttered. “I know you’re suffering, but please leave it for when we’re off-duty.”

If that got my cheeks burning, what Sierra added next turned them thermonuclear.

“Damn, and I thought I was the filthiest mare in the ELF!” Sierra guffawed. “Nice goin’, splattercrotch! The techs are gonna love licking the seat clean.”

I turned my head skyward, swallowing the thick lump of shame in my throat. I could just about die. I could throw myself from the Skimmer and that would be the end of my wretched, embarrassing shit-fest of a life.

I looked up at the snowdrifts clinging to the foot of the Crystal Mountains. It was dark. Dark and bitterly cold. Everything was shaded in a dark grayish twilight hue. Snowflakes drifted lazily from the sky. When Sierra brought the Skimmer to a halt to get her bearings again, the air around us was dead still. The silence was eerie.

Sierra consulted a paper map, looking up at the landmarks and checking her field compass. “Okay, we are here.” She tapped her hoof against part of the western end of the range. “We’re a little off course. We should be about ten klicks east. That’s no problem. I can get us over there in just a few minutes.”

Sierra changed course and started picking up speed. The Skimmer’s roaring pyrojets kicked up a plume of snow in our wake, our searchlight cutting through the darkness. We veered into a tree-lined valley, the mountainsides looming ominously over us as we negotiated a winding, frozen river.

There was a deep rumble from behind and above us. We all turned around in our seats. There was something giant plying the skies to our rear, its fog lamps bathing the valley underneath it an incandescent hue.

“Sierra!” Bell shouted. “Go dark!”

Sierra shut the Skimmer’s lights off and hurriedly landed the vehicle, shutting down the engines to reduce our noise output and visual signature. I cloaked the Skimmer while leaving us uncloaked so we could see, and the three of us unlatched our restraints and quickly hunkered down in a snowdrift. Moments later, we were briefly lit up like Celestia herself had dropped the sun on us, but it passed without incident. To our knowledge, we’d remained undetected. We looked up, our jaws agape as the huge dropship soared overhead, flanked by a pair of smaller ones.

The hulking alien craft were painted white and had glowing blue lines running along the edges of their airfoils. The heavy dropship, the one in the center of the formation, had to be a good hundred meters across. I’d never seen one so large. The smaller VTOLs looked like great seabirds, their capacious fuselages suspended on masterfully crafted wings with control surfaces like great metal feathers. They were at once hard-edged and also smooth and sculpted. They were beautiful, ghostly, and completely alien things. I’d never seen anything like them before.

“Is it the Confederacy?” Sierra said.

“No, it ain’t,” Bell muttered. “I’ve never seen that model of dropship in my life, and I know ‘em all. Imperial, Confederate, nemrin, xicare, linnaltan, all of them. Those are literal UFOs.”

I pulled my binoculars out of my saddlebags, trying to see if I could get a better view of them. As I zoomed in on the dropships receding into the distance, I spotted a strange roundel of some kind emblazoned on the side of one of the smaller ones, surrounded with some manner of alien text I didn’t recognize. A few seconds later, they disappeared into the gloom. I blinked a few times and rubbed my eyes. I was almost certain I’d seen them practically vanish into nothingness, like when I cloaked myself. Their logo was a striated blob on a black background. After I mulled it over a few seconds, it finally clicked.

“Was that a brain in a circle?” I wondered aloud.

Bellwether stiffened visibly. “Oh no. Oh fuck, no. Not them. Not here. Please, no.”

“Who’s ‘them’, Bell?” I said.

For a few seconds, Bellwether didn’t say anything. He merely shook his head, his eyes as wide as saucers. “We need to fucking leave. Abort the mission.”

“Why would we do that?” Sierra said. “Who the fuck are these assholes that we’d abort just because they have a few piddling dropships? Well, not piddling, but you get the idea.”

“I am not at liberty to answer that question, Sergeant Sierra.” Bell turned away from her and looked me straight in the eye. “All I can tell the two of you is that we are all in grave danger. Not just the three of us. The whole resistance. Shit, the whole fucking planet.”

That statement gave me pause. “The whole planet? On account of three weird-looking dropships? What can these assholes do to us that the Confederacy can’t?”

“You don’t wanna know,” Bellwether said.

“I don’t think we need to head back just yet, Bell,” Sierra said. “Based on their course and airspeed, I don’t think they’re headed for Pur Sang. They’re on their way somewhere else, further east. We came all this way. Splashed two gunships for our trouble. Shouldn’t we reconnoiter and see, at the very least?”

Bell deliberated on the question for a few moments, his jaw set angrily. “Maybe. But let’s wait a little more before we get going again. We do not want to be spotted by those guys.”

I frowned. Bell knew something about the mystery aerial contacts, but he wasn’t telling us. It was some spook shit, apparently. The way he was so disquieted by their presence was disturbing to me, in turn. Bellwether was a stallion who could look a Kark straight in the eye and take it down with a knife and some explosives without the slightest bit of hesitation. If something had him freaked out enough to call for us to scrap a mission, it had to be something really, really bad.

I drank a few gulps of water from a canteen and chewed idly on a ration bar while we waited. I had to fill my aching stomach up with something. My head was on a swivel the entire time, looking for any signs that I should hunker back down to avoid detection.

“I think the coast is clear, now,” Bell said. “We’ll continue with the mission, but if they show up again, we gotta go, and we’ve got to do it in such a way that they can’t trace us back. If they do start following us, the smartest thing to do would be for us to simply scuttle the Skimmer and scatter in all directions. I’m not joking. This is not something you wanna fuck around with.”

“Really, Bell?” I said. “Strand ourselves? Just because of some weird brain-in-a-circle guys?”

Bellwether glared at me. “It’s either that, or we condemn me, you, Sierra, and every single pony at Camp Crazy Horse to a horrible death. If we’re compromised, and those ‘brain-in-circle guys’ are the cause, the smartest thing to do would be for me to blow our vehicle into little tiny bits and for each of us to run as fast and as far as our legs can take us and get in the damn woods. That is correct. That’s also why we’re going silent. No radio transmissions, period. Is that understood?”

Sierra and I shared a look of mild shock, and when we looked back at Bell, it was clear he wasn’t joking in the slightest. He literally meant that the wisest course of action, if we were detected and followed by this new, unfamiliar foe, was to maroon ourselves and split up so we couldn’t be tracked.

“Yes, Sir,” I said.

Bell’s contingency plan didn’t make any sense to me at all. The Skimmer was an order of magnitude faster than moving on the hoof. From my perspective, the best method of escape would involve its use, rather than its destruction. The three of us mounted the vehicle and Sierra fired the reactor and contragrav drives back up, the electrokinetics building to their characteristic rattling whine and the pyrojets flaring with ethereal heat. In no time at all, we were back up to cruising speed. I had a lot to ponder on the way to our destination.

After a couple more minutes, we crested a hill and encountered a snow-buried road with dead street lamps, their foundations hidden by a few feet of powder. The upper halves of each of the buried street lights snaked up through a mountain pass until they stopped at a checkpoint with a chain-link fence and retractable bollards. Beyond that loomed a network of ominous-looking concrete bunkers and automated gun towers with faceted, angular armor. Sierra brought us to a skidding halt, facing us perpendicular to the road. I scanned the area over a klick ahead with my binos.

The turrets were still moving. Still scanning for targets. Each one sported a twin-forty, like on the head of my Mirage. They also came equipped with a spinning aerial search radar. In the center, above the autocannons, was the baleful eye of a heavy beamcaster gimbal. The turret was an all-purpose system, capable of engaging armor, air targets, and incoming artillery and mortar shells alike.

Just barely poking out of the top of the snow layer were what looked like the burnt-out husks of a few Confederate Conqueror tank turrets. Some wayward enemy tank platoon had made their way up the pass years ago, only to be fried by the turrets. After that, they probably tried hitting the base from the air, only for the automated air defenses to swat them down. At some point, the base must have been designated as a low-priority target and the invasion force’s efforts focused elsewhere, because the attacks had ceased and the defenses were still standing.

“Fucking Omni-turrets, Bell?” I said. “And they’re still active? Geez.”

Those turrets could fry a main battle tank instantly. If we were engaged by one, we would instantly shatter into a cloud of aluminum, composites, blood, and bone. We were nothing but a great big clay pigeon, and an Omni was like Salzaon Granthis himself with a shotgun full of birdshot.

“Cloak us,” Bellwether said. “We’re going in.”

“Here goes nothing,” I whispered.

I turned to sit crosswise in the seat with my hind-hooves braced against the contragrav’s frame, angling my head forward and balancing my Orbit’s weight on my back. After hitting my stopwatch, I covered us and the Skimmer in an invisibility field, plunging us into darkness. Without an exterior hull to redirect light around, the only way I could cloak us completely was by cloaking our eyeballs as well. We were completely blind. My invisibility magic made us invisible not only to the naked eye, but to radar as well, which was a good thing, since robotic auto-turrets tended to use millimeter-wave, infrared, and terahertz detection systems instead of pure optical recognition. The entire electromagnetic spectrum was nullified, not just visible light.

That also made our radios useless. Only aetheric responders ignored the cloak. Chargers could transmit many kilobytes of data over aetheric because they had numerous aetherbits in their comms gear, and those systems cost as much as a few battle tanks all on their own. For full bandwidth communication, Stealth Courser pilots still had to expose our antennas, however.

I pinged the area around us with my echolocation magic, feeling for the cliffsides at the edge of the pass. The soft, powdery snow confounded my efforts, reducing my effective spatial resolution. I’d never noticed that effect before, but then again, I couldn’t recall having ever used my invisibility magic in the snow, either. The Confederacy preferred arid or temperate rainforest climates over the cold tundra or taiga, and many of their worlds reflected this preference.

“Okay, right eighty-seven,” I said.

Sierra nosed the craft over until we lined up with the road. We were off to a good start.

I let off another ping. “Forward, slow.”

Sierra throttled the Skimmer up a bit, until we were moving at about a cantering pace. I pinged our surroundings again. We were going to run off the road unless we corrected course.

“Left eleven degrees,” I commanded.

Sierra listened closely to the device the technicians had installed, which let off one audible click with each degree of rotation. Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. After about a minute, we had moved a couple hundred meters from our original position. I kept adjusting our course, relaying commands to Sierra based on the information gleaned by my magic pings.

My echolocation spells weren’t quite like seeing. They were more like feeling. Everything around us was reduced to a tactile map in my mind’s eye. I could feel the terrain. I could feel my compatriots’ heartbeats. I could feel everything.

Minute after minute passed. I grit my teeth as I struggled to keep the Skimmer invisible. It was such a complex object. So many exposed, skeletal bits. That made it more difficult. Contiguous surfaces were easier to cloak. Trying to conceal objects with large surface areas or exposed porosities was very difficult. I missed my cloaking trainer. It was a one-cubic-centimeter block of titanium foam that was as difficult to cloak as a non-porous object many, many times the size. An excellent tool for practicing and trying to extend one’s magical endurance.

I could feel sweat on my brow from magical exertion, even in the cold, or perhaps it was my imagination. My forehead tingled. My horn began to ache. I silently prayed to Celestia that the turrets didn’t have thaumatic detectors, or we’d be lit up like a Hearth’s Warming tree from my magic, and subsequently, we’d be lit up in a more literal fashion as well.

“Okay, we’re at the bollards,” I said. “Ascend, ten meters.”

There was a slight downward tug into my seat from our upward acceleration, and when we reached our new altitude, I directed Sierra forward, past the guardhouse, through the checkpoint, and over the fence.

“We’re in,” I said. “Those turrets are very much active and armed. Probably why no one’s been up this way. If our IFF’s no good, they’ll turn us into charcoal.” I checked my stopwatch, briefly uncloaking my own head and foreleg to do so. Over five minutes had elapsed since we began. “I’m going to keep us cloaked, but we’ve already burned through something like half of my magic endurance so far. This is kinda hard to do without a locus.”

We advanced deeper inside Pur Sang’s perimeter, winding up through the pass until we reached the windblown plateau at the top. I accessed my mental map of the facility. Based on the maps and diagrams Garrida had shown us, we were at the southwestern end of the facility, working our way towards the northeast. Directly east of us was the open expanse of the airstrip, which ran from north to south. To the north were the rows of hangars and bunkers, including the main command and control facility, sitting astride the length of the runway. As I directed us to the north, I felt around with my magic until I detected a large concrete structure festooned with aerials and dishes on top. That was the main command center, the one from which all the turrets were controlled.

“This is our stop,” I said. “We’re almost to the objective. Left seventy. Ascend twenty meters. Forward—okay, halt. We’re over the roof right now. Nothing is obstructing our descent that I’m aware of. Bring us down slowly until we land.”

We settled down atop the main command and control building, remaining cloaked as we disembarked. The coast seemed to be clear, so I decloaked us. There weren’t any auto-turrets in sight. The roof of the facility was covered in a blanket of soft, powdery snow that crunched under my hooves. After Sierra shut the Skimmer off and secured the reactor, I directed us to the access door. It was an ordinary fire door, unlike the reinforced blast doors at ground level. None of the ponies who constructed the facility ever expected air-mobile infantry to get this close in the first place, apparently.

The dark cliffs of Pur Sang Peak towered high above us. The winds were picking up. The aerials on the roof of the command center sang a phantasmal chorus as the mountain air whistled through them. I couldn’t shake the strange sense of dread that seeped through my nerves. Somehow, all of this felt too easy. I wasn’t about to say anything, lest I jinxed the entire mission with my shitty luck again, but there was something malevolent in the air that I couldn’t quite place.

Bell slapped a wad of plastic explosive on the door. “Breaching in! Everypony get back!”

We all moved to a safe distance, and then Bell hit the detonator, blowing the door off its hinges.

“Wow, that was subtle,” I said.

“Ain’t no other way,” Bell muttered.

The three of us left the Skimmer on the roof and moved in. As we moved down the stairs, my ears perked up at a few angry beeping noises in the hall beyond. “Oh shit!” I dove for cover as a pair of green beams filled the air where I’d stood just moments before.

“You hit?” Sierra said.

“No, I’m fine.” I brushed my hooves over my armor, just to double-check for smoking, carbonized pinhole entrance wounds and the smell of burnt flesh. “I’m okay. There’s a pair of fucking beamcaster turrets at the end of the hall. Well, that just about confirms that our IFFs are no good and those Omnis would’ve torn each of us a new asshole. Fucking things tried to punch my ticket!”

“I hear you’re pretty good at levitation, Storm.” Bell nodded, passing me a chunk of CH. “See if you can move this sucker down the hall.”

“Trivially easy,” I said.

I lifted the plastic explosive in my levitation’s orange glow, moving it through the doorway past the bottom of the stairs, into the hall, and all the way to the end, where the turret gimbals resided, smacking it against the wall and molding it into place. Levitating something so far away always felt funny, like the strange, weightless tickle in one’s skull from hanging upside-down off the edge of a bed.

“Charge in position, Bell,” I said. “Blow ‘em.”

“Fire in the hole,” Bell muttered.

There was a loud bang and in an instant, the end of the corridor turned into a pile of rubble. I took a peek and sized up the situation. The rubble wasn’t completely blocking the way. We could climb over it, if we had to. I peeked further outside the doorway. The path split three ways. I checked the frame of the door above my head. No more automatic caster gimbals.

“Hey, Bell!” I said. “Looks like the coast is clear!”

That was when the klaxons sounded. Fire suppression sprinklers activated, drenching my whole body. The lighting switched from white diodes to red strobes. The whole base’s alarm system had gone off.

“Perimeter Warning,” the base’s intercom sounded. “This is not a drill. Intrusion countermeasures have been deployed. All base personnel, seek shelter immediately.”

Me and Bell glanced at each other, wide-eyed.

“Oh crap,” I muttered.

I undid the straps holding Lucky onto my back, giving the little Orbit a charge and issuing some hurried voice commands. “Lucky, exit the way we came, ascend fifty meters, track movement, send the feed to my eyepiece!”

The Orbit beeped a few times after its rudimentary programming parsed the command. Once it displayed the green light of comprehension on its chassis, it immediately turned and zipped outside. Fortunately, we were in an area that the Omni-turrets didn’t cover, or else Lucky wouldn’t have been so lucky after all. I could see them. Over a dozen of them, at least. War Automata deployed by the base’s defense alcoves.

The quadruped robots were larger than a Karkadann. They were also stronger, faster, and better-armed. To top it off, each one was sapient. A golem piloted by a soul-bound Anima. Almost like a miniature Charger. High-grade automata like the Type-857 Wolfhound were hideously expensive and usually reserved for defending high-value installations, or augmenting spec-ops assaults.

I could hear their voices over Lucky’s feed to my headset as they chattered amongst themselves. “We got meatsacks, boys and girls! They’re trying to break into Command from the roof, and that means they’re going for the Core! Move in, go, go, go!”

“Oh fucking fuck, Bell!” I wiped the sweat from my brow. “We got twelve, no, fourteen Wolfhounds!”

Sierra was wide-eyed with terror. “Fuck. Fuck! They’ll rip us to pieces! Where are they?!”

“They’re entering the lower levels of the building as we speak,” I said. “The defense system is opening the automatic blast doors and letting them through.”

“We’ve got to get to the Core,” Bellwether said. “It’s our only chance. Let’s go!”

I recalled Lucky with a headset command, and it flew back down the stairs and assumed formation over my shoulder. We ran down the concrete corridor, mounting the heap of rubble and making a left at the corner, pumping our legs as fast as we could.

We passed full-height polycarbonate windows that enclosed rows of abandoned offices, paperwork strewn everywhere and seating left askance. Aside from old sticky notes, whiteboards with years-old scrawling caked onto them, and clipboards with outdated reports, there wasn’t even the slightest hint of life. Not even equine remains. I wondered how the base personnel had evacuated, and where they’d gone.

We dashed down another flight of stairs and turned a corner. More auto-turrets at the end of the hall, along with an airlock. Bell passed me another charge and I moved it all the way to the end with my levitation.

“Fire in the hole!” Bell shouted.

With the detonation of another, slightly smaller charge of CH than the last one, the auto-turrets were reduced to sparking, smoldering junk and the outer door to the airlock was forced ajar. We hurried down the corridor and Bell left a pair of five-pound charges on both of the corridor walls, presumably to collapse it and deter our pursuers if necessary. We got to the end and forced our way inside, past the steel and clear ballistic polymer doors. Bell tried manually closing them behind us, grunting and struggling with all his might, but it was no use. They were jammed. Giving up in frustration, he began fiddling with the keypad for the inner airlock door, trying to scan his ID.

There were voices up the corridor from us. “They’re almost in the damn Core! We need to stop them!” The first Wolfhound, one possessing a feminine voice and personality, rounded the corner to the hall behind us, its Charger-like head angling towards us. “What? Ponies? Not the damn satyrs? Never mind, they’re still trespassing and damaging government property!”

Before she could open fire with her beamcasters, without even turning around to look, Bell whipped out the detonator and triggered the explosives, closing off the corridor completely. I gripped the sides of my head, my ears feeling like they’d been stuffed in cotton gauze from the overpressure. Bellwether immediately returned to his task as though he hadn’t been interrupted at all. When he placed one of his other ID cards atop the scanner, the red light switched to green.

“Agent Bellwether, BASKAF,” the reader sang out. “Access Granted.”

We practically threw ourselves into the big, circular core room, onto one of the catwalks on the upper level, our armor rattling against the expanded metal floor grating. A dozen beamcaster gimbals arrayed around the edge of the room locked onto us with a series of frenzied beeps. There was nowhere to dodge, and not even a single scrap of cover. I groaned at the sheer magnitude of our shit-hooved bungling, squeezing my eyes shut and anticipating the end.

“You’re not Confederate troops,” a voice spoke, low and menacing. “Come down here. Leave the damn explosives and detonators in the airlock. All of them. I have terahertz scanners and can sniff the spectroscopic signature of everything in and on your body. If you lie, if you still have some, even if you try hiding it in your ass, I’ll know.”

“I’m not sure if Bell’s all that keen on butt stuff in the first place,” I muttered, getting a nasty look from him in response. “We’ll comply. Don’t shoot. Please.”

I nodded to Bell and he moved to the airlock, dumping his explosives and detonators there as ordered. He stumbled out with a heavy sigh, clearly disappointed at having to leave his ordnance behind.

“Very good,” the voice spoke. “Now, come on down and let’s see if we can’t talk this out.”

The room below us was bathed in a greenish glow. It resembled Scheherazade’s core room, in some ways, but the technology was fundamentally Equestrian. Above a large circular console in the center of the room, there was a floating spherical device over a meter in radius that hummed with power and radiated more thaums than a crowd of unicorns casting all at once. A Quantaetheric Core.

As we worked our way down the stairs, a holotank built into the console lit up. A great horned dragon materialized from thin air and eyed us haughtily.

“I am Tiamat, the Anima of Pur Sang Arsenal,” she said. “Bellwether, I recognize from the ID match, but I’m not sure I know who the two of you are.”

“I am Sergeant Desert Storm, Seredo Twenty-Seven, Service Number five-dash-six-six-eight-two-dash-four-one-three-one. Light Scouts, Eighth Cavalry Division. The other one’s Sierra, also of the Light Scouts.”

Sierra waved nervously. “Hi!”

Tiamat squinted at us, grinning wide and displaying row after row of sharp teeth. “Database matches confirmed. Former military and intelligence. Two Charger pilots, as well. Still carrying on the fight against the Confederacy even after total command structure collapse. Is that about right?”

“We’re with the Equestrian Liberation Front,” Bellwether said. “Any aid you could provide us would be appreciated.”

“Excellent,” Tiamat said. “You aren’t chipped. Your blood pressure and heart rate are normal. That indicates to me that you’re not brainwashed Confederate agents and what you’re saying is the truth. I take it you’re interested in what we have in stock?”

I always found it unsettling how an Anima hooked up to the proper sensor equipment, like terahertz cameras, could peer inside one’s body and determine if they’d been implanted like an infiltrator would be. I shook off the momentary feeling of discomfort and gathered myself.

“Well, that’s not the first thing I wanted to know,” I said. “What I wanna know is, why did the Confederacy give up the assault on the base, for one thing, and for another, where the hell are the base personnel? We need skilled ponies almost more than we need the war materiel.”

Tiamat’s expression fell, her mood growing somber. “For the former, I can’t explain exactly why. After I shot down a few of their stealth bombers and took out several Conqueror tanks approaching the base, they simply gave up, withdrew their forces and moved on elsewhere. As for the latter, twenty-five percent of base personnel are casualty-status. The other seventy-five percent are below. In the subterranean bunkers. I’ve been out of contact with them for some time, but I assure you, they are still alive down there. I can see them on the security feeds.”

“How many?” Bellwether said.

“Seventy-five hundred civilian, four hundred military. There are enough consumables down there to feed the whole base for a decade. Supplies are approximately twenty-five percent exhausted.”

I smiled wide, looking over at Bell, who wore a shocked expression on his face. This was big. Bigger than any of the weapons or materiel we could’ve retrieved here. Nearly eight thousand of the base personnel had survived and were still on-site.

“That’s great news!” I said. “What’s the catch?”

“There were riots.” Tiamat was sheepish, rubbing the back of her virtual head with her claws. “The civilians panicked at the prospect of staying underground for years and awaiting rescue. This escalated into a conflict with civilians grabbing blunt objects to try and overpower the guards and escape the base.

“Over two thousand civilians and nearly a hundred military personnel were killed in the ensuing battle. The underground sections of the base were not equipped with trash incinerators large enough to fit the bodies, so the guards decided to cut each of the deceased into small pieces and flush them down the waste-dissolving lavatories.”

Sierra and Bellwether were utterly chagrined. I pinched my brow, squeezing my eyes shut. “Oh fuck. They’re all fucked up.”

“That’s a very concise way of putting it, Sergeant Storm,” Tiamat said. “Rates of mental illness among the survivors are unacceptably high. They have distributed medication as needed. Anti-depressants, mostly. However, they are running short. They need treatment that I am not equipped to provide. Somehow, I doubt you’re any better off in that category.”

I groaned and rolled my eyes when I thought of my therapy session with Weathervane. She was about to get way, way busier.

“What weapons and materiel do we have on-site?” Bellwether said.

“The motor pool has twenty Centaur armored personnel carriers and four Bull Runners. At the armored vehicle depot, there are eight Gargoyle IFVs, four Minotaur tanks, two Manticore self-propelled guns, and two Chimera anti-air vehicles, along with some construction equipment you may or may not be interested in. There are also two Whirlwind fighters and four Roc VTOL transports in the hangars.

“The Charger stables have seven at full operational readiness. Four Coursers, two Rounceys, and one Destrier. There are a further thirteen Chargers in a state of moderate disrepair, but there exists a large enough supply of spare parts and feedstock on-site that they could conceivably be reconditioned and put into action.

“The arms bunkers contain a number of different weapon modules, upgrades, and spare components for Chargers and other ground and aerial vehicles, along with several thousand Mark-76 SSMs. Additionally, there are six hundred fusion warheads in the ordnance bunkers, fifteen megatons each.”

My jaw dropped. “What the fuck? That’s enough to equip an army! Why weren’t they used in combat?”

Tiamat sighed. “Base personnel were ordered to load the fusion warheads onto the Whirlwind stealth fighter-bombers, penetrate enemy airspace, release their weapons over populated areas, and destroy as many of the occupying forces as possible. Salt the earth, in other words. A final, last-ditch offensive. Using the loss of contact with central command and failure to confirm their orders as an excuse, they refused to carry out their duty. Instead, they chose to retreat into the underground vaults and seal themselves inside, where they have remained to this day.

“If the base was ever overrun by enemy personnel, I have the means to scuttle everything. My own reactor room and secondary Quantaetheric Core, deep below us, possesses a fifty-megaton fusion charge powerful enough to blow the top off this mountain and obliterate all the munitions and sensitive technical information kept here. However, given the lack of a solid evacuation plan that would guarantee the survival of base personnel, that was deemed a last resort.”

“This is huge,” Bellwether said. “We hit the fucking motherlode. Captain Garrida needs our report, pronto. We need to rescue these ponies and recover the equipment, and we’re going to need help, lots of help.” Bell tapped a shorthoof message into his aetheric responder.

DE BW. RCN FIN. JCKPT. VRY LRG QUANT MATRL. 7900 SURVIVRS. SND HVY TRANS TO PR SNG PK.

A few seconds later, we got the reply, in the form of a green light on our headsets strobing in code. DE CG. UNDRSTD. SNDNG REINF. GD WK.

“This could really turn the tide,” Bellwether said. “This many ponies? Who knows how many of them are specialists and technicians?”

“I wonder if there are any Charger pilots among them?” I said. “Maybe we should fire up the whole lance. Set up a perimeter. Any way we can get those ponies to come out of the bunkers on their own accord, Tiamat?”

“Negative,” she said. “They have overridden my controls and purposely jammed the door to the subterranean facility’s western sector. I could have used charges or cut my way inside, but that would have unacceptably breached base security by leaving the bunker network exposed to the base’s exterior. Now that you’ve arrived, that changes things. Presumably after you rescue the base personnel, you have additional plans in mind for Pur Sang?”

“We’re going to recover as much of the materiel as possible to distribute it to the resistance,” Bellwether said. “The nukes will go into Admiral Crusher’s safekeeping. Then, we’re going to make backups of the data. Captain Garrida will decide the base’s ultimate fate, but in all likelihood, once we’ve gathered all useful materiel and intel, we’ll need you to set the base to scuttle to eliminate any residual technical data and keep it out of enemy hands. We’ll pull your portable core, and you can come with us.”

Tiamat almost seemed to cry holographic tears of gratitude. “Thank you. Thank you so much. I thought we were all going to be stranded up here forever.”

“The hard part is getting all this stuff out of here,” Bellwether muttered. “It’s going to take multiple trips. Maybe even dozens. Avoiding detection and interception by enemy forces will be next to imposs—”

There was a low rumble that shook the command building, a few items rattling and falling off of nearby desks.

“What the hell was that?” Sierra said.

Tiamat’s draconic countenance resolved into a look of horror. “I don’t know. There’s a dropship outside. They bypassed the defense cordon entirely. Some sort of cloaking technology. I don’t recognize the model in any of my databases.”

The holotank switched to a view from one of the command center’s external cameras, showing searchlights penetrating the gloom. The nose of the dropship pierced the fog, its lights scanning over the base as it hovered over the runway east of the command center. It was one of the ghostly, white, seabird-looking things we’d spotted earlier. I glanced back at Bellwether, who appeared to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

“It’s them,” he whispered. “They’re here.”

“The brain-in-a-circle guys?” I said.

Bellwether was pacing around frantically. “We have to get out of here. We have to get the survivors out, now! They’re trapped like sitting ducks! We—”

On the feed, three sealed metal pods in the dropship’s sides unfurled and deployed three bipedal beings. Once they hit the ground, they did not hesitate. They sprang into action instantaneously. The creatures immediately started scrambling towards the base in a mad dash. They appeared frenzied. Berserk, even. The feed zoomed in one of the strange beings, resolving what looked very much like a damarkind.

“Three dummykins? Is that all? We can take ‘em, Bell.” I grinned, at first, but my lips curled downward in horror as I watched them engage the Wolfhounds, which had been sent by Tiamat to respond to the incursion.

The medium beamcaster arrays that the automata were armed with were the kind that could turn the average satyr’s torso into a cloud of vapor and flying bone fragments, and yet, they bounced off of the damarkinds’ armor completely. Even when the Wolfhounds expertly shifted their aim to their targets’ joints, there was no penetration. No part of them was vulnerable to beamcaster fire.

When the Omni-turrets opened up on them, blue bubbles of force flared around their bodies, deflecting forty-millimeter shells and heavy beamcaster fire like it was nothing. They were completely engulfed in overwhelming firepower, only to emerge from the flames and fragments totally unscathed. They possessed some manner of personal shield system, like on a Dragoon exosuit. One that could absorb firepower fit to vaporize a battle tank. They moved fast. Supernaturally fast.

When the lead Wolfhound charged with its energy claws active, one of the creatures simply slapped it aside, sending the half-ton quadruped robot hurtling sideways, tumbling end over end through the snow. Three more Wolfhounds pounced at the creature, only to be repelled by some sort of omni-directional energy blast that showered the air with electrical arcs. As the creatures closed in, sprinting towards the base at upwards of sixty kilometers an hour, I could make out more details from the camera feed, like the fact that their armor seemed to be embedded in their skin.

“The hell are those?” I murmured.

Bellwether was frantically tapping into his aetheric responder. DE BW. CNTCT SIVSCA. SND ALL DRGNS SVP. The old earth pony collapsed to his haunches, covering his head. He was practically curled up in the fetal position. “Fuck!”

“Come on,” Sierra said. “How do we stop them, Bell? Talk to me.”

“I asked Garrida to send every damn Dragoon we have, but they won’t be here in time. We’d have to fire up the Chargers. They’re already inside the perimeter, brushing the sentry automata aside. It’s too late. If they get into the subterranean facilities—”

There was a smash of shattered polycarbonate and a distant roar. The whole building trembled ever-so-slightly with the faraway tromping of heavy footsteps. There weren’t any windows on the first level. The thing had scaled a wall and hurled itself through one of the observation windows on the second story. I shared a look of horror with my comrades. We all knew what that meant.

“It’s inside,” I whispered. “In the command center. With us.”

“Oh, fuck me,” Sierra said. “How the fuck did it get through the bulletproof glass? You can’t even break that shit with a sledgehammer!”

I turned to the core’s central console, leaning my hooves on one of the desks that protruded from the circle. “Tiamat, can you operate the base’s security system remotely, or do you have to be plugged in?”

“I can do it wirelessly, yes. All I have to do is leave one of my expert programs in the system to manage my affairs and configure it to accept orders over encrypted radio, like the kind built into your armor.”

I nodded. “We’re pulling you. Now. And then, we’re gonna fucking hide, okay?”

The draconic Anima appeared somewhat worried, before her expression turned to one of grim determination. “Do it. I don’t trust the caster turrets in here to stop that thing from ripping everything in this room to shreds, including me.”

Tiamat’s portable core—a cylindrical, metal-tipped vial of quantaetheric substrate much smaller than a Confederate AI core, its hard crystalline center glowing iridescent green with magic—popped out of the center of the console. I levitated Tiamat over to Bellwether and he hooked her data port up to his armor’s computer and then ran both the core and the cable into one of his saddlebags. After that, he dashed up the catwalk to go retrieve his explosives and detonators.

“Where’s the nearest ventilation access?” I said.

Tiamat responded quickly, her voice emerging from my radio headset. “If you’re coming from the upper airlock, that would be to the left of the console, against the wall.”

I spotted the ventilation damper and tugged on the louvered grating with my levitation. I kept applying force until I stripped the screws out of the sheet metal they were threaded into, destroying the linkage for the motorized shutters. The space beyond was just barely large enough for a pony to fit. I gave Lucky a once-over and stowed the Orbit securely over my haunches. It was going to be a tight fit.

“Into the ducts,” I said. “Let’s go!”

“But I don’t wanna go in the ducts,” Sierra whined and pouted. “That’s where the monsters usually are.”

“Just pretend you’re in a B-movie,” I muttered. “Come on, fucking hustle, you two. If that thing finds us, it’s gonna push our shit in.”

Bellwether galloped back down the stairs and followed Sierra and I into the vent after we waved him over. As we crawled into the cramped, dark ductwork, the thin galvanized metal buckling and warping under our weight, he was whimpering. I had never seen him so freaked out before.

“Bell, what’s wrong?” I said.

“We’ve already screwed up,” he said. “They’re going to kill everyone.”

“No,” I said.

“What?”

I grit my teeth in anger. “I said no. They’re not. We’re going to work the fucking problem. We are going to neutralize these shitstains however we can. We are going to rescue those ponies and bring them into the fold. Do you two have my back?” Bellwether and Sierra gave me an intense stare, their eyes glinting with worry in the darkened space, but they both nodded their assent. I nodded to them in return. “Good. No more bellyaching. We are professionals. Let’s get this shit done.”

The three of us crawled what felt like hundreds of meters through the command center’s ventilation system, avoiding blower fans and other hazards. Eventually, we came across an air register in the ductwork’s floor. There were hissing and snarling sounds beneath us. I shushed my compatriots and the three of us quietly inched over to the slats and peered down into the darkness.

The creature was non-verbal. The only sounds that issued from its throat were unnatural trilling and warbling noises and otherworldly, mindless roars, like a Karkadann. A normal damarkind would be taunting the fuck out of us, demanding that we reveal ourselves and prepare to receive his turgid member forthwith, not howling and drooling all over the place like a mad dog.

The strange beast paced around in a circle in the storeroom beneath us, sniffing at the air, occasionally growling and pawing at itself in its madness. After a moment, it paused, its nostrils flaring as if it had discovered a new scent. Then, with a roar, it mounted a storage rack and launched itself straight upward. Directly at us.

The three of us screamed like schoolgirls when the damn thing rammed headfirst into the underside of the exposed ductwork with enough force to dent the sheet metal in the shape of its armored skull.

“I fucking told you!” Sierra said. “Never go in the ducts!”

“Go, go, go!” I shouted. “Fucking run!”

We crawled as fast as we could to the end of the duct as the maddened creature shredded it with its gleaming metal claws. It roared and punched its bladed fingertips through the sheet metal, trying to stab us in the belly as we crawled. I gasped and shrieked, hurrying my pace, my muscles burning, my lungs on fire. My mouth was as dry as a desert, my face streaked with tears of terror.

The creature’s claws punched through the galvanized steel, gripped, and began to pull. The whole duct shook and groaned. The hangers that held it up were audibly strained from being placed under tension. The beast was ripping it out of the ceiling. If it were to collapse, then I’d be down in the storeroom with it, at which point it would swiftly tear me limb from limb. I was panting, my breathing only interrupted by swallowing the lump in my throat and gasping for breath immediately after.

Bellwether and Sierra had already made it to the other end of the duct and were waving me over. With Lucky stowed on my back and the ductwork shaking violently from side to side, I was finding it near-impossible to crawl. The creature quit trying to drag the whole duct down to the floor, and for a moment, I paused, trying to still my breathing so as not to make a sound. It seemed like it had abandoned its assault entirely. Then, its claws punched through and wrapped around my left hind leg, gripping it so hard I could feel the joints pop.

“Bell, help me!” I screamed. “Help me! It’s got my fucking leg! Ah, Keleste, nei! Sadare, nei! Tanminne asrii!” Every variation of please and help escaped my panicked lips.

With the ceiling anchors for the hangers already weakened from the previous assault, the HVAC duct heaved and collapsed atop the shelving, inclining my path to freedom at a thirty-degree upward angle. The creature let go of my leg, letting out an animalistic roar as it circled around to the exposed end of the duct. First, it tried crawling inside. Then, when it failed due to its sheer bulk, howling its displeasure, it shook the whole duct to try and get me to tumble towards it. It was like jiggling a vending machine to dislodge a stuck candy bar, except the candy bar was me, and I was this freak’s idea of a light snack.

“Oh my fucking fuck!” I screamed. “No! Please, no!”

I dug my rubberized boot soles into the sides of the duct, trying desperately not to slide towards the abomination. If I had bare hooves, I would’ve already slid down the duct and been summarily ripped to shreds by the living meat grinder at the bottom. Instead, I inched upward, ever-so-slowly, my legs splayed out at either side of me to tension my torso between the inside walls of the ductwork. I was sobbing, frantic, desperate, my muzzle running with snot.

“Grab my hoof!” Bellwether shouted.

I looked up, and there he was, his sapphire eyes gazing down at me, proffering one hoof while holding onto a length of rope with the other. I didn’t even know he carried rappelling gear. After a moment’s hesitation, I took hold of his hoof, and with his earth pony strength, he hauled us both up the incline with surprising ease. When we got to the top, I was panting like crazy.

“You alright?” Bell said.

“Fuck, dude!” I said. “I could kiss you! That shit was fucked! Screw that professional talk. I nearly fucking shit myself. I wanna go home. Fuck.”

“Stow it, Storm,” he said. “Believe me, I feel you, but we’re not out of the woods yet.” He looked down at the creature as it glared up at us through the end of the duct, hissing and drooling, its struggling having ceased and been replaced with a sinister motionlessness. “Got a present for you, motherfucker.” Bell wrapped a grenade in plastique to boost the yield, and then pulled the pin and rolled it down the incline.

“Oh shit!” I muttered.

The three of us clambered deeper into the HVAC system to escape the blast radius. A couple seconds later, there was an earsplittingly loud bang that slapped me in the face with overpressure. The remainder of the collapsed duct was shredded, giving us a clear view of the space below us. We nervously peeked around the edge, looking down into the darkness. The creature roared, its shield flickering and flaring. It was practically unharmed.

“What does it take to stop these fucking things, Bell?” Sierra said.

He shook his head. “I don’t know.”

Bell and I shared a look of hopelessness before Sierra made us come to our senses. “We’ve got to move, you two. We can’t stay here.”

We crawled through the ductwork for another hundred meters before I hit another grating with a blast of telekinesis and sent it flying, clearing our path to the ground floor of the command center. We were in a main lobby with a vaulted atrium and two corridors leading off to the wings. The security desk was unoccupied, with not a single pony in sight.

“Shit, that was loud,” I muttered. “I hope that thing didn’t hear.”

I heard a far-off roar and the sound of armored footsteps. By the looks on Bellwether and Sierra’s faces, they’d heard it, too. It wasn’t very encouraging, to say the least.

“Where are the damn Wolfhounds?” Sierra said.

“Tiamat, get this damn blast door open!” Bellwether waved his armored foreleg over a security panel and it blinked from red to green.

“Aren’t the other two still outside?” I said. “What about the fucking skimmer?”

“What about it?” Bellwether said. “We can’t just waltz through the fucking command center with that thing in here. The rooftop is a no-go. We have to get underground, with the rest of the survivors. It’s our only chance.”

There was a loud clank and the whine of hydraulics, and the blast doors to the command center slowly reeled open, revealing the dark, frigid wastes beyond. There was a roar behind us and the sound of footsteps fast approaching. We turned and spotted the augmented damarkind, running straight at us down a long corridor. There was no fleeing from it. If we turned and bolted, we would have only made it a hundred meters at best before it caught up with us.

As Sierra and I made a break for it, out into the cold, where the other two of those creatures lurked, a frantic Bellwether held his hoof over the external access panel. “Seal it, seal it, seal it, fuck!”

Slowly, the jaws of the blast door slid together, the beast howling furiously as it lunged and thrust one of its arms through the gap, only for the limb to be lopped off by the force of the whining hydraulics, falling to the snowy ground and painting it hues of red. Bellwether stumbled and fell on his ass, before he, too, broke into a gallop after us.

“Tiamat, what’s the fastest route underground?” I gave her a shout on the radio.

“The way into Pur Sang Sector West was deliberately sealed by the base personnel. They permanently jammed the door by cutting the hydraulic ram itself. I have reports from the security system that there has been a breach in through the vent towers. The interlopers are trying to get to the survivors!”

When I looked up at the corrugated walls of the ventilation towers atop the subterranean bunkers that served the HVAC system to the underground portions of the base, there were smoking, damarkind-shaped holes in them. The creatures, by some unknown means, had burrowed through the metal and into the ventilation system’s interior.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck!” I shouted, picking up the pace, my companions following suit.

After galloping a couple hundred meters through the snow, thoroughly winded from our sprint, we arrived at a blast door leading into the underground bunkers, shaking the powder off our bodies. The door’s mechanism had a hole with a scorch mark leading out of it. The control panel was non-responsive.

“No good!” Bellwether said. “Tiamat’s right. This thing’s fucked and won’t open in a million years. The mechanism’s been torched from the inside. Oxyacetylene, looks like.”

“Allow us.”

Shocked, we turned to the source of the voice, only to be greeted by the facility’s entire pack of Wolfhounds, their crimson, cyclopean mechanical eyes regarding us with derisive stares.

We stood back as the guard automata fired up their beamcasters, blasting out a continuous stream of arcane force that slowly, but surely, began to slag the door. After ten seconds, the blast door was a white-hot puddle of molten metal. Bellwether moved to make entry, but one of the Wolfhounds held him back.

“Caution,” the golem said. “The edges are still white-hot and you’ll be burned severely.” After a few seconds, the metal cooled to red-hot. “Go.”

We moved into the dark interior of the facility’s entrance. There were signs of an old battle, things strewn all over the place, beamcaster scorch marks, makeshift barricades, and other detritus littering the area. We vaulted a barricade and moved deeper inside, with Bell using Tiamat’s security access to get us through the doors.

I ran headfirst into a lit corridor, gasping in shock when I saw the barricade at the other end, a good fifty meters away. There were two armored ponies with a crew-served machine gun, a gunner behind the spade grips and a loader feeding the belt. In the narrow space, there was no cover to hide behind and no way to dodge. If he opened up on us, we’d all be mulch.

“Don’t shoot!” I shouted.

“Don’t you fucking move, fucking looter bitches, or I’ll turn you into fucking chum!” the gunner behind the barricade shouted.

“We’re not scavvers,” I shouted. “We’re with the Liberation Front! We’re Star Crusher’s boys and girls!”

“What?” he said. “Get the fuck on over here, then! Hooves up, no magic, and no funny moves, or we blow your fucking head off!”

When we got close, they confirmed our IFFs, shaking their heads. “Codes are good, but out of date. With the network down, it can’t be helped. Proceed. Colonel Rune Ward’s the base commander, and he’ll want a word with you. We’ll stay here and cover the main entrance.” The base’s soldiers gawked as the Wolfhounds casually walked right on past them. “Fucking Tiamat, really? You let her shit-hounds in here?”

“On the contrary, they were the ones who let us in,” I said. “This is an emergency. There are unidentified life forms inside the perimeter. Threat level, off the charts. Wolfhounds can’t hold them back. Some new kind of enemy bioweapon. They’re inside here, with us. They broke in through the damn vent towers!”

“Oh, that’s great,” the gunner said. “Just fucking great.”

Ignoring his grousing, we moved deeper into the base, the Wolfhounds taking point. We worked our way down long stairwells, deeper into the earth, through one drab, dilapidated, dimly lit concrete corridor after another. One doorway opened onto a catwalk overlooking a large underground storage space four stories high.

I peered into the storage racks below us. There were dozens of Mark-76 box launchers, like the kind that were often found strapped to the hips of my Mirage. The markings on the missile canisters were unmistakable. My old sins were staring me right in the face, sending shivers down my spine.

“Organophosphate,” I whispered. “Binary submunition dispersers.” I thought of Hoodoo, and my face warped into a hateful sneer. “Time to weed the garden again.”

The Wolfhounds had gotten ahead of us. There were sounds of a scuffle in the next area, punctuated by the otherworldly roar of one of the creatures.

“Dammit, the one from the command center got inside the same way the others did!” Tiamat said. “It’s in the space beyond. Hide. Let the Wolfhounds handle it.”

We took up position in a side storeroom, aiming our weapons at the entrances in case it worked its way back. I concealed us with my magic, hitting my stopwatch at the same time.

“I’ve got about five minutes left till I burn out,” I said.

“Hold position, you two,” Bellwether said. “Let’s let the Wolfhounds take care of it, if they can. If not, we’re going to withdraw and lay traps along our path of retreat. Got me?”

“I hear you.” I nodded.

“Invisibility magic,” Tiamat said. “So that’s how you three got in past the Omnis. You’re a Stealth-Recon Courser pilot.”

“That’s right,” I said. “Not just any Courser, but the Mirage. Got any Coursers lying around?”

“Not with Illusion locuses, no.” Tiamat sounded almost disappointed that she had none to offer. “Ours were configured for light attack roles. Elemental magic. Synergistic weather manipulation experiments. One Charger and ten pegasi to do the work of a hundred pegasi, that sort of thing.”

The sounds of the battle intensified, the clash stretching on for what felt like minutes, beads of sweat dripping down my forehead as I neared burnout, until finally, Tiamat gave the all-clear. When I decloaked us and we moved up, two of the Wolfhounds were limping, injured, and one of the creatures—the one with the missing arm from the command center, which had somehow outpaced us to this point—was lying on the floor, twitching and flailing in its death throes as the Wolfhounds poured firepower into its prone form.

“Well, that was anticlimactic,” I said.

“It was in a bad way,” Tiamat said. “Half bled-out already from its wounds. Door did a number on the arm, for sure. The others are still fresh enough to be a more serious threat.”

We sidled past the scene of carnage and walked up to a control panel to a heavy blast door leading deeper into the facility. When Bellwether tried using Tiamat’s access codes with his armor’s transceiver, waving a hoof over the panel, the door refused to budge.

“Huh, that’s fucking weird,” Bellwether said.

He tried scanning again, only for the severe-looking face of an older stallion with a long, stringy white mane and beard to flash into existence on the door panel’s screen. He wore an officer’s cap and long coat and bore a look of stern authority. “Ahh, so that’s where you idiots are,” he spoke. “I’ve received a report of ponies claiming to belong to some supposed rebel organization attempting to breach my base’s security. Explain yourselves at once, before I have you shot and your bodies thrown off the premises.”

I didn’t know why, but I had an instant and instinctual dislike of him. Nevertheless, I stepped up to the plate. “Colonel Rune Ward, Sir, I am Sergeant Desert Storm of the Light Scouts, Charger Pilot. I am accompanied by Sergeant Sierra, also a pilot of the Light Scouts, and ORACLE Agent Bellwether. We were sent under the authority of Captain Garrida to conduct salvage operations and search for useful weapons and materiel so that the Equestrian Liberation Front may continue the war effort. This base is under attack by unknown hostiles who pose a grave threat to the survivors. They’ve breached into Pur Sang Sector West. Please, Sir, all we ask is that you allow Tiamat’s automata to assist in the defense!”

“Negative, Sergeant,” Rune Ward shook his head. “Under no circumstances is this door to be unsealed, do you understand me? We have no proof that you are who you say you are, or what your intentions are. You are to hold position until we can send someone to verify your identity, which may be several hours from now. Any attempt to breach our security will be considered a hostile action, and accordingly, our response will be with lethal force. This is your first and final warning. Comply or die.”

Bellwether and I shared a look of disgust. Something wasn’t right, here. I turned back to the door’s control panel. “Sir, we—”

The feed cut off and the door remained unresponsive. “Dammit!” Bellwether shouted. While he kept trying to access the door panel, we heard a loud hiss and crackle on the other side, followed by muffled cries, and then hellish wails of pain and terror from what sounded like a crowd of ponies. There were shouts for help and for reinforcements, beamcaster discharges, bloodcurdling screams, and sounds of flesh being rent asunder, punctuated by the mechanical roars of the half-machine abominations.

Bellwether kept trying to access the door, swiping his leg over the control panel, using his access keys, and frantically swiping all his ID cards. Nothing worked. He pounded his hoof on the console, his grief apparent in his voice. “Damn it all, they’re on the other side, with the civilians!”

The Wolfhounds had just about enough. They were getting ready to breach through the blast door. Suddenly, Colonel Rune Ward’s figure reappeared on the screen. “What in Tartarus is going on down there? What have you absolute, fetlock-dragging, mouth-breathing morons let into my base?!”

“That’s what I was trying to tell you,” I said. “Unknown hostiles. Inside the perimeter. They breached in through the ventilation towers on the roof of Sector West, and we’re pursuing them with intent to neutralize.”

“Those vent towers are heavy-gauge steel!” he shouted. “The whole bunker is supposed to withstand a proximate kinetic strike or fusion bomb blast!”

“They burrowed right through, somehow,” I said. “We saw evidence of the breach from the outside.”

There was a pause. “I can see the feed,” the Colonel said. “Those monsters are tearing us to shreds!”

I pounded my hooves on the console. “Then let Tiamat and the damn Wolfhounds in to stop them before they kill anyone else, Sir!” I shouted.

“I am doing this under protest!” he said.

With a clank, the blast doors began to retract, the Wolfhounds surging into the gap without a second thought. We almost followed them in, but Tiamat knew better.

“Don’t go in there,” she said. “You’ll die. The telemetry from the Wolfhounds is telling me that the creatures’ swipes and punches peak at over a hundred Megapascals. Suffice it to say, it’s enough to take your head off. Besides, I found out a few things about our new guests. Come have a gander at this.”

“Gander?” I muttered. “What century is this?”

While the sounds of battle in the room beyond the blast door intensified, we ambled back through the darkened concrete hall to where our headsets projected Tiamat’s glowing, draconic figure. She was hunched over the corpse of one of the creatures, the first to fall in battle. What remained of it was scorched by continuous MBC fire.

“I got a scan on it,” Tiamat said. “It’s heavily augmented, to a degree most would regard as both impossible and extremely unethical. If that was a damarkind, it’s not anymore. There’s no way that any damarkind in his right mind would consent to what was done to these things. I am left to conclude that they were most likely unwilling test subjects who were abducted for the procedure, but that’s just idle speculation.”

“And what the hell was done to them?” I muttered.

Tiamat’s projection waved a claw over the dead creature, pointing out the gadgetry hanging out of the stump of its severed arm. “They’ve been completely vivisected and stuffed with bionics from head to toe.”

Glowing holograms were projected into our field of view by our augmented-reality headsets, showing the full extent of the surgical procedures that had been performed on this damarkind. There was so much metal in the damn thing, it probably weighed as much as a car.

“Fucking hell,” I whispered.

Tiamat pointed out each of the augmentations. “Extensive combat stim injector array. Direct vagus nerve stimulation and modulation. A very invasive neural lace, with neuroprosthetics in place of much of the frontal lobe. Skeletal reinforcements and artificial muscle and nervous tissue enhancements. An unknown phased energy generation system. It can repel attacks and even melt right through metal, like my Wolfhounds’ beamcasters.

“Most disturbingly, they’ve been castrated and had their testes removed. In place of their scrotum is a device that seems to function both as a permanent catheter and an extremely potent hormone synthesizer. That’s not even all of it. There are so many individual systems and implants in these things, it would take me hours to document and describe them all.”

“Practical terms, please,” I said. “And while it may be disturbing to you, it’s kind of a relief to me that, at the very least, they’re not packing heat down there.”

“You and every mare in the galaxy.” Tiamat nodded. “They’re stronger than normal damarkinds. Much stronger. They have no capacity for free will or conscious thought. They ignore pain and they hold back not an ounce of their prodigious physical strength. These things will happily put their fists through a brick wall and not even feel it. They can run and jump hard and fast enough to experience ligament tears, and they’ll ignore it and keep moving.

“To top it all off, they can also generate a potent energy shield that takes many megajoules of absorbed energy to collapse, one that radiates so much energy that it is capable of being used as offensive weapon. They weren’t made to last very long, I’d say. This is not a soldier. This thing is a living, air-dropped munition, made to go completely berserk and then burn itself out in a twisted dance of death.”

“Celestia’s blood,” Sierra muttered. “They fucking lobotomized these poor dingoes, just like a big, nasty Kark!”

“That’s a very troubling prospect.” Tiamat’s face warped into a scowl. “Damarkinds are a legally-recognized FTU associate species in Confederate space. Under the Stellar Code, this is highly illegal medical experimentation. Whoever did this, they’re operating well outside the bounds of galactic law.”

I snorted derisively. “They’re fucking damarkinds, Tiamat. If they replaced his legs with a unicycle and his arms with clown horns, it’d be an improvement.”

There was some sort of alien script on the creature’s chest armor. On the left side of the breastplate, above the creature’s heart, was the insignia of a brain in a circle, viewed in profile and facing left, with the cerebrum, cerebellum, pons, and medulla oblongata all clearly recognizable, surrounded above and below by the inscrutable text NDRAS THUAX. Some sort of motto, it seemed. It looked like a unit patch of some kind. On the right half of the breastplate was another word in the same indecipherable script. VURVALFN.

Sierra looked down at the creature, scanning it with an impassive gaze, before looking up at the pair of us, a deep frown etched on her face. “Bellwether, what the hell are we dealing with, here? No more of your ORACLE secrets. We need the truth. Now.”

Bellwether sighed. “What if I told you two that there’s an enemy out there that’s far more insidious than the Confederacy, one that can’t be reasoned with and can’t be stopped?”

That sounded awfully similar to the Confederacy, to me. After all, every attempt at diplomacy with the satyrs had been an abject failure. Still, I was willing to entertain Bell’s charade as long as he coughed up with something more substantive than the noncommittal spook lines we’d been fed.

“Who?” I said.

Bell looked up at me, his eyes haunted. “That’s the thing. We don’t know. We were a fucking intelligence agency. We were supposed to know these things. We weren’t even able to figure out what they’re called.”

Sierra huffed impatiently. “Not even a name? Work with me, here, Bell. What the fuck are these guys?”

“I told you, we hardly know a damn thing about them,” he said. “We’ve never been able to capture one of them alive or bring down one of their craft. Their shielding and cloaking tech is too advanced. All we know is that there have been numerous mass-casualty incidents and kidnappings out on the frontier over the past several decades, typically involving isolated science outposts. It’s like they’re looking for something specific.

“The one thing tying these incidents together is that symbol on that thing’s chest, along with intercepted Confederate communiques that coincided with these events. We think the Confederacy are better at tracking these alien craft, or else they’re collaborating with them somehow and have foreknowledge of these attacks. We don’t know who they are, what they want, or even what language they speak. All we know is that they’re extremely hostile.”

“But they’ve got to have a name,” I said. “Even a codename is better than nothing.”

“SILVER SCALPEL,” Bellwether said. “That’s the code that all these events have been filed under. And you’re not to fucking repeat it to anyone. Either of you two.” He glanced between us, concern evident on his face. “You spot anything SILVER SCALPEL-related, you are to bring it directly to me, Captain Garrida, or one of the Dragoons. Absolutely no one else is to know of this. You’re in the circle of trust, now. Do not betray that trust.”

“As if the Confederacy wasn’t bad enough,” Sierra muttered, tossing her mane and adjusting her watch cap. “Now, you’re telling me there’s another species out there that wants us all dead? What ancient Zebra burial site did we build Everfree City on, anyway? What rotten luck!”

“I mean, it’s right in the name,” I said. “To build Everfree City, they had to bulldoze the whole cursed Everfree Forest. You know, timberwolves, manticores, haunted castles, spooky shit. Were you paying attention in History?”

“Shut up, nerd,” Sierra groused.

I grinned wide. “Make me.”

“If you were as good as you think you are, you woulda been a history teacher and not a waitress.” Sierra laughed.

That hit me right in the sore spot. “I beg your fucking pardon?”

“We’ve got a big huge problem, you two,” Bellwether spoke over the radio; I hadn’t even noticed he’d left us alone. “Major fucking problem.”

We followed Bellwether through the open blast door and into the antechamber, our faces warping into masks of dread at the overwhelming smell of copper beyond.

“Oh geez,” I whispered. “Oh fuck, Bell. No!”

There were hundreds of the civilians strewn about the place. What was left of them. They’d been torn to bloody ribbons by the creatures. Trapped. Confined. Unable to escape the beasts’ aimless wrath and their ripping claws. There were rivers of gore. Blood pooled and ran so loudly, it sounded like a waterfall. The floor was coated with so much red ichor, it looked either like a foal’s amateurish attempt at an impressionist painting, or like a unicorn had levitated a dozen chainsaws and spun them in a circular orbit around herself while walking through a crowd.

In the corners were the maimed and wounded, screaming and crying and moaning and begging for their misery to end. Some had hidden under the corpses, hoping they’d be overlooked, and they raised their blood and gore-drenched faces to see if the coast was clear. Others were so badly destroyed, ripped asunder by teeth and claws, there was nothing they could do but spasm and flail what remained of their ravaged bodies, praying for the end to come quicker. A few of the corpses were smoldering, their skin charred black.

The other two of the augmented damarkinds lay surrounded by a pile of destroyed Wolfhounds, their dark gunmetal bodies shattered to pieces. Only three out of the original fourteen of the base’s guard automata had survived. The rest had sacrificed themselves to protect the base personnel, and they’d brought the monsters down in what must have been a battle terrible to behold, if the caster scorch marks dotting the room were any indication.

“That climactic enough for you, Storm?” Sierra mused.

I winced at how badly her remark stung. She was right. An uneventful, cleanly victorious fight was preferable to this kind of mess, by far.

“Six hundred civilian technicians and thirty military personnel killed or injured,” Tiamat said. “Roughly eight percent of the survivors, casualties. Eleven of my precious Wolfhounds, destroyed. I hope all this was worth it.”

There had been perhaps a thousand ponies trapped in the roughly fifty-by-fifty-meter concrete room, one out of what must’ve been another seven adjoining, equally sized rooms. For years, they’d lived like this, jammed in like sardines with an average of a couple square meters of floor space for each of them. Just enough for a bedroll and their scant belongings. By the looks of things, a number of them had trampled each other to try and escape the two enhanced damarkinds, only to end up dying in great heaps.

I covered my muzzle, my eyes watering from the overwhelming scent of fresh blood, and worse. The room absolutely reeked. Judging by the smell, they’d been lucky enough to have proper sanitation, but none of them had showered in years. I could feel my gorge rise, but I struggled to keep it down. I’ll be damned if I’m gonna let myself shrivel up and dehydrate over this, I thought.

This wasn’t a pilot’s life. This was what the grunts had experienced during the war. Day in, day out, face-to-face with scenes of horror and unspeakable cruelty. It was the kind of thing that turned perfectly good mares and stallions into broken husks if they witnessed too much of it.

“They massacred us,” I whispered. “I can’t fucking believe this shit.”

Colonel Rune Ward and his entourage of armed guards approached us, the sneering officer regarding us with contempt. I saw the way the civilian mares looked at him as he passed, shrinking away with fear in their eyes. I noticed, with creeping dread, that a large percentage of them were, to put it bluntly, with foal. My worst suspicions were slowly being confirmed. I made eye contact with one of the mares and then nodded my head in the direction of the base’s commander, and she slowly shook her head in response. It all clicked into place. I could almost predict the words that would come out of the Colonel’s mouth next.

“Oh no, look at that,” Colonel Rune Ward said. “Looks like we’re—”

I stepped up, gritting my teeth in anger as I interrupted him. “Going to have to repopulate?”

He looked me up and down, nodding with approval. “Smart. Good genes.” He sniffed the air. “And even on her heat already. Take her to my quarters.”

His six heavily armed and armored guards instantly complied, moving up with their weapons trained on us. Mostly stallions. Hardly a mare among them.

I snarled in raw anger. Not this fucking shit again.

“I’m infertile, you sick fuck,” I said. “War wound. Got hit by spall.”

There was a look of shock that briefly crossed his face. “Oh, well, in that case, of what use are you to me?”

“It wasn’t claustrophobia,” I said, facing them bravely. “Tiamat knew. She knew and she held it back from us. After you tricked them into following you underground and sealed the exits, you fucking animals murdered those civilians when they wouldn’t go along with your sick, demented harem fantasies.”

The Colonel nodded. “Some regrettable sacrifices had to be made in order to perpetuate the species in this time of crisis. I’m sure you understand the ramifications of our defeat better than anyone. After all, you’ve been on the outside for the past three years. What do you think?” He tilted his head in an inequine way, like there wasn’t much of a pony left in him. “Can we win, without more births? Are there enough of us to make a difference?”

I sharply inhaled a breath to challenge him, but I was at a loss for words.

He smiled wickedly. “Your silence speaks louder than words.”

“There are enough!” I pounded my hooves against the concrete. I was on the verge of tears. “There are enough that you don’t need to do this!”

“Taken a census lately, Sergeant?”

“I—I—”

“I didn’t think so.” He waved a hoof over us. “Take them away.”

This was going pear-shaped in so many ways. I wasn’t about to just stand by and let this iniquity continue, especially not when it involved my own species behaving so shamefully. What can I do? If I cloak, they could hit Bell or Sierra. If I open fire, they’ll riddle me. What do I do?

The answer came on its own in the form of three Wolfhounds, who slammed into the Colonel’s guards with irresistible force, sending them screaming and hurtling across the room and bouncing off the far wall with a wet thud. The Colonel panicked, scrambled to his hooves and ran, presumably back to his quarters. The Wolfhounds fanned out and took up a defensive circle around us.

“Son of a bitch is getting away!” Sierra said.

“Why didn’t you tell us, Tiamat?” I said, knitting my brow in anger. “Why didn’t you tell us the truth?”

Bellwether cleared his throat and stepped forward. “She didn’t because she knew that if she did, you’d be combat-ineffective, because you’d be thinking about the Colonel’s actions and not the mission, because she’s an Anima and she’s a thousand times smarter than you and can read your physiological stress markers right off your face like an optical lie detector.” Bell glanced at Tiamat’s ghostly figure behind us. “That about right?”

“Precisely,” Tiamat said. “However, I regret to inform you that the situation has taken a turn for the worse.”

“What now?” I said, groaning and rolling my eyes.

“More of the creatures, outside. That dropship came back around for another pass and dropped six of them this time. They’re crawling all over the command center as we speak. Six hyper-augmented damarkinds, three Wolfhounds. It took fourteen of them to bring down two, with a seventy-eight percent casualty rate. You do the math.”

I smirked, feeling a rush of sheer crazy take me over. “Oh, I’ve done it, Tiamat. I did the math about five seconds ago. Three Liberation Front members. Three Wolfhounds. Three shortcuts back to the surface.”

I leapt atop one of the Wolfhounds, mounting my steed and petting the back of its head. It shook angrily like a wet dog, looking over its shoulder with its expressionless face. “We guard automata are not vehicles!”

“Bullshit,” I said. “All you’re missing is a saddle. Tiamat, instruct them to take us to the Charger stables, now! Get the Destrier spun up!”

“What are you planning?” the base’s AI said. “That machine doesn’t even have an Anima installed.”

I grinned, looking over my comrades and the civilians who gazed upon me with newfound awe as I rode atop the automaton, addressing the crowd. “Maybe some of you think the war is over. It’s not. For as long as there are people who want to genocide us or turn us into their property, the war isn’t over. This will only end in one of two ways. Either every last pony alive is dead or enslaved, or we’ve sent every last one of these alien sons of bitches home in body bags. This injustice will not stand. Not on my watch. We’re gonna give these alien freaks a proper Imperial welcome. We’re going to punish these motherfuckers. We’re going to make them regret everything that’s happened from the day they were born until now!”

The cheers I received weren’t the roaring chorus I’d expected. The survivors were too broken. Too beaten-down. I could see the looks they were giving me. They saw me as just another member of the military. They identified me and my patriotic rant with the Colonel. Violence had never been particularly fashionable among our species. To the citizenry, my kind were regarded as a necessary evil at best, and predatory mutants at worst. Opposition to the military had increased in recent years, due in part to Confederate propaganda. Moreover, the bodies of these ponies’ friends and family hadn’t even gone cold yet, and there I was, using a literal mound of corpses as my own personal soapbox. All I felt was disappointment. Partly in them, but mostly in myself.

I looked up at the ceiling, and there were two damarkind-shaped holes where the creatures had melted through before dropping down into the center of the room and raising hell. It was like something out of one of the bad horror films me and Barley used to watch. Bellwether and Sierra reluctantly climbed atop the backs of the other two Wolfhounds, settling onto their pointy and uncomfortable lumbar armor with grimaces on their face. I snickered softly under my breath. Revenge. Revenge for making me ride that stupid fucking contragravitic vomit-comet, barf-bolide, fucking Skimmer piece of shit.

“Bell,” I said. “Get up to the ventilation towers and the main entrance and seal the breaches with the last of your explosives! Before you go, gimme Tiamat. I need her. Sierra, you’re on distraction. Get to the Skimmer and draw them off. I’m heading for the Charger stables. I’ve got a little surprise for these fuckers.”

For a moment, Bellwether appeared shocked and appalled that I’d dare to order him around, but when he saw the logic of my plan, he nodded, unhooking Tiamat’s core from his armor’s onboard computer and tossing her to me. “Don’t let those fuckin’ things catch up to you!”

I stuffed Tiamat in my saddlebag after plugging her into my armor’s onboard computer. We went our separate ways, the Wolfhounds swift beneath us, ferrying us at an alarming rate of speed to our respective destinations. It was an uncomfortable ride if there ever was one, like piloting a very small Charger with a very short stride period. The frequency of each of the canine guard robot’s footsteps was positively brain-rattling. I had to duck beneath low overhangs and the tops of doorways to avoid getting my head taken off.

When Sierra and I charged back out into the dark and the cold, the creatures were waiting for us. They took enraged swipes at us as we fired our casters to try and distract them. The Wolfhounds were faster, sidestepping their blows and protecting us from our attackers. My heart was pounding in my chest with abject fear. I looked over my shoulder. They’d taken the bait. They weren’t heading underground; they were following us instead. Some tens of seconds later, there were a pair of explosions that sealed the underground facility and would hopefully make it more difficult for the creatures to get inside.

Sierra split off and headed for the skimmer, her Wolfhound steed leaping and clambering up the side of the command center, clearing its entire height in a single bound while she clung for dear life to its back.

“Wow,” I whispered. “I had no idea they could do that.”

The Charger stables were in sight. Massive, vaulted concrete hangars with reinforced sliding doors several stories high, partly recessed into the mountainside. When I turned to look over my shoulder, I could see quite plainly that the enhanced damarkinds were gaining on me.

“Sierra?” I called out on the radio. There was no reply. “Sierra, they’re onto me! Come on!”

They were fifty meters away and closing, their limbs jittering and their warbling cries filling the air. I sobbed openly as I watched death closing in on me, implacable and inevitable. I thought of the civilians, and how they’d been torn to pieces. This was how they must have felt in their final moments. I cursed my own powerlessness.

“You fuckers!” I turned to face backwards and fired my casters at my relentless pursuers. “Die! Die!” I screamed.

When they closed to within ten meters, the Skimmer blazed past us, with Sierra at the helm. She swung into a J-turn and blasted them with the quad-casters. “Over here, bitches!”

Five of them broke off and followed her, but one would not be deterred from its quarry. After a brief pause, it resumed the chase. Tiamat sent a signal for the hangar doors to the Destrier’s stable to open. We tore ass through the narrow gap before she sent the signal for them to close again, but it was too late. The creature had made it through with us. The Wolfhound leapt back as the crazed damarkind cyborg made a downward slash with its claws, narrowly missing my head. Another swipe. Another dodge. I shrieked in terror. The beast beat its chest and let out a roar as it released an omni-directional surge of crackling blue energy. I screamed as I felt nothing but searing pain from head to hoof. It felt like I had been struck by lightning.

I was flung forcefully from the Wolfhound, rolling and tumbling end over end. I coughed. I was smoking like I’d been shocked severely. My heart was seizing in my chest. I gasped, practically choking on my saliva, rolling onto my back. I had been shocked severely. In fact, I was fibrillating, my armor’s heart monitor beeping insistently and warning me of an abnormal heart rhythm. I was fucked. The creature stalked up to me, raking its claws together like a griffon’s steak knives. Shing, shing, shing. It roared and raised a metal paw above its head, ready to bring it down upon me and cleave me in two. When I looked up, a mighty Coloratura-type Destrier of the Empire stood above me, its gleaming white and gold livery seeming to shine even in the gloom. I smiled and closed my eyes. At least I got to see such a beauty before I died.

Just when I thought the end had come, the beast was tackled from the side by the Wolfhound, sending it flying. The Wolfhound scooped me up and tossed me so that I lay crosswise on its back, and I held on as best as I could while having a heart attack. We ran through the dimly lit stable, our course taking us beneath a gantry holding up a Charger’s disembodied torso in an adjacent stall. The damarkind followed us, running right underneath it. Tiamat released the clamps remotely. With an earth-shaking wham, the spare Destrier torso, which by itself weighed as much as an entire battle tank, smashed to the floor, flattening the creature like a bug and cracking the concrete.

Not even breaking its stride, the Wolfhound carrying me ran up the stairs and onto the crew gantry, the hatch to the Destrier’s cockpit opening ahead of us. I was dumped inside, croaking and crawling and struggling to stand, but failing. The Charger’s hatch automatically closed behind me.

“The AED, it’s your only chance!” Tiamat said.

I crawled to the cockpit’s aid station, unhooking the automated defibrillator from the wall, gasping for breath as I opened the lid and unwrapped the probes. Our defibrillators did not use pads but pointed electrodes instead. They were designed to work without needing to shave one’s coat, which would’ve taken too long for a pony. I rolled onto my back. With my levitation, I opened my armor’s defib ports and jammed the electrodes into my chest and the side of my barrel, drawing a little blood in the process. I collapsed backwards, my breathing reduced to short, pathetic hiccups, tears in the corners of my eyes.

“Analyzing heart rhythm,” the machine spoke. “Shock is advised. Please stand back. Five, four, three, two, one. Administering Shock.”

I wondered how I was still conscious. Ventricular fibrillation usually meant that the victim would pass out almost instantly. It was very unorthodox to attempt to resuscitate someone who wasn’t already half-dead. Though I sincerely wished that I wasn’t, I was awake and aware the entire time as my muscles contracted from the AED’s shock. It was one of the worst things I’d ever felt in my life. I gasped for air, the pain in my chest subsiding. The heart monitor in my suit stopped chiming. My rhythm had returned to normal, the readout showing all-green. I whimpered softly as I ripped the probes out, sat up, and flipped the lid of the automated defibrillator shut. I stowed the AED out of habit, since true pilots never left anything unsecured to go flying ‘round the cockpit of a Charger, and then, I scanned my environs.

I promptly did a double take, my jaw hanging loose as I gawked at my luxurious surroundings. I’d never even been inside a Destrier before, aside from cramped simulators. Spacious didn’t even begin to describe it. The Coloratura R79’s cockpit was a two-seater, with two saddles in tandem, a very unusual configuration for any Charger. I surmised right then that it had been heavily modified. There were two bunks and a kitchenette, an aid station with a folding litter and the defibrillator that had saved my life, and a sizable first aid kit, and there was even a toilet. Everything was painted high-contrast white and trimmed in gleaming, golden titanium nitride, which made it look like a Saddle Arabian pimp palace.

“It’s like a fuckin’ five-star hotel room!” I laughed, every thought of my near-death experience having vacated my head. “Geez, those lucky bastards even had a proper commode. I had to piss in a fucking funnel!”

I levitated Tiamat’s core out of my saddlebags, inspected her for damage, and, finding none, I plugged her into the console. The holotank lit up with her smirking, smug form, sitting perched on a virtual boulder and resting her chin on her paw.

“That’s nothing,” Tiamat said. “I scanned you earlier. You’ve got an auto-dialysis implant. They were planning on making those part of a pilot’s standard aug regime as part of the Next-Generation Charger Program, once they’d figured out how to solve the quality-of-life issues. They’ve been working on that model for over a decade, rolling out new prototypes, and they never quite got it perfectly right.”

I punched a hoof into the magnetically latched drawer beneath the bunks, pulling out the spare syncsuit that I’d expected to find there. It had belonged to another pilot. The name tag said Maj. Springblossom. I knew of her. A Baroness. One of the nobility, and a test pilot. There was no telling what had become of her in the intervening time.

“So what?” I said, angered that Tiamat had peeled back a scab. I’d almost allowed myself the luxury of not even knowing that hunk of metal was in my back. I checked the syncsuit’s size by laying it beside my torso. It was a good fit, so I began the process of stripping off my winter coat and my armor and donning the syncsuit. “What does that have to do with anything?”

I zipped up the syncsuit, patting out the folds before depressing the button that ran the motorized take-ups and cinched it tight around my body. Finally, I pressed a hoof into the back of my neck and clicked the suit’s link plug into the port for my neural lace. I sighed a bit at the tingling sensation that ran from my head to my hooves. The suit had effectively become an extension of my body. I quickly stowed my armor where I found the syncsuit, finding that I had to use significant force to shove it into the tiny drawer.

“Really?” Tiamat cocked her head quizzically. “You don’t know? Pull that hose out from under the pilot’s seat, and I’ll show you how it works.”

Feeling a little queasy at the implications, I looked at the underside of the saddle, and then reeled out the hose located there. “Okay, now what?”

“Plug it into the port on the back of the syncsuit. Upper-right side, above your haunches.”

I pushed the hose into my back with my levitation and rotated it into place with a click. I gasped at the strange pulling sensation, like something was being vacuumed out of me. I also noticed that I’d suddenly lost the urge to piss.

“You’re fucking kidding me,” I said.

“Nope.” Tiamat laughed. “You’re catheterized. It’s permanent. The implant goes all the way down into your bladder. Bet you didn’t know that, did you?”

“But—but the nice toilet!”

“You don’t need it. In fact, the new-gen Destriers were going to delete it from the design entirely. You hook up the hose when you embark, you leave it in, and you don’t even notice as your insides are evacuated for you. Great for protracted operations.”

I whimpered like a foal who’d lost her favorite toy. I was sick to my stomach. They were making us Charger pilots less like ponies and more like equipment every day, before our entire nation went tits-up.

“But what if I have to shit?” I whined.

Tiamat giggled. “Glad you asked. For number two, well, we had magic zap-away disposal baggies for that. You’d open a port in your syncsuit like a onesie, and then they’d clip onto your ass and you’d—”

“Enough. I get it.”

“Sergeant Storm, you don’t know the half of it. The NGCP included advances in Charger tech so profound, they’d make your Mirage’s standard pre-production configuration look like ancient history. Are you aware of the Brabant program?”

“The Super-Destriers? Yes, I know of them. Crookneck Squash told me all about it.”

“That geezer is still alive, huh?” Tiamat said. “Not all that surprised, to be honest. What if I told you that the Brabant was mostly a psyop?”

That gave me pause. “What do you mean?”

“It’s a distraction.” Tiamat waved a claw dismissively. “Disinformation, mostly. We leaked bits of it to the enemy, to make them complacent. There were black projects that would make the Brabant look like a medieval trebuchet. Oh, sure, we’d probably have ended up building Super-Destriers anyway. You’re sitting in a testbed for one, hence the two-seat cockpit. However, they were far from being the crown jewel of our research programs. Your Mirage is something special. The key, the lynchpin, of a weapon system vastly more powerful than any other Charger in existence. Even Crookneck doesn’t know everything. He just thinks he does.”

I sighed. “Great. Wonderful. I’ll probably never get to pilot whatever the hell you’re talking about. Enough of the chitchat, we’ve got a job to do and very little time to do it.”

Tiamat laughed. “Just passing the time. Main systems are still booting. There.” The rest of the cockpit lighting kicked in, before dimming to a comfortable level, the Charger’s systems humming softly. It was nothing like the unrefined, visceral slamming of breakers and buzz of transformers one heard in a rough-hewn prototype Courser. It was muffled and serene. If one didn’t check the instrumentation, one would hardly know the damn thing started up at all. “Secondary and tertiary polywells online. Ready to synchronize now. Please—” Tiamat conversationally simulated clearing her throat with a mocking tone, since she had no throat to actually clear. “Assume the position.”

I climbed onto the pilot’s seat, which was the foremost of the two, like a fighter aircraft. Presumably, the rear seat was for a gunner or weapons officer of some kind. I had never seen this particular configuration before. Apparently, Brabants were meant to be operated by two crew members, and this Destrier was set up to test that configuration for tactical viability.

“One to pilot, one to run the artillery and adjust the point of impact on the move,” I said. “Clever. Ready to sync!”

The Sync Arm lowered into place over my back and neck, clicking into my suit’s spinal ports and linking the Charger directly to my neural lace, providing direct feedback through the Syncsuit’s haptics and nerve impulse sensors. Without a Syncsuit, a Charger was just a vehicle, operated by hoofcups just like a tank. With a Syncsuit, it felt more like a vague extension of one’s body. When a pilot was synchronized with their Charger, the Anima had a deeper understanding of the pilot’s intentions. With pilot and AI working in tandem, I could quite literally dodge tank shells or vault over obstacles. I took a deep breath, letting some of the tension out. It was time to get to work.

“Sync rate is fifty-seven percent,” Tiamat said. “Oh boy, this should be interesting.”

“What do we have for weapons?” I pretended I hadn’t heard the words that no pilot ever wanted to hear.

“Octuple MBC array and seventy-six-millimeter autocannons in the head, quad HBC in back.” There was a loud ping and a whine of hydraulics outside the hull. “There. Rearming gantry retracted, fresh magazines in place. You’ve got a full ammo load.”

I sighed, satisfied with the loadout. “Perfect.”

The hangar doors to the Charger stable began grinding open, the two massive slabs of steel slowly rolling aside on tracks to a chorus of klaxons and flashing yellow lights. I felt a thrill deep in my core. This was actually happening. I was in the saddle. I was in a syncsuit. I had a hundred tons of titanium under me, loaded for bear. I also had a known set of targets. Five enemy heavy infantry, rampaging around the base. One aerial contact, intermittent.

Only one thing left to do. Win.

“Game on, motherfuckers,” I muttered.

With but a thought, I fired the pyrojet boosters, destructively severing the Destrier from its stabilizing gantries and propelling its massive frame out of the hangar. There was more inertia than I was used to. More momentum, too. It was three times heavier than a Courser, and each motion was three times more sluggish and purposeful. With ice creeping into my veins, I suddenly realized three things. One, before today, I had zero hours on an actual Destrier. Two, my Courser skills were not interchangeable. Three, I had absolutely no idea what in the blue fuck I was doing.

“Wait! Shit!” I panicked as the hundred-ton machine skidded across the snow, before tripping and rolling over onto its right side with an earth-shaking boom. I grunted explosively, gravity tugging me halfway off my seat.

“Epic fail!” Tiamat laughed.

“Are you twelve?” I said.

“Nine, actually.”

“That explains so much.” I rolled us upright with the thrusters, planting my feet purposefully. “Where are those fuckers, Tia?”

The skimmer zipped across my field of vision, with Sierra being pursued by five enraged Vurvalfn. I wasn’t sure if that was what the creatures were called, and I wasn’t even sure how it was supposed to be pronounced, but that was what I’d taken to thinking of them as. Eight strange, unrecognizable, unpronounceable alien letters in an unknown writing system belonging to an unknown and highly advanced species.

I shook my head. It was like the whole universe wanted us dead for some reason. We’d never done anything to these people. We didn’t even know who the hell they were, but they knew everything about us. They didn’t introduce themselves. They didn’t even say hi. They didn’t even knock. They just barged in and started slaughtering us, without warning and without explanation. At least the Confederacy made it clear where we stood with them. They wanted our land, they wanted our resources, and they wanted us as their slaves. These bastards, on the other hand, didn’t even want anything from us. Somehow, I doubted that a race so advanced needed anything from anyone. I grit my teeth with rage.

“Well, that answers that question.” I flicked a few switches for the multi-function displays to enable the sensor overlays and toggled back and forth from white-hot to black-hot on the thermals just to make sure I was seeing what I thought I was seeing. “Arm the heavy beamcasters!”

The four HBCs unfolded from their stowage position on the Charger’s back like four giant fingers, motes of violet energy building along their sides. I sighted in the first of the creatures, the one in the lead, the targeting pip shaking as the Charger’s weapons stabilized themselves. When it turned red and acquired a lock, I pulled the triggers in my hoofcups. There was a blinding flash and an earsplitting crack of four simultaneous HBC discharges. The creature’s spherical shield bubble flared bright blue, sputtered, and died.

“Arm autocannons!”

The Destrier stumbled a few steps. I was a poor fit for the great beast of war. My sync rate with Tiamat was only fifty-seven percent. Well below the eighty-five percent threshold needed to qualify for the type. Our personalities conflicted too heavily. My training and experience on Destriers were next to nonexistent. Tiamat herself was familiar with neither me and my neural patterns nor the Destrier itself. It was a mutual, three-way relationship between pilot, machine, and Anima. The Pilot’s Triangle. This one was fundamentally skewed.

“Come on,” I howled. “Come on!”

The Vurvalfn turned and bolted straight towards me, intent on boarding my Charger and melting it into scrap with their energy projectors. They needed physical contact to do it. I needed to put distance between myself and them, in what was quickly turning into the world’s worst game of tag. I tensed my legs and jumped, my pyrojet thrusters roaring as I took to the skies. Snow billowed underneath me, vaporizing into great clouds of steam from the heat. Long plumes of exhaust with Mach diamonds lanced out from beneath me.

I got a targeting lock on terahertz and infrared. The creatures were blazing hot on my sensors, their silhouettes clearly visible on the displays. Nothing about them was stealthy. They practically glowed on my displays. I raked them with seventy-six-millimeter cannon fire, the heavy autocannons thumping out an extended burst of twenty rounds. Big, rippling flashes and puffs of frag tore the base’s runway to shreds.

The 76mm cannons’ heat warning blared, cryokinetics automatically powering on and removing the waste heat from the barrels. Guns of this type tended to have advanced and expensive active cooling systems when mounted on Chargers, unlike the naval versions which typically used seawater instead. The Vurvalfn with the downed shield had crumpled in a heap, its insides reduced to mush by shrapnel and concussive force. The other four kept charging, darting around and parting ways, trying to avoid bunching up and being caught in the same salvo.

I did a one-eighty in mid-air, firing the thrusters to rotate me as I descended. The moment I hit the ground, I broke into a sprint. Or, at least, I tried to. Instead, what happened was that I fucked up the landing and skidded some tens of meters on the Charger’s knees, scuffing the paint against the runway.

“Fuck!” I looked over the self-diagnostic damage reports, which indicated mild impairment in the forelegs’ duostrand caused by the harsh impact. “This shit is all fucked! I don’t know this fucking machine!”

Tiamat sighed explosively. “Neither do I. It’s one thing to know a Charger’s blueprints. It’s quite another to know how to sync with one, even for us AIs. This thing’s my body, right now. Please try not to bust it up.”

I was physically and emotionally exhausted. Being fresh would’ve given me about ten more percent. Having at least a few hundred hours on actual Destriers in training would’ve given me another twenty percent. I hadn’t even gone over the R79’s checklist. The control layout was similar enough, with a few extra bells and whistles here and there, but that was all. The remainder was all down to the pilot and the anima gaining experience and working together over time.

I had a ninety-six percent sync rate with Dust Devil on a bad day. Her core was more deeply embedded in the Mirage’s systems and not conveniently removable, and she’d been practically custom designed for the thing. The ability to plug a general-purpose Anima into any Charger was a backup function, in case the Charger’s own core had been damaged by enemy fire or removed for servicing and the machine needed to be operated in an emergency. This was one such emergency.

I fired the boosters to build to a gallop, quickly topping out at over a hundred. There was no way they could catch me, but I wasn’t confident enough to try and turn at this speed, so I simply ran down the runway in a straight line. I bled off some speed, strafing sideways with the thrusters a bit. I came to a halt by a cliffside and turned around. The Vurvalfn were fast approaching, three hundred meters out and closing.

What they hadn’t realized was the reason why I’d chosen this location to stop. The moment they got within a hundred meters, I turned the Charger’s head and blasted the mountainside with autocannon fire. There was a rumble and then, a rockslide that quickly built into a full-on avalanche. I fired the thrusters and jump-jetted over a hundred meters into the air to avoid being engulfed. The Vurvalfn weren’t so lucky. They were buried in a fast-moving wall of rock and snow. I watched them tumble end over end and disappear beneath the churning white.

“That’s right,” I said. “That’s right, you pieces of shit!”

Without warning, the cliffside erupted in a ferocious conflagration, sending clouds of debris hurtling through the air. A rock smashed into one of my cameras and cracked it, setting off damage alarms. I spun to face the attacker. It was the dropship, back for more. Judging by the scintillating lines of energy building along its sides, it was getting ready to fire its chin gun again.

I fired the R79’s boosters, propelling myself out of its field of fire before it unleashed another pulse of energy, one that vaporized an entire storage bunker, turning it into a cloud of flying concrete. The blast wave from the secondaries slammed into my machine a split-second later, rattling my insides and sending me rolling end over end. I yelped and shrieked as the hundred-ton machine tumbled sideways through the snow, before righting itself with a burst of thruster power. When I turned back, there was a rising fireball the size of skyscraper a couple hundred meters to my rear.

“Holy fuck,” I muttered.

“Welp, there goes a few hundred of the SSMs,” Tiamat said.

I panicked. “Nerve gas, or conventional?”

“Conventional, thank Celestia.” Tiamat sighed. “You think it would’ve been that big of a boom if it was poison? Get real. That was like three hundred tons of TNT equivalent that just went up, there. What a mess. The adjacent bunkers are compromised, too. Don’t stand next to them! If they go, and we’re too close, then we go, too.”

“Got it.” I turned back to the threat, tracking them as they hovered over the airfield and slewed sideways, watching as they kept me in their sights the entire time, as well. “What the fuck are we dealing with here?”

“Can’t get a good reading,” Tiamat said. “Their shielding is blocking my scans!”

“Well, I’m pretty sure I can do something about that,” I said. “Lock HBCs!”

The target pipper squalled and turned red as it locked onto the enemy dropship. I unleashed the power of the quad heavy beamcasters, slamming into their shielding with four columns of blinding purple kinetic energy. A blue bubble flared around the craft. Their shields held fast.

“Dammit! What the hell kinda shielding do they have?”

“That last volley we sent was over three hundred megajoules,” Tiamat said. “Enough to destroy a good thirty-odd main battle tanks. All I can say about their shielding is that they’ve absorbed at least a gigajoule in total so far, from us and from the Omnis. Their shielding is very, very strong.”

The dropship let loose with another pulse of energy, which went wild and smashed into the cliffs. The blast wave rocked my Charger back on its hooves. The rockslide that followed threatened to bury a good portion of the base.

“Fuck, it’s like a bomb going off!” I said.

Tiamat’s holographic representation bit her claws, her every feature tense. “It’s not like a bomb going off. It practically is a bomb going off. Wherever that beam touches, it causes a two-gigajoule explosion, like a half-ton bomb. I’m still running my analysis, but I’m pretty sure that one chin gun on that dropship is more powerful than each of our heavy beamcasters by at least twenty-six times. To put that in terms you can easily understand, what you’re facing has the equivalent firepower of something like six or seven Destriers packed into one single weapon.”

I broke out in a cold sweat. The over-match lethality was insane. No Charger stood a chance against that kind of firepower. My only saving grace was that their gunnery was worse than an epileptic foal’s.

I grinned wide. “I want that fucking gun!”

“Good luck with that,” Tiamat said. “Can’t imagine what the power requirements must be. Must take a city’s worth of juice to run it. How do they cool the damn thing?”

“Tiamat, get the Omnis ready. I’ve got something for these pricks.”

I turned and ran the length of the airfield, the dropship in pursuit, charging their weapon again. I watched them in the rear-view cam, gasping with shock as they vanished into thin air.

“Fuck, they cloaked!”

There was a brilliant flash that painted the entire plateau white. Right when their weapon discharged, I fired an evasive burst of thruster power and watched as the runway ahead of me erupted in a plume of asphalt. The shockwave nearly knocked my Charger off its hooves. When the dust began to settle, there was a fifteen-meter-wide crater where part of the runway once stood. If that shot had connected, that crater would have been me.

“Luna’s tits!”

“An apt summary,” Tiamat agreed.

I spun on my hooves, facing the aggressor as they rematerialized. “Got you right where I want you, now! Fire all the Omnis at it!”

I’d lured the dropship to where the base’s turret coverage was the greatest, in the middle of the airfield. Five heavy beamcaster shots lanced out from the corners of the base, striking the dropship all at once, from all angles. I loosed my own HBC array at that exact same moment. Nine heavy beamcaster pulses, all on the same target. It had to count for something, I reasoned, and it surely did. The dropship’s shield bubble shattered with a flash of crackling blue-white energy.

“Locking cannons!” I shouted. “Firing!” I pulled the triggers in the hoofcups, letting loose with the seventy-six. Ten thumps shook the cockpit as I let off a burst, and then another ten as I fired another.

The dropship’s hull was pockmarked with orange flashes. Something in their right wing started to smoke, but their armor was barely scratched by the autocannon. “The fuck are they made out of?!” I shouted.

Once their shields were down, Tiamat scanned the dropship, bringing up salient information on my augmented-reality displays. “I have taken this rare opportunity to perform penetrating scans of the vessel. New classification; Orca Dropship. My analysis is complete. The engines are inertialess. The wings produce lift by electrokinetic means and are not conventional airfoils by any stretch of the imagination. They can dynamically shift from straight wings to a delta shape using an invisible phased energy field bubble that reshapes itself depending on airspeed. The craft is not only capable of vertical takeoffs and likely hypersonic flight, it can also stop on a dime by turning its invisible force envelope into an airbrake.”

“Who’s piloting it?” I said. “What species?”

“There are no life signs aboard that I can detect,” Tiamat said. “The vessel is apparently an optionally-manned drone with voids indicating internal crew spaces. It is currently operating in what appears to be an unmanned mode. Most alarmingly of all, I am detecting strong gamma bursts at the impact point every time the dropship fires its weapons. Some sort of positron cannon. That thing is shooting antimatter! If we’re hit, we’re as good as vaporized!”

“Gamma rays?” My eyes widened with horror. “Am I irradiated?”

“No, we’re fine. Our armor’s absorbed it. You have to be close enough for the actual explosion itself to be more of a problem.”

I regarded this new, enigmatic foe with newfound respect, and more than a little fear. They had weaponry at their disposal that made beamcasters and pulsecannons look like toys. Worse, they had weaponized the most volatile substance in existence. I bit my lip as I thought of the possibility of being engulfed in a massive explosion if the dropship’s antimatter traps suffered catastrophic containment loss from battle damage.

“Who the fuck are these people?” It wasn’t even a valid question, for I knew there were none who could answer it. It was more like a declaration of my own fear and disbelief.

They started charging up another shot. This time, they were aiming for the bunkers leading into the underground sections of the base. An easy, stationary target. I wouldn’t let them do it. I had to stop them. I pulled the triggers and the HBCs cycled and fired again and again, the booster coils practically smoking from the heat. I focused on the same spot, digging a hole through their insanely tough armor until finally, something inside the fearsome craft yielded, exploding outward with a blue, plasmatic flash. The Orca nosedived towards the entrance to Sector West, its entire hull engulfed in an orange fireball. I wasn’t sure how big the explosion would be when the thing slammed into the ground. I wasn’t about to take any chances.

“Come on, you big bastard!” I wasn’t even sure if I was saying it to the Destrier I was piloting or to the plummeting dropship, but somehow, I willed the machine to rear up on its hind legs, intercepting the craft’s path of descent. The dropship smashed into me with incredible force, sending me skidding backwards on my machine’s hind-hooves. I pulsed the boosters to brake my rearward motion. “Tiamat, suplex!” I yelled, not able to coax the motion out of the Destrier with the neural link due to the poor sync rate.

“Got it!” Tiamat said.

The Anima ignited the pyrojets in sequence, rolling us backwards and flipping the dropship over, imparting momentum to it as we spun. This sent the ailing craft hurtling end over end, where it smashed into a jagged cliffside, rolled downhill, and dug its own snowy grave. Flames and thick, black smoke billowed from the wreck.

“What kind of spell locus do we have?” I said.

“Elemental, why?”

That was exactly what I wanted to hear. “Jackpot. You got a spell diagram for cryokinesis?”

“Of course.”

The holotank flared, revealing glowing blue rows and columns of magic symbols in Old Equish. I charged my horn, carefully reading off the diagram. Ice, instantiation, projection. In modern Equestrian, it would’ve been rendered as the phonetically similar Ordet Imnas Kraista, but Old Equish was still the standard tongue of spellcraft. I minded my pronunciation as I spoke the spell.

“Hordettas, Imanas, Carraistur!” I shouted.

A halo of brilliant white magic coalesced above the Destrier’s head, between the antennae, before blasting outward as a blizzard of ethereal cold. I could feel the power of three polywells surging through my mind as I cast in sync with the Charger’s locus. It was cold and refreshing, like chewing a whole pack of mint-flavored gum at once. I guided the stream onto the crash site, snuffing out the flames in mere seconds, letting out a few more bursts just to be sure. The wrecked dropship was charred black in places, but still recognizable as the original article, its thin and feathery-looking wings not even bent by the impact. Whatever it was made of, it was incredibly robust. I realized, with some alarm, that my horn had iced up. I yelped and tapped it with my hoof, my brain chilled like I’d just eaten a giant spoonful of shaved ice.

“What the fuck?” I said.

“Typical for inexperienced elementalists,” Tiamat said. “You can easily burn or freeze yourself, too.”

“I wonder what we can salvage from the wreck?” I said, knocking the ice off my horn with my hoof. “Could be something good in there, if anything’s still intact. We need to know more about these assholes, and we need to know right the fuck now.”

“I couldn’t agree more,” Tiamat said. “Wait—incoming!”

Without warning, one of the Vurvalfn latched onto my main camera, its armored body clinging to its surface and obscuring my view. Its enraged roar shook the whole cockpit. I was startled halfway out of my seat. I was shocked that they’d managed to dig themselves out of the snow so quickly, but given their other feats, I shouldn’t have been. I had been too sloppy and too preoccupied with the dropship to watch my own back. The other three clung to my legs like living limpet mines, releasing plasmatic blue pulses of energy that began to melt through my LAMIBLESS and disable my electro-magical transducers.

“No!” I shouted. “Let go, you pieces of shit!”

I fired the boosters, trying to shake them off, but there was a loud pop and one of the instrument panels began to smoke. The pyrojets went out instantly. Upon landing, the Destrier collapsed to the ground, three of the legs having failed almost entirely. The main camera went out, and then, the multi-spectral sensors. Just like that, they’d accomplished a mobility kill and blinded me. They pounded on the hatch to the cockpit, denting it inwards with their augmented strength. I began to hyperventilate with fear.

“Oh no, oh shit! Tiamat, desync!” There was no reply, and I was growing increasingly agitated. “Come the fuck on, Tiamat!”

The sync arm wouldn’t retract. For some reason, it had jammed. Tiamat was non-responsive and the electronics in the cockpit were failing one after another. First, the MFDs went black, then the controls went dead, and then, the lighting went out, plunging me into the darkness. Out of desperation, I reached back and unclipped the syncsuit’s connection to my neural lace, something that was never supposed to be done when a pilot was still synced. I screamed in agony at the feedback that surged through my body, my legs spasming a few times until the pain subsided. The sync arm jettisoned itself automatically, detecting the loss of synchronization.

I stumbled a few steps, coughing, every nerve in my body on fire. With every blow, the hatch dented further. I could see a crack forming, with frenzied movement on the other side. I hurriedly pulled Tiamat’s core from the console, popped open the locker under the bunk and shoved it into my discarded armor’s saddlebags. I groaned in pain as I pulled myself onto the top bunk, activating my invisibility magic. With one final slam, the hatch busted open. The Vurvalfn flooded into the cockpit. With me.

I didn’t breathe. I didn’t move. I didn’t make a sound. I hoped that the syncsuit would be enough to mask most of my scent. I was sweating bullets. I only had a couple minutes of invisibility left before I burned out. Then, they would see me, and I would be torn to pieces. My lips trembled, tears running down my cheeks as I put a hoof over my mouth and suppressed the urge to sob audibly. I was glad I’d had the contents of my bladder sucked out. I might have simply wet myself right then and there, otherwise. With their acute senses, they would’ve smelled it and discovered me immediately.

I could hear one of them, beside the bunks. Though I couldn’t see it, and I didn’t dare attempt an echolocation spell, I could feel its humid breath against my face as it snorted and growled mere inches from me. It turned its head towards me and I froze. A clawed hand raked across the mattress right in front of me. I pressed myself back into the corner and remained absolutely still, biting my lip so hard that it nearly bled. Not like this, I thought. Please, not like this.

I was having flashbacks to Ahriman Station. A scalpel-like tail lashed at me, slicing into me with ease. A misshapen hoof slapped into my foreleg with overwhelming force, breaking it. These mindless beasts were so much stronger than a Karkadann. So much deadlier. There wouldn’t even be anything left of me to bury. I struggled to maintain my cloak, gritting my teeth with exertion.

The little lockbox in my head flew open unbidden. Age ten. I was huddled in my bed, clutching a plush toy to my chest, my back pressed up against the far corner of the room, the intersection of the two walls cold against my withers. I’d locked the door to my bedroom, because he was out there, and he was half of an entire fifth bottle from sobriety. An angry hoof pounded on the door, so hard it sounded like he’d smash the door frame out of the wall.

Storm, open the fucking door!

Go away, Dad! You’re drunk!

I am at my wits’ end with you, you stupid little cunt! I’m gonna take the lock off this fucking door!

I couldn’t even remember what it was that had driven him to such anger. It was something so trivial, I’d completely forgotten.

Don’t, I thought, at the time, but I didn’t say it. Don’t take the lock off. It’s the only thing standing between me and you. I need to be alone. I need to be safe. I need to be unhurt.

Storm! he yelled. If you don’t open this door in five seconds, I’m going to break it down, and if you make me break this house, then guess what? I’m gonna break you, next! One, two, three—

I’ll call the cops, I swear I will! I screamed, hugging the plush Celestia toy tighter to my chest, silently bidding that her divine power shield me from my father’s wrath. They’ll get me a real dad!

Oh, you will, will you? Now you’re gonna get it, you stupid little bitch. You want foster parents, is that it? Do you know what happens to kids in foster care? Is that how you wanna lose your virginity? Some crusty ol’ foster father, pushing you down in your nice little pink sheets and—

I heard the roar of pyrojet engines, snapping me back into the present. I slowly opened my eyes, even though all I could see was inky black.

“Hey, uglies!” A PA speaker blared. “Get out here!”

I recognized it immediately as Captain Garrida’s voice. Incensed, the Vurvalfn roared a challenge as they departed the cockpit with haste. I crawled out of the bunk, dragging my armor and my jacket with me, and ambled over to the wrecked hatch of the Destrier, releasing my cloak and taking in the proceedings. I gaped in awe at the sight before me. Garrida stood in the open side door of a Roc dropship that I didn’t even know we had, hovering over a hundred meters away, her rifle trained on the Vurvalfn. Sierra and the Skimmer hovered in formation with them.

However, that wasn’t the most shocking thing. Three of Her Majesty’s honored Dragoons were part of the formation, as well. Commodore Cake was there, along with two others I couldn’t identify. The one in the lead bore the unmistakable insignia of a Star Cross. Her white armor was accented black and Twilight Sparkle’s six-pointed star was proudly emblazoned across her chest.

“In the name of the Empress,” the Star Cross spoke, raising her lance high, “smite the evildoers and their wretched abominations!”

The three angled their lances at the Vurvalfn and executed a supersonic dive, accelerating with impossible swiftness. It had to be the doing of magic. A temporary reduction of air density to reduce drag, or the like. The opening move of their assault generated a sonic boom, and the fierce impacts at the end made a thunderous report. The two events happened so close together, they sounded almost simultaneous. Their lances smashed into the creatures’ shields. Drained as they were by the battle, the forcefield bubbles—which seemed to draw from a limited and finite pool of energy rather than regenerating—put up no resistance. The barriers shattered instantly.

The creatures took swipes at the Dragoons with their claws, only to be parried by the Dragoons’ lances and receive broken arms for their trouble. The Star Cross was an expert with her lance, thrusting and blocking in the same move, almost faster than the eye could perceive. The Vurvalfn were fast and strong, but dim-witted and possessed of poorer reflexes. The lead Dragoon’s lance shot out and smashed into her opponent’s jaw, the force enough to spin his head and break his neck. He toppled and collapsed instantly.

Sensing the threat she posed, two others broke contact with the other two Dragoons and slashed at the Star Cross from in front and behind, and she practically did the splits to duck beneath their blows, before sweeping the legs of the one in front of her with her lance and bucking the one behind her into the air, sending him flying. Before he could land, she launched herself skyward with a flap of her wings and a burst of thrust from her exosuit’s pyrojets and front-flipped into a vicious descending lance blow, imploding his chest armor. When she landed, she did a hoof-stand to pull an about-face while simultaneously dodging a blow from the third creature.

Two medium beamcasters nestled in the back of her exosuit unfurled like a second set of wings. The pulse of blinding arcane energy they released was enough to send the third damarkind flying backwards, his chest armor scorched. The beam width had been dialed up intentionally to produce something more like a traditional arcane blast spell, imparting kinetic energy over a larger area and forcibly repelling one’s foe to create distance. I’d heard of exosuit-mounted medium casters before, but I’d never seen one up close and personal. I’d never seen pyrojets so small, either. I didn’t even know they existed.

The Star Cross lunged, her suit’s built-in pyrojet boosters driving her to insane speeds. Her lance was ensconced in a field of blinding white energy that tapered to an impossibly sharp point. She slammed it into the damarkind’s stomach before he even had a chance to hit the ground, impaling him in mid-air. A shower of atomized blood erupted from his back. However, she wasn’t finished. That was just the pinning attack. A prelude to the deathblow, which came when she fired her armor’s light beamcasters point-blank into her enemy’s torso.

They were a model that I’d never seen before. The emitters were square instead of round, composed of what seemed to be a plethora of smaller emitters, like the compound eye of an insect. Rather than sending a pencil-sized beam of arcane energy downrange, they fired a multitude of needle-thin pulses in sequence, at what sounded to my ear like thousands or even tens of thousands of pulses per minute.

With a great ripping noise that lasted only for a second or two, she cleaved the beast in half, right across his chest, the tiny beams sawing him to ribbons and emerging from his back, severing his spine in an instant. He fell from her lance as two heaps of gore, landing in the snow many meters below with a wet plop of spilled entrails.

The last of the creatures decided to try and leap at her from behind, coiling and hurling itself into the air with alarming strength and speed. Commodore Cake and the third Dragoon intercepted it, slamming the points of their lances into its chest simultaneously, reversing its course and sending it flying. The Star Cross was on it, her pyrojet boosters surging as she intercepted the augmented damarkind mid-fall, riding him across the runway like a snowboard as he dug a furrow in the powder. She reared up and brought her hooves down on his head with an audible grunt of exertion, pulping the creature’s skull instantaneously. The three Dragoons instantly resumed formation, their lances arrayed outward to respond to any threat.

I clicked my tongue with disappointment. If I thought I was going to be sitting around watching Dragoons do all the fighting, I would’ve brought popcorn. I’d just about finished stripping off Major Springblossom’s syncsuit when a hoof reached down into my field of view, startling me.

“You okay?” Bell said.

I looked up, accepting Bellwether’s assistance as he helped me to my trembling hooves. “I’m alright. Scored one dropship kill. We know these fuckers aren’t invincible. They can be beaten. They fucked up the Destrier pretty bad, though. Be sure to convey my sincerest apologies to the Baroness Springblossom when and if you see her. How’d you get past the rubble?”

“I wasn’t dumb enough to seal myself inside when the bombs went off, that’s how.” Bellwether grinned, shaking his head. “You’re fucking crazy.” He patted me on the head patronizingly. “Keep it up and you might get on my good side, Sergeant.”

“Bell, that was just one dropship.” I continued conversing as I donned my armor and winter coat. “They nearly took us all out with just one fucking dropship. They had at least one other, and that big huge hoofball-field-sized one, too, remember? If the Orcas could carry such a nightmarish cargo, I don’t even wanna know what the big fucker’s got in it! We need to get the civilians the hell out of here.”

“Orcas?” Bellwether raised a brow.

“That’s what Tiamat calls ‘em. Oh, shit. Speaking of which—” I pulled Tiamat’s core from my saddlebags and plugged it into my suit computer. “Tia? You there? Talk to me.”

“I’m fine,” she said. “The Destrier ain’t going nowhere without a flatbed, though.”

I practically jumped out of my skin when I saw Tiamat’s augmented-reality projection in my eyepiece. “Oh shit, Tia, you’re all glitched out!”

The suit computer was trying, and failing, to represent the three-dimensional model of Tiamat’s body. Her polygons were stretched grotesquely over a distance of hundreds of meters and her eyeballs and tongue were floating outside her head.

“What?” Tiamat said. “Oh, it’s nothing. It’s just your suit’s graphics accelerator chip. Took some damage, looks like.” Out of courtesy, she disabled the gruesome visuals. “As for the Charger, the EMTs in the legs are done. They fried like eighty percent of them. Most of the cockpit electronics are ruined, too. It’s going to take months to repair it, if it’s even fixable at all.”

“I thought Chargers were supposed to be hardened against electromagnetic pulses?” I said.

“They are. It’s not EMP that those creatures are putting out. Well, not directly, anyway. I’ve finished my analysis. When those things release a phased energy pulse, the electromagnetic oscillators in their bodies produce a polarized quantum vacuum standing off an immeasurably tiny distance from their skin. This creates a high-energy plasma discharge and extremely powerful radio waves, which can induce a current in electronics.

“The polarized Q-vac effect can phase through any solid matter they touch, so conductive shielding is useless. If that wasn’t bad enough, the plasma discharges can melt through hardened steel at short range, allowing them to bypass all kinds of barriers and pierce straight through EMP shielding anyway. The electric arcs coming off of them are just electric arcs. Stay away. Or don’t, and get your heart going all floppy again. See if I care.”

“Great,” I said. “What the fuck does any of that actually mean, though, Tiamat?”

“It’s something very similar to the principle used by electrokinetic drives to create and accelerate packets of virtual mass, but weaponized,” Tiamat said. “They can repel incoming energy and mass with those forcefields. I’m surprised these things don’t use it to fly, but it could be that they’re incomplete. Something about this tells me that this was all some sort of experiment or live-fire test, or else they would’ve brought more reinforcements in to finish the job.”

I huffed angrily at that. The idea that they were an unfinished product, that they could be refined into something even more monstrous, chilled me to the bone. They were already bad enough the way they were. They had the ability to leap surprising distances into the air. It was as if they could reduce their own weight with electrokinetics and defy gravity. One of them had leapt a dozen meters straight up to clamp its whole body onto my Destrier’s head.

I turned and surveyed the hulk of the collapsed Charger, its legs still smoking from where the EMTs had popped and the LAMIBLESS had burned through. I held my breath as I backed away from the wreck. The acrid black waft smelled like burnt honeycomb. The changeling-derived synthetic resin gave off neurotoxic smoke when it burned. The Vurvalfn were the natural enemy of vehicles and their vital electronic systems. The ability to fly would’ve made them a true nightmare.

I realized with a start that the letters VURVALFN were very similar to their Ardun equivalents. I was very poor at reading cleomanni script, because they used both an alphabet which I mostly knew and a syllabary that I did not, but I could see the parallels.

“One of those things had something etched on its chest armor. Wurr-wholphin? Forvaphn? It looks almost like Ardun lettering, but different.”

“Vur-val-fin,” Tiamat corrected. “Tentative translation, Sholashtonn. Like Sholashwyodhy, Timberwolf, except with Tonna. Wolf-that-is-a-person. Werewolf. We know of this script in our databases. That’s partly why these encounters have been so alarming. We’ve found numerous ancient artif—”

Bellwether unplugged Tiamat from my suit computer and stuffed her in his saddlebags, raw anger in his expression. “We’ve found nothing. You didn’t hear that.”

I looked up at him with a brief, furtive glare, before turning back to the carnage and shaking my head. Too many questions, not enough answers, and typical BASKAF coverup bullshit to cap it all off. ORACLE no longer existed as an organization. We were all on the same team. Bellwether had no right to keep anything from any of us, classified or not. I plugged my armor computer’s cable into the data port on the back of my neck, running a quick self-diagnostic.

I squinted at the glitched text in my eyepiece and gritted my teeth. The implant was reading only partially functional. Maybe one kidney’s worth of filtration at best. Probably from the same hit that sent my heart rhythm haywire. The catheterization was a passive feature and the implant didn’t need to be functional for the drain port to work. However, using the drain hose might’ve introduced unwanted bacteria into my bladder, due to the much-vaunted self-sterilization features of the implant possibly being inactive. There was no telling if the auto-dialysis implant’s condition would continue to worsen. Argent was going to need to dig into it sometime within the next few days or so, or I was fucked, either from a lack of functioning kidneys or from infection. Somehow, I already knew how this operation would end. With me on a stretcher, running a high fever and almost blacking out from sepsis.

As Sierra pulled in low and waved us over, I mounted up on the Skimmer with Bellwether, taking up position on the tail gun. We provided overwatch with the Dragoons as Garrida’s Roc landed and disgorged troops. They immediately went to work with shovels, digging out the rubble from the collapsed bunker entrance until they made a hole big enough to storm inside. The Dragoons and the surviving Wolfhounds rushed in after them, providing support. Approximately fifteen minutes later, Colonel Rune Ward and the rest of the base’s security detachment filtered outside, having been stripped of their weapons and armor. As our ELF boys and girls marched back out, prisoners in tow, we landed the Skimmer and hopped off, covering the area with our casters.

The Star Cross shoved the Colonel face-first into the snow, sending his peaked officer’s cap flying. Her helmet was retracted and her weathered face was a mask of hatred, her eyes lined by crow’s feet so deep they looked like war paint. “You’re going to stand trial before Admiral Star Crusher before the week is out, you son of a bitch. You spilled innocent Equestrian blood, and you’ll pay for it with yours!”

“The Empress ordered us to kill more!” he shouted. “We were one of the last airbases with a functional runway. She ordered us to kill millions! To bomb the cities while our people and our soldiers were still fighting for their lives in them! I refused!”

“You disobeyed a direct order, ignored your duty to the Empress, and turned this facility into a mockery of its prior function, all for your own personal gratification.” She ground her hoof into the back of his head, forcing him face-down into the powder. “You brazenly admit your guilt before all assembled here. You shame us all with your cowardice.” The Star Cross waved a hoof over all of us. “Every mare, every stallion, every pony alive who struggles to restore the Empire, each individual hair on the backs of their heads has more honesty and more courage in it than you do in your entire body, you scoundrel! For your actions, you will face justice.”

The senior Dragoon waved her hoof, and the ELF troops clapped heavy steel hoofcuffs on him and escorted him to the Roc. Captain Garrida leered at him dangerously as he passed, but otherwise said nothing. I winced. She knew what he’d done. He’d be lucky if she hadn’t busted his jaw in five places by the time they got back.

The Star Cross turned to the rest of the base’s garrison, some of whom sheepishly stared at the ground rather than meet the gaze of her fiery yellow eyes and her slitted pupils. I realized, with some surprise, that she wasn’t a pegasus at all. She was a thestral. Her kind were thought to be all but extinct. How one ended up being born and raised within the insular and secretive society of the Dragoons, I hadn’t the faintest idea.

I supposed they were similar enough to a pegasus, except that they were generally said to lack the broader weather-manipulation and cloud-walking powers that pegasi possessed. Their powers were more personal and shorter-ranged, limited to condensing the air around them to generate small obscurant clouds or mists. I wondered if her powers, combined with her suit’s unique features, had something to do with her bursts of tremendous acceleration.

“As for the rest of you,” she began, “you’re not going to escape punishment for your role in collaborating with a depraved coward in turning one of the Empress’s military bases into his own personal fuck-factory. You’re going to gather up the bodies of the fallen and bring them out here for identification and burial. If you leave even one piece behind, then you’re going to draw lots. When the lot falls upon one of you, I shall strike off his head in that very same instant. This process will repeat until either the bodies of the victims are all accounted for, or all of you are dead. You have one hour to deliver unto me the corpses! Go!”

The mortified base guards immediately did as ordered, running back into the bunker to gather the bodies and avoid incurring the Dragoon’s considerable wrath. The rest of the troops went with them, so that they would remain under guard the entire time. The Star Cross gathered up the abandoned syncsuit from outside the Destrier’s wreck, marching over to me with the article in her hoof.

“I am Star Cross Wraithwood,” she said. “I am told that you piloted this Destrier in defense of this base. What is your name, soldier?”

I promptly saluted and stammered out a reply to the best of my ability. “S—Sergeant Desert Storm, Eighth Cavalry Division, ma’am!”

“Well, is it true? Were you the one who piloted it?”

“Yes, ma’am!”

She gazed down at the syncsuit she held, a wistful look in her eyes. “I knew the Baroness. The Empress assigned me as her personal guard for a number of years, due to the importance of her role in the test pilot program. Her skill and penetrating insight into the nature of Charger design and operation was unparalleled.” When she looked back up at me, it was with the eyes of a ferocious predator. “Was there any reason why you, a lowly volunteer pilot, saw fit to wear her uniform, and to bring such incomparable ruin upon one of the Empress’s divine creations?”

I was sweating bullets. Even being dressed down by Garrida was nothing compared to this. If the Dragoon wanted to, she could legally execute me on the spot. The blow would be so powerful that my very soul would ejected from my body at relativistic speeds. I would feel it in the afterlife, if there was an afterlife.

I clenched my eyes shut, trying to hide my tears. “I—I did what I had to do, ma’am! The civilians’ lives were all at risk! I swore an oath to protect them to my very last breath!”

The Star Cross chuckled softly. “Open your eyes, Sergeant.” I did so, watching with bewilderment as she casually tossed the syncsuit aside and rested an armored hoof on my shoulder, beaming with pride. “Bellwether already told me everything in shorthoof over the aetheric. With the full knowledge that these foul abominations were waiting out here to carve you into ribbons with their claws, you three rushed out into the cold, dark night on your own initiative, you deployed a Charger with no support crew and no backup, and you brought down a SILVER SCALPEL dropship.”

“It was nothing,” I said. “I was only doing my duty.”

“That’s where you’re wrong, Sergeant. It wasn’t nothing. You drew first blood, against a foe we haven’t so much as scratched in the past. I’ve lost five of my best against them, and yet, you survive. Machines can be repaired. Pilots with your kind of grit are one in a thousand.” The grinning thestral clapped me on the shoulder playfully. “Be proud, Sergeant. I know the Baroness would be, too, even if you did scratch up her steed.” Wraithwood glanced over at the corpses of the Vurvalfn, her expression turning grim. “There is, however, something that I need you to do. The three of you must compile a detailed after-action report on this encounter and pass it to Captain Garrida.”

“Count on it, ma’am.” I nodded.

“Include every last detail.” The Dragoon sighed. “We need every scrap of information we can get about anything related to SILVER SCALPEL. The future of our species depends on it. Our conditions are meager enough that the Confederacy alone poses an existential threat to us all. The presence of this unknown faction only compounds the risk. Oh, and before you go, there is one other thing.”

Star Cross Wraithwood pulled out a small black case, presenting it to me with her hoof face-up. “This isn’t anything like a formal ceremony. My sincerest apologies, but we don’t exactly have much time for those, these days. When I heard the code SIVSCA had been called, my blood ran cold, but I still had the presence of mind to make sure I brought a few of these with me. Dozens of my sisters-in-arms, five of them my own treasured subordinates, have fallen in battle against these worthless bastards. As for the ones who have survived, they are part of an elite group, and that now includes you three. I present to you the Order of the Sterling Lance.”

I took the case and opened it, awed at what I found inside. The silver medal was exquisitely detailed, bearing an embossed image of a Dragoon’s lance, standing point-up and wreathed in laurels. It bore a motto in Old Equish. Anla Noci, Wirda Laus. I quickly translated it to modern Equestrian in my head.

“Anlia Nocire, Virdanen Leus,” I mouthed near-silently. “From darkness, divine light.” It bore no other markings or any indication of what it was awarded for. I held it to my chest, almost overcome with emotion. “This is an unbelievable honor, ma’am.”

“The honor was all mine, Sergeant,” she said. “Go see the medics if you’re hurt, and for goodness’ sake, get some rest. You’ve earned it.”

As she flew over to present the other two medals to Bellwether and Sierra, I closed the case and stuffed mine in my saddlebag. My limbs felt leaden and I wanted desperately to lie down for a bit, but there was more to be done. The LZ wasn’t exactly secure. The other two dropships could’ve swung by at any time, and the results would have been disastrous. I didn’t particularly relish the idea of what came next. We had civilians to evacuate, and a giant mound of corpses to deal with.

// … // … // … // … // … //

While we stayed on station with the Skimmer, providing overwatch and keeping an eye out for more aerial attackers, the soldiers used shovels and a bulldozer from the motor pool to push the bodies into a hastily dug trench. I watched as they struggled to roll the big, heavy bodies of the Vurvalfn into the pit. Two of them, what I surmised were the least-damaged specimens, were placed on stretchers and covered with tarps, hauled into the Roc by two lab-coated ponies that I didn’t recognize. One other detachment of troops wearing gas masks sifted through the wreckage of the Orca, hitting the still-smoldering bits with portable halon extinguishers as they conducted their investigation.

I shook my head. There were so many. So many bodies. It seemed like it’d never end. They dug a trench several meters long and a few meters deep and used the dozer blade to push them over the edge. Once that trench was full, it soon became clear that they’d have to dig another. Many of the bodies were in pieces. I watched a head rolling independently of any barrel. A bit of leg here, a flayed ribcage there. An unrecognizable hunk of meat, plowed through the dirt and pushed over onto the heap. There was a mother screaming for her young daughter. One of the civilians. The soldiers held her back, pinning her down when it looked like she might jump into the pit to try and find her filly’s remains. My eyes teared up. I couldn’t watch. It had only been a month since I’d buried my sister in practically the same fashion.

“Bell.” There was no reply, so I raised my voice. “Bell!”

“Yeah?” he said.

“This is fucking me up.”

He looked back at me, his own eyes brimming with tears like mine. “You think you’re the only one? Keep your eyes on the horizon and shut up.”

After a few hours, the deceased civilians were all in the ground. They heaped the dirt atop the bodies and graded it with the dozer. It would be a good ten hours before the first five-ton trucks and Centaurs pulled into the base, their synfuel engines rumbling up the mountainside. No sign of hostile contacts. Pegasus recon teams reported back with absolutely nothing. The five Roc dropships—one of ours and four of the base’s—had already made several trips before the trucks had even shown up, ferrying hundreds of civilians to the south and troops and recovery workers up north with us. It was almost hypnotic to watch as the heavy transports landed and took off like clockwork, their quad pyrojet nacelles tilting up for a vertical descent during their approach, and then tilting forward for horizontal flight when they departed.

It was dark out. Dark and cold. The sun hadn’t moved even a centimeter from its place below the horizon. I was tired. I was hungry. I would’ve rested my chin on my gun’s receiver and nodded off, but it was unbecoming of a soldier, for one thing, and for another, Bell would’ve killed me. I fought the microsleeps, passing out for two seconds every minute, catching myself with a startled huff. I wished I had some meth, like last time. Either that or a hoofful of caffeine pills.

I watched the trucks and dropships come and go, the hours ticking by as the recovery personnel quickly loaded up the canvas-topped trucks with ordnance and marshaled the Bull Runners’ flatbeds to move the Chargers and the other equipment. One team was using cranes to try and lift and dismantle parts of the damaged Destrier. I came to the slow, horrified realization that this was going to take days. Weeks, even.

Those brain-in-a-circle assholes knew we were here. I had a horrible feeling deep down in my gut that they weren’t about to let us get away with our unexpected victory. I knew their type, thinking they could conquer a whole military base with one dropship and a few harebrained creations of mad science. They would be too arrogant to let it go.

The battle for ownership over Pur Sang’s treasure trove had only just begun.

// … end transmission …

Record 12//Override

//HOL CRY SWT
//CHECKSUM READ
//CHECKSUM READ
//CHECKSUM READ
//CHECKSUM READ TIMED OUT
//CRITICAL ERROR

// … %aeokbs7gnsxf^ja2kn*prilj% …

// … %rvnkv9tlkmg#stlde7xsdhs% …

// … %eoxnm4tngsx*agfke3dfdt% …

Desert Storm

It was around the 34-hour mark that I first passed out for real, with snores and everything. I was startled awake when Bellwether socked me in the head, hard enough to knock the brim of my helmet onto my muzzle.

“No sleeping, dumbass!” Bell said.

“Huh? Wha—” I scrambled to reposition my comms helmet on my head so I could see, the overlays from the retinal projectors resolving as a bunch of friendly contacts in my field of view. I’d kinked my neck and it took me a couple seconds for the blood flow to my brain to resume so I could figure out what the hell I was seeing.

I was still sitting on the tail gun of the Skimmer. We were on overwatch while the recovery teams swarmed Pur Sang Arsenal, looting everything in sight. The local datasphere allowed me to keep track of their positions with their IFF transceivers, even when they were inside buildings.

There was one team that specialized in recovering documents and holocrystals, as well as cracking safes and collecting IDs, blueprints, CAD drawings, tech specs, and other security-sensitive information for collation and, in the case of duplicates, disposal. They were busying themselves ransacking the command center.

There was a second team whose specialty was weapons and supplies. Their role was inspecting and transporting all the missiles, ammunition, guns, and nukes, along with all the rations and medical supplies and other stores at the base. There were crates and crates of personal infantry casters, anti-tank guided missiles, and portable air defense systems. Thousands of them. There were also much larger containers that contained complete cannon systems and medium and heavy beamcasters for vehicles, including Chargers.

The third team was hard at work reactivating and recovering the Chargers and ground vehicles. The Whirlwind fighter-bombers, we didn’t have any pilots for. The big flying wings had pyrojets for atmospheric flight and fusion thrusters for SSTO transfers to orbiting carriers. Over the comms, I could hear them contemplate scuttling them, but Garrida relayed a message from Crusher that suitable pilots were on their way, so, the techs kept the fighters intact rather than turning them into piles of smoking wreckage with CycloHex charges.

The Minotaur tanks and Manticore SPGs were up and running. The tanks took part in the patrols of the base perimeter while the artillery stood by for potential targets. I’d driven a Minotaur before, when I was a tanker. The driver’s compartment was as cramped as could be, but in all other respects, they were generally superior to Conqueror tanks. Faster, more heavily armored, and more heavily armed than its Confederate counterpart, the Minotaur was a hybrid design that used a pair of powerful multi-fuel generator sets as its prime movers.

The tank’s turret hosted twin auto-loading 120mm cannons that could deliver a ferocious one-two punch, and the rear deck of the tank possessed a powerful Mark-84 rocket artillery system that could be fired until empty for the opening phases of an assault, and then jettisoned to reduce the vehicle’s weight and profile. Not only did it feature medium beamcasters for anti-infantry and light anti-vehicle use, it had an all-aspect LBC-based active protection system for shooting down incoming rockets, ATGMs, and projectiles, just like a Centaur.

The Chargers, we couldn’t find pilots for, unfortunately. Some of the base’s pilots were among those few strong-willed individuals who rebelled against Colonel Rune Ward, and they’d died in the ensuing riot, but most of them were already deployed in battle when the capital was overrun, and they’d gone down fighting in a last stand against overwhelming numbers and impossible odds. A few others had survived underground, but after their ordeal, they weren’t in the right headspace to take the controls of a Charger. They’d been evaluated by the medics and then evacuated with the rest.

Just thinking about the Colonel made my gorge rise. I had no idea why he tried taking us captive in the middle of a battle, with Tiamat’s Wolfhounds standing by, no less. Perhaps he thought the battle was over after the first three Vurvalfn were defeated. Maybe he was just insane. Regardless, the best the techs could manage was to have each Charger slowly amble up to a Bull Runner and kneel on the flatbed for transport. Sierra and I volunteered to spin up a couple of the Chargers, but our request was denied. Apparently, Garrida decided we were more valuable on the Skimmer.

The fourth team was a loose assortment of lab-coated scientists and black-armored pegasus Stormtroopers. The Airborne Pegasus Commando Corps were an elite force of highly skilled spec-ops soldiers, second only to the Dragoons in combat ability. They specialized in orbital insertions, aerial assaults, and weather manipulation warfare. The Stormtrooper appellation was more literal than figurative. They were trained to relentlessly pelt our foes in rain, sleet, and hailstones, bogging their vehicles down in the mud. This last group was highly secretive. They didn’t talk to anyone, and all they did, the entire time, was go around collecting SILVER SCALPEL-related intel. They had cameras out and were documenting every little thing. Every footprint the Vurvalfn had made in the snow, every hole they’d made in a structure with their plasma discharges, and every bit of debris from the dropship; all of it was photographed and catalogued in obsessive detail.

They were led by a pony in a long cloak. Some old unicorn, by the looks of him. He had a hunch in his back. Something about him was very, very familiar, but I couldn’t quite place it. I pulled the binoculars out of my saddlebags and zoomed in close on him, watching as he pulled his hood back to reveal his gray mane and weathered face.

“Cicatrice,” I muttered, lowering the binos. “Bell, that’s fucking Cicatrice down there!”

“The Ninth Magister?” Bell angled his head in the cloaked pony’s direction. “Oh shit, sure enough.”

“Mind if I go say hi?” I said.

“Are you out of your mind?” Bellwether’s eyes widened.

“That’s probably not a good idea,” Sierra said. “One, he looks very busy, and two, you don’t just ‘go say hi’ to one of the Twelve Magisters. Especially not a cranky dark magic practitioner. If he decided he didn’t like you, with a wave of his hoof, he could literally make you try and sniff your own butthole, for hours.”

“But I was one of his students.” I thumped my chest confidently. “I knew him personally. We used to hang out in the cafeteria back at the academy. Hey, Cicatrice!” I waved at him, raising my voice to a shout so he could hear. That got him looking in my general direction.

Sierra let out an explosive sigh as she pulled us in close and I hopped off the Skimmer. Bellwether was beside himself, making unintelligible noises of frustration and anger as he watched me canter off towards the old codger in the black robes. There were a couple stern-faced bodyguards who moved to intercept me, but Cicatrice recognized me and waved them off.

“Ahh, Desert Storm!” Cicatrice smiled. “One of my former pupils. I had a feeling somepony like you would be mixed up in all this.”

“Been a long time, Your Excellency,” I said. “How have the years been treating you?”

He shrugged. “Well enough, I suppose. Say, this is a very interesting rock.” He reached down in the snow and hefted a hoof-sized stone, idly tossing it in the air and catching it. “Wouldn’t you agree, Storm?”

I raised a brow. “I’m—I’m not sure I follow.” I slowly started backing up when it dawned on me what he was about to do. “Wait, you wouldn’t—”

He cast a spell on the rock. I didn’t see him cast, but I could feel it. He knew how to mask the signature from his horn and turn its glow invisible, a very advanced technique that took years to master. The stone started to roll of its own accord, right off the tip of his hoof and across the snowy ground. “Oh, look at that! It appears to be capable of self-locomotion!” With his trademark sadistic grin plastered on his face, he cast another spell on it, one far more complex. “That rock is a very important specimen, now! I’m going to need you to collect it for me for later study!”

I could not resist the compulsion that fell upon my mind. It was far too powerful. I desired that rock more than anything in the world. It was an all-encompassing sort of desire. A kind of greed bordering on maniacal lust. I wanted to possess the rock in every way it was possible to possess it. I wanted to put it on a velvet pillow in a display case on the mantelpiece. I wanted that ordinary rock more than I wanted sex. If it was a stallion, I would’ve torn my armor off and fucked it on the spot.

Before I could stop myself, my tongue lolled out of my head and I barked and panted like a dog, setting off to fetch the rolling stone. My body was completely beyond my control, my limbs moving of their own accord, my rationality a passenger in the back seat of my mind. The stone adjusted its pace accordingly, so that it always moved at the same exact rate I did. The spinning rock took a lazy loop around the end of the runway before turning back, settling on a circular path a good kilometer in length or more.

A come-to-life spell and some variation of want-it, need-it, cast on the same object. It sounded simple on paper, but it was very difficult in practice and required very skillful casting for it to be self-sustaining. Not only did I not know the method to dispel it, I lacked the ability to reason; even if I knew the counter-spell, I wouldn’t have been able to consciously cast it, impaired as I was. As I outwardly panted and drooled and galloped through the snow, incredibly excited at the prospect of recovering the rock for my master like a good doggie, some small, suppressed part of me in the back of my mind was indignant.

Damn you, Cicatrice!

// … // … // … // … // … //

Bellwether

I watched, transfixed, as Storm stepped off the Skimmer and walked right up to the Magister without my approval. Predictably, he had her bewitched and off playing fetch in about ten seconds flat. In all fairness, Sierra did try warning her. Cicatrice had gone easy on her, in my opinion. It was well within his power to make her do any number of far, far more embarrassing things. A little run in the cold would do her some good. Keep her sharp.

When I approached, I made damn sure not to share in her fate.

“Cicatrice, Your Excellency,” I said, bowing slightly in deference. “It’s an honor to have you here.”

“Oh, what now?” Cicatrice whined. “Can’t you ponies see I’m busy, here? This, all of this, is highly classified. No, I’m not answering questions about our work. Would you care to join Storm on her hunt for the elusive self-rolling stone, or would you prefer to kindly fuck off?”

I flashed my ID. “Agent Bellwether, BASKAF. I’m cleared for SILVER SCALPEL.”

“The Vargr, yes.” Cicatrice nodded. “What about them?”

“We have a name for them, now?” I was surprised at this news.

“To the best of our knowledge, that’s what they’re called. We’ve dug through hours of intercepted Confederate comms and noted the word’s relation to their movements. We’ve also managed to record some of their own communications, as of the past twenty-four hours. These channels were highly encrypted and impossible to crack, until we got our hooves on an intact radio transceiver from this crashed dropship, here, and with it, a working knowledge of their comms. Want to hear what we’ve picked up?”

“Sure.” I nodded. “Let’s hear it.”

Cicatrice held out a portable recorder and hit the play button. The guttural speech that poured from the speaker was as unfamiliar as it was unnerving.

“Secutu Saix, rokon.”

“Saix ken, rokonin. Allekleer.”

There was a long pause and static, before a very concerned-sounding and unmistakably feminine voice cut in. “Secutu Nonen, wei commeas downe tropfskip, haw rok?”

“Nonen, wei ken. Es Linvargr VURVALFN tryall. No thinge ye be conkern, komand.” The tone was conciliatory, reassuring.

Whatever was said by the underling reporting back, it pissed off the female commander something fierce. “Es allewayes conkernes hwahn tropfskip es downe by broetheri! Deie comme posineg herre oure speeke ef deie rekedas sza tropfskip radyo, moroni!”

Another voice, older and male sounding, added its input. “Alle kanel, coude kange.”

Cicatrice clicked the stop button. “That’s all they let us have before they changed the codes, rendering our captured radio set useless. Even though we have some of our best translators and AIs working the problem, we only have a vague idea of what they were talking about. Based on how heated it got and how we lost contact shortly thereafter, I’m guessing they got wise and realized there was a possibility we could hear them.”

The hairs were standing up on the back of my neck. I had to consciously still my rapid heartbeat. We had tentative translations of a few of their words, based on recovered fragments of their written text. That was likely how Tiamat’s advanced heuristics had been able to figure out what Vurvalfn meant. This was the first time, to my knowledge, that anypony had ever heard them actually speaking their language and lived to tell the tale.

“Have we learned anything else about these bastards that might come in handy?” I looked over the wreck of the dropship.

Cicatrice smiled. “A number of things. They got sloppy, here. Very sloppy. They weren’t in their usual form. If they were, we would have nothing. We know that they’re roughly cleomanni-sized. The seating and controls of the dropship seem to indicate as much.”

“What’s this stuff I hear Tiamat’s been saying about antimatter? Isn’t that stuff made in particle accelerators? How the hell are they able to obtain militarily-significant quantities of it?”

That put a frown on Cicatrice’s face. “We don’t know. I don’t know. I’m not a damn particle physicist. I’m the foremost expert in dark magic and soul-binding in the whole Empire. We didn’t find any antimatter in the wreck, and we don’t know why that’s the case. The only one I know who could even come close to deciphering any of this is her.”

“The Empress, I assume,” I said.

Cicatrice grunted in annoyance and disappointment. “If we had Twilight Sparkle with us, right here, right now, we would know everything about how their weapons and propulsion systems work, at the very least. She’s an engineering savant. We need her. More than you know.”

“How goes the search?”

“Not here,” Cicatrice growled. “Not in the open. If you want the details, we can discuss it later. In private.” He looked over my shoulder at Storm making her third lap of the runway, a perverse smirk etching itself on his face. “See that, Agent? That’s what a hero looks like, right there. Young, optimistic, and filled to the brim with piss. She’s a nice piece of tail. You should tap that before it goes to waste. Ponies like her don’t live to be my age.” The dirty old stallion roared with laughter.

“She’s already taken,” I said.

“Who’s the lucky stallion?”

“Some guy, I don’t know. He was in the capital when it fell, or so I hear.”

Cicatrice let out another round of hearty laughter. “He’s dead! Do ponies even realize what a calamity Everfree was? By my estimates, less than ten percent of the population survive to this day, many of them enslaved. Less than a hundredth still live there! You need to give her the talk, my boy.”

“I think she’s still holding out hope.”

The Magister sighed. “Ahh, where would we be without optimists? Probably dancing on the rubble of Kar Hollinvost. The Empire could’ve done with a few more cynics. Like me.” Cicatrice put his hoof on my shoulder. “Well, it’s been a pleasure, but we must cut this short. Resume your patrols. The last thing we want is to be caught out of our sheaths by more of the fucking Vargr.” Without missing a beat, he raised a hoof and the self-rolling stone came to a halt right under it. A panting, exhausted Storm dipped her head down and tried picking it up with her mouth, like a dog. Cicatrice lifted her helmet with his levitation and ruffled her mane with his hoof. “Aww, good girl!”

I grimaced at the spectacle. Storm said he was a pretty sketchy guy, but I had absolutely no idea.

// … // … // … // … // … //

Desert Storm

I drew a blank as the dirt-encrusted rock fell from my lips, leaving an earthy taste on my tongue. Cicatrice was nowhere in sight. My face warped into a hateful scowl. “That. Mother. Fucker!”

Bellwether stood next to me, snickering. “Sierra and I both told you. Don’t pester dark mages.”

“I am a dark mage, dammit!”

“Not one of that caliber, you’re not,” Bell said. “Come on. Party’s over. Let’s get back on overwatch.”

I looked down at the rock, shaking my head. I needed Cicatrice to teach me that trick, sometime. It could’ve come in handy. When he wasn’t so busy as to not even give me the time of day, I remembered him as a patient and thoughtful instructor. Rather than being particularly angry, I was already thinking of the practical applications of such spells while also wondering when I became such an egghead.

Chargers were unkind to the uneducated, and most pilots, even ones with modest academic backgrounds, ended up a fair bit nerdier than the average grunt. I felt a drip of fear-sweat bead on my forehead. Am I a nerd? I looked over my shoulder at Sierra in all her repulsive sleaziness, leaning up against the skimmer and babbling back and forth with Bellwether. I couldn’t let her know, or I’d never hear the end of it.

As we mounted back up on the Skimmer, I could feel exhaustion creeping into my bones. My helmeted head felt heavy, like a lead sinker on the end of my neck. I was tired. Tired and horny, but mostly tired. I hated being tired-horny almost as much as being horny and sick, and in the past day, I’d been all of the above. I could feel a wrongness creeping up behind my eyeballs. A fatigue hollowing me out from the inside. I needed to see Argent about getting my implant fixed, or I was in deep shit.

The rattle of the electrokinetics was giving me a throbbing headache. I was achy all over. I could’ve sucked down four tablets of ibuprofen and not felt any better. Another couple hours went by, slow as molasses. Nothing eventful happened. Just salvage crews milling around. Just when I thought I couldn’t take it anymore, Garrida waved us down from the ramp of her landed Roc. We touched down beside the VTOL and she marched up to us.

“You three are done for the day,” she said. “Good work. Go get some shuteye in the bird. The techs will take care of chaining up the Skimmer for transport. We’ll rotate you out and rotate some pegasi in.”

With a groan, I stumbled and nearly fell flat on my face. Garrida rushed up and steadied me. “Damn, Storm. You look like you’re gonna fall over. You okay?”

“No, sir. My implant’s fucked up. Got hit by some kind of electromagnetic pulse those creatures put out. Got shocked pretty bad, too. I had to defibrillate myself shortly before you guys entered the AO.”

She raised a brow. “Defibrillate yourself?” A smile slowly crept across her face. “Are you fucking with me?”

“Nope. My suit’s heart monitor went V-fib. I used the Coloratura’s AED on myself, and it shocked me back to normal rhythm while I was still conscious.”

The corners of Garrida’s beak fell. “What in the rat-dick fuck? How are you still alive, Sergeant? How did you not pass the fuck out and die?” She looked me up and down. “How are you still on your hooves?”

I looked over my shoulder, and then back at her. “I don’t know. I’m just as weirded out as you are, believe me.”

The griffon pointed her finger at the Roc. “Well, get in there and get some damn rest, before you go croakin’ on us, Sergeant! And by the way, don’t bother Cicatrice again unless he specifically solicits your attention, or your ass is grass!”

Me, Bellwether and Sierra ascended the boarding ramp into the dropship’s spacious hold, finding a few canvas cots that had been set up there for the units overseeing the base’s decommissioning and salvage retrieval. After shaking the snow off my hooves, I set my helmet aside and threw myself onto one of them, sighing as the tension soaked out of my muscles.

Bellwether sat down, put a pot full of water on an electric stove between the cots, and started making packets of textured vegetable protein and noodles into soup. I was famished, sitting up and looking at the concoction with teary eyes. Bell nodded and grunted in the affirmative, as if to imply that I’d get some of it, too, and waved his hoof for me to settle down. I leaned back against the cot and stared at the structural stringers in the overhead and the crisscrossed bracing between.

“Hey, Bell,” I said.

“Yeah?”

“D’you think the Confederacy will ever leave us alone?”

“I feel like we’ve had this conversation before,” he said.

“We can’t beat them the way things are. It’s not possible. Hell, we can hardly even delay them. Sooner or later, we’re going to crack, and that’ll be all she wrote. And those fuckers who attacked us here? I don’t even want to know what nightmares those crazy bastards have brewed up for us. It feels like the whole galaxy wants us all dead. What do we do? How do we survive? How do we win this?”

Bell shook his head. “We don’t. Realistically, I don’t think any of us are gonna live another year. It’s like you say. When our numbers are up, that’s it. We’re done. And Celestia help those poor fuckers they made into chattels. But I’m not going to just roll over and present my ass. I plan on making those freaks pay a heavy price for every one of us they take. How about you?”

I smiled. “The same. Fuck all of these motherfuckers. Who gave them the right to colonize us? To steal us from our homes? To consume us like a product? Nothing about this war is acceptable. They don’t see us as equals. They never did. As if taking our land wasn’t enough, those greedy bastards actually have the nerve to think our bodies belong to them, too. I don’t get it. How far are their heads lodged up their own asses? If they tried this with anyone else, any other intelligent species, they’d face censure from every corner of the fucking galaxy. But picking on us is okay, because we don’t have hands. What the fuck? What the fuck kind of logic is that?”

Bellwether shook his head. “I’ve spent years and years of my life trying to figure out the answer to that question. I gave up about twenty years ago. It just doesn’t matter to me anymore. They’ll never recognize our right to autonomy. We just have to keep fighting them until either we break, or they do.”

“Do you think they’ll make me use OA-13 again?” I said, my tone darker. “I don’t know if I want to. I mean, a part of me is furious about my sisters, and yeah, I’m mad enough to kill over it. But now, it almost seems like it’s not enough for me, anymore.” I smiled, slowly baring my teeth. “Poisoning them is too clinical. Too clean. I want it to hurt. I want to feel their warm guts splash my hooves. I want to taste their fear. I want to watch them run, only to be reduced to puddles of gore.

“I don’t want it to be easy for them. I don’t want them to enjoy a quick, dignified death, as befits a soldier. I want to slaughter them like they slaughter their animals. I want them to fucking wallow in their blood and guts and then piss and shit themselves before they die. Seriously. That’s all I can think about these days when I see a satyr bastard. I want him to wallow in his blood, guts, piss, and shit. Was Broggas right? Am I a predator, like him? Am I gonna start eating people, like the fuckin’ Vandals?”

Bell looked at me with wide, perturbed eyes. “I don’t wanna fucking hear talk like that. If you’re going psycho on me, Storm, keep it to your-fucking-self. Seen enough ponies crack to last me a lifetime. Either shut your fucking hole, or go to Weathervane and get your shit unfucked with some pills, but don’t bother me with it, you understand?”

I hiccupped a little bit, and sobbed, and then I sobbed a little more, my eyes filling with tears. “Bell, I’m tired. I’m so fucking tired. I wish it didn’t have to be like this. I wish I could be normal. This isn’t a way for any pony to live. We aren’t killers.”

Bellwether quit stirring the soup pot for a moment, frowning hard. “That’s wrong, too. Both extremes are wrong. Or did you forget in your three years on that station? You know, you’re not the only one who’s seen some shit. I was a combat engineer for years and years before I became a spy. Soldiers don’t kill because we like it, or because we hate it. We do it because it’s our job.”

“Bullshit!” I shouted. “You don’t spend years of your life killing alien cocksuckers without forming an opinion on killing. That ‘oh, it’s just my job’ talk is—what’s the word? Sophistry. And if some ponies need to lie to themselves to stay sane, then good for them. But I’m done. I’m done with lies. You know what makes our enemies special, Bell? They’re predators. They eat meat. They were born to kill. It doesn’t come so easy for us. It’s not an instinct. For a pony, it’s a skill. It takes practice. And Sierra? Yeah, I see you over there, listening.”

She shook her head. “Not involved. Just here for the soup.”

“Fuck you, miss ‘Storm doesn’t know her history’, because I do know my history. I know it very well. And you know what? It’s only right for us to poison those bastards, because they’ve poisoned us. Them and their predator ways. Their predator wars. They infected us! This? All this shit? This isn’t our culture. This is their culture. And if the Empress were standing right here, this Celestia-fucking minute, she would agree with me. You know why? Because she was alive back then. Back when ponies were still building gingerbread houses, or whatever the fuck, instead of concrete pillboxes with machine gun nests!”

Bell stood up and forcefully pushed me back in my cot with one hoof, pointing at my face with the other. “Listen. Nopony wants to hear your shit, Sergeant. We’ve all had a very, very long day. You’re tired? Sleep. Hungry? Wait for the soup to finish. But if I hear one more word of this garbage out of you, I’m going to find out where they keep the duct tape on this Roc, and it’s going over your mouth and ‘round the back of your head. You got it? Shut. Up.”

After a few tense moments of glaring up at him with resentment, I slowly nodded, sniffling a bit. As I lay flat, I realized how exhausted I felt. The lack of sleep was getting to me. It was a toss-up whether or not I’d have enough energy to stay awake for the food to finish, but I was so hungry, I would’ve been willing to suck Bell’s dick for his share of the rations. It was kinda hot when he got all bossy like that. It made me wanna whip it out of him with a switch. He’d probably squeal real nice. He looked like a squealer.

Altrenogest. I needed it. Badly. Or I wasn’t sure I’d make it through this heat without doing something I’d regret.

I picked up the comms helmet in my hooves, set it atop my head and dialed it in. “This is EIDOLON, do the salvage teams read me?”

The radio crackled, before the harsh, grating voice of a rough-hewn mare came through. “Who the fuck is this? You just blasted everyone’s ears! Clear the fucking channel, you dumb bitch!”

“Naw,” some guy in one of the other squads said, before continuing, “I wanna hear what she has to say. This is Hairpin One, go ahead, EIDOLON.”

I let out a sigh, adjusting my comms. “Since Colonel Clusterfuck decided to knock up every mare in this base, I’m guessing there’s a bunch of unused heat suppressors around. You got any for me?”

“Yeah, sure! Let’s see, we’ve got—me, Crossguard, my buddy Bo, here. Lots of options. Hey Crossguard, when was the last time you got laid?”

“At pussy o’clock!” a mare squealed.

“Classic Crossguard,” the squad leader said. “And you, Bowtie?”

“Like about five hours ago,” Bowtie said in a mock-suave voice. “I run a rotating schedule of ladies. My own herd, if you will. We’re always looking for fresh volunteers. To jump my dick.”

I snarled. “Fuck you, assholes! I’m tired of this shit! I’m tired of everything getting all weird and sexual every time I turn around! I need it for my health. Trust me, I’d rather not drink that disgusting shit. I’d rather lie around in a field all day eating flowers and frolicking in the sun and fucking like an animal, as I’m sure all of you would if you had half the chance, but I’ve got a job to do. Now, have you got the shit I need, or are you gonna keep yanking my fucking chain until I come down on you shitheads like a sack of bricks?”

There was raucous laughter on the other end that lasted several seconds before they finally got back to me. “Yeah, you guessed right. We’ve got crates and crates of that shit, Sergeant. Want a few bottles?”

“How’d you know it was me?”

“Who the hell else in this outfit would have a creepy callsign like EIDOLON? That’s totally Storm. Heard ‘bout what you did here, Sergeant. That was some good shit. Turn invisible and ghost some Con-fed fuckers for me, will ya’?”

“Cut the chatter and get back to work, dipshits!” Garrida muttered over the channel. “Work like gunships could be overhead any minute, because for all we know, they’re on the fucking way. Sergeant, I’ll send a medic over to check up on you. Keep you in fighting shape in case we need to get moving. Now, stop bothering my salvage teams, turn off that hyperactive brain of yours, and get some sleep. Or do you want another one of my patented rear naked choke lullabies?”

“Sir, no sir!”

“That’s what I figured. Out.”

I put aside the comms helmet and rubbed my hooves together in anticipation as Bell started ladling some soup into our bowls. “Fucking finally.”

I stirred the piping hot noodles with my spoon, sticking my face in the bowl and inhaling the steam to clear my sinuses. After I’d indulged in a few deep sniffs and ahhs, Sierra got pissed. “If you don’t cut it out, Storm, you’re gonna be wearing those noodles on your head.”

One of the medics showed up with a bottle of altrenogest a minute later. “Perfect timing,” I muttered. I snatched the bottle of liquid hormone juice from his hooves, poured some into the cap, and then upturned the contents into my mouth like a shot glass. It tasted like chemicals. Like ground-up and liquefied multivitamins for foals. The flavor was indescribable, but the primary notes were somewhere in the vicinity of rotten old grapes and battery acid.

“Oh jeez, that shit’s so gross,” Sierra said. “Why don’t you just put it in your food like a normal pony?”

I let out a sigh. “Because I’d rather deal with the nastiness up-front and wash it down with my food instead of eating funky-tasting soup.”

Bellwether grinned. “That’s kind of a microcosm of your whole philosophy, I notice. You wanna take all the bad shit on now, so you don’t have to deal with it later. One of these days, you’re gonna get burned out like that. Like night before last. You took on a lot of responsibility, goin’ for the Destrier like that.”

I smiled a bit as I gazed down into the oily broth. “I wouldn’t be a pilot if I did things bite-size.”

“You’ve got to learn to rely on your team more,” Bellwether said.

Sierra smirked. “Yeah, we’re all in this together.”

“As if I couldn’t infer that from the context,” I whispered under my breath.

“I still need to do your checkup,” the medic said.

I frowned. “Can it wait till after I’m done eating? My soup’s gonna get cold.”

The medic fixed me with a scowl. He opened his mouth as if to say something, but then thought better of it. I decided I wouldn’t hold him up any longer than necessary, in case he had other ponies to attend to. I practically inhaled the noodles in well under a minute. I was beyond famished, even after I was done. The medicine and the food felt like a lump of lead in my guts. I was shaky as I proffered a hoof for the medic to look me over. He quickly hooked up a portable terminal to my armor’s life sign monitoring system and then strung a cable around to the port on the back of my neck.

“Well, that’s not good.” He turned the screen on his diagnostic slate around to face me, pointing to the yellow region in the middle of my back. “It says your implant’s fucked. Partial function, if that.”

I laughed. “You don’t say? I’ve been trying to tell Bell the same thing for the past thirty-something hours since I ran a self-diagnostic test.”

“Let me tell you what’s gonna happen, ma’am,” the medic said. “You’re gonna get edema from water retention, and then you’re gonna start throwing up, and finally, your heart is going to stop from electrolyte imbalance.”

I blinked a few times, pressing my lips into a thin line and raising my brows, the universally recognized expression for when nothing could be done about a situation. “Welp, guess I’ll die, then.”

The medic turned to Bellwether. “The Sergeant needs an evac back to base as soon as possible, or her health and combat-readiness will continue to decline until she’s of no use to anyone, least of all herself. I can’t service an auto-dialysis implant here. I don’t have the parts, or the tools, or the necessary skills. That shit is very arcane. Only a few ponies in the whole resistance know anything about bionic implants. Argent is one of them.”

Bellwether looked back and forth between the medic and I, his consternation apparent in the grimace he wore. It was clear that he was disappointed at the prospect of his team being down a mare, but at the same time, he cared enough about my wellbeing that he didn’t want to lose me to illness, either.

“We’ll get her back to Crazy Horse as soon as we can. We’re almost done with the first stage of the salvage operations. She’ll be in that convoy. Shouldn’t be any more than forty-eight hours before we head home.”

“If it were my choice, I would recommend flying her on this Roc direct to Crazy Horse, immediately,” the medic said. “But hey, if you wanna take a chance on her life, Bell, that’s up to you. It’s possible to survive a week or longer with total kidney failure, but it’s not pleasant. In any case, I estimate she’ll be laid up for a couple weeks after the surgery to fix the busted implant.”

“You hear that, Sergeant?” Bellwether said. “Sounds like you’re gettin’ another vacation.”

I let out a heavy sigh. “Can’t fucking wait.”

“Let’s rest up,” Bellwether said, slurping up the last of his soup. “We’ve got more shit to do in a few hours.”

As the medic headed out and left the three of us alone, we tucked into the canvas cots, tossing blankets over ourselves and leaving our armor on in case we needed to haul ass. This was going to be one of the less comfortable sleeps I’d had in a while.

It was only a few minutes before Bell and Sierra were sawing logs, but as I lay back in my cot, I grew aware of the fire in my loins and the way it slowly, ever-so-slowly, guttered out. Soon, I felt hollow. Empty. Like there was nothing left for me to live for. The bubbly feelings of a typical estrus cycle had fled me almost entirely, but so had the pain and the nausea. I had to be careful. Some mares were known to engage in suicidal ideation shortly after a dose. The potential for severe depression was a known side effect, one often masked by the fact that our line of work was intrinsically depressing.

I felt cold and angry. Instead of folding in on myself, I focused all that negativity outward, into my thoughts of the Confederacy, as well as their allies and everyone else who assisted them by harming our cause. I thought of Hoodoo’s killers and Windy’s kidnappers. My missing and quite possibly deceased mother and father. My utterly absent fiancé. I ruminated about all of these things until my hatred was sharpened to a razor-keenness.

“Is this all I am, now?” I whispered.

I sighed and closed my eyes, leaning back into the cot. It wasn’t enough. This wasn’t a life. It was a sick parody of existence. We were the last ones. The last pillars of our society. If we were to bend, if were to break, they’d come crashing down on the rest. The ones who couldn’t protect themselves. The last remnants of ponykind would be snuffed out in an orgy of violence to shame the whole galaxy.

The ones who remained wouldn’t even be ponies any longer. They’d be a product. Things. Stripped naked of our identities and sold as everyday commodities. Stallions to work to death. Mares to spread and fuck. Meat. Meat, and nothing more.

And then, there were the monsters we’d faced night before last and their mysterious masters. In mere minutes, those abominations had scythed through hundreds of innocents and reduced them to puddles of gore. They’d nearly killed me. They had, in fact, brought down my Charger with their augmented bodies alone.

This was a foe that possessed transports that fired beams of antimatter, with shielding that could resist a sustained assault from a Destrier and several Omni-turrets. An enemy depraved enough to take sapients—awful sapients, but sapients nonetheless—twist their minds and bodies with surgery and bionic implants, and turn them into living weapons to use against us. An enemy that had chosen to attack us utterly unprovoked.

My lips trembled in wordless horror. One tear worked its way down my cheeks, and then another.

Celestia help us.

With my levitation magic, I slowly, shakily pulled out one of the medals that Star Cross Wraithwood had awarded to the three of us, holding it tight to my chest like a magic charm. I closed my eyes and carefully controlled my breathing. Stilled my trembling limbs. Tried to relax. Let all the accumulated stress and pain go.

After a minute, my eyes flickered open. I could feel it. A vague hint of actual magic emanating from the silver medal. I turned it over, inspecting it closely. There was some kind of mechanism embedded in the back. I realized with a start that the whole reverse face of the medal was some sort of dial. I decided to play with it for a bit. I fiddled with it for a few minutes, seemingly to no end. Finally, I figured it out. I rotated it until it clicked, and then rotated it back until it clicked again, and then forward again. The rear of the medal popped out and hinged open like a locket.

There was text embossed on the inside, along with a small, shrouded red button. AETHERIC RESPONDER BEACON – IN CASE OF EMERGENCY, DEPRESS BUTTON AND PLACE NEAR YOUR LOCATION. DRAGOON ASSAULT TEAMS WILL RESPOND AS SOON AS POSSIBLE.

I looked over the medal with newfound awe, wondering why the Star Cross hadn’t told me about its special feature. I closed the back of the medal and locked it back up, glancing over at Bellwether. I would need to tell him about this after we’d rested up.

// … // … // … // … // … //

My sleep was very broken, interspersed with nightmares where I’d gasp awake, sit up, and scan my environment to make sure that the cargo bay of the Roc hadn’t been infiltrated by the enemy. The Vurvalfn had me on edge. In my dreams, I could see their razor-sharp claws lash out from the darkness. I could hear them hiss and growl, the pitter-patter of their drool splattering the floor. In reality, the three of us were left undisturbed the entire time.

As I lay on the cot, staring at the ceiling through bloodshot eyes, I occupied my mind with various thoughts, like what Cicatrice’s presence here meant. The Twelve Magisters of the Twilight Conclave were the most skilled magic practitioners in the whole galaxy, responsible for leading the teams of researchers that developed all of the magtech that we used.

Over the centuries, the Conclave was responsible for the development of beamcasters, locuses, grimoires, and Chargers, among countless other inventions. Every magic-obsessed unicorn filly’s dream was to become one of them. Not only were the Conclave responsible for research and development of magtech devices, the unicorn Battlemages and Charger pilots attached to the Imperial Army were all Conclave-trained and administered.

The Imperial War College in Baltimare and the attached Fort Solstice military base was a sprawling jungle of concrete and glass that covered over a hundred thousand hectares of deciduous forest, with ranges for tank and Charger training that included mocked-up urban environments and complicated live-fire exercises. The Running of the Leaves at Fort Solstice was an annual marathon that was, oddly enough, open to the public. Contestants raced along the outer perimeter of the base, on a dirt road just outside the fence. The Mages’ Academy, where all Charger pilots were trained in the use of spell locuses and the necessary magic, was a part of the College itself. There, the class divisions in our society were clear as day.

Low-born unicorns at the academy were not held in high regard, and volunteer Charger pilots even less so. The place was a playground for stuffy nobles to bully and hound their lessers. The blue bloods were mean as sin, and the mares were the worst of all. It was like high school, but worse. Hazing was a serious problem at the academy. It was funny how they called it bullying when we were kids, but for adults, it was hazing. The word changed, as did the supposed intent behind it, but the experience was generally the same.

Sometimes, they’d pretend to let you in their special club or clique or sorority or whatever, but they never really meant it when they said I could be one of them. By the time I got out of that place, I’d been held upside-down with my head in a toilet, had my ass hanged by my skirt in a dorm closet, been dunked in the fountain in the courtyard, and doodled on with permanent markers in my sleep several times.

We all went to the Mages’ Academy before going through basic training. I always felt that particular institution would’ve benefited from that sequence being the other way around, with students only being put through magic training once they’d learned some discipline and proven their physical aptitude, but the nobles had a lot of pull; if their precious little foals couldn’t hack it as soldiers and washed out of training, well, at least they learned magic on the state’s dime. I couldn’t wait to get out of that hellhole and go to Basic.

The Battlemages-in-training always looked down their noses at us. They thought that us pilots weren’t even real mages, because most of us never had the opportunity to fully master magic in the way that they did. Instead, we allegedly let machines do all the work. None of it was true, of course. Although we had an accelerated training schedule due to the desperate state the country was in, our job had its own risks, and synchronizing one’s spells with a Charger’s locus was no walk in the park.

I was technically a Military Occupational Code 22, Charger Operator, though I also held a Conclave certification as a Silver-rank Illusionist, with high marks for my sustained use of invisibility. I was also a Bronze-rank Arcanist, owing to my slightly better-than-average use of precision telekinesis. The rankings in magic aptitude went from Bronze, to Silver, to Gold, to Platinum. All mages of the Imperial Army carried cards that signified our rank in each school of magic, plated in the metal corresponding to the rank. All of the Magisters were Gold-rank in multiple schools of magic, and of Platinum rank in at least two. My cards had been in my quarters when our transport was shot down, along with my uniform and my bomber jacket. As a matter of fact, I was pretty sure my cards were in my jacket’s pocket. I liked that jacket, dammit.

I couldn’t believe Cicatrice had completely snubbed me like that, sending me off on a wild goose chase so I wouldn’t occupy his time. I pondered the aftermath of my little escapade. I hadn’t been very winded after my run in the snow. I’d felt exhausted, but not particularly out of breath. Months ago, I’d been thrown out an airlock with no pressure suit, and I’d stayed conscious for nearly a minute. I’d also had a severe heart attack within the past two days but remained plenty lucid enough to do the unthinkable and use an AED on myself.

I was working on a theory. As an experiment, I drew in a deep breath and held it, just to see how long it would take before I felt the urge to draw another.

I held it. And I held it. And I held it. Minutes ticked by. I watched the digital clock above the doorway to the cockpit. Nervous beads of sweat dripped from my forehead as I passed records held by mares who did extreme-depth free-diving. I had no urge to breathe. No air hunger. Nothing.

“I don’t need air,” I said.

Bellwether sat up, blinking away sleep, his brow knit with tired confusion. “What?”

“I’ve been holding my breath for the past twenty minutes.”

He turned and stared at me, concern etched into his features. “Oh, that’s great. That’s just great. You’ve finally lost it completely.”

“No, I’m serious.” I shook my head. “I don’t know what the fuck either, Bell. I don’t need to breathe!”

Bellwether sighed and leaned back in bed. “Nope. I’m going back to sleep. When I wake up, there had better be a whole lot less crazy in the back of this fucking Roc, or my report to Garrida will include recommending you for a psych-eval.”

I clammed up at Bellwether’s threat, deciding I’d be better off leaving such matters for Argent’s purview. Bell wasn’t a doctor. He didn’t know a damn thing.

I briefly fascinated myself with how the intricate, delicate-looking struts in the overhead wrapped around the fuselage, before letting out a big, long yawn and falling fast asleep.

// … // … // … // … // … //

It felt like I’d only been snoozing for a few seconds when someone thumped my chest with their hoof. “Storm, get up!”

“What is it, Bell?” I was still groggy, half-in, half-out.

“Huge fucking Confederate force!”

That got me wide awake, my eyes bugging halfway out of my head. I sat up and quickly donned my helmet, throwing on my Orbit and my saddlebags. “Where?”

“Down in the valley. They’re headed towards one of our convoys trucking supplies out of the base.”

I glanced out the Roc’s ramp. There was a great deal of commotion outside as my fellow Liberation Front members rushed to respond to the threat. The self-propelled guns were already sending shells downrange, the rhythmic bass thumping of the artillery shaking the whole cargo bay of the Roc.

“How many?”

“Lots and lots!” Bellwether’s face was lined with anguish. “Unknown number of foot-mobiles, but at least ten thousand. Scout pegasi counted well over a hundred tanks and a couple dozen Ifrits, and there are probably more on the way. There are one or two whole enemy armored divisions out there, and they have gunship support!”

I drew in a long, panicked gasp. My eyes began to water. We were outnumbered by at least twenty to one, maybe forty to one, maybe worse. I shook my head. “Is this it? Are we screwed?” My thoughts drifted into dark territory. “I won’t let them take me prisoner. Not again. Not after what I’ve seen. No way. If it comes to that, I’ll just eat a fucking grenade.”

“We’re going to survive this,” Bell said. “We have to.”

A pang of dread gripped me, my heart squeezing in my chest. I tried to tamp it down before it got away from me, but I couldn’t quite manage to catch it. My feelings cascaded and fled my control, like a runaway engine. My ears rang, long and low, a gong heralding doom. My equilibrium was shattered. I felt like I was going to die, right then and there.

“You okay, Storm?” Bell said.

I screamed, gripping both sides of my head with my hooves. Fear. All I felt was fear. Raw and primal. When I was in combat, I was tense, but focused, and the prospect of my own death was the furthest thing from my mind. This was different. It was like a feedback loop inside my head, my terror building and building of its own accord until what occupied my every nerve was a hurricane of emotions completely beyond my control. I was having a full-fledged panic attack, for the first time in over a year.

“I don’t wanna die!” I shouted. “I don’t wanna—”

Bellwether wrapped his hooves around me, pulling me into a hug. “I’m here, Storm. I’ve got you.”

In a burst of adrenaline, it ended just as quickly. The pressure in my head was lifted. Sudden relief, followed by confusion, and then shame. I hated losing control like that. It made me feel like there was something wrong with me. Like I was an ill mare. Like I was too sick to do my job. But the sickness wasn’t with me. It was with the unconscionable world that I was born into, with horror and death dogging my heels every step of the way.

As I returned Bellwether’s embrace, I was inconsolable, tears streaming down my face. “I’m so sorry,” I said. “I don’t know what came over me.”

“You have nothing to be sorry for, Sergeant. It happens to the best of us.”

“I don’t wanna end up like my fucking sisters, Bell. It’s different for stallions. They just kill you, or they use you for hard labor. They don’t—”

Bellwether grabbed me by the shoulders and gave me a few stiff slaps across the face. “Snap out of it! We’re gonna go fuck them up, together. I need you to be focused on the mission. What’s in the past doesn’t fucking matter!” I could see the tears in his eyes. “If I spent all my time thinking about everything that’s happened to me and my family because of this dumb fucking war, I wouldn’t be able to keep going. You have to let it go. There are ponies who are still alive, and they need us, you understand?”

After a moment’s hesitation, I flipped my helmet’s lens up and wiped the tears from my eyes, nodding in affirmation and steeling myself with newfound resolve. “All right. I’m okay. I’m okay.”

“You sure?” Bell dipped his head to look me squarely in the eyes. “Because you didn’t look okay a moment ago.”

I gave him a death glare. “I’m fine. Let’s just fucking go.”

Sierra rushed into the Roc’s bay, motioning vigorously with her hooves. “Come on! Skimmer’s all chained up and I don’t know where the fucking keys to undo ‘em are!”

Bellwether and I marched out of the Roc. It was pure bedlam outside, ponies scattering every which way. We moved across the snowy ground and arrived at the flatbed truck where the Skimmer had been secured for transport.

“Where the fuck is the Captain?!” I shouted.

“Artillery!” one of the soldiers screamed. “Get to cover!”

I heard the screech of a plummeting shell and reflexively grabbed Bellwether and dived into the snow, shielding him with my body. The heavy mortar round landed right under one of the engine nacelles of the Roc at an oblique angle, shredding it instantly and sending fragments and debris everywhere. The transport’s fuel ignited, promptly engulfing the whole thing in a massive fireball.

I slowly stood, my hearing muffled and every nerve in my body burning. I let out a soft little gasp of pain. I felt around on my side, my hoof coming back bloody. When I looked down, there was a thirty-centimeter chunk of jagged wreckage sticking out of the side of my armor. Like a cartoon character hanging in mid-air off a ledge and sparing one last glance at the audience before gravity kicked in, there was a latent period of painlessness before the delayed realization of my injuries suddenly plunged me into a pit of gut-churning agony.

I rolled off Bellwether and onto my back, my screams full-throated and earsplitting in pitch and volume. My blood quickly stained the snow red. My whole left side felt like it was on fire. I was in so much pain, my entire barrel spasmed, drawing my legs together. I shriveled in on myself like a dead spider.

Bellwether was chagrined to see me so badly wounded, to say the least. I was his little project, after all. “Dammit! Don’t you go dying on me, now!”

He grabbed the shrapnel with his teeth and yanked it out of my side. My screams stopped. The pain was beyond comprehension. I made these soft little hiccups, my eyes wide and teary. “Oh fuck.”

Bell peeked in through the hole in my armor. “Looks like your rib stopped it.”

“You can see my rib?” I croaked.

After a pause, Bellwether shook his head. “I see something that might be a rib.”

I groaned and leaned back into the freezing snow as Bellwether pushed a syringe full of clotting gel into the wound. “Hold still. This is going to feel like shit.”

He depressed the plunger and I gritted my teeth, trying not to scream like a pussy. It was like the pain from a styptic pencil, jammed inside every cubic centimeter of a gaping hole in my torso. It felt like being injected with a balled-up lump of barbed wire. It felt like knives ripping me open from the inside. When he was done, he slapped a dressing on top of it.

“Best I could do,” Bellwether said. “Argent will have to do the rest when we get back. Don’t move for about ten seconds. The gel needs time to harden, and if it falls out, you’re probably gonna bleed to death.”

I could feel the enchanted Hemogel heat itself to slightly above body temp as it quick-cured into a semi-flexible, gelatinous lump of wound packing. Bellwether helped me to my hooves. I was shaky, but I was up. I could feel the radiant heat from the burning Roc. I was glad no one was in it. I was even happier that we left it when we did. If Bell had to console my whining ass for a minute longer, we’d both be a couple of well-done pony steaks.

“You have my thanks,” Bellwether said. “Didn’t have to shield me like that, but you did. You’re somethin’ else, Storm.”

I hissed in pain. “Don’t mention it.”

Sierra popped up over the top of the Skimmer from where she’d dived for cover behind it. “Over here, you two!” The ratty unicorn motioned to the locks for the transport chains. “I can’t get ‘em open. We’re sitting ducks on the ground, you guys. We need some altitude, and right the fuck now!”

Bellwether put tiny lumps of plastique on the locks and rigged them with detonators. “Everypony, stand back.” We took cover in front of the flatbed’s traction unit and Bell flipped the cover on his remote detonator. “Fire in the hole!”

There was a muffled pop as the tiny charges split the bodies on the padlocks in half. Bellwether and Sierra grabbed the chains and yanked them through the frame of the Skimmer, freeing it. Sierra mounted up in the pilot’s seat, Bellwether took the middle as usual, and I slowly, painfully climbed into the tail gunner’s seat, charging the action on my autocannon. The Skimmer’s reactor hummed to life and the contragrav bike rattled as it lifted the three of us skyward. When we cleared the ridge south of the runway, I gazed down into the valley and spotted a good two dozen Ifrit-class goliaths.

The big, headless Confederate walkers had saucer-shaped bodies and spindly limbs. They were slow and ungainly, their movements lacking any semblance of grace as they tromped along at a mere thirty kilometers per hour, about half of their maximum speed. The right side of their body was equipped with a fixed plasma pulsecannon that was used to snipe targets from afar, and the left side had a manipulator arm with a giant plasma sword of the barrier-destructor type, designed to eliminate tank traps and flatten buildings. It could also be used in close combat in a pinch, but it was much too slow to hit a Charger unless the pilot on the receiving end was totally unprepared for it.

Their swords’ emitters glowed bright blue in the twilit gloom, making them easy to spot. The roof of an Ifrit’s torso featured an electro-optical sensor turret for target acquisition and ranging, along with an auto-loading 120mm heavy mortar for indirect fire support. Like clockwork, the Ifrits rattled off a salvo of mortar rounds, the shells arcing high into the air before screaming down from the heavens and shredding the base facilities below us, leaving dozens of dead and dying resistance members in their wake. The rest moved for the cover of the subterranean bunker network, sheltering in place.

“Agent Bellwether to Captain Garrida, please respond!” Bell radioed. There was no reply.

“Fuck me,” I whispered. “This day just keeps getting better and better!”

“Yep,” Sierra said. “Comes with the territory, so suck it up, Stormy.”

I shook my head vigorously. “Bullshit, Sierra! Bullshit. If a battle this size is an everyday occurrence around here, then I’ll eat my fucking boot.”

Bellwether motioned towards the mountain pass on the southern end of the base. “Sierra, take us down through the pass! That’s where the convoy went, and we need to see if they’re alright!”

“Was the Captain with them?” I said.

“No,” Bell said. “No idea where Garrida is right now. The convoy’s not responding on the damn radio, though. I’m worried they made contact with the enemy.”

“Where the fuck is Cicatrice and the Stormtroopers?” I said.

“They left hours ago. It’s just us and the salvage and recon teams. A few tanks and artillery pieces, too. We don’t have enough in the way of numbers or firepower to repel an attack like this.”

I grimaced. “Dammit. This isn’t good.”

“Tell me something I don’t know, Storm.”

We swung down through the pass, the snow-covered trees a blur all around us. The tire tracks in the snow led down towards the valley. There was smoke off in the distance, quickly resolving into a smattering of fires and a whole lot of debris. The supply trucks were unrecognizable; a chunk of bodywork here, a bit of axle there, and a bunch of scattered truck tires lying in the snow. There were bodies everywhere. The recovery crews had been exceedingly unlucky. They’d been hit dead-on by a mortar salvo, or something of that nature. There were no hostiles in sight.

“Are there any survivors?” I said.

When we brought the Skimmer to a halt, I hopped off and started surveying the damage.

“Storm, get back here!” Bellwether shouted.

“I wanna see if there are any—”

That was when we noticed it, over the din of far-off gunfire. There was an ethereal howl in the air. Bell and I shared a horrified glance before we both slowly turned and looked straight up. There was a Confederate drone swarm circling overhead, their rudimentary AIs coordinating their movements like a flock of birds. It wasn’t artillery that took the convoy out.

“Screamers,” Bellwether whispered. “Storm, get back on the damn Skimmer, now!”

I limped over to the Skimmer, ignoring the ache in my side as I climbed onto its frame. As I tried lifting my hind leg to mount the seat, there was a stab of raw agony in my guts and I slipped, crying out in pain. Bellwether grabbed my hoof and yanked me up onto the Skimmer.

“Sierra, go!” Bell shouted.

Sierra poured on the thrust, and just in time, because the swarm decided right then and there that we were a juicy target, diving towards us, the shriek of their propellers doppler-shifted. The Skimmer’s superior speed drew them into a long, thin line, and I exploited this by unleashing a hail of explosive autocannon rounds straight into the drone swarm’s formation. Several of the Screamer drones fired their terminal intercept rockets to catch up to us.

“Evade!” I said.

Sierra pulled hard to the left, nearly sideswiping a tree. The Screamers’ explosive charges detonated and sprayed the area with shrapnel as they tried airbursting as close as possible to us, stripping the limbs from the trees behind us. There were a few stragglers, but hitting them dead-on with the cannon was out of the question. It simply wasn’t accurate enough to pop something so small.

“Sierra!” I yelled.

“I know!” Sierra swung the Skimmer around and engaged the remaining Screamers with the forward beamcasters. In a matter of seconds, her precision gunnery made short work of them.

“Is that all of ‘em?” Bellwether said. “Are we clear?”

“Yeah,” I said. “We’re clear. Sierra, let’s swing back around to the site where the convoy was attacked. I want to make sure we aren’t leaving anypony behind.”

Sierra brought the Skimmer around and headed back, bringing us down in the midst of the wreckage and debris. The three of us stepped off and searched the area. There wasn’t anyone moving. Nopony breathing. I checked the driver’s pulse. I lifted his foreleg and looked underneath it. A shrapnel wound had taken out his left lung and heart.

“Dead,” I growled. “They’re all fucking dead.”

Sierra grimaced. “Great, what do we do now?”

My gaze fixed itself on one of the containers the trucks had been carrying. It had busted open and there was a long, tubular object inside. I walked over to it and shoved the heavy lid aside, inspecting the contents. Inside was a two-meter-long munition with a bone-white metal casing and guidance fins at the back. One of the fifteen-megaton fusion bombs from Pur Sang. The device was hundreds of pounds. I could’ve moved it a short distance with my levitation, but not all the way back to the base.

“Shit.” I gritted my teeth. “Bell, we’ve got a problem. One of the nukes is here. Could be more, for all I know. What are we gonna do?”

Bellwether looked off into the distance, shaking his head as he set his jaw. “Storm, I take full responsibility for what we’re about to do next. Garrida will fucking kill me for this, but it’s the only way.”

I smiled. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d say you were about to suggest we nuke the fuckers down in the valley, right?”

Bell gave me a stern look but didn’t say a word.

I stopped smiling. “Oh fuck. You’re serious.”

The grizzled old stallion plugged Tiamat into his armor’s computer. “Tiamat, you hear me?”

“Go ahead, Agent,” she said.

“You got the codes for the nukes?”

“Yes. Why, thinking of arming one? You need dual authorization to—”

“What I’m about to do, Storm, Sierra, never do this, ever,” Bellwether said. “Anima matrix override, sigma two-seven-nine-seven.”

The virtual representation of Tiamat’s personality matrix projected in our eyepieces instantly turned a deep red hue, the dragon’s expression locked in an uncanny, dead-eyed stare. “Code accepted. Matrix override confirmed. Diagnostic mode online.”

“Retrieve memory block.”

“Specify address.”

While I looked on in wonder, and no small amount of fear, Bellwether rattled off a string of hexadecimal numbers. What the fuck are we doing? I pondered. Are we really doing this? Nukes? Fuck me.

“Confirmed,” Tiamat said. “Executing. Returned zero-nine-seven-one.”

Bellwether opened a side panel on the fusion bomb, revealing a small display, data port, and keypad. He ran a cable from his suit computer to the data port.

“Tiamat, inject zero-nine-seven-one.”

“Zero-nine-seven-one, arming code accepted.”

“Arm and set yield, three hundred kilotons, delay, six hundred seconds. Disable barometric, disable impact, disable global positioning. Put a synchronized timer in our heads-up.”

“Confirmed,” Tiamat droned mindlessly. “Yield, three hundred kilotons. Barometric fuse disabled. Impact fuse disabled. GPS and guidance fins disabled. Time delay fuse activated. Delay, six hundred seconds.”

My blood ran cold as a ten-minute timer appeared in our heads-up displays and began to count down. He unhooked the cable from the bomb and reeled it back into his armor.

“Tiamat, end diagnostic mode,” Bellwether said.

The anima’s holographic avatar turned back to her original greenish-black color. She shook her head vigorously, shaking out the cobwebs. “What the heck just happened? Bell, have you been a naughty boy?” She noted the timer, her expression growing angrier by the minute. “What the hell did you do?”

He unplugged Tiamat’s core from his suit computer and stuffed her back in his saddlebag. “None of your fucking business is what.”

“There’s no turning back.” Bellwether looked me squarely in the eye. “No way to disarm it if something goes wrong. In ten minutes, this son of a bitch will go off and this mountainside will look like Celestia herself dropped the fucking sun on it.”

“Holy shit,” I whispered. “Holy shit.”

Bellwether reached out a hoof. “If we don’t make it out of this, I just wanted you to know, Storm, you’re a hell of a soldier. I wouldn’t say these past few months have been fun, but it’s been an honor to fight by your side.”

I smiled, taking his hoof and giving it a shake. “Don’t get sappy with me, Bell. Let’s go blow these fuckers to Tartarus and then go home.”

“Why don’t you two lovers find a room?” Sierra said.

I was immediately on the defensive. “We’re not! I mean, are we? Yeah, I don’t think so.”

Bell and I looked at each other, blushing a bit. We gazed into each other’s eyes, his sapphire pools met by my tangerines. He took in a deep breath as if to say something, but his confession, or whatever it was going to be, was interrupted by the sound of gunfire. There was a scout helo a couple hundred meters from our position, the co-pilot leaning out the door with one foot on the skids and popping off rounds with his flechette gun. It was one of the stealthy Asp gyrodynes with the low-noise rotors. We didn’t even hear it coming. We dived for cover as flechettes ricocheted off the container holding the nuke.

“You fuckin’ Con-fed cockbites!” Sierra shrieked.

She dashed over to a spilled crate of mortars, kicked one into the air like a hacky sack, caught it in her hoof, wound up, and threw it with all her might and a cry of exertion. I watched in stunned silence as it twirled and arced high into the air and then hit the cockpit of the scout helicopter dead-center, blowing the canopy to smithereens and sending the whole thing crashing to the ground in a giant fireball. Bellwether said nothing. He was too astonished by what he’d just seen.

I blinked a few times, my jaw agape. “What. The. Fuck. Sierra?”

“Lots of earth pony in the bloodline,” she said as she dusted her legs off with a few pats.

A couple more scout helicopters crested the ridge and fired off rocket pods, white trails streaking through the sky.

Somewhat cognizant of the fact that it was becoming my own personal catchphrase in these trying times, I screamed, “Oh shit!”

I dived into the snow and covered my neck. Explosions and shrapnel and waves of heat and pressure washed over us. I could feel some of the frag bounce off my armor, crying out in pain at the sting. Bellwether looped some transport chain through the eyes on the corners of the container, and then through the frame of the Skimmer. He quickly rigged the eyes up with small explosive charges to sever the chain at the precise moment. He jumped onto the seat of the Skimmer behind Sierra, who was already at the controls and taking off.

“Storm, get on!” he shouted.

“Wait, I—” I limped towards the Skimmer and watched in shock as Sierra gunned the throttle and they started leaving without me.

Without thinking twice, I jumped into the container holding the nuke as it passed. I raised my head over the edge of the container, climbing up and straddling the bomb between my hind legs, shouting loud and vehement profanity all the while. The scout helicopters closed in and opened up on us, raking the container with their gun pods.

I covered my head with my hooves, not believing what was happening. “Shit, shit, shit!”

The Skimmer was towing a container with an armed fusion bomb inside it like a fucking sleigh. I was sitting on top of the damn bomb, being shot at by enemy gyrodynes. The container weaved from side to side through the snow, lacking any skids to stabilize it. I fired off a volley from my beamcasters at the hostile air, and they responded with even more gun pod fire. A round caught me in my barding and I grunted explosively and crumpled over in pain, a giant welt growing under my chest protector.

“Ow, dammit! This is completely fucked!”

With a loud two-stroke roar, a pair of Confederate snowmobiles jumped a nearby ridge and joined the pursuit. They each had two crew members, one to drive, and one hanging off the back hefting a submachine gun, because of course they did. They closed in on us from behind and sprayed us with gunfire as I slid off the bomb casing and dived inside the container for cover. Bullets pinged off the thick metal container, not penetrating or even making a dent in it.

“What the fuck is this spy movie bullshit?!” I shouted. “Bellwether, you better not be jerking off up there!”

“Too late!” he shouted back. “Already nutted!”

“Do something about these guys, you prick!”

Bell climbed back into the tail gunner spot where he should’ve been the entire time, cycled the action on the gun, and took aim at the snowmobiles. “Eat this, motherfuckers!”

The autocannon sang its deadly chorus, the muzzle blast nearly deafening me as I crouched in the container downrange. One of the snowmobiles sustained a direct hit to the fuel tank and then promptly burst into flame and rolled over, its occupants screaming as they tumbled through the snow. The other wisely peeled off before it met the same fate, and so did the gyrodynes.

“Bell, they know we’re here,” I said. “They know we’ve got a nuke, too!”

“Dammit, I know! We’ll think of something. Chill your tits!”

“My tits are chilled!” I said. “I’m so fucking cold, my nipples are fixing to rip a hole in my fatigues!”

“Yeah, yeah,” he said. “There it is. Typical bitching Storm.”

“Oh!” I dragged the word out in derision. “I see how it is! So, all those compliments and lovey-dovey eyes and stuff were just bullshit, eh?”

“Well, we’re not fucking married to anything other than this bomb, so quit bickering like we are!”

When we crested the next ridge line, we were greeted by endless rows of enemy tanks and assault walkers and mechanized infantry supported by armored fighting vehicles, marching in formation across the twilit plain. Mamba gunships loomed high above, providing close support for the formation. We were descending straight at them down a long, snowy slope at considerable speed.

The lead Conqueror MBT fired off its hundred-forty-millimeter gun, the sabot dart making a deafening crack as it missed me by a hair. One of the actual sabot petals embedded itself in the side of the nuke’s container, leaving a massive indentation. If that thing had hit me, I would’ve died instantly. Instead of swearing, I simply screamed and pressed myself down into the container, as low as possible. There were no words that could have articulated the gut-wrenching fear I felt.

“Storm, cloak!” Bell shouted.

Sierra angled us towards a hole in their formation. Taking a deep breath and putting aside my fear, I quickly lit my horn and sheathed us, the Skimmer, the bomb, the container, and the chains in invisibility magic.

“Not gonna last long like this!” I said. “It’s too complex! One minute, tops!”

“One minute is all we need,” Sierra said.

“This is Agent Bellwether,” Bell radioed. “Any friendly units, get underground as quick as you can. Find cover and shelter in place. Do not go south of Pur Sang! Do not get within line of sight of the enemy, or you will die!”

The timer in my HUD read five minutes. We were running out of time to reach a safe distance, and we hadn’t even emplaced the damn thing yet. If it went off with me right next to it, I wouldn’t feel a thing. I’d be conscious one moment and see darkness eternal the next. It wasn’t the worst way to die in this war. Not by a long shot.

I could hear them. The rattling of Conqueror tracks. The stomping of Ifrits. Their angry shouts as squad leaders ordered their troops to search the area for us, warning of the grave threat we posed. They knew what was coming. Some of them panicked. They cried out in anguish, expecting the end to come at any moment. They had no way to know if this was a suicide attack and the bomb was set to explode seconds from now. All they knew for certain was that they were all dead men walking.

I reached out with my magic and felt around as Sierra pulled us into the cover of a copse of trees and set the Skimmer down. My magic nearly exhausted, I uncloaked us, ducking low as searchlights scanned the forest.

“Storm, not gonna say it again,” Bell said. “Get on the fucking Skimmer, now!”

I jumped out of the container and took up the tail gunner position as Bell scooted towards the middle. I latched my fall protection gear to the eyes on the Skimmer’s frame. Bellwether clicked the trigger of his remote detonator, severing the chain with a bang, leaving the nuke in place. He then patted Sierra’s shoulder twice, signaling her to take off.

We made for the nearest ridge, seeking out cover. Small arms fire sliced through the air at us, snapping and cracking. Autocannon rounds missed us by a hair. A Vulture dropship swooped in, trying to intercept us. They took up formation on our left side, their door gunner opening fire on us with his mounted machine gun. Sierra pulled us into a sharp climb and evaded hard left, trying to get above them and out of their firing arcs.

When I looked back and down, through the canopy of the dropship, I could see the face of Mardissa Granthis looking up at me, pointing furiously at us, urging the pilot to do a better job of intercepting us. Sierra throttled up and the pyrojet flared up like a torch, giving off waves of heat, its blue exhaust sharpening into a long string of shock diamonds. We quickly outpaced them, pulling far ahead of the Vulture as we dived below the line of the next hill.

The Vulture pilot was good. He descended straight towards us, maintaining nap-of-the-earth flight with his weighty bird almost brushing the treetops. They opened up with the chin gun, which, unlike the Orca’s, was thankfully of the conventional variety and not a positron gun. It seemed almost quaint compared to the monstrosities I’d had to face night before last. This was just like old times.

“We have to get over the next ridge!” Bellwether shouted. “We have to, or we’re fucked!”

The timer ticked down the last remaining seconds. No point in staying on the gun and getting myself blinded. I turned around in my seat, hugging Bellwether’s back.

Nine. Eight. Seven.

I looked over my shoulder. “We’re too fucking close!”

Six. Five. Four.

“Come on!” Sierra yelled. “Come on, you fuckers!”

The Vulture was closing with us again, its mass plowing through the thin mountain air towards our much smaller hover bike.

I stared breathlessly at the numbers in my HUD, my eyes watering.

Three. Two. One.

We crossed the next ridge, diving down the slope. The Vulture just barely maintained its pursuit, but they were at a higher altitude, and thus more exposed.

The timer hit zero.

The shadows on the trees seemed to stretch into infinity. The dark and snowy Crystal Mountains flared red, as if a second sun had erupted behind us. The ground heaved far below us, snow dusting the air from the shockwave.

“Bell!” I shouted, holding him tight and squeezing my eyes shut. “I lo—”

There was a sound unlike any I had ever heard. A pressure wave slammed into my back and shook every organ in my body. I was thrown from the Skimmer by the force of the blast. Bell got knocked off, too. My harness caught me and snapped taut. As Bell flew away from me, seemingly in slow motion, I reached out and caught him, finding myself looking down at his terrified face. We were still well over a hundred meters off the ground. If I dropped Bell, that would’ve been the end for him. I couldn’t lose him. Not like this.

I was hanging from the Skimmer by one fall protection strap. The other had failed. While steadying myself with one foreleg, I held onto Bell’s forehooves with the other, holding up his earth pony weight and all his armor and weapons with every last ounce of my strength. I was completely deafened by the blast, my ears ringing continuously. My muscles burned with exertion. I couldn’t even hear myself scream.

I seized Bell in my levitation, slowly lifting him up and into his seat, setting him down as best as I could. I reached up to him, and he gave me a hoof to help me climb back aboard. When I turned and looked back, there was a mushroom cloud rising over the Crystal Mountains, the terrain painted an apocalyptic red hue. The whole forest had been lit ablaze for many kilometers in all directions, even in the areas well ahead of us.

The enemy dropship had been hit by the blast wave and radiant heat from the nuke. It spiraled into an uncontrollable descent, its fuselage aflame and engines smoking. We were lucky to have been in the shadow of a mountain, or else we would’ve been burnt to a crisp by the thermal pulse. Slowly, ever-so-slowly, my hearing returned. The air rushing past us sounded as if I were underwater.

“We did it.” Sierra looked back at us, grinning. “We fuckin’ did it! We—”

That was when the Skimmer’s power finally crapped out from the reactor control circuits being fried by the nuke’s electromagnetic pulse. It was amazing that it’d lasted any longer than a split-second. The electrokinetics flickered and died and the Skimmer dipped low and to the left, quickly spinning out of control.

“Hang on!” Sierra shouted.

I gritted my teeth and held on tight. The ground came up fast. Too fast. We hit the snowy earth at an oblique angle, catapulting us from our seats as the Skimmer tumbled end over end through the snow. As my world spun, I watched Sierra smack headfirst into a tree, hard enough to shake all the snow from every single one of its branches.

When I struck the ground, I was knocked unconscious.

// … end transmission …

Record 13//Weltanschauung

//HOL CRY SWT
//CHECKSUM READ
//CHECKSUM GOOD

// … decoding …

Desert Storm

An indeterminate amount of time later, I awoke face-up in the snow. I groaned and held my head in my hooves. I felt like I’d been bucked in the head by a mare with horseshoes on. My extremities were numb, a sickness tingling in my core. I hoped I wasn’t glowing in the dark. My armor had a built-in dosimeter in case of nuclear weapons use or radiological accidents. I was almost too scared to check it.

“Sierra!” I cried out. “Bellwether! Sound off! You guys okay?”

I crawled over to them. Bell was moving, but just barely. Sierra wasn’t moving at all. She was hardly even breathing. She had a gaping head wound dripping blood all over her face. With a hit like that, skull fracture wasn’t out of the question.

“Oh fuck, Bell, Sierra’s wounded! It’s serious. She needs a medic!”

“Keep it down, Storm,” Bellwether groaned. “There could be Confederate patrols surrounding us. That crash was everything but quiet.”

“Don’t they have bigger fish to fry after the nuke?” I said.

Bellwether turned towards me, his expression slowly resolving into one of shock.

“Storm!” He leaned up, panicking.

There was a loud humming noise behind me. I rolled to the side as the plasma sword smashed into the ground where I previously lay, the snow instantly hissing into great clouds of steam.

As I scrambled back, I turned to face my attacker and was greeted by the enraged countenance of Captain Granthis. She was clearly wounded and aggravated, one of her legs afflicted by a noticeable limp. Her pale skin was covered in dirt and soot, chunks of her armor charred and cracked. The thermonuclear explosion and subsequent crash of her transport did a number on her.

“You!” we shouted at each other simultaneously.

“Yeah, we do have some fish to fry, and you’re the biggest fish in the sea!” Granthis said. “I should’ve known it was you, blue-mane! You’re becoming a real thorn in my side, you know that?”

I looked over my shoulder at the mushroom cloud rising over the ridge to the east. “Just a thorn?”

“A pain in my neck!” Granthis yelled, making a fist. “A crick in my cunt!”

I nodded. “Better.”

“You idiots.” She seethed. “You detonated a weapon of mass destruction in an occupation zone. My father will use this as an excuse to rain death on this planet, and he’ll blame me for forcing his hand!”

“We had no other choice,” I said. “It was either that, or we let you assholes overrun us.”

“You do have a choice!” The albino cleomanni glared at me, leveling her Eliminator squarely at me. “Surrender! Surrender and submit!”

“Submit to our own genocide?” I said. “Submit to being enslaved, eaten, and experimented upon? Give our lives and our bodies into the groping hands of deviants and madmen?” In spite of my own injuries, I stood tall before the oppressor. “No! Not for any fucking price. Go home and tell your bastard father that Equestria lives free or dies free. There is no alternative, no substitute, no compromise that you can offer with that snake tongue of yours that any true Equestrian will accept!”

Granthis was flabbergasted. “Why won’t you surrender? You’re a pony! Ponies are supposed to be weak and cowardly! You should be begging for your life!”

I pulled all the fragmentation grenades from my harness with my levitation. “You got a limp, girlie. How would your dear old dad like it if I pulled the pins on all of these, ran you down, and pasted both of us across this field? You think he would miss you?”

“I don’t understand you ponies. Why would you do that? Why would you sacrifice yourself so easily?”

“Because I’m a soldier of the Imperial Army and you’re just a Confederate piece of shit! You’re not gonna take me captive just so you can give me to the damarkinds!”

There was a brief look of confusion on Granthis’ face. “What?”

“You sick motherfuckers have been selling mares to those creeps!” I roared. “You sold my sister to a damarkind mercenary captain. How would you feel if that was your sister, forced to lie beneath one of those hairy, smelly, drooling maniacs, day after day, until she lost the will to live?”

Granthis was silent, her weapon dipping towards the ground, her eyes darting around as the gears turned in her head, her expression growing more horrified and disgusted by the second.

I grinned, pleased to have struck a nerve. “I see daddy doesn’t tell his precious little girl everything about the family business, or does he?”

“I don’t know what sort of sick, degenerate mind games you’re trying to play, pony, but you’ve impugned my honor, and that of my family.” Granthis’ face warped into a hateful scowl. “This is an insult I will not bear.”

The cleomanni tossed aside her weapon, stripping off her ruined power armor until she was down to just her bodysuit. She adopted a fighting stance, holding her hands up like a boxer. “In our culture, there is the tradition of the Diwa Gagarum, the Duel of Honor. First, the wager. If I win, you’re a liar and a coward. If I lose, there may yet be merit to your claim. Cast aside your weapons and fight me, pony! Let our strength be the test of truth!”

“Don’t—do it,” Bellwether said, clutching his chest and groaning in pain. “She’s just trying to trick you into letting your guard down.”

I ignored him, my eyes locked on my adversary, regarding her with a disdainful sneer. “I accept your challenge, Confederate bitch.”

I unlatched my Bulwark armor, removed my helmet, and shrugged my caster and my Orbit into the snow, until I was down to just my fatigues. I sized up my opponent. A cyborg, like me, except her augments were for more than just keeping her alive. They enhanced her strength. Without them, she would have been no match for a pony. With them, she was at least on-par or better.

The muscle suit, on the other hoof, was a problem. It amplified her strength beyond even that, enabling her to hump weapons like her Eliminator over long distances without getting winded and to fire it without shattering her arm. She’d taken off her breastplate, however, which meant the micro-fusion reactor on her back was exposed. That would be my first target. She wouldn’t just turn her back of her own accord. I would have to make an opening.

“You think I won’t stuff you and mount you on my dad’s wall?” Granthis grinned. “I’m looking forward to it.”

“Kinky,” I said.

The albino cleomanni glared at me, those shockingly white eyebrows of hers curling into a frown. “That’s not what I meant!”

“Suit yourself.”

“On the count of three,” she said. “One, two, three, fight!”

We charged at each other, our speed hampered by our injuries. I reared up and threw a right hook at her face. She caught my forehoof, grinning as she slowly overpowered me, bending my leg back with her twice-augmented strength. She wasn’t the only one who could cheat. I lit my horn and fired off a telekinetic pulse that sent her reeling, but she quickly recovered, using her long, thin, whipping tail expertly to shift her balance.

The satyr turned and pivoted on her hooves into a spinning back kick that caught me right in the muzzle. I was lifted off my hooves and skidded several meters across the snow from the force of the blow. I saw stars. Felt my equilibrium go topsy-turvy. I had to shake my head to clear the dizziness and get back in the game.

I rolled over just in time to avoid a powerful axe-kick. Just like a satyr to kick someone while they were down. Sensing the opportunity, I lunged for the gap between her legs and got behind her.

“You slippery little cunt, you—” Granthis snarled.

I had a clear shot. It was now or never. I seized her suit’s fusion power pack in my levitation and pulled, tearing it from its mounting. Unfortunately for Granthis, this ripped the back of her bodysuit off with it, baring her shoulder blades and the crack of her ass to the biting cold. I blinked a few times, mildly embarrassed at what I’d done.

“Oh, uh, damn,” I said. “I can see why you guys wear so much clothing.”

Granthis wheeled on me, furious to the point of froth. “You think I’m ashamed of my body?”

I squeezed my eyes shut in exasperation. “Oh no, here it comes.”

The cleomanni grabbed the collar of her no doubt very expensive and very much ruined artificial muscle suit, and then she ripped off every last scrap of what remained until she was stark naked. Aside from the hair atop her head and the white fur that covered both of her legs, the cleomanni woman had a light fringe of fur that ran from her shoulders and down the outsides of her arms. Other than that, there wasn’t much else, nor was there anything left to the imagination. She looked cold. Cold and fleshy.

I could see the faint outlines of her augs poking through her skin, along with the traces of surgical scars and access ports all over her body. Her right leg was matted with blood from her injuries. She had a mild burn mark here and there. If she was in pain, she didn’t show it. I could see her shiver ever-so-slightly, but she was startlingly adept at concealing that, too. Every centimeter of her was stacked with rock-solid muscle. She may have had the soft face of a spoiled brat, but the rest of her looked like it had been chiseled from stone.

“Gaze upon me in awe!” she said, spreading her arms wide. “Gaze upon the form that shall conquer the whole universe!”

“Really?” I muttered.

“You’re not impressed?”

“So you have a penchant for the dramatic. Two can play that game.” I unzipped my uniform, undid my saddlebags, and let the remainder of my clothes fall to the snow. “You see this? This is the body of the people that you alien freaks are trying to claim as your property. If you cared that we were sapient, then you wouldn’t care what we were shaped like. You would respect our right to freedom and autonomy regardless. But no, you covet our bodies. Our flesh and bone.” I advanced on her, watching as she grew increasingly unsettled.

Granthis broke out in peals of nervous laughter. “People?” She pointed at me. “You weird little bug-eyed things don’t even have fingers! What manner of people don’t have those?”

“Or maybe you’re just afraid,” I said, coming to a halt. “Maybe we remind you of something you wish you could forget. How you’re part-beast yourselves.”

The cleomanni shook with rage. “Silence, worm.”

I allowed myself a devilish, toothy grin. “What if those hooves and all that fur were to crawl up your torso and swallow up the rest of you, until you were just another lowly animal, like me? Would the rest of the galaxy see you as fit to enslave, then?”

Captain Granthis charged at me, roaring in wordless anger. She lashed out with a wild kick, but I brushed it aside and grabbed her injured right leg. With a yank and a twist, I sent her to the ground. Bipeds were so poor at balancing. I tried getting her in a leglock, wrenching her injured leg, but she kicked me in the head with her other one and shimmied out of it. As she attempted to crawl away and right herself, I charged into her side, knocking her onto her back.

I mounted her midsection and rained blow after blow on her face, grunting with exertion each time. Cleomanni weren’t nearly as strong or as tough as ponies. They were soft. They broke easily. Their bones shattered like glass from impacts that would leave a pony merely bruised and annoyed. I avoided using the full extent of my strength, not intending to kill her. I wanted to kill her. I wanted to kill her so badly, my legs shook with adrenaline. My vision narrowed to a tunnel, ringed black around the edges. I had to hold back my rage. Instead of pulverizing her entire face, I merely broke her nose. I went for her jaw, next, but when my hoof connected, it felt like I’d punched the frame of my motorcycle. My whole hoof throbbed from the impact.

I gritted my teeth. “Dammit! How much of you is metal?”

“More than enough,” Granthis said.

The cleomanni took advantage of my hesitation, reaching up and gripping my broken rib, twisting it in her hand. The pain was debilitating. I cried out and crumpled like a wet noodle. My foe rolled me over onto my back, clambering onto my chest and laying into my muzzle with fierce punches. The blood from her busted nose dripped off her chin and into my eyes. She tried strangling me with those little hands of hers, digging like knives into the muscles of my neck. She hauled me up into the air, my hind legs dangling, and then choke-slammed me into the ground, knocking the wind out of me.

My forehoof smashed into the side of her head, knocking her off me, quickly followed by a kick from one of my hind legs that sent her stumbling back. I tasted blood. She’d split my lip. One of my eyes was swelling shut. I rolled upright and kicked off with my hind legs, screaming a battle cry and propelling myself like a bullet into her midsection, tackling her and sending us both rolling through the snow.

The fight was neither flashy nor glorious. It was an animalistic and primal struggle, testing the limits of our flesh. We grunted and screeched as we wrestled and struck each other with savage blows, quickly finding ourselves coated in flecks of each other’s blood. Bitch, whore, slut. We called each other everything under the sun.

I was fighting an enraged cleomanni cyborg in the freezing-ass wastes while my boss looked on in slack-jawed wonder at two naked girls beating the pulp out of each other, all set to the backdrop of a rising mushroom cloud. What the fuck is my life anymore?

“You little monsters!” Granthis screeched. “You turned one of our prison camps into a bloodbath! You murdered hundreds of innocent civilians!” She struck me with all her augmented might, knocking the wind out of me.

“It wasn’t a prison for rebels,” I said. “You bastards were kidnapping random ponies and letting your merc friends fuck the life out of them and then eat them for dinner!” I kicked off the ground with both of my hind legs and slammed both my forehooves into her midsection, making her double over and knocking the wind out of her in an explosive cough.

“You liar!” The bloodied and beaten Guild Marbo champion stumbled backwards, fell flat on her ass, and tried crawling away from me, her expression panicked. “You lying, perverse little creature!”

“You want me to stop killing satyrs?” I scooped Granthis up in my forelegs, lifting her struggling form high into the air as I reared up. “Then stop fucking killing ponies!”

I body-slammed her into a tree, hard enough to cover us both with heaps of snow. I collapsed to the ground, panting hard. A psychological reaction, I knew. The air was unnecessary. I didn’t need to breathe.

Granthis, bruised and bleeding from several places, shakily tried to stand, only to crumple against the trunk of the tree I’d thrown her into. I slowly got to my hooves and walked over to her, raising my hoof to strike her again.

“I yield!” she said. “I give up. You win, damn you!” She was shivering more profoundly, now. “You win.” With her anger dissipated, she seemed less proud of her nudity and more lost and afraid than anything else.

“I don’t care about your stupid duel.” I licked my stinging lip, hocked and spat blood. “Your people have been systematically kidnapping and enslaving mine. Can’t you understand why we’re angry? Are cleomanni physically incapable of self-awareness, or what? Am I speaking to a fucking child?” I raised my hoof. “Is this what it takes to get through your skull? A pounding? We are not animals. We are not your property. We are not your playthings to toy with, you dense motherfuckers!” I stomped her bare cunt. “Fuck off!”

Granthis rolled off the tree trunk and fell on her side, her eyes brimming with tears and her shoulders shuddering as she cupped both her hands over her bruised equipment, gasping and wheezing in shock and pain. “Why?”

“Mauvas?!” I shouted. “Aspare muarecule. Aspare ut redever tinse ut doedi biduakin ia hurridnek eiren ut iuva tewext asrii ut tangawuam. Sem melmuarii hrondes aspare ut kuk ast jats virauade a sprenni eir ut a kartar!”

I told her that she was an asshole. That the merc pieces of shit that her people hired had murdered and raped their way across my hometown. That a little booboo on her puss was nothing compared to the degradation we had to suffer. Watching her subsequently shrivel and whimper like a child quickly filled me with a strange sense of remorse.

Granthis wasn’t a real soldier. She wasn’t anything. She was just a spoiled brat playing dress-up on daddy’s dime. I looked down at my shaking, blood-smeared hooves. The power to crush someone with such ease was not a thing to be taken lightly.

The wounded cleomanni slowly rose to a sitting position and wiped her bloodied nose against her arm. “You little liar. My father is a righteous man. He would never sanction the things that you’re accusing him of.”

“Oh really?” I said. “Then explain this!” I limped over to where my Orbit lay in the snow. “Lucky, boot up! Playback mode, charnel-house-dot-vid.”

I gave my Orbit a quick charge with my horn, making sure to fast-forward the recording past Broggas’ imbroglio with the Confederate officer—it was valuable leverage I could’ve used against him at a later date and time, if necessary. Then, I tossed it to the president’s daughter. She caught it out of the air, holding it gingerly with both of her little paws.

“What’s this damnable contraption?” she said.

“An Orbit. A personal aerial drone designed to follow and assist the wielder. You’d know that if you’d studied your enemy enough to call yourself a soldier.”

She gave me a skeptical look, before returning her gaze to the holographic projection of the recording I’d taken in Dodge. I made sure she watched every second of my grisly discovery and subsequent fight. She was lucky that my Orbit didn’t have smell-o-vision; that feature only came standard on top-end models. The enchantment was too complex for most consumer-grade Orbits like the Juke. Otherwise, she would’ve smelled the combination of blood, bile, piss, and shit that saturated the filthy warehouse where the damarkinds had been butchering my kind. However, that proved unnecessary. The visuals were plenty enough.

When the recording came to a stop, Mardissa let the Orbit drop into the snow. She tucked her knees against her chest and buried her head in her hands, sobbing piteously. The sight of it wrenched my heart out of place. I had half a mind to join her. Watching my sister die wasn’t getting any easier. If anything, it was harder each time.

“I don’t know what your father—what your people—have been telling you about my kind,” I said. “Whatever it is, it isn’t the truth. You want my perspective? I’ve been alive for twenty-seven fucking years, and every single one of those years I can remember, I’ve felt nothing but powerlessness. Except for those sparse and terrifying moments where I was in combat, I cannot think of a single day of my life where it felt like I was actually in control of anything.” I gripped one of Granthis’ horns, twisting her face towards me. “And to think, I could’ve had a real life, if it weren’t for you fuckers. Millions, no, billions of ponies could’ve led decent lives, if you assholes had simply left us alone. You destroyed our civilization. Our culture. You took our future away from us. You ruin everything you touch. All you had to do was nothing!”

“Oh gods,” Granthis whined. “I didn’t know they were abusing prisoners! I swear!”

“Ignorance is not an excuse. Your ignorance is what just killed thousands of your countrymen. That’s the thing about you fucking satyrs that’s always ticked me off. You whitewash everything. You like to dissemble and pretend you’re doing something different from what you’re actually doing. No, that’s not the anguished cries of concentration camp victims. It was a flock of geese. No, we didn’t extract every mineral resource we could get our hands on. These are just some shiny rocks. Well, guess what, sunshine? Fuck you!”

“They said your magic would destroy the universe. They—they told us you were dangerous animals that needed to be controlled, for all our sakes!”

I let go of her horn. “The history of ponykind stretches back thousands of years. If that were possible, don’t you think it would’ve already fucking happened by now? No, it’s just another half-baked excuse to treat us like garbage.” I pressed my muzzle into her broken nose, making her wince. “Your species are a bunch of cruel, sadistic morons, and you are a fucking fraud who couldn’t take one injured mare bare-handed even with millions of credits’ worth of augs! Get off my fucking battlefield, you sheltered bitch!”

“I’m—I’m sorry, I—”

I leaned back. “Are you in fucking politics like your father? Can you change even a single fucking thing about your country? Anything noteworthy? Anything at all?”

The white-haired Dochnast stared at me with wide, haunted eyes before casting her gaze downward. “I don’t have any political power. Guild Champions forfeit the ability to hold a public office for a period of ten years after our service is complete. We live to serve the Guilds and act as their representatives on the battlefield. We don’t have a say in anything.”

“Then I don’t give a fuck how sorry you are. Go back to dear ol’ dad and tell him everything you’ve seen here. Let’s see how sorry he feels. I guarantee you, he won’t give a dying rat’s last shit.”

I grabbed the remains of Captain Granthis’ power armor undersuit, ambled over to her and draped it over her shivering form. She looked up at me, her eyes red and bleary, her face streaked with bloody snot.

“Thank you,” she said.

“Eat shit,” I muttered. “I only did it because having Salzaon’s daughter freeze to death on a mountainside while buck-naked and bloody all over isn’t a good look.”

“Oh.”

I gathered up my uniform and my armor, donning them as swiftly as I could with my injuries, which wasn’t very fast. “Ow.” I softly hissed in pain. My face felt like mashed potatoes. Granthis could throw a mean punch.

I sent my Orbit up to survey the area for hostiles and perhaps reveal a way back to the base. Bellwether had bandaged Sierra’s head and treated the rest of her wounds to the best of his ability. He’d also fashioned a makeshift sled and harness from the Skimmer’s wreckage and some paracord, using it to tow our wounded pilot through the snow.

“Right, let’s move out,” Bell said. “See if we can’t find our way back from here.”

Sierra was one of the last survivors from my old unit. We were never particularly close friends, but I didn’t want to see her shuffle off this mortal coil so soon, either. She needed medical attention, and soon. We took a few steps into the woods and quickly realized that we were lost. The EMP had knocked out our helmet radios and we couldn’t access the local datasphere. The way my Orbit seemed practically unharmed was a total mystery to me. It was a civilian model. Suffice it to say, EMP-hardening didn’t come standard on those.

“Just keep on livin’ up to your name, Lucky,” I muttered.

“Who’s Lucky?” Granthis said.

She was following us, jabbering at us as we marched through the snow. I rolled my eyes in exasperation. I’d had enough of her to last me a lifetime. I wished she’d picked another path through the forest. Anything but tagging along with us. Aside from her, our surroundings were eerily quiet, and we had nothing but dead trees and grayish boulders for company. And snow. An endless, white hell of snow.

“My Orbit.” I waved a hoof skyward.

The cleomanni woman smirked. “You named your drone?”

“Yeah. What’s it to you?”

“Nothing. I just think it’s funny. I’m so used to seeing them as completely disposable.”

“It’s not a fucking Screamer. It’s a personal entertainment unit. I wanted to have something to blast tunes with when I was on my break at my old job. You used to see ravers and stuff with these things all the time.”

“How did it survive the electromagnetic pulse?”

“No fucking idea. If I had to guess, I’d say it was magic. Maybe the spell locus warped the EMP flux and kept it away from the electronics? I have no clue.”

Granthis frowned. “So, you’re saying that thing’s roguetech?”

“Yes!” I said. “Everything’s roguetech. Almost everything we make uses magic in some form or another.”

Granthis came to a halt next to her discarded weapon. “Huh. Well, my transport went down a few hundred meters from here, in the woods. See the smoke?” She pointed with one of those bony fingers of hers.

I looked towards the southeast and nodded. “I see it. Kinda hard to spot with how little sunlight we get up here, but yeah, I see it.”

“Let’s head that way. We should be able to salvage something from the wreck. Maybe build a fire. I don’t know.” Her teeth chattered together. “I don’t wanna turn into an icicle out here.”

I huffed with amusement. “Then don’t start a nudist colony in the Crystal fucking Mountains. Leave that to the people with the fur all over. You look like a fuckin’ chimp with alopecia.”

“Oh, drop dead, you miserable creature,” the cleomanni groaned.

“You first.”

Captain Granthis sighed as she idly reached for her Eliminator lying in the snow. Bellwether bared his teeth at her.

“What are you doing?” he said.

“Nothing,” she said. “I’m doing nothing. Do you know how much this thing kicks? I can’t shoot it without the suit, anyway.”

“Good.”

The cleomanni woman grumbled as she slung the great big gun-sword over her shoulder, adopting a non-threatening posture. Bellwether shook his head at me, giving me an unblinking stare. I nodded. The meaning was clear. Granthis was probably leading us into a trap.

“Dammit, I still can’t believe you actually tore the reactor off my power suit!” Granthis whined. “You can’t buy those. They’re issued to us. Do you know how expensive those things are? My salary wouldn’t pay for it in two hundred of your years! I’d be well on my way to retirement by then!”

I came to a halt. “How long do you cleomanni live?”

“Five-hundred-something on average, but my twenty-fourth-great grandfather was well over six hundred when he passed. I’m—well, I’m barely any older than you, even. By about four of your planet’s cycles. I’m just a baby, pretty much. I have a long, boring life ahead of me, so long as I quit picking fights with lunatics like you, I suppose.”

I gave her a look of sheer astonishment. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“I’m quite serious. Why? Don’t you ponies live basically forever? I know your Empress had apparently been kicking around for at least a thousand years.”

“No, we don’t. She’s an alicorn. They’re special. For the rest of us, it’s like, seventy, eighty on average. Maybe over a hundred if we’re lucky.”

“Oh.” Granthis’ eyes widened. “Wow. How unfortunate.”

“Now I have something else to hate you fuckers for! You don’t need all those years, so give me some!”

The two of us roughhoused for a moment, ending in fits of giggles. It was all very strange, how easily we got along, still sporting the marks of our vicious brawl. The young cleomanni had quickly wormed her way into my confidence, and I into hers. My smile fell as I looked at her warily out of the corner of my eye. She seemed almost like a different person from when I’d first met her. She’d made me dance with explosive slugs, cut a mare in half with her sword, and attacked us with spider-bombs. Where did all that typical cleomanni viciousness go? What the fuck is her angle?

“Quiet, you two. We’re coming up on the crash site.” Bellwether squinted. “Contact, one Confederate soldier. By the campfire. No others that I can see.”

“It’s just me and the pilot,” Granthis said. “The rest died in the crash. I see the fire’s already built. Perfect.”

There was a distraught-looking fellow resting his chin on his hand and sitting by the fire on what looked like a jumpseat recovered from the wreck. Since my helmet’s EMP-hardened eyepiece was still functioning but had lost its radio link, I had Lucky come back down to ground level using an orbit recall spell. I played back the footage of our immediate surroundings.

There didn’t appear to be any hidden hostiles lying in ambush, as one would expect. Scattered all around the pilot were the debris of the Confederate Vulture dropship, its smoking engines a grave marker for the soldiers unfortunate enough to have been in the troop bay when it ate shit. It looked like it came down on its belly, rolled over, and the rear section of the fuselage had snapped off and tumbled hard while the cockpit section remained mostly intact. Mardissa’s backseat driving was what saved her life.

When the wayward pilot looked up, his face spread wide into a grin. “Mar! You’re back, did you—” His expression dissolved into one of disgust and horror as he drew his sidearm and leveled it at us. “By the Makers! Stay back! Stay the fuck away!” He was more frightened than anything, almost stumbling over the seat as he backpedaled.

“Ket, they’re with me, relax!” Granthis said.

“They’re fucking Equestrians! Oh gods, did they wipe your brain with their magic? You won’t get me, you little freaks!”

I was about to fire off a retort, but my memory of my earlier encounter with Cicatrice was summoned to the forefront of my mind. My chat with Mardissa and this dropship pilot’s stark fear of us made me realize a couple of things about the cleomanni that I never quite noticed before. It hit me like a sack of bricks.

One, cleomanni longevity—which I might’ve heard of in passing but never gave much thought—would have exerted enormous pressure on them to behave in an expansionist manner. They seemed to reach sexual maturity and have offspring at roughly the same rate ponies did, but then, they continued to linger on for centuries afterward. This meant they could either institute draconian policies to limit births and avoid overpopulation, or they could expand outward through conquest and colonization. They had chosen the latter.

Two, Equestrian magic was a fearsome thing from their perspective. Ponies were magic. We were its living avatars. We violated the laws of the natural world with contemptuous ease. We warped the fabric of spacetime to suit our whims. To us, it was normal and natural. An intrinsic part of our minds and bodies. To them, it was like ionizing radiation. Once cast, it could not be seen, heard, tasted, smelled, or touched. An invisible poison that disfigured its victims and rendered them insane.

I had no way to prove that I hadn’t mind-controlled Granthis into being an obedient puppet, thus having her persuade the pilot into dropping his guard so I could kill him. To the cleomanni, each and every one of us was like a living nuclear weapon, to say nothing of the actual nukes and other tools of devastation we possessed. Ponies were a proliferation hazard. We were something to be tamed, corralled, and controlled. The very thought of it made me feel somehow ashamed.

Mardissa marched up to him, her fist clenched, not caring that she was still half-naked and chilled to the bone. “You dumb fuck!” She dropped the Eliminator, grabbed his pistol and clocked him hard enough to send him into the snow, disarming him in the blink of an eye. She removed the magazine, cycled the action, and then stripped the handgun down to its components for good measure, casually tossing them aside.

“It’s me, you blithering idiot. I’m in full control of my faculties. How dare you suggest otherwise?” Granthis’ statement seemed absurd in light of the fact that her only clothing was a tattered muscle suit draped over her shoulders. “You’ll quit it with this nonsense at once, or I will beat the living shit out of you!”

“Yep,” he groaned. “That’s you, ma’am.”

“Kinda bipolar,” Bellwether whispered in my ear as I suppressed a chuckle.

“Oh no, I think I like her,” I said.

“Ma’am, your armor!” Ket said. “Did they—”

“It was an Honor Duel.”

“Did you win?”

“No.”

Ket looked at us with renewed awe and horror. “How? How could they take you in a fight, ma’am? You’re augmented!”

“They’re much, much stronger than their diminutive size would indicate.” Granthis sighed, turning to me and straightening herself. “You fight well, if a little dirty. That’s twice you’ve bested me, blue-mane. I would have your name.”

“Sergeant Desert Storm, formerly of the Imperial Army. Now, a member of the Liberation Front.” I wasn’t sure if I trusted her enough to tell her what unit and role, yet. She might’ve gotten pissed. “We’re the freedom fighters that you’ve been hunting doggedly for the past several months.”

“I am Captain Mardissa Mavali Taffalstriak Granthis, Champion of Guild Marbo and daughter of Salzaon, president of the Cleomanni Confederacy. This ruddy little Zinsar fellow here is Lieutenant Ketros Armagais, Vulture pilot.”

Ketros waved at us nervously, clearly upset at the idea of a cease-fire, however temporary. Next, Granthis turned to Bell, an expectant look on her face.

“Agent Bellwether, BASKAF.”

The cleomanni briefly made eye contact with each other before they both doubled over laughing.

“What?” Bellwether said. “What’s so funny?”

“My translator must be malfunctioning because of the nuke,” Ketros said. “Did he actually say his name was Castrated-Leader?”

That got me fucking rolling, too. Bellwether stood there, practically vibrating with anger as the three of us had a hearty laugh at his expense.

“It’s—it’s a codename, it’s not even my real name! It’s one of those spy callsign things, like Deepthroat or—” he grumbled. “You know what? Fuck you assholes.”

The three of us laughed even harder. I had to wipe the tears of mirth from my eyes. “Oh, Bell, you’re adorable when you’re mad.”

“Why are you all so upbeat about all this? I mean, look at you two over there.” Bell waved his hoof at the cleomanni. “You’re in pretty good spirits considering we just fucking nuked you.”

Both of them frowned at us. Ketros inhaled sharply to deliver his retort, but Mardissa raised a hand, making it clear he should hold his tongue.

“We’re not happy about it, no,” Granthis said. “I lost a number of my most valued subordinates today. They knew the risks, but none of us anticipated a disaster of this magnitude. Point is, I’d rather not think about what just happened, because it’s too fucking overwhelming. I have a hunch that the rest of you feel the same way. What do you say? Truce?”

I shrugged. “I need a breather, and I don’t care if that means calling time-out and having tea with some satyrs or whatever, because that would be substantially less insane than everything else that’s happened. Besides, none of us have any idea when we’re gonna be rescued or by which side. We’re basically fucked. There’s no food out here. No drinking water, unless you melt some snow. If we split up, we’re probably all gonna freeze to death up here.”

“Truce it is, then.” Granthis’ bruised face widened into a wild grin. “Did someone say tea? I have just the thing! It was in my locker on the Vulture. Oh, I hope it’s not scattered all about the place.”

Mardissa pulled a disappearing act. I glanced at Bell for some moral support through the medium of body language, and when I turned back, she was gone. Me, Bell, and the dropship pilot ambled over to the smoking wreck. The three of us shared some very confused glances as we watched Granthis cursing and dragging corpses from the dropship’s severed aft section. Not to rescue them from the smoke. Her soldiers were already quite dead. No, she just wanted them out of her way, since they were stacked up like cordwood in the dropship’s bay.

A few minutes later, she reappeared from the yawning maw of the doomed craft, dressed in suspendered mechanic’s overalls and sporting a wide grin on her bandaged face. She was holding a bundle of her personal effects in her arms. She rushed over to the campfire with almost childlike glee. I watched her unfold the legs on what I quickly realized was a camp stove, and then set a kettle boiling on it.

“Teatime, everyone!” Granthis waved us over.

We were standing in what was practically a damn blizzard, at perpetual dusk, in the shadow of a mushroom cloud, and the Confederate president’s daughter, who I’d just beaten within an inch of her life, was cheerily inviting us over for tea.

I had to still my breath. I was starting to hyperventilate and wheeze. I walked over to Bellwether and seized him by the collar. “I’m about to have another nervous breakdown.”

“Why?” He said.

“I take back what I said about needing a breather. Nothing is making sense today, and I’m sick of it! Did we survive that nuke? Is this hell?”

“No,” Bellwether said. “It’s an intel opportunity. Follow my lead. Oh, and keep an eye on Sierra’s vitals. We don’t want to lose her.”

He pulled the sled with the casualty over to the campfire. I followed him and checked on our stricken pilot. She still had a pulse and her chest was rising and falling, but she was unresponsive. Not good. I took my helmet off and set it by the campfire. Damn thing was on the fritz, anyway. Granthis had brewed a pot of some manner of loose-leaf tea of a species I’d never seen before. She poured four cups, one for each of us, except for the one who was comatose, obviously. I watched closely to make sure she hadn’t poisoned any of them. Her tea set was one of the gaudiest things I’d ever seen. Every single cup and saucer and even the kettle itself had some crazy gold filigree on it.

When she handed me mine and Bell’s, I hit both the beverages with an adulterant-detection spell that I’d sometimes used when tending the bar at the Gridiron and suspected that some loser was trying to roofie one of my patrons. I’d personally given more than a few stallions some savage beatings over that. They were bigger and stronger, sure, but no one can handle an enraged unicorn mare swinging a barstool at their head with levitation, followed by the rest of the bar dogpiling them until the authorities arrived. Nothing like customer loyalty.

There was nothing. No poison, no sedatives. Nothing. Granthis seriously, no shit, wanted to just kick back and have tea with us, no strings attached. I sat there, wide-eyed and sullen, as I took a few shaky sips to ward off the surreality of it all. It was dark and strong whatever it was, with a hint of cardamom. It wasn’t bad at all.

“So,” Granthis began. “Just so you know? That was it.”

“What?” Bell said. “What was what, now?”

“That force. That the three of you little maniacs just bombed into dust. That was it. That was all I had on this damn backwater planet. We were tracking your transports’ movements on radar. I thought, well, they’re up in the mountains, and they’re obviously up to no good, so, maybe I can take them out all in one go. So, I sent everything I had. Wait, did I say I sent everything? No, Colonel Ashoram sent ‘em. I didn’t do a damn thing of any use. I just tagged along on typical bullshit Guild Champion observation and cheerleading duty. But I think he’s dead, too, so, yeah. I’m all out. That was it.”

“Why are you telling us this?” I said.

Bell shot me a glare, pissed that I’d suggest Granthis show discretion. He clearly sought to take advantage of her loose lips and frayed emotional state.

The satyr woman clapped her hands on her hips. “No point in keeping it a secret, because it doesn’t make much of a difference. I’m basically screwed. You know you kicked over a hornet’s nest with that thing, right?” She pointed at the mushroom cloud. “I have absolutely no clue what sort of reinforcements are on the way, only that they’ll come in numbers fit to blacken your skies. Me? I’ll probably get sent home. Home is, in a word, boring. Very fucking boring.”

“Sucks to be you,” Bellwether said.

“Yeah, it does suck to be me.” Granthis shook her head. “Dad’s gonna fucking kill me!”

“You’re not the only one around here to ever disappoint her father,” I said. “Join the club.”

Granthis gave me a knowing look but chose to ignore that comment. “This has already been a very politically-embarrassing and costly occupation. No one can figure out why the hell we’re even here. I think there was some talk about setting up a gemstone mine? The contract fell through. No one would take it. Too far to transport.”

“So, you can’t even profitably sell the spoils of war,” Bell said. “What a shitshow.”

Captain Granthis jerked a thumb over her shoulder. “We conquered a ball of dirt that we can’t even use, because it’s literally in the middle of buttfuck nowhere, a hundred light years away from the nearest trade lanes. We’re so undermanned and under-supplied, we’re going fucking stir crazy out here. Dieslan Veightnoch has his head up his ass. I’ve never met a narcissist such as he, and I possess several full-length mirrors. He’s sniffed his undies so hard, he’s high on the smell of his own sweaty taint. He dreams of becoming planetary governor over this pathetic little ball of dirt, but he’s sweating bullets because he can’t find any commodities here that anyone could conceivably want.”

“Except us,” I said. “He’s selling us.”

The satyr raised her hand as if to say something, but then thought better of it, resting her chin on her knuckles as she composed herself. “Well, that would explain the sheer desperation in your tactics. I think that was probably more Naimekhe’s idea than his. I hate that fucking bitch. I wish she’d choke on a chicken bone.”

I bristled with rage. “Emlan Broggas told me you fuckers were selling mares into sex slavery. He said we were a hot-ticket item in Confederate space. How could you not know about this, with as highly-placed as you are?”

Granthis leaned back. “Oh, come on. He was fucking with your head. He’s a damarkind. That’s what they do. Or the smart ones do, anyway.” The satyr pinched the bridge of her aching nose. “Or at least I think he was fucking with you. Oh gods, that’s so gross.” She sighed heavily. “Rest assured, I had nothing to do with it. I’ve been busy. Guild business. Livestock isn’t Marbo business. Weapons and consumer goods are. Many of the major defense conglomerates fall under our aegis. What is it you think a Champion does? I’m the face of the whole Marbo brand. My likeness is a commodity. I’m on cigarette packs, I’m in commercials.”

“Oh, no way,” I muttered. “Cigarettes?”

I watched with great incredulity as Granthis pulled a pack of cigs from her pocket and waved it around. Sure enough, her smiling, pigtailed face and pearly white teeth were front and center, framed art-nouveau-style. “Presidents.” She pulled one out and lit up, taking a few drags, before she handed one to each of us. “Gods, we had to film a spot just the other day. They had the worst camera crew I’d ever seen, flown out here on a budget. They fucked up everything and we had to retake the whole damn shoot. Reminds me, I kinda need my face intact. It’s valuable.”

I cringed as I watched her grab her thin little broken nose and center the cartilage back up by hand with a click and a grunt of pain. She was weirdly insensitive to her injuries.

“Doesn’t that hurt?” I said.

“Why, do you want it to?” She glared at me.

“Well, maybe not.”

“My bionics are, well, they’re all over. I’m almost completely chromed up, but it’s all hidden under living skin. Very spendy. One of my augs is a pain canceler. Intercepts those pesky nerve impulses before they ever reach the brain and register. GARGs have something similar, but it’s more in-depth and fully modulates behavioral impulses as well. That’s part of why they’re so fearless. I’ve got major skeletal reinforcement and artificial muscle enhancements. I also have an adrenal auto-brewer and numerous other tweaks to keep me sharp.”

I laughed. “You know, the last time I saw you, you weren’t so, uhh—”

“What? Nice?” She let out a huff. “I was basically high on all kinds of stimulant compounds generated by my implants. Dialed them up on purpose. I was probably a sight to see. How about you? Got anything?”

I looked down at the cig. I’d never really smoked tobacco. Weed, once or twice, but that was never really my thing, either. Like my frenemies used to say, I had no chill, and no amount of pot would fix that. Bell had already lit up his. I put the cig in my mouth and tapped the end of mine to his, lighting it up. Bell smirked, clearly intrigued by the gesture’s connotations.

I drew in a breath of smoke, coughing and hacking a few times from the irritation to my airway. First time I tried tobacco, and it was a Confederate cig, while sitting amidst wreckage of a Confederate bird, shooting the shit with some satyrs we’d just nuked. What a weird fuckin’ day this turned out to be.

“Just a standard military neural lace and nanomachine colony,” I said. “And a big hunk of metal in my back that replaces my kidneys and lets me vacuum piss out of my bladder through a tube, apparently. If I want drugs, I have to take them the old-fashioned way.”

“Suck,” Granthis muttered. “I guess they don’t really care about augs in Equestria.”

“Dragoons have augs,” I said. “Most ponies don’t need ‘em. We’re strong enough as it is. It would be cheating.” I smirked.

Granthis laughed. “You’re not strong. You’re ridiculous. When I hit you, it felt like I was pounding a squishy sack full of oobleck. Right under that soft, furry exterior, your insides are dense and leaden. What the hell are you made of? Are you telling me you’re mostly flesh and blood?”

“To my knowledge, yes.”

The satyr ran a finger along her jawline. “If I didn’t have titanium under here, you would’ve broken my jaw. You weren’t even trying, either. I could tell. Do you realize that if you actually took a swing at the average woman, her face would look like a broken jar of ligadtze?”

I had, in fact, taken a swing at more than a few straight-meat cleomanni in my life, and knew exactly what the results were, but I wasn’t about to tell her that. “Liga-what?”

“Lingtberry jam. It’s an engineered hybrid from the early days, back when Guild Marbo had a bigger stake in agricultural products. You know, genegineered seeds and weed killer and all. However, I digress. That vid you showed me. You took five armed damarkinds with a knife and a returned grenade? Are you kidding me?”

“What’s your point?”

“You’re dangerous.” She sighed. “There’s no two ways about it. You ponies are a dangerous, savage species. If you were a part of wider galactic society, how would non-ponies deal with pony criminals? You could be drinking at the bar, getting along merrily with the other patrons, when eventually, as things occasionally do in the course of an evening, a brawl erupts, and before you know it, there’s blood on your hooves and you’re surrounded by twenty dead people. That’s just the physical part. If we include magic, it’s even worse.

“If one single pony actively used magic for force or fraud, to deceive and discombobulate, to warp minds towards some unknown and lofty purpose, it would be a disaster; a pony con artist skilled in the art of mind control could have a trillion-credit pyramid scheme up and running at the word go. Individually, you could unravel the very fabric of our entire society. Collectively, you’re a nightmare.”

I was mad. Livid, even. I had to bite my lip to hold back what I was thinking, because it was laced with all sorts of profanity. “So, that’s the line they’re feeding you people? That we’re a threat to the peace, simply by existing? How can you say that when you’re standing on the grave of our civilization? Are you satyrs really that paranoid, that you can annihilate another species with a clean conscience, and you neither notice nor care that we were obviously never even a real threat to you?”

Granthis blinked a few times. “I’ve never really heard those words in that particular configuration, but when you put it that way, yeah, I suppose so.”

I got to my hooves, marching up to her angrily. “You killed us. You destroyed our cities. Bombed our factories and military bases. You brought everything we built to ruin. Your people are in the process of enslaving mine as we speak, for purposes too hideous to contemplate. And yet, you still have the nerve to say to my face that I’m the danger?”

“But, your magic—”

“We have magic. So what? The nemrin have magic, too, some of it quite dark and nasty, and I don’t see you beating down their door. The things we do with magic, you do with technology. A spell can control a mind. So can an AI algorithm that feeds targeted ads at people. The tools that you’ve used to shape your society and allow it to prosper aren’t any different from ours. Your excuse for our destruction does not hold water!”

Granthis was shaky as she took a sip of her tea, her eyes darting around as the wheels turned in her head. She took an uncomfortably long stare at the mushroom cloud. “Teatime is supposed to be a time to relax. This is getting kinda uncomfortable.”

I threw my forelegs into the air. “Welcome to my entire life! The fact that it took a barely-educated mare from a dead-end town like me to put a rich, spoiled brat like you in her place is the saddest fucking thing I’ve had to deal with all year, and I had a death in the family!”

“You’re an autodidact,” Granthis said.

I cocked an eyebrow. “A what?”

“You may lack a formal education on general topics, which I’m honestly not sure how much is true and how much is just you being in denial and clinging to some small-town sentimentality about your class identity, but judging by the way you speak, you read, and you read a lot. You have a penchant for violence. Certainly enough to take me on with your bare hooves. You’re also very politically-minded.” Granthis fixed me with eyes that were piercing and predatory; less her cutesy, fakey mask, and more of the real cleomanni oppressor that I suspected she was, deep inside. “I can see why Broggas wanted you for his traveling carnival of death, pilot.” She spat the word.

“You know?” I muttered.

“Of course I did. You admitted to it on camera. Bright in some ways, but dull in others, I see. But then again, I suppose it’s been rough, what with the trauma and all. Have any brain fog, lately? Difficulty remembering basic details?”

I rolled my eyes. “Fucking hell. The president’s daughter is a better shrink than our base’s actual shrink. I give up. This is too weird.”

Granthis doubled over laughing. She put a hand on my shoulder. “I’m just fucking with you, come on.”

The two of us shared a bout of genuine, honest laughter. More than I thought possible when in the presence of our species’ mortal foe.

“Oh shit, you had me!” I said.

“It’s one of the few things I’m actually good at,” she said. “You know how fortune-tellers work, right? They just say generic things that could apply to almost anyone, and half-wits actually lap that drivel right up. Politics is much the same. Having to sit around listening to politicians and CEOs and other insufferable cretins, you pick up some people-reading skills. I had to get away. I was tired of it all. I needed adventure.”

My smile fell. Adventure. The word roiled my consciousness. She’d just fucked up. We had been getting along so well, too.

“So, your idea of adventure was to take up arms, travel halfway across the galaxy, and kill people that you don’t even know, just for sport?” I said.

“Wasn’t it the same for you? Why did you enlist?”

I stared at the ground, shaking my head, before fixing an angry glare on her. “I joined because my people were under attack. I joined because I didn’t think there was going to be a ponykind in a few years, the way things were going. I had a job. I had steady, if meager, income. I didn’t need to do this. I wanted to. To defend my people and save them from destruction. How does that even compare to your cooped-up boredom?”

Granthis was shaking, spilling drips of her tea. I could see the dread in her eyes. The reality she’d tried desperately to ignore was staring her right in the face.

“You’re not an animal,” she said.

I nodded eagerly at her to continue. I liked the way this was going, and I urged her along this train of thought. She was thinking the unthinkable. Saying the unsayable. The forbidden words. They all knew it. After all, non-sapients didn’t build starships and mechs. They’d chosen to deliberately deny our intellect and capacity for reason, against all evidence.

“You’re a person.” She looked me up and down as if I had suddenly grown another head. “Oh gods.”

Ketros shook his head angrily, like he was disgusted with her for turning traitor right in front of him. He knew the truth, too. His loyalties, however, were stronger. I could tell that Salzaon’s daughter resented him enough to defy his will. She was a weak link. She could be exploited. I briefly felt disgusted at myself for thinking it. It was like something a satyr would think. This, however, was no mere chat with the enemy. This was a continuation of the battle by other means.

“Congratulations.” I said, clapping my hooves together in a slow, mocking manner. “I look forward to when Mil-Int finds out about your little epiphany and you commit suicide with two bullets to the back of the head.”

“What?” Granthis was aghast.

“Really? You don’t know?” I chuckled darkly. “Your intelligence service assassinates dissidents all the time. You can’t keep billions of people from recognizing the sapience of an alien species without propaganda, and where propaganda fails, murder shores it up.”

Granthis stiffened with anger. “So what you’re saying is that you believe there is a conspiracy that was hatched by Confederate Military Intelligence to kill our citizens for expressing themselves in a free society?”

“Yes.”

“That is an extraordinary claim.” Granthis loudly clinked her teacup against her saucer. “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”

“Right. And if I were you, I’d keep a lid on being a pony sympathizer, unless you want your dear ol’ daddy to put you in a cage and throw away the key.”

“We cleomanni believe in democracy,” she said. “If there is a problem with our foreign policy, it ought to be put to a vote. I may be willing to recognize the personhood of Equestrians, however, it is an unavoidable fact that your government was an oppressive and dictatorial one. Twilight Sparkle was a bloodthirsty lunatic. You let an undying mad scientist rule unopposed for centuries. What did you expect? That the galaxy would welcome you? You, yourself, are a Charger pilot. No doubt a fugitive and a war criminal. I’m supposed to take you in for interrogation, not give you succor. Terrorists and WMDs are a nasty combination. In spite of it all, I am forced to acknowledge the simple fact that you’re a threat to the peace.”

“Yeah,” I muttered. “All the democracy money can buy. Look at you. You have enough invested in your augs to feed a thousand families for a year. You carry a gold-inlaid tea set into battle. Our government was strict and authoritarian out of necessity. It took every single resource, every scrap of labor, everything we had, just to resist the tip of the Confederacy’s finger. Do you know what that means? It means that our public works were robbed to pay for weapons. We had to live like dogs, just to secure our independence. We had to sacrifice everything, just to survive. You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you? You spent your entire life in luxury. This isn’t a war for you bastards. It’s an all-expenses-paid vacation.”

“You wretch.” Granthis’ eyes narrowed to slits. “You’ll not speak to me that way, or demean my country so.”

I chuckled darkly; this conversation mirrored the one I’d had with Broggas, except now, I was the cackling creature on the other side of it. “I can and I will. I’ve lived the kind of life that you only pretend to live. You know, it’s ironic. You style yourself as some warrior-princess, but I bet if we compared body counts, I’d be on top, too. Just like I beat your ass black and blue. What made you think you could keep up with a Charger pilot for killing? I bet I’ve killed more people before breakfast than you’ve managed in your entire career. I’m better than you at everything. Cuter, even. That white hair makes you look like an old nag. That’s why you had to mash up my face. You’re jealous of my good looks.”

Granthis stood, her hands balled into fists. “Your people may have some legitimate grievances that have not been addressed, but you? You are contemptible, petty, and arrogant beyond belief. You might be one of the most distasteful people I have ever had the misfortune to make the acquaintance of, and I’ve sat in on meetings with heads of state. Is fighting all you know? Have you forgotten how to behave? How to be a person?”

“Rich of you to complain about that, when all of two seconds ago, you hadn’t yet acknowledged that I was one!” I shouted at her, my tears flowing free. “You’re out here, casually cutting ponies in half with a plasma sword with the help of a fortune in augs, because home is too boring. I’m out here, fighting with every last ounce of strength and willpower remaining in my failing body, because if I don’t, my people will be reduced to living as your fucking pets! There are fundamental, irreconcilable differences between you and me, imp. The more you compare yourself to me, the angrier I get!”

“You snuck in, in the dead of night, into one of our outposts, with intent to murder my comrades in their sleep.” Granthis pointed at me accusingly. “You got the whipping that you deserved!”

“Ladies, calm it the fuck down.” Bell turned to Ketros. “Aren’t you sick of this shit, too?”

“Just shoot me already,” Ket sighed. “If I’d known I’d be crashing my bird and then listening to this much pony melodrama today, I would’ve chugged a whole bottle of sleeping pills and checked out.”

“I dunno,” Bell said. “Looks like the Captain can whine up a storm, too. No pun intended.”

“Good to see women are the same everywhere.” Ket snickered.

I fixed him with a glare. “Shut up and stay out of this, you scrawny little prick.”

“Bite me, you sopping cunt.”

I practically invaded his personal space, to which he shrunk away in terror. “Oh, you wanna go, too, string bean?” I said. “You want me to beat both your asses, is that it? Huh?”

“Leave Ket be,” Granthis said. “He is no match. You’ll break him like a twig. I will take this fight. I want a rematch. Certainly, it is impossible that there is anything like honor or virtue in one such as you. Your victory had to have been a fluke. A mistake. I will rectify this.”

Granthis rolled up her shirt sleeves and adopted a fighting stance, well away from the campfire, where we wouldn’t trip on it at the very least. I squared up to her, my whole body practically shaking with rage. Bell and Ket decided to step back out of the way, giving each other mortified looks at what was soon to ensue.

Bellwether shook his head. “Sergeant, Captain, we don’t have enough medical supplies if one of you is seriously wounded. All we have is just what’s in the wreckage of the transport. Do you want us to try and find our way out of here with a broken bone slowing one of you down? Because if that’s what ends up happening, then guess what? I ain’t pulling a sled with you on it. Either of you. You can die in the fuckin’ cold for all I care.”

Both of us ignored him. Granthis swept her hands in an upward motion, swinging her arms in a circle. I guffawed like a maniac at this pathetic display. “Is that some martial arts thing? Are you trying to incapacitate me with laughter, flapping your wings like a fucking chicken over there? You’re a joke. The hell are you even doing, besides a pretty good impression of a windmill?”

“Turning all the augmented reality sliders on my combat augs up to max,” she said, her head twitching a little as her eyes tracked things I couldn’t see.

My smile slowly evaporated. We circled each other for a few seconds, sizing each other up. Then, we lunged. She closed the distance faster than I expected, her rising knee slamming into my chin and sending me tumbling back. My muzzle dripped blood into the snow, tinging it red.

“That’s the way you wanna play?” I wiped my nose. “Fine!”

I cloaked myself and launched myself into a full gallop, circling around behind her, fully intent on clambering onto her back and putting her in a choke. Instead, her hand latched around my neck and she twisted and slammed me to the ground, my invisibility faltering.

“How?” I croaked.

“I can see your prints in the snow, dipshit,” Granthis said. “Circular impressions from those big, dumb hooves, clear as day. What, you didn’t think the daughter of a hunter could track? I used to make plaster casts of animal tracks and collect ‘em!”

“Wow.” I rolled my eyes. “What a dumb hobby.”

“We ate well.” She licked her lips. “Very well.”

“Fuckin’ carnivores. You’re all the same.”

She dragged me up and clobbered me with a haymaker, making me eat dirt. “Say what you want, salad-munch. I miss the taste of venison. The other day, I saw a deer that talked. Great big ten-point buck. He nibbled on some berries and then he started jawing at some other forest critter. Couldn’t work up the nerve to shoot him since he was neither armed nor resisting, and my guys went hungry that night. Thought I was losing my marbles, but I guess this planet does that to you.”

“You should’ve stayed home.” I slowly stood, nursing my wounds. “Nopony wants you or your kind here. Just go. Leave us in peace.”

“So you can start another huge arms buildup and come after us later? Do you seriously think I’m gonna let you little rainbow pastel freaks cart off those nukes and sneak them into our population centers?” Granthis raised her fists. “I’ll put you in the fucking ground, first!”

“There it is,” I said. “Your paranoia overrides your basic decency, mercy, and common sense. Yeah, we’re gonna build ships and tanks and Chargers when we have places with no electricity, no running water, and no functioning hospitals that aren’t alley docs. No wonder the Diplomatic Corps made no headway. You fuckers can’t be talked to. You’re sympathetic and understanding one minute, and the next, it’s completely vanished from your head and replaced with scheming and malice! Maybe you’re the threat! Maybe you people are a danger to the galaxy, and we ponies need to save it and everyone in it from being bullied by you!”

Granthis gesticulated madly, jerking her finger at the mountain range. “You just killed an entire division of my troops with a fucking nuke!”

“Oh yeah!” I said. “I bet they were some real family men, raining down mortars on a rescue operation! That base’s bunkers had thousands of non-combat personnel trapped in them for the past three years! Why’d you attack us in the first place? You wanna enslave them, too? Huh, bitch? You worthless bitch! They’re out of your reach, now! You’ll never have them!”

Ketros rubbed his chin, sitting on a rock side-by-side with Bell. “You know, this kind of raw xenophobia between our species never really occurred to me, but seeing it in this context, it’s like, wow, how did I not notice it before? This is just plain ugly.”

Bellwether sighed and unscrewed the cap on a metal flask. “I don’t usually drink on the job, but today, I’ll make an exception. Can’t handle this shit sober.” He took a big long swig and then hoofed it over to Ket.

“What’s this?”

“Gin. Other half’s yours.”

Ketros winced and wiped off the neck of the flask, before chugging the last of it. “Never thought I’d swap spitback with a pony.”

“Hey.” Bell frowned. “Code of manliness. We don’t talk about the backwash in the liquor. Besides, the alcohol kills everything.”

“Yeah, including my dignity.”

I reared up and both my forehooves smashed into Granthis’ upraised palms. We struggled like that, hoof-to-hand, trying to overpower each other. With a savage roar and a fit of froth, the cyborg got the upper hand, pushing me back. My hind legs tried finding purchase, but I was digging furrows in the dirt. Then, she headbutted me, sending me reeling. She didn’t let up the pressure. She dashed up and drove her fist into my broken rib. The pain was debilitating, even through my armor. I fought the urge to cry out in agony. I had a pain-blocker, too, but mine had to be activated manually, for specific zones of the body, and was far more primitive and riskier to use.

I made some distance between me and my opponent and then ran the cable from my armor to my spinal port, plugging it into the back of my neck. “VoCom, salve zone C2!”

“C2, neuro-salve active,” my armor’s onboard computer buzzed.

A stinging pain filled my side, like a swarm of wasps had gotten to it. I let out a little shriek, stifling it through gritted teeth. Soon, a burning numbness coated my ribs and I sighed in relief. Everypony’s body was split into zones, according to the vital sign monitors in our armor. A1 was the head, followed by B1, B2, B3, and B4, which were the right leg, right chest, left chest, and left leg, C1 and C2, which were the right and left halves of the abdomen and the back, and D1, D2, D3, and D4, which covered the haunches and the hind legs, again, from right to left. The system monitored the status of every part of my body with the help of my nanomachine colony. A medic could read it out and get a general idea of one’s injuries in moments, allowing for prompt treatment. I reached up with my forehooves and cracked my neck from side to side.

“I’m gonna enjoy beating you to a pulp,” I muttered.

“Try me, you little whore!” Granthis grinned. “I bet your sister loved the dicking she got! I bet you’re jealous you didn’t get some of that alien dick when you had the chance!”

My heart surged in my chest with rage the likes of which I’d never felt. I wanted to rip her face off and wear it. However, in an instant, it dissolved into a cold nothingness as the rational half of my mind took over. I looked up at her with concern on my features.

“Captain, you’re not the same person I was talking to a moment ago. Those augs are no good. Walking around and making yourself chemically-imbalanced at the flick of a switch can’t be good for your brain.”

“I didn’t have a choice!” The corners of her mouth frothed, like a mad dog. “They don’t let me fight without them!” She fell to her knees, burying her head in her hands. “They don’t let—they don’t let soldiers fight without them, unless you’re a man.”

I thought back. Delved into my memories. I’d never really seen any female cleomanni on the battlefield. The occasional security officer, medic, or non-combat personnel, sure. They weren’t a primary component of the infantry. Not like mares were for the Imperial Army, which had a far more equal gender ratio. I’d never really pondered the implications up until this very moment.

“Are you serious?” I said. “I thought we mares had it bad, what with the damn heat suppressors and all that annoying bullshit. Are you telling me they won’t clear you for front-line combat unless you agree to be chromed up like a hot rod, just because you’re a woman?”

She nodded, sobbing all the while. “Yes.”

“What else don’t they let girls do in your fucked-up country?”

“Hold a job. If we’re married. It’s against the law. We’re expected to do housework and manage our husband’s property. It is a grave dishonor to him if a man’s wife earns more than he does.”

I felt a cold emptiness in the pit of my stomach. It took me several mortified, teary-eyed seconds to formulate a cogent response. “That’s fucked.”

Granthis looked up at me, indignant, shaking with anger. “How much can you lift?”

“I dunno.” I shrugged. “I mean, I can bench like eight hundred kilos, at least, but I’m kind of not in the best shape anymore. Most I’ve ever had on my back was when some construction dudes in Baltimare dared me to see if I could balance an I-beam on there. Why?”

“Without my augs, the most I could bench was sixty, maybe seventy kilos. With them, five or six hundred. Your natural strength is an order of magnitude greater than ours.”

I was taken aback. They were so weak. Back at the Gridiron, we regularly carried serving trays of beer stacked almost all the way to the ceiling on our backs. No magic, even. “Sixty kilograms? That’s nothing!”

“To you, sure. For us, it’s something. Even a strongman who’d trained all his life could never match an Equestrian’s strength. You’d shatter him like a porcelain doll, if you really tried. You’re just like a godsdamned damarkind, at a fraction the size. You’re an abomination. Aberrant and bizarre!”

I marched up to her, my anger boiling over. “So, you’re insecure about your biology, you’re paranoid about the threat we allegedly pose, you’re motivated primarily by boredom and listlessness, and your country is a chauvinistic hellhole?” I looked down on her with the utmost contempt. “You’re such a waste of fucking space, it’s embarrassing. I’m embarrassed for you. I used to have nightmares about you people.” I poked her chest with the tip of my hoof for emphasis. “I had no idea I was fighting an army of weak, lily-livered, selfish, ignorant, spineless cowards!”

Granthis seized my right foreleg and yanked it with all her might, pulling me to the ground with her. There was a brief struggle, the two of us wrestling for a few moments, trying to gain purchase. She wrapped her legs around me, using her whole body as a lever, twisting and pulling. I cried out in pain as my leg got away from me. There was a sickening pop as my shoulder dislocated. I screamed and I screamed, my adrenaline flowing in lightheaded, agonized terror. As she let go of me and stood up, I writhed on the ground, sobbing and panting, trying to steady myself.

“I’m not gonna let you take me,” I said. “You’re not gonna take me alive!” I scrambled for the grenade on my vest. A pair of hands came down and clasped around the metal globe. We fought over it, punching each other bloody, her with whichever arm she chose, me with my good leg. I was losing. With every blow that struck home, I sank further and further into unconsciousness. Bested by the president’s brat and her fancy, expensive bionics. How humiliating.

When her fist came down for what must’ve been the eighth time, rather than taking it on the muzzle, I spread my jaws wide and latched around her wrist, biting the hell out of her. I refused to lose. I was a daughter of Equestria. I was more than the equal of any satyr, no matter what trickery or surgical improvements they possessed. She started freaking out, thrashing around and trying to free herself as I bit down harder, tasting her blood on my tongue.

“Let go of me, beast! Bug-eyed furry freak!”

I twisted her arm up and back with my neck, wrestling with her until I’d gained the top mount position. With my left leg, I struck her in the ribs, grunting explosively and kicking her over and over with every ounce of strength in my body, her metal innards clanking and crunching until finally, something snapped. Her screams were the sweetest music to me. I wanted to break her more. Crush her like aluminum foil. Pop her head like bubble wrap. I wanted to recreationally destroy her, piece by bloody piece.

“Alright, cut it the fuck out!” Bellwether said, interposing himself between me and my mark and forcing us apart. “That’s enough! Break it up!”

I rolled off of Granthis, my left eye swollen completely shut, my insides protesting. My right shoulder burned like hell.

Bell glared down at us disapprovingly. “Are you two happy now? You pleased with yourselves? What do you think this does for our chances of survival, with the two of you fucking each other up like this? We have a wounded and unresponsive mare, here. We don’t know when she’s going to be treated. We don’t know when we’re going to be rescued, either. We need every resource at our disposal, and our health is one of them. Knock it the hell off!”

I dragged myself over to the cleomanni woman, crawling on top of her and draping my foreleg over her neck. Not quite a hug, or an embrace of any kind. I slumped onto her, our bodies warm against each other in the cold snow.

“Give ‘em back,” I cried. “Gimme my sisters back. It’s not fair. You had no right.”

Mardissa’s bloodied hand slowly, shakily reached up and caressed the back of my head. “I’m—sorry,” she rasped. “Sorry—about your loss.” She swallowed a mouthful of blood. “I have siblings, too. I can’t imagine what I’d do if something so terrible happened to them. I just wanted to do something my family would be proud of. I don’t understand. I did everything right. Why did it turn out—like this?”

Ketros sighed and shook his head, still perched on a rock several meters away. “Ma’am, if you two are gonna do what may be the first interspecies lesbian kiss in the history of their kind and ours, then just get it over with, already.”

“Fuck off, Ket,” Granthis said.

“Yeah, fuck off,” I concurred.

“It’s been a thousand years since our two species collided,” Bellwether grumbled under his breath. “It’s happened before, trust me.”

I stood, steadying myself on three legs, gritting my teeth in pain. “VoCom, salve—” I broke down in fits of coughing.

“Please state the zone you wish to neuro-salve,” my armor’s onboard computer spoke.

I just stood there, shaking and crying. I couldn’t think of any specific one. I was chilled to the bone and hurting all over. Physically. Mentally. My very soul ached.

“Zones B1 and B2,” I said.

The suit let out a chirp. “B1, neuro-salve active. B2, neuro-salve active. Warning; excess use of neuro-salve may lead to permanent neuropathy. Please discontinue use immediately and contact a healthcare professional.” This synthesized voice was followed by a pre-recorded message of Twilight Sparkle’s actual voice, which I’d always found hilarious. “Avoid demyelination sickness, soldier. ‘Cause my—elin’s impor—tant!” She sang from my suit’s external speaker.

I snapped a branch off a tree, stuck it in the bars of my mouth, and bit down, hard. I steadied my breathing, staring straight ahead. I gripped my dislocated leg in my levitation, my chest tightening in anticipation. This would have to be quick. I applied more and more force, pushing the joint back into its socket, until there was a loud, juicy pop. I screamed. Even with my nanites clustering around my nerve endings and blocking most of the pain signals, it was pure agony. After spitting the branch out, I tested my foreleg, finding the mobility satisfactory. There would be some serious soreness later, but that was par for the course.

I sat down hard, right next to my opponent. Didn’t even look her in the eye. Couldn’t. She’d leaned up and was clutching her abdomen where I’d beaten her severely. The two of us sat there for a minute, breathing heavily and staring out into space.

“Captain,” I said.

“You can call me Mar,” she said. “Everyone else does.”

“Okay, then. Mar?”

“Yeah, what?”

I huffed a couple times, almost a laugh, staring up at the partly dispersed mushroom cloud that hung silently over the frozen peaks. “Do you think this is just going to keep going on forever like this? Ponies and satyrs. Hurting each other. Forever. Huh?”

I looked her in the eyes, wearing the best pleading expression I had. Our gazes locked together, her obstinacy in retreat before mine. There was only one thing I could detect in the countenance she wore.

Fear. Overriding, all-consuming fear.

// … // … // … // … // … //

Mardissa Granthis

I reached my hand out to touch Desert Storm’s cheek. Her beaten, miserable face didn’t move a muscle. I rubbed the light orange fur between my fingers. My hand retracted in mild shock. It was like velour. Impossibly fine.

“Soft,” I said. “Soft and warm.”

A memory filtered through, up from the doldrums. An instructor tapped his stick against the blackboard, pointing to the anatomical features of a pony drawn in chalk. They use their innocuous appearance as a weapon. To manipulate and deceive. Consider the poison dart frog. It, too, appears colorful and harmless at first glance, but the colors are a warning. They say, ‘I contain a deadly toxin.’ These are not beings that any sane person would want to get cozy with.

“Aren’t you tired?” Storm said. “When does the killing stop? For both of us? When do we go back to what remains of our normal lives? What will that take?”

These creatures possess a power known in their culture as magic, but to our science, broadly, as Equestrian Paraphysicalism, or EP. It is much like the paraphysical phenomena wielded by the nemrin, but far more potent and more dangerous. The unicorns are the ones you want to watch out for. Beware their horns. A skilled practitioner of EP can inflict a wide variety of disturbing and lethal conditions upon their victims.

“I’m tired of the killing. I’m tired of fighting. There’s nothing left for me to even fight for. It’s all gone. Everypony is dead!”

Should you come into contact with one, you may be violently torqued or crushed with telekinetic powers, hypnotized, set aflame by paraphysical means, or even have security-sensitive information stolen directly from your mind. If you are taken captive, reveal nothing. Do not respond to their verbal prompts. Concentrate on the idea of an empty, white room. This will prevent your mind from being pilfered of classified data.

“I’m tired.” The grief-stricken Charger pilot shook her head slowly, tears dripping off her chin. “I’m so tired!”

An Equestrian may try pleading with you for its life. This is a trick. Our neuroscientists have determined that these creatures are non-sapient and have no internal experience or qualia. Everything they do is an automatic response to danger. What appears to be learning and cognition is nothing of the sort. They will lie and deceive you until you betray your allies, or subtly manipulate you with their magic until you become mentally disordered. If that happens, you may be quarantined until you can be medically cleared to return to duty, once qualified personnel have determined that you remain free of the taint of paraphysical phenomena.

In defiance of all logic, along with everything I’d been trained to do in this situation, I reached out and swept my arms around the unicorn, pulling her tight to my chest.

I’d expected to be bitten, to be crushed, or to be brainwashed with powerful and inscrutable magic if I ever made the mistake of getting this close to a pony. Instead, the strong, determined, brave, and fully sapient person in my grasp slumped against me, her tense, abused muscles relaxing, her wounded body trembling in the cold as she tearfully returned my embrace.

I cried like I hadn’t done since I was a child.

// … end transmission …

Record 14//Archon

//HOL CRY ADV
//CHECKSUM READ
//CHECKSUM GOOD

// … decoding …

//… error - critical error …

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8dO6YsUeEp

Desert Storm

I was bedridden. Or rather, I was glued to what passed for a bed out in these trackless wastes. Shortly after my fight with Mardissa, the four of us took entrenching tools and dug graves, burying the bodies of the Vulture’s ill-fated passengers. Mar and Ket had looked over their shoulder resentfully at me and Bell the entire time. We were the reason they had to bury their friends. We helped them erect grave markers made from scrap and hang their buddies’ dog tags on them. When we were all done, they were thankful for the help, at the very least. They’d knelt and offered a short prayer to whatever strange beings they venerated, bidding that they ferry the souls of their comrades to one of the better afterlives.

Day two, we started stripping everything we could out of the wreckage. Seat cushions and blankets to use as bedding, first aid kits, rations from the lockers, and all the weapons and ammo we could get out of the cargo spaces. We put everything in a neat pile, within easy reach. We used the broken-off nose section of the Vulture for shelter. We even managed to find a propane heater. Altogether, we had at least enough to stay out here for a week, were it not for my condition and Sierra’s. She was still comatose and unresponsive, but her pulse and blood pressure remained normal. After the beating I’d sustained, face was swollen like I’d stuck my head in a beehive. I could barely see or speak coherently.

It was day three, post-nuke. I shivered under my blankets, cold and achy all over. I reached a shaky hoof into my saddlebag, retrieving the medal I’d been awarded. I briefly considered using the beacon to call for help. This was, after all, an emergency. However, I did not wish to call in such a favor frivolously, only to need it later on when—and if—those brain-roundel creeps showed up. For that matter, I didn’t know what the Dragoons would do when they saw Mar or Ket. They’d probably kill them without a moment’s hesitation. There was also the matter of Sierra’s condition to consider, however.

We could’ve practically walked back to Pur Sang, if Sierra and I were in any shape to go. We’d been approximately eight klicks away when the bomb had gone off. I was worried that the prompt radiation might’ve fried us, but as it turned out, the mountains shielded us from most of it. Blast, thermal pulse, radiation. All blocked by the mountain range. It had been a ground detonation, not aerial. That had confined most of the three hundred kiloton blast to the valley. I hoped the guys at the base were alright. They were at a much higher elevation, so they might have survived. I hoped Captain Garrida was still alive, even though I knew she was going to wring all of our necks.

Last night, I heard the fighting resume. There were the occasional, far-off sounds of artillery and gunfire. We weren’t sure which side it was coming from or what they were targeting. I’d packed a pillow full of snow and used the cold to try and bring the swelling down, but I was getting sicker and sicker. My auto-dialysis implant was barely functional. The toxins in my bloodstream were building up. I was running a fever. At least most of the swelling from where Mar had beaten me had gone down.

“Bell!” I cried. “Bell, c’mere.”

He got out of the pilot’s seat, toting a bottle of whiskey. I had no idea where he’d gotten it. Having liquor materialize out of thin air was like a superpower of his. It had to be some kind of earth pony thing. I wished I could do that.

“Yeah, what is it, Storm?”

I groaned. My back and my shoulder hurt like hell. “Morphine. Please. Anything. Please! My shoulder feels like someone’s stabbing me to fucking death!”

“Ain’t got any of that. They had those little fentanyl dispensers in the aid kits, though. Want a snail?”

“Sure.”

Bell hoofed over a small stainless-steel device that was, indeed, vaguely snail-shaped. The Confederacy liked using these electronic, tamper-proof dispensers to allow patients to dispense their own fentanyl without ODing or abusing it. They had an onboard clock and would only dole out one tablet every four hours. They were also durable enough to be struck with a sledgehammer or run over by an armored vehicle without relinquishing the rest.

“You gotta place it under your tongue,” Bellwether said. “Or between your back teeth and your gums. Don’t swallow it. Let it dissolve. Slow-release.”

I nodded, placing the tablet under my tongue and sighing as I felt it fizz softly. Over the next half-hour, the pain slowly melted away and was replaced with a pleasant numbness. After some minutes spent in total silence, aside from Bell taking noisy gulps from the liquor bottle, the amber liquid sloshing around in the bottom, I spoke up.

“Bell, I’m dying,” I said. “My heart keeps jumping around in my chest and it won’t stop. I feel like I want to throw up. It’s pure willpower that I haven’t already.”

“Hold on, Storm.” He put a hoof on my shoulder, his brows knitted. “You’ll get through this.”

“He’s really gone, isn’t he?” I let out a low, mad chuckle.

“Who?”

“My Barley. He’s dead. Does this mean I’m going to meet him?”

“Relax.” Bell checked me over, feeling for a pulse and examining my breathing. “Your vitals look fine. You’re good for now, Sergeant.”

“I’m scared.”

Bellwether laughed. “You can’t always be scared every time it feels like you’re gonna die. Celestia knows I’ve been at death’s door more than once. I had pneumonia when I was a kid. That shit will fuck you right up.”

I raised a trembling hoof to Bellwether’s face, feeling the old stallion’s weathered cheek. “I’m scared all the time, Bell. I try and put on a brave front, but you can’t imagine how afraid I am. Of everything.”

“This is about those two, isn’t it? This doesn’t even have to do with how ill you are.”

I nodded. “Yeah. I feel like—I don’t know. Like I’m gonna be p—punished. In death. For what I’ve done in life. Celestia’s going to punish me.”

“What for?”

I felt nothing but guilt. Guilt and shame. I’d murdered those cleomanni civilians in Dodge without a moment’s hesitation. Now, I was getting friendly with one of their elite. Did the rest of them not deserve the same consideration, just because they made the mistake of being poor and unimportant? The question gnawed at my sanity.

I slowly shook my head. “I’ve killed so many. So many people, Bell. I can hear ‘em. In my head. Sometimes. Especially when I let my—” I coughed hard. “When I let my guard down. When I’m weak. When I’m running a high fever and I’m popping meds, like now.”

“What—what do these voices say?”

“They’re angry with me. They’re mad that I cut their lives short. They had so much more to live for. More than this. They died when their lives weren’t even half-over. Or one-twentieth. Young men and women, Bell. People who still had centuries of life to look forward to. The ones the older pricks sent to die and form a breakwater with their bodies as our Chargers crashed on them like a wave. They’re waiting on the other side. All of ‘em. To jump me. Or maybe it’s just my fucking—” I broke down in a fit of coughs. “My imagination.”

“Yeah, it probably is. I wouldn’t worry about any of that. We’re here, now. Let’s make the most of it while we can.”

“I thought you knew better. That’s some greeting card crap, Bell. You don’t have to form-letter me. Just tell me what’s on your mind.”

Bellwether sighed. “I don’t wanna talk about it. Why do you think I’m drinking so hard?” He raised the bottle for emphasis. “Hasn’t quite hit me, yet, but I’m almost there.”

“Can I have a little?”

“Not in your condition, no.”

“If I’m dying, I think I ought to have a little before I go, don’t you think? My legs are all swollen up, my chest feels like someone sat on it all night. I’m fucked, Bell. If we don’t get back to Crazy Horse in the next couple days, I’m gone.”

“Well, alright. But just a taste. I don’t want you getting sicker. This is from Mar’s stash, by the way. One of the perks of being Champion. She was nice enough to share.”

Bell lowered the bottle to my lips and I took a swig of the whiskey, sighing at the sweet, oaken burn that worked its way down my throat. I looked over at where Mardissa was tossing and turning under a blanket, her face contorted into a mask of misery.

“You know, I’ve never really done this before,” I said. “This whole being diplomatic thing. I was a real asshole to her, wasn’t I?”

“Well, you were, but she had it coming.”

“What do you think she’s dreaming about, Bell?”

“I haven’t the foggiest.”

// … // … // … // … // … //

Mardissa Granthis

The Granthis Estate on Maroch III was one of the most luxurious properties in the whole sector. A hundred thousand hectares of pristine forests and pastures, including a cattle ranch and horse stables. The servants’ quarters alone were as large as a college dormitory. There were three homes on the land. The mansion, the ranch house, and the villa by the western coast, which had its own private marina and doubled as a hunting and fishing lodge. All the buildings were painted a resplendent white and were practically visible from orbit. It was a sunny afternoon. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky. Everything was perfect.

I depressed the ornate lever of a door handle and swung the heavy hardwood door inward, entering my father’s study. He was seated at his desk, reading a book and smoking a pipe. When he saw me, he beamed, spreading his arms wide.

“Oh, my darling daughter! My sweetie pie!”

There was a man seated across from him, corpulent and pockmarked, with skin like a catcher’s mitt. A hunch-backed demon of my subconscious. He turned and regarded me with a sneer for interrupting his business.

“Sal, who’s this young thing?”

“My daughter, Mardissa. Her eighth birthday’s coming up next month. Say hi to Mr. Bertag, Mardi.”

I offered a quick wave and a smile. “Hi!”

“Aww, what a cutie wootie,” Bertag said. He smiled one of those not-smiles. A creepy and off-putting exercise in baring his stained teeth.

Father snaked an arm around me and lifted me onto his knee, closing his book and snuffing out his smoking materials. I was a living prop, as always. An extension of my father’s will, illustrative of his deeds. The fruits of a long and successful life.

Bertag crossed his arms, leaning back in his chair. “If this deal goes through, Sal, you know, you could be running the whole country in a few years. Think about it. Concord artifacts. Relics thought to be lost forever. I already have some interested buyers lined up. The kind of people who make for good political donors.”

Dad didn’t say anything, he merely smiled, chewing on his cheek. He did that a lot. He always smiled. He always stood around, hands on his hips, chewing on a wad of nothing, and smiling. When one is a mere ten years of age, every smile looks genuine, no matter who it comes from, and so did my father’s.

“I have some favors to call in,” dad said. “Rest assured, you’ll have your money. And cargo transports. I know people who can retrofit them with survey gear, but as for a science team, I’m going to have to make a few calls. I can put you in touch with someone who knows the right people for the job.”

“You’re a lifesaver, Sal. You just made us billionaires.”

The two of them scanned their surroundings briefly before bursting out in laughter.

Father set me down and shrugged his broad shoulders. “Well, ol’ friend, you and I both know it’s merely counting coup at this point.”

“There could be other benefits, here. The boys were sayin’ there’s some serious tech opportunities in this. If there is, you’ll get a cut. It’s all right there in the contract.”

“Are you sure this is even going to turn up anything? This little jaunt of yours?”

“Positive.” Bertag nodded. “My man’s tips are always good. How hard could it be to dig up some antiques?”

Bertag vanished. Puffed out of existence. I had some vague awareness of the passage of time. When I looked down at my legs, I’d grown a few inches. I looked up at father, and he seemed to have a few more creases in his face. Not from age. A few years is a mere blip in the average cleomanni lifespan. No, this was from stress. When he set down his data-slate, I quickly read the headline of the article he’d been poring over. I was skilled at reading things upside down. One of my many useless talents.

Carpentaria Expedition Ambushed! Is the Empire to Blame?

“What happened to Mr. Bertag, daddy?” I said.

My father leaned back in his chair and gave me an appraising look like he wasn’t sure how much he wanted to tell. “First off, I don’t just tell my personal business to everyone who asks, but for you, sweetie, I’ll make an exception. Sonnem Bertag was an artifact hunter and personal friend of mine. I sponsored him to the tune of millions of credits to find some old Concord things and make some important people very, very happy. Those gods-accursed Equestrians have murdered him, and my investment is ruined.”

“Are we sure it’s them?”

“Who else could it be?” He waved a dismissive hand. “Of course it’s them.”

Dissatisfied with this explanation, I pulled up my own slate and read the article myself. Even though the attackers were assumed to be the Empire, there was no positive ID on who was responsible for shooting up half a dozen cargo transporters, two fully outfitted survey ships with ground-penetrating scanners, and their mercenary escort. It could’ve been anyone.

The Empire was blamed because it was politically convenient to do so. A perfect excuse for renewed hostilities. We had them on the ropes, last time. We would be fools to let them nurse their wounds and regain strength. When he ran for president, my father campaigned on the murder of his friend, rabble-rousing about Equestrian aggression. Another prop. Another stepping-stone. Everything was for his own benefit. Even failure could be spun into victory.

The world flashed to daytime, in the garden of our mansion. Like a movie on fast-forward. I giggled as I ran into the underbrush, holding up the hem of my white dress. I was playing hide and seek with my older sister.

“Mar? Come on out, Mar!” Silassa yelled. “I know you’re in here somewhere.”

I crawled through the dirt, rocks scraping my knees, not worried about ruining my clothes. Dad could afford more. I crawled into a hollow hidden in the brush abutting our hedge maze, where daylight could just barely reach, filtering through the leaves above. I smirked; Sil would never find me here.

That was when I noticed a snail, crawling across the dirt patch at my feet, leaving a slimy trail. For some reason, I detested snails. Well, dream-me hated them. In the real world, I couldn’t care less about snails. This particular snail, however, had killed Mr. Bertag. I was sure of it.

With a grunt of exertion, I brought my boot heel down upon it, enjoying the satisfying squish and splatter of mucus it made. However, my victory would be short-lived. The halves of the crushed snail each became their own living individual. I stomped both of them, incensed that they’d have the nerve to persist. Those two became four. Four became eight. Eight, sixteen. I frantically crushed them all, one after another, but they kept doubling each time.

Then, I heard the voices.

“Help, she’s killing us!”

“I don’t wanna die, please! Someone, help me!”

Upon closer inspection, the small creatures squirming on the ground at my feet were tiny, shelled, gastropod ponies, their bug-eyes mounted on stalks, their muzzles unmistakable. When I looked up, the shrubbery surrounding me had vanished and a dark and vast nothingness had taken its place. I was so shocked at what I saw, I stumbled back and fell flat on my ass. I was face-to-face with a giant snail-version of Desert Storm, her terrifying stalked eyes tracking my movements and blinking.

She bared her teeth. “Are you people so paranoid and deranged, you can exterminate an entire species with a clean conscience, just because they might become a threat in the future?”

“I—I—it wasn’t—I didn’t—” I stammered out, rising to my hooves.

“Fuck off!”

Snail Storm yanked on a steel release cable with her teeth. I looked to my right, my vision tracing the squeal of metal-on-metal. There was a giant crane with a wrecking ball that was swinging straight at me. There was no time to dodge. It struck me in a place that I really wished it hadn’t.

Even dream-me’s groin wasn’t safe from Desert Storm’s wrath.

// … // … // … // … // … //

I awoke with a start, my head jerking over to the snoring little creature I shared a wrecked Vulture with. We’d run out of propane for the heater and I was freezing my ass off. Storm was fast asleep. She was sick. Her wounds weren’t healing up very well. Her legs had started to swell like a diabetic with edema. Apparently, her bionics had been damaged in the fighting, and she was experiencing all of the symptoms of kidney failure. Ket and that BASKAF spy were nowhere in sight. I assumed they were out patrolling or looking for a way to contact any survivors from the battle.

The proud, headstrong, and determined warrior—the fascinating creature who’d laid me low a mere three days before—was a feverish, shaking little ball of fur, inches away from death. It didn’t seem right for one such as her to perish in their sick bed. Her doom should’ve been more dramatic. More heroic.

I didn’t know what came over me. Maybe it was the cold. Maybe I was going crazy. I inched closer to her, looking down at her face. She wasn’t wearing her armor. She was as naked as the day she was born, in fact. Her eyes were closed, her nostrils flaring, her chest rising and falling as she breathed. Occasionally, she would shudder from the cold, grimacing in her sleep.

I raised a hand, curling my wrist back tentatively, unsure if I should disturb her. I resolved to do it as stealthily as I could. I curled my arm around Storm’s chest, snuggling against her back. I sighed softly. She was so warm. Like a pillowcase fresh from the dryer. Soon, both her shivering and mine had stopped. I nodded back off to a pleasant, dreamless sleep almost immediately, only to be roused hours later by Storm’s squirming and struggling.

“What the fuck? Who the—” Storm angled her head back to look straight at me, and there was an awkward moment where our gazes locked together and we couldn’t work up the nerve to say anything. I’d frozen in place, my guilty appendage still wrapped around her chest. The Sergeant broke the silence first. “Mar, what in the fucking fuck?”

“I was cold.”

“Do you wanna fuck me? Is that what this is? Do you hit on all your prospective girlfriends with your fists, or just me?”

My arm yanked back on reflex, like a spring-loaded seatbelt retractor. “No, I—that’s—don’t be ridiculous. I would never be—romantically interested in a pony.”

“Lies. You totally would. You know, I never knew the great Demon-Breaker could be such a softie.”

“That’s not what Taffalstriak means!”

“Oh? What does it mean, then?”

“Mardissa is a variation of Mardiza, and it means vineyard. A Mav is a quay or wharf. Mavali means quayside. Taffalstriak could be transliterated as demon-breaker, because that’s the literal meaning of each word in the compound, but together, those words mean something entirely different. Fey-warded. It’s a little spell to keep children from being replaced by changelings or hounded by malicious house spirits.”

“You have Changelings, too?”

I mulled it over for a few moments before shaking my head. “I bet that term means something completely different in your language, so I’m going to say that ours are different from yours, mainly in that they don’t actually exist. It’s a silly old superstition. Putting something like Taffalstriak in your kid’s name is meant to confuse the Fey and make them pick someone else’s kid to mess with. It breaks the name apart, hence demon-breaker.”

“Weird. Well, what the hell does Granthis mean, then?”

“It means blessing, or benediction.”

“So your name is actually Vineyard Quayside Fey-warded the Blessed? That sounds pretty, actually.”

“Well, I—” I blushed. “Thank you.”

“Still doesn’t explain why you decided it would be a good idea to literally cuddle one of your species’ mortal enemies.”

I played with my fingers, trying to hide my embarrassment. “I—I used to snuggle up to the horses back home. You reminded me of them.”

Storm eyed me with a scowl. “So, because I bear some superficial resemblance to one of your other pets, you thought you’d domesticate me, too, huh?”

“No! You looked cold, too.” Oh great, now she’s blinking at me with those huge eyes. “I mean—fuck—I don’t know what I mean. I keep saying awkward shit. Work with me, here, Storm. What can I say that won’t push your buttons?”

“Vanishingly little. Why should you care, anyway? You’re fucking Con-fed, and you outrank me. You’re awful chummy for an officer, you know that?”

“I don’t care about rank.”

“Spoken like a true civilian. That whole Guild Champion thing is a big fucking joke, isn’t it? What sort of training do you actually have?”

I bristled at the insult. “We have private dojos and firing ranges, and—”

“Wait.” Storm leaned up. “Are you saying you’ve never been to officer school, or basic?”

“Well, no. It’s not the same pipeline. We—”

“—never go into battle without your tea sets,” Storm interrupted. “Okay, I think I see the problem, here. They basically want you poor fuckers to die. Can you think of any reason why your father might want you dead?”

“I’m—” At first, I was incensed by the accusation. “I’m an embarrassment to my family. I wanted to be a painter. I loved doing landscapes and architectural stuff. Dad said he’d write me out of the will unless I did something with my life, and this was what he proposed. I don’t think he expected me to come to any real harm, and I’d rather you not cast any aspersions on him.”

The pony stared at me with haunted eyes, before she grinned and cackled darkly. I wondered what I’d said to prompt that sort of reaction. It was almost like she’d masked her dread with laughter.

“First of all, Mar, your father is the man principally responsible for reducing all of Equestria to rubble, so I think ‘casting aspersions’ on him is the least I could do. If I saw him in front of me right now, no amount of pleading on your part would be able to keep my legs from going ‘round his fucking neck. Secondly, how old is Salzaon, anyway?”

I fixed a resentful glare on the little orange creature before me. Her impertinence was galling. I did a quick calculation in my head. “Three hundred and forty-four of your years.”

Storm broke down in a fit of coughing, taking a few moments to gather herself. “Wow, so another couple hundred to go, at least? That’s a long damn time to wait before you inherit all his shit. If I were you, I’d get in touch with my broker and look at some alternative ways of making money. You think your dad would be amenable to the idea of giving you a small loan of a million credits or so?”

I touched a finger to Storm’s muzzle. “How is it that beings as cutesy as your kind could be so unrelentingly foul?”

She gently pushed my hand aside. “I’ll tell you how. Try being born as a member of a species that no one takes seriously, in a nation in a perpetual state of emergency, where everyone around you is stressed half to death or abusing narcotics to escape their despair, and most of the galaxy thinks you’re sub-sapient despite all evidence to the contrary. Now, approximately how bitter do you think you’d be?”

“Uhh, extremely bitter?”

“There you go. You just answered your own question, Mar.”

I let out a sigh. “You have no idea how much of a culture shock this has been. Do you know the sorts of things they teach us about your species? Just from a few minutes of conversing with one of you, any fool could determine that all of it is lies and slander of the basest sort, calculated to instill an overwhelming fear of your kind. We’re basically told that you’re like robots. That you have no internal experience and are puppeteered, perhaps, by forces unknown.”

Storm blinked a few times, clearly shocked by my words. “Are you fucking kidding me? Is that what you gaping assholes really think?”

“I’m no idiot.” I shrugged. “There’s no way that organisms with such complex social behaviors could be acting solely on instinct. You experience the full range of emotions, from anger, to joviality, to a sadness so profound that it breaks my heart. You’ve engaged me with both insults and sardonic humor. You’re clearly, transparently a person. Oh gods, what have we been doing to you people? You’re unfortunate as it is without being hounded into an early grave. No fingers? If you took any of the major species in the galaxy and lopped their hands off, they’d be begging for them back within that very same minute. How do you care for yourself? How do you bathe, eat, and wipe?”

“Wipe?”

“Toilet tissue.”

Storm nodded. “Ahh. We use bidets. Much easier. What, you mean you actually use tissue paper on your ass?” Storm broke into riotous laughter, bookended by fits of coughing. “You’re fuckin’ killing me over here! You absolute savages!”

“Well, now I feel quite stupid.”

“Don’t feel too bad.” Storm rested a hoof on my shoulder. “It’s not like your entire species hasn’t been perpetuating a myth that a whole ‘nother species consists of non-sapient meat robots for generations. I mean, that’s way, way dumber.”

We both stared at each other, horrified comprehension dawning on our faces.

“How in the fucking hell—” I began.

“—has this deception gone on this long, unchallenged?” Storm finished.

I scratched my head for a few seconds. This was something worth brainstorming about, and I had a rare opportunity to bounce ideas off of one of them.

“The lack of access,” I ventured. “No visas granted, no travel or above-board commerce of any kind between the two nations. One side could basically say anything they wanted about the other, and their citizens would accept it uncritically.”

“Relentless propaganda,” Storm said. “Both sides. We’re as scared of you as you are of us, by and large. However, our concerns are more practical rather than abstract. We don’t think your species are a bunch of soulless automatons. Well, most of us don’t. Can’t speak for everypony. Instead, we see you as a conquering horde that is trying to destroy us. Of that, there can be neither doubt, nor any dispute.”

“Oh, come on. It’s not like you didn’t get your licks in. I used to read about Imperial gas attacks all the time, growing up.”

Storm had a despondent, faraway look on her face. “Yeah. I know. I personally conducted a few of them.”

I felt my anger rise to the fore, my jaw working up and down in silence. “You?”

“I’m a stealth expert,” she said. “Cloaking magic is all I know how to do really well. They used ponies with my sort of talent for the worst jobs imaginable, and yes, that included infiltration work and raids deep inside enemy territory.”

I slowly shook my head. I knew she was a pilot. I didn’t know for certain that she was that sort of pilot. I’d suspected she was, but I’d been willing to give her the benefit of the doubt. After that little admission, it was difficult for me to see her in the same light as I had before. The creature lying next to me was a cold-blooded killer. A murderer with few equals. When she looked up at me, her eyes were filled with shame, like she expected me to judge her harshly for it.

“Why?” I hissed.

“They told us—” Her words were interrupted by a spate of coughing, and she was courteous enough to turn and cover it, even though her condition wasn’t contagious. “They told us it was to delay you. To slow you down by any means necessary. We went after scientists, engineers, and tradesmen. We were trying to deliberately decrease the Confederacy’s industrial output so you couldn’t overrun our colonies so quickly. It seemed to work for a while, but it wasn’t effective forever. You guys changed your policies. Started distributing gas masks and other protective gear, even incorporating chemical-resistant panic rooms into the architecture of the buildings where these people worked. By the time I enlisted, nerve gas was hardly as effective as it used to be. They kept making us use it anyway. Most of the time, it just killed random people out on the street, not the targeted personnel. It was always a PR disaster and destroyed what little goodwill a lot of sympathizers had for us. They didn’t care. The brass didn’t give a damn. They ordered us to keep carrying out the attacks. Pure desperation.”

“I didn’t ask why they told you to do it,” I said. “I asked why you didn’t object to it.”

Storm rolled over and grabbed her Orbit. “Lucky, boot up. Playback mode, meadowgleam-dot-vid.”

She gave me the ovoid drone, and a video started playing on its holoprojector. I watched, my jaw slackening with horror, as the grainy vid of a passel of pony soldiers standing around the rim of a long trench cut to a camera angle that aimed down the trench’s length. There were thousands of Equestrian corpses. Soldiers with shovels were exhuming more.

“What—what is this?” I whispered, aghast.

“You didn’t know?” Storm muttered. “When the Confederate Army rolled up to our settlements, they exterminated them. Every mare, every stallion, every foal. Herded into pre-dug trenches and then cut down with machine gun fire. They didn’t even have to move the bodies. They just started covering them with dirt when they were done. This was just one of the sites we’d found. There were dozens of others. It wasn’t supposed to get out. Somepony leaked that vid to the datasphere. The very same day, we had thousands of ponies lining up at the recruiting stations. Every mall had a line that ran outside and down the damn block.”

“Oh gods,” I said. “Was that—was that why you joined?”

“I’d already been deployed for quite some time when that vid was taken. You know, I talked to a homeless vet on a street corner, same day I enlisted. He was strung out on heroin, because it was the only thing that kept him going. I told him what my plans for the day were, and he reached up and he grabbed my shoulder and begged me, with tears in his eyes, not to go. I’ll never forget the look on his face. There aren’t any words for the pain that I saw there. We don’t have superlatives that go that high.”

“I had no idea things were this bad out here,” I said. “This is absolutely appalling.”

“Oh, that’s right.” Storm clapped her hooves together. “You ever hear about the Karkadann? I mean, why would you? It’s not like they’ve told you much that’s of any real use, it seems.”

“The what?” I was genuinely confused by her words. “Karkadann? What are you talking about?”

“A top-secret Confederate weapons program. Gene-modded, bionically-augmented, pony-based organisms. They fit them with combat augs and implanted armor and stuff and use them as mindless, perfectly obedient shocktroopers. One of ‘em broke my fuckin’ leg, and you know how hard our bones are to break. You know, it’s kind of ironic, but sub-sapient pony meat robots are actually real. You people made them. And before you ask, no. You can’t take an actual pony and turn them into a Kark. They start off as a fetus that way.”

“How? We don’t have artificial wo—” My eyes widened. “No. Oh gods, no.”

The Sergeant laughed. “I had the same exact reaction you did, with almost the same exact timing.”

My heart was beating madly in my chest. “They didn’t. That’s not right. It’s not fucking right!”

“They did.” What Storm would tell me next would take it well beyond the pale. “Your side took pony embryos, modified them, and then implanted ‘em in captive mares with IVF. Then, after they were born, you chromed ‘em up and sent ‘em to kill us.” She leaned in closer, her eyes narrowing. “The perfect weapon. The ultimate organism. The pinnacle of genetic supremacy. Our one and only real advantage over you; the information that makes us grow into the sturdy and powerful beings that we are. All you bastards had to do was steal it.”

I immediately got up and ran outside, nearly tripping over debris in my rush to get away from those judging eyes of hers. I didn’t want her to see me like this. I was sweating. Panicking. My entire world had been turned upside-down, my conscience and my rationality engaged in a violent tug-of-war for my mind. Everything I’d believed in, for decades, was a cruel lie. The adrenaline and nausea made me whimper and dry-heave. I leaned up against the severed nose of the dropship, trying not to throw up.

Monsters.

I shrieked and sobbed, pounding my fists on the destroyed Vulture’s fuselage hard enough to leave impressions. Ket was nearby, standing guard. He gave me a disdainful look, huffing with exasperation. For the first time in my life, I saw a member of my own species with the same gut-wrenching fear that ponies felt. The familiar became uncanny. The mundane, extraordinary. The Lieutenant seemed to transform into a horned devil before my very eyes. It felt like I was going insane.

We’re monsters.

Storm had caught up to me, limping visibly in her terrible condition. “Mar! Come back inside. It’s freezing out here.”

“I’m going to resign my commission,” I said. “I can’t do this any longer. If everything you’ve told me is true, then we’re in the wrong, and have been so for a very, very long time. I have made a terrible mistake, coming here. I aim to put things right. I just—oh gods, ten years is too long. You’ll all be dead. Oh gods!”

The Sergeant ran up and hugged my legs. She was so soft. Literally, physically soft. Their adorableness was a weapon, irresistibly potent. They were fools not to exploit it at every opportunity. When they were armed to the teeth and bundled up in that heavy body armor of theirs, it was so much easier to slaughter them without remorse.

“Don’t go,” Storm said. “Please don’t go, Mar. They’ll kill you. They’ll kill you now that you know the truth!”

“Is she bothering you again, ma’am?” Ket approached us with apprehension on his face.

“No, Lieutenant,” I said, running my hand through Storm’s hair. “Far from it.”

Ketros looked down at Storm, and his anger seemed to soften. I could tell by the look on his face. If I was good with her, then so was he.

“Don’t go back,” Storm said. “Don’t go back to them. You don’t have a place among your own people anymore. Come with us.”

“You mean become a turncoat?”

“If that’s what it takes, then yes. I’ll protect you, Mardissa. I promise. Even if Captain Garrida rides my ass for it, I’ll be your shield. In return, I want you to promise me that you’ll never kill another pony ever again. Can you do that?”

“But you’ll keep killing my people?” I said.

“If they’re coming to kill us, then I don’t have a choice. But if they’re not fighting back, then I won’t. I can’t do it. Not anymore. I’m done.”

“I—” I averted my eyes from her intense stare. “I’m loyal to the Confederacy. If we’ve made a mistake, then I want to fix it. I want to change our policies to be more welcoming to your kind. To provide reparations to Equestrians and—and the opportunity for you to obtain legal recognition and citizenship. To rebuild public services and restore normalcy here. It’s the least we could do.”

Storm shook her head sadly. “You’ll never fix the Confederacy, Mar. Better people than either of us have tried. And they’re dead. And we’re still at war. Don’t throw your life away.”

“Why do you care if I live or die?” I said. “You’re a pony.”

“We need something. A lifeline. Anything. We need to end this war, or my people are all going to die. I don’t want us to be erased. I need you.”

I pondered Storm’s words from a few days before. The treatment of Equestrians was not only abominable, it was largely unknown to the public. Even some parts of the military weren’t privileged with such information, if my ignorance was any indication. A coverup on an unimaginable scale was the only sensible explanation. Were it not for the concerted effort of clandestine forces in our respective societies, we would have found peace long before this. Without interference, it was an inevitability. It didn’t take centuries to befriend one of them. It took days.

The Charger pilot and war criminal by the name of Desert Storm was a disgusting and wretched little creature, bitter as wormwood and filled with barbs and cynicism and relentless insults, but she’d grown on me, like a wart. She was the pestersome little sister that I always wished I’d had, instead of the bossy elder sister I actually had.

My experience could not have been unique. This had happened before, over the past millennium. Many, many times. Every time, the truth-seekers were hunted, quarantined, and killed like dogs, to keep the virus called peace from spreading. To keep the war going. To keep lining the pockets of the guilds, like the one I represented. It all clicked into place, and the picture it painted was one of misery and suffering so deep that it defied comprehension.

It was unspeakably strange. Just days before, I would’ve thought nothing of cleaving a pony in two with my sword. Now, every one of their lives seemed precious, their future prospects tenuous and fragile. I was gripped with remorse. The war—including the reasons for it, and the forces behind it—became, in my mind, a giant and eldritch thing, something beyond understanding or control. I doubted that my father would allow me to be killed, as Storm suspected, but I would undoubtedly be placed on house arrest for the foreseeable future if I spoke openly against the persecution of Equestrians.

“It’s too vast,” I said, my eyes welling with tears. “If what you’ve told me is true, the corruption has spread too far. I can’t—I can’t fix it. Not alone.”

“I know.” Storm reached out with her hoof. “I want to help you.”

I smiled, slowly shaking my head. I returned the gesture by clasping my hands around her proffered appendage. “The strength of your convictions is unbelievable. I never once considered the possibility that ponies were like this. Your will to survive is inspiring. I am humbled beyond words. Humbled and ashamed.” I sniffled, trying to hold back tears. “Very well, I’ll go with you. But not as a defector. As your guest, or a prisoner, yes. I want to know more about your kind. No more lies. I want the truth.”

Storm grinned wide, and then, she promptly broke down into one of her coughing fits, practically collapsing face-first in the snow.

“Sergeant! Are you alright?” I helped her to her hooves.

She wiped her muzzle with a foreleg. “I’m not long for this world, Mar. My bloodstream’s backing up. I haven’t had the equivalent of functioning kidneys in nearly a week. I’ve been taking opioids for the pain, but they’re not clearing out well. Nothing is. I’m dying.”

I was angry that she hadn’t impressed upon me the severity of her condition. “You idiot! We have to fix this. I’m not letting you die. Not after all this.”

Storm laughed, flopping over on one side, leaving an impression in the snow. “I’m tired. So tired.”

I fiddled with a digital radio I’d recovered from the crash, but it was deader than dead. There wasn’t even static. No lights. Nothing. “Dammit!” I threw it in the dirt, stomping on it a few times for good measure. “Someone’s got to know we’re still out here!”

There was a roar of engines that filled the sky. I looked up, and through the fog, I saw lights arrayed on the underbelly of a craft passing overhead. “Hey!” I yelled. “Down here! We need help! Hey!” I sifted through the pockets of my overalls and grabbed a flare. I was just about to set it off when Storm reached up and wrapped her hoof around my wrist.

“No!” she said. “Wait.”

I watched as the hundred-meter-long ship pierced the fog, accompanied by a smaller dropship of some kind. They were of no class that I was familiar with. The larger of the two was a brilliant white in color, blue lines glowing along its edges. It was propelled by no discernible engines of any kind, the air crackling and smelling of ozone as it rumbled overhead. Its searchlights were scanning the terrain, piercing the twilit gloom. The smaller one had wings that were practically feathered, like some great seabird. A creeping sense of dread came over me.

“Who the fuck?” I said.

When I looked down at Storm, she was frozen in fear, her eyes wide, her jaw shaking. “No. Not them. Not now.”

// … // … // … // … // … //

Desert Storm

SILVER SCALPEL. They’d returned. Either to investigate the nuke crater, or to finish us off. This was it. This was the appropriate time to use the beacon that Star Cross Wraithwood had given me. We were all in terrible danger. I clambered to my hooves and ran to get my saddlebags, stowed in the severed nose of the dropship. Mar was chasing me, demanding an explanation. There was no time. Her words were just noise. As I rifled through my things in a frantic daze, Bellwether appeared at the opening to the Vulture’s nose section, panting, out of breath from a run.

“They’re here,” he said. “We need to hide. Now.”

“I know. I know!” The medal had worked its way under everything else. When I finally found it, I quickly rotated the dial on the back and flicked it open. I showed it to Bellwether, and his jaw practically fell through the floor.

“That’s a fuckin’ responder in there! Does it work? The one in my armor’s fried.”

“One way to find out.” I depressed the button. After a delay of about ten seconds, a light on the back began to flicker. A coded message.

“Stay—put—cavalry—on—the—way.” I smiled. “Yes! These fuckers are in for a little surprise if they stick around.”

Mar practically shoved Bellwether aside in her haste. “They’re touching down. About three hundred meters to the northeast, in the clearing!”

“Fuck, that’s practically right on fucking top of us!” I pulled my binos from my saddlebags and rushed outside, moving as quick as I could in my addled state. My limbs felt like lead. Everything hurt. Adrenaline kept me going.

The four of us scrambled to the nearest rise and took cover behind a large boulder. I peered through my binoculars and watched as the larger of the two ships extended landing gear and touched down. The massive spacecraft sunk into the terrain by a considerable amount, even though its skids had a surface area like a city block. Tiamat had mentioned that these craft had the ability to neutralize their own mass somehow, which would have reduced the amount of thrust required to propel them. With its inertialess drives powered off, it must have weighed tens of thousands of tons at normal gravity. It was dense. Dense and heavy for an atmospheric craft.

A boarding ramp extended, a strange fog rolling out from within the craft. I zoomed in, trying to get a better look. This, I had to see. Half a dozen bipeds rushed down the ramp, leveling rifles of some kind. They were roughly cleomanni-sized, but bigger. Broader-shouldered. I couldn’t make out their faces. They wore ballistic masks and heavy load-bearing vests with pouches holding cylindrical metal objects. Their shoulders were draped with white ponchos that blended in with their surroundings. I panned down and took note of their legs. No hooves. No tail. Plantigrade feet, like a bear, wrapped in black leather combat boots. Were it not for that, they could easily have been mistaken for the satyrs. They moved like professionals, securing the LZ, gesturing and signaling the rest of the squad to move up as they established a perimeter. A pair of vehicles rolled down the ramp. Hover-tanks of some kind. They were large, white, and bulbous, as sleek and sterile as their dropships, bristling with gun turrets that left no doubt as to their purpose.

Everything about them filled me with a sense of unease. These people, whoever they were, were death incarnate. There was no fighting them. No resisting them. Only terror and death lay that way. The only answer was to hide. To flee. I lowered my binoculars and turned to the other three.

“Guys,” I said. “We’ve gotta—”

“Look!” Bellwether whispered, pointing at the interlopers.

I hunkered down against the smooth surface of the boulder and lifted the binos to my eyes, zeroing in on the boarding ramp. Something was descending the ramp. Something that made every hair on the back of my neck stand on end.

It was tall. Easily three meters in height, at the very least, although I couldn’t tell precisely how tall it was from this distance. The thing was a writhing, bluish-black mass of tentacles, perambulating with great swiftness for its size. It crawled along the shining metal gangway, its tentacles whipping every which way. It was shaped like a stemmed glass, narrow at the bottom and widening at the top. Looming above the great mass of tentacles that draped from its head was what might have been a face, but from this distance, I couldn’t tell. The biped soldiers set the butts of their rifles on the ground and knelt before the creature as it passed, showing the utmost deference.

My companions were confused at my distress, looking between me and the scene that unfolded in the distance. None of them were unicorns. None of them knew. I could feel its spectral emanations. I was a dark magic practitioner. I was attuned to the same wavelength. Whatever the hell it was, that creature was composed of sheer, absolute malice. The blackest of spectra rolled off of it like a tsunami radiating from the epicenter of an oceanic quake. Even a ceremonial hall packed with necromancers wouldn’t have given off this much pure, concentrated darkness.

That thing was not supposed to exist. No individual soul, not even that of an alicorn, could contain so much power. I could feel it, even from such a great distance, as though it were right next to me. It could feel its movements, pressing on my mind, as if its tendrils were wrapped around me. A thaummeter would’ve simply overloaded and broken in its presence.

My eyes welled with tears that quickly overflowed and froze on my cheeks. I was shaking from head to hoof, rendered speechless from fear. I took deep, shuddering breaths.

We had to leave. We had to leave Equestria. This whole planet was a lost cause with that thing on it. I would have screamed were it not for my fear of us being discovered.

“Storm?” Mar put a hand on my withers. “Sergeant, what’s wrong? What are you seeing?”

I gave her the binoculars with a shaky hoof as I quietly sobbed in terror. She took a few moments to adjust the binos to her own interocular distance and bring it into focus.

Captain Granthis was shocked. “What the fuck?”

I grabbed her shoulder and looked her straight in the eye. “Run!”

We sprinted back down the hill, to the broken-off nose of the Vulture. I tripped a couple times, owing to my worsening condition. Sierra was still comatose. No improvement, but she still had a pulse. She was certainly in no condition to move herself. Then, there was the matter of all the salvage we’d accumulated. Leaving that behind would’ve been a disaster in any other circumstance, but if the Dragoons got here in time, we’d be rescued. All that mattered was our continued survival up to that point, and I feared our lives would be cut short if we did not act quickly and decisively.

“They’re going to search the crash site,” I said. “It’s the only real point of interest here. Ain’t nothing else out here but fucking snow. Why else would they land so close?”

“What do we do?” Mar panicked. “What the fuck was that thing? Who are these people?”

“The Vargr,” Bellwether said. “A certain someone higher up the food chain told me that’s what they call themselves.”

I shot him a glare. “And you didn’t tell me this, because, why?”

“Need-to-know basis,” Bell said. “You didn’t need to know. You just need to do your damn job and do as you’re told, Storm.”

I sneered at Bellwether. Ungrateful son of a bitch. I saved his ass twice a few days ago. He should’ve been licking the soles of my fucking hooves.

“Mar, I saw those assholes and their pets turn hundreds of ponies into cat food,” I said. “Their dropships have antimatter guns and extremely strong shielding. It took a Destrier and several fucking Omni-turrets just for me to drop their shields. Even if you had all your Ifrits against whatever the hell those tanks and that big white sucker are, I don’t think they’d stand much of a chance. I don’t even wanna know what they’re selling this time. I almost wish we had another nuke, at this point. Not even fucking kidding.”

“Well, what are we gonna do, genius?” Ket said. “Ain’t enough meat on my bones to make more than a couple tins of cat food, anyway.”

“I’ve called in the Dragoons with a beacon.”

Mar’s eyes went wide. “You fucking what?”

“No choice. There’s nopony else around who can stop ‘em. If we go out there and the Vargr spot us, we’re beyond fucked. If we stay here and they find us, we’re also fucked. I’m gonna cloak us when they arrive. We’ll let them search the site, and then, hopefully, they’ll leave or the Drags will arrive before my magic burns out. How does that sound?”

“How long can you sustain your cloak?” Mar said.

“Normally? Like thirteen to fifteen minutes or so. In my present condition? Five, maybe six.”

“What if they hang around and search the site for like forty-five minutes to an hour?” Ket said.

“Then we’re fucked.” I nodded sagely.

Ketros huffed with derision. “Great. Just great. So what you’re saying is that our survival hinges on all of us being hidden by fucking pony magic for a small window of time, and if that fails, then we’re caught and gruesomely killed?”

“Yes, Lieutenant. That’s exactly that I’m saying.”

Ket’s eyes rolled back into his head. “Why oh why didn’t I put in for a fucking transfer?”

“Too late, fucker,” I said. “You’re stuck with us, now. In the trenches. In the shit. Face-down in a big, warm, smelly cowpie with your pony pals. Picking hay out of your tee—”

“Enough!” Ketros shouted. “I get the picture.”

I peered out of the Dropship’s severed nose section at the advancing tanks and infantry. “Guys, they’re coming. Press yourselves up into the corners and keep quiet.”

Bellwether propped the makeshift sled holding Sierra against the back of the pilot’s seat, and we squeezed into the corners of the cockpit. I cloaked all five of us with my magic. If they bumped into us, it was game over. Even a cloak couldn’t keep the enemy from recognizing that they touched something solid that they couldn’t see.

I heard the tromping of heavy boots and the clacking of weapons being operated.

“Wei ken ye beath! Wei ken ye kamo! Kom oot, ye!”

Their language was strange and guttural. Barking and aggression-laden. They were addressing us directly, and they were angry. That meant they knew, or suspected, that we were here.

“Ans! Dres! Treu! Fenif! Viar!”

Some sort of countdown? No, counting up, I realized.

They swarmed into the dropship’s broken-off nose section seconds later, marching straight towards our hiding place without hesitation. A hand snapped out like a cobra and gripped me by the mane. I shrieked and dropped my cloak as I was dragged from the wreckage, my body scraping first against the rough deck and then the freezing snow. There was no hesitation. No delay. They could see right through my cloak like it wasn’t even there. I caught glimpses of the rest of them leveling their weapons at the others.

“No!” I shouted. “Bellwether!”

“Storm!” He tried coming to my aid but was viciously rifle-butted in the head.

The Vargr bastard dragged me up by my mane and hammer-tossed me a few meters. After landing face-first in the freezing cold powder, I rolled face-up and steadied myself, gazing at him in shock as he approached. I assumed it was a he. He was sure built like one. The alien removed and stowed his ballistic face mask, revealing a pug-like countenance not unlike the satyrs, but softer, rounder, like a lump of clay given life. Everything that was pointy on a cleomanni was round on these people, I realized. Round ears, round nose, round chin. They were frightening and bizarre in ways that even the satyrs weren’t. I evaluated my options. I had no armor, no weapons. I was completely bare. I was too sick and exhausted to even consider melee combat as an option. That only left one thing. A tongue-lashing.

“Wow,” I said. “It’s like a chimp fucked a pig!”

“Broetheri!” he growled as he planted a savage kick in my midsection.

I coughed up blood, wiping my spit on my hoof as I gathered myself. “What—what the hell does that even mean?”

“Arre-sooker! It mene ye sook arre an’ ye kom in no euse elsewayes!”

“I’m just going to assume that was an insult.”

“Dumbe blutey skurrer! Ye feck weiar Conidore, kille weiar VURVALFN, an’ ye maide me caspa broeth downe me feckin’ naicke. Namen ye ken ye ar?” The Vargr brought his jack-boot down on my neck with a vicious stomp. “I wille brokk ye!”

I laughed. I laughed and I laughed. I plumbed the depths of misery and madness.

“Ye ken is larghuatarishe?” he said.

“Riiatas enefhe sparras ut gruirnen. Mauvas ast asrii neim nockhnett?” I looked up at him. “Lar, eir bidu aspare ut hoxelen, ia arreteceire aspare ut higlamenbar, ia eir ast neim nek repenat, aspare sereinstobor lokul!”

Just another bunch of thugs. Why am I not surprised? Yeah, we killed your freaks, and blew up your transport, and we’re not fucking sorry, you alien prick!

He reached down, lifted me by the neck with both hands, and squeezed, making me gag. “Ye wille be.”

I hocked and spat a glob of blood and mucus in his face. After casually wiping it off, his face warped into a hateful scowl. He backhanded me hard enough to make me see stars, hurling me into the snow. He knelt in the small of my back, putting his considerable weight into keeping me pinned. He drew a primitive sidearm and pulled the percussion hammer back, placing the freezing cold muzzle of the weapon against the back of my head.

My heart leapt into my throat, blood from my nostrils dripping off my upper lip. After everything, is this how I die? Done face-down in the fucking snow by a weird, greasy ape?

What happened next made me wish that he’d shot me. I felt its presence long before I saw it. A slimy tentacle wrapped around my neck, constricting fiercely, cutting off my air. When I looked up, that thing was there, towering over me, its very form an icon of phallic aggression. The pressure of the miasma exuded by the creature at point-blank range was nightmarish. The air felt thick and heavy. Gravity itself seemed to lose all meaning. I was floating in a soup of pure evil.

The Vargr bowed his head, offering me to the Beast. “Voivode, sup o’ des aan. Draahn ‘er.”

I screamed as I was engulfed by the creature’s tentacles, drawn up out of the snow and towards its body. I squirmed and struggled and tried desperately to escape, but its limbs held fast. Every single part of my bare body was gripped in its oozing flesh. The smell it gave off was like rotting fish and seaweed mixed with moldy onions. I felt my gorge rise. I whimpered as its tentacles crawled and slithered across every millimeter of me, leaving thick trails of its slime in my fur. Nothing was left untouched. It was degrading in the extreme.

The creature brought me before its face, stretching me out spread-eagle high off the ground. I screamed. My previously dislocated leg was a nexus of agony as the tentacles twisted it into an unnatural position. What I saw was too terrible to describe, and for that matter, it defied explanation. Its countenance was a beaked, writhing mass of eyes and mouths, spewing dark and blasphemous whispers. Above its central beak sat a cyclopean orb that blinked sideways, its pupil slitted like those of a venomous reptile. I feared that it had designs on my body, in the worst way imaginable. Its true intent was far more vile than I could have possibly imagined.

Without hesitation, it latched its largest beak around my muzzle and thrust its leathery tongue past my lips and inside my mouth. I screamed around the violating appendage as it pushed deep into the back of my throat. I felt it crawl down my esophagus. The taste was like a fragrant bouquet of shit from the bottom of a latrine. I gagged and I gagged, my throat spasming and constricting around the wretched thing that invaded it. I felt it twitch and pump something into my stomach. After a few seconds, I felt woozy and dazed.

Arais Vingt Sanctu kommbe. Arraneas balsphor.

I froze. What?

The emissary of the Holy King has come. I am Arka-Povis, Seneschal of the Second Legion, whose Seal is the Ten Towers of Terror. Open the gateway to your mind. Give in.

The voice had come from within my own head, rattling like the tines of a fork against a bed of nails. A stinging wind of gravel and hot tar that carried words with it.

Never! I thought.

Submit and open yourself to me, child. You have neither the right nor the power to withhold anything from me. It is a trespass unimaginable, that you would insult me by daring to refuse any of my commands. You will open of your own will, or I will tear you open.

Never! I forced myself to think of the word, and nothing else. Never, never, never! Never will I give in!

You struggle in vain, not knowing the reason. You have been misled with false hope. There is no future for your kind. Your lives are forfeit. Your fate was decided long ago.

Why?

Your species bears a small seed. The mark of the Great Enemy. This is something that we will not tolerate. Every single tonnanen is condemned to death.

Why would you let the cleomanni enslave us if you wanted us all to die?

The cleomanni were useful pawns, for a time. The yoke of slavery would have broken you enough to slowly pick off what remained. In a few thousand of your years, you would have been no more, and that would have been enough. However, some of you have attempted to weave a new destiny and circumvent your sentence. This is forbidden. Because the cleomanni have failed to contain the threat that you pose, we have been forced to take a more active hand in matters.

And what does that mean?

Every tonnanen will be scourged. You will be tormented and broken. There will be no respite, no mercy, and no salvation. Your bodies will be riddled with disease and shriveled with starvation, your sores biting into your bones. Your screams of agony, a symphony of pain. When we come to reap what remains of your pathetic lives, you will beg for the scythe to fall on your neck. You will tell me where the rest of you hide. You will not refuse. You will not resist.

Or what? You’ll rape me with your tentacles? I was so tired of being threatened by scum like this. I almost felt like daring one of them to do it. Just get it the fuck over with, already.

The thing laughed. Both inside my mind and in the physical world. A bellows of rasping irons. Its eyes seemed to close as it shuddered with mirth. Child, the rape of the body is a small word for a small concept that only concerns mortal, baryonic beings.

A chill ran down my spine. What are you going to do?

The monstrosity’s stern and hateful gaze fell upon me. I am going to pour myself into you in such a way that your soul will be tainted beyond death. You will always feel me within you, even in your most private moments. A twitch in your belly, or in the base of your skull. A tumor, festering. In the next world, your spirit will be bonded to me and serve me for all eternity. You will scream and beg and scrape your hooves against the door to paradise as you are dragged away, down, down, down into the darkness where I reside. Once there, you will remember pain, and nothing else. Every second of every joyous moment in your mortal existence will be torn from you like a precious morsel and will provide me with nourishment. You will spend the rest of your days in dread, fearing the end, because you know that in the moment your heart stops beating, you will belong to me. And your children. And your children’s children. Forever.

Is that all you have to threaten me with? It was my turn to laugh, albeit nervously. You’re a fucking joke. I never had any happy moments. Certainly not enough for you to chow on, you dumb octopus fuck. It was all shit. After everything I’ve done, after all the people I killed, I expected to go to Tartarus anyway. You’re trading one hell for another. You have nothing to scare me with. You have no bargaining power. Why don’t you pack up your pet chimps and fuck the fuck off to whatever hole you crawled from, before I saddle up in my Charger and make you?

A million years.

What?

It has been over a million of your years since I was last rebuked with such intensity. Such youthful vigor. Such naïveté and foolishness. Its myriad eyes flashed a hellish white glow. OPEN WIDE.

My very soul was cleaved in two. My inward scream, and the realization of what had happened to me, was delayed by a matter of seconds. When I heard its echo in my own mind, I wasn’t sure if it had even come from me. My psyche was fractured. Smashed into pieces, and the pieces strewn everywhere like shards of broken glass. I could see reflections of my memories twinkling in each one.

Dad! My bike’s having some engine trouble. I don’t know if these mods are working out. There’s something wrong with the carb. I think it needs adjusting. Can you help me out?

There’s nothing wrong with the carb, it’s your imagination. Listen, I work for a living. Maybe if you had some money, you little bum, you’d actually be worth my time.

Typhoon! That’s no way to speak to our daughter! You’ll apologize to her at once!

Mom. Somehow, I knew she was dead. I missed her terribly.

Duty calls, and honor awaits! Your Empress needs you. Every life not dedicated to the war effort is a life wasted. Together, we will beat back the satyr menace! Enlist now!

A propaganda poster was pasted on the wall in triplicate, with a depiction of Salzaon Granthis as a red-skinned demon. Behind me, there was a parade. I turned and watched as the Centaur APCs, Minotaur tanks and ballistic missile carriers rolled by, followed by a slow procession of regal-looking command Chargers in the white and gold livery used by the nobility. In the center of the formation was an open-topped white limousine with elaborate gold trim. There, perched on her raised platform, was Twilight Sparkle, dressed in white regalia and a peaked cap with a shining black visor. I waved and called out to her, trying to raise my voice above the cheering crowd and rear up to make myself taller and more obvious.

Empress Sparkle! Your Majesty! I’ve made up my mind, I’m gonna enlist!

She smiled and waved back. Good, we need you! It’s really cool and you’ll get to drive one of these!

She pointed up at the Charger. The giant titanium pony. I decided right then what I wanted to do. Too bad I wasted my first tour driving a tank, instead.

The Beast muscled its way into my mind. A burglar rummaging through the drawers. My body jerked and spasmed as the creature’s essence barged inside. This was so much worse than forcible sex. The Beast had shoved its vast ego inside my brain and squished me against the inside of my skull. The pressure in my head made me feel like my cranium was about to pop. I felt like a mouse that had been rolled over by a yak until it burst into a pool of blood and organs. It was so much deeper and more intimate than any mere nervous stimulation. I was violated in a manner most total. My mind, my soul, my very identity. All were ravished completely.

I saw myself killing one of the first cleomanni I ever encountered outside of a vehicle. I had the drop on him. I had every advantage. My hooves fell on him, over and over. He’d broken so easily. His head was mush. My hooves were covered in red.

Why? I didn’t hit him that hard!

I’d cried for days.

Useless, the Beast thought. These memories are too old. I suppose it is true, what you said. You did not have very many joyous occasions in your short life, did you? How unfortunate. This means you will have a less appealing flavor. I am amazed that you are still conscious. Do you not need to breathe, child?

My mind’s eye fast-forwarded to the recent past. Mardissa and I were fighting, and then, we were reconciling, exhausted and in pain from each other’s blows.

You’re a person. Oh gods.

A strange part of me wanted to love her. Like a substitute for the other painter in my life. The one I’d lost. Another part of me dreaded the pain and heartache of failure if I could not woo her to our side. I pushed her away. I pushed her away because I was afraid. And weak. Admitting that she was decent meant that they all had a chance to be, and that invalidated all the hatred that I had invested myself in. Without my hate, I was nothing.

I was lost, and alone, and scared.

The Beast let out a bassy, rumbling laugh. You think to conquer your old enemy with the power of what? Friendship? You will always despise each other. We will make certain of that.

My memories of Camp Crazy Horse were being dredged up. The bar. The cells. That old coot Crookneck’s office.

No. No! I had to keep the Beast at bay.

The creature made its satisfaction apparent. Yes. More of this. I need to know where you little ponies are hiding.

I needed something. A weapon. A spell. Something to keep my memories safe. I began rummaging, too. Tried outpacing the monster as we sifted through the hills of broken glass.

Ah. There it was.

Cicatrice and I were sitting back-to-back in the cafeteria at the academy. He was slowly chewing on a daffodil sandwich, shaking his head in abject displeasure, swallowing only with great difficulty. The food was awful, but the Magister insisted on eating with the students and on us being very informal with him. Something about the suffering making dark magic stronger.

Storm, you ever been mind-fucked?

I looked back at him, appalled. The fuck does that mean? No, I don’t think I have!

He nodded vigorously, taking a bite out of his sandwich and speaking through a mouthful of food like a slob. If a dark magic user is rifling through your head, here’s something you can use.

Cicatrice wrote said something on a napkin, and then presented it to me.

I squinted at the old runes. Karad, Daggas—

Cicatrice raised his hooves. Don’t actually cast it! I have several important spells going right now, and you’ll fuck them up. And you’ll give me a splitting headache, too.

Truth, Valor, Point? Like, the point of a fencing foil? What does it do?

He grinned. It’s a counterspell. Very effective. Takes all the dark magic being focused on you and reflects it right back at the caster. Really fucking ruin their day. And the best part? The stronger your opponent is, the more of that shit goes right back into them! It’s like holding a microphone right next to a PA system speaker. The feedback is ferocious!

What school is that?

Displacement magic. Light and dark. It’s not a traditional dispel. It depends on your light aptitude, though. How good are you with light magic?

Just so-so, really.

Well, practice. Shit, I keep trying to impress that on students. The most important thing for a unicorn is practice. Everything else is just bullshit. Magic is a muscle. You must exercise it to make it stronger.

You sound like my PE instructor.

I am your PE instructor. A unicorn’s horn is an integral part of our bodies. Forget about Chargers and tanks. Your horn is the greatest weapon in Equestria’s arsenal.

I struggled against the Beast. Ignited my horn in spite of its influence, my eyelids twitching, my nerve impulses scattered. The monster’s face was bathed in an orange glow.

Karad, Daggas, Vatorou.

Everything flashed white. Everything inside me that the Beast had sundered to pieces instantly smashed back together into a concrete whole. My senses returned, and with them, the feeling that I was being flung backward. Something long and leathery jerked from my muzzle with a spray of oily black liquid as I fell to the snow. The creature howled in agony, its massive body reeling. I hacked and coughed up the acidic, moldy-tasting filth that it had pumped into my guts, sputtering and trying to center myself. I moaned in pain. The entire length of my throat burned. I lacked the strength to even crawl.

A tentacle whipped and latched around my neck. I heard the Beast’s voice in my head once more. Its eyes were filled with rage.

That was a mistake. You will pay dearly for it, small, finite, mortal flesh-thing. I find that a little humiliation loosens the soul. The surrender of the ego makes it easier to pluck the spirit from the body!

I struggled, albeit briefly. I knew exactly what brand of evil the Beast intended for me. I could feel its terrible will pressing on my mind before it actually began. The sickening touch made my skin crawl. I tried covering myself with my tail, but it was no use. A tentacle wrapped around my dock and bent it out of the way, leaving me completely exposed. I gritted my teeth. My whole body tensed up, but the foreknowledge of what was coming didn’t lessen the blow to my dignity as I felt the Beast gather itself like a battering ram at my gates.

“Fuck you,” I rasped out.

I was dry as a bone, partly because of the altrenogest but also because I was terrified out of my wits. It didn’t matter. The cold, glistening, pitiless creature was perpetually lubricated from top to bottom with foul-smelling black slime, and its coiled appendages had no difficulty penetrating me. Without hesitation or remorse, the Beast pressed inward, stretching me obscenely. A pained moan escaped my throat. The pressure was unbearable.

“Fuck you!” I screamed. It became like a mantra of survival. The profanity was the only thing that kept me from slipping under the waves as I was rocked violently back and forth. I refused to be dominated. “Fuck you!”

I liked to imagine that most rapists regarded their victims, at the very least, as actual living people that they wanted to fuck. Next to the Beast, I was much, much less than that. I was roadkill, and its pumping, twisting, torquing appendages were the shovel. I gagged and heaved and shrieked as I was choked and constricted, my guts cramping over and over, squeezing the rubbery flesh that impaled me unbidden. The squelching noises of vigorous sex, the nauseating, slimy wetness, and the unwanted arousal that consumed my nether regions all conspired to make me feel vulnerable and helpless in a way that I never wanted to feel.

Through the disgustingly intimate connection that we shared, I could feel some small measure of the Beast’s mind. From its perspective, there was nothing even sexual about what it was doing. It was pure, unfettered hatred that drove its movements. I just happened to be some meat that was in its way, like a factory worker caught in an industrial shredder. It received no physical pleasure from this. It wasn’t getting off. It couldn’t. The very idea was beneath it. No. It just wanted me to hurt. It wanted to savor my screams and delight in my struggle.

Despair, little one! the Beast howled into my mind. Despair and die!

No passion. No desire. Only pure sadism. It was then that I knew. This was something truly alien. Something beyond mortal reckoning.

My life up to this point hadn’t been kind to me. I’d forgotten what happiness actually felt like. Now, I feared that I’d never know, ever again.

I looked up just in time to see a hard-driven lance catch the Beast right in the head. Black ichor gushed from the wound as it screeched and swayed. Its slimy tendrils fled from me, the pressure relieved. Star Cross Wraithwood looked down at me, her eyes pitying me through the red-tinted slits of her visor.

“Sergeant, run!”

I tried to stand. I fell face-first in the snow, my body too weak to do even that. Dark whispers filled my head. Proof of the Beast’s defilement. “I—I can’t.”

Everything around me erupted into chaos. Six other Dragoons, including Commodore Cake, descended on the Vargr, going straight for CQC. The aliens fired a few wild shots to try and deter them. When those rounds struck trees, their trunks splintered with the force of a hand grenade.

Their personal rifles fired antimatter, too. Because that wasn’t unfair, or anything.

The Vargr were outmatched in close combat with Dragoons, and they knew it. They retreated into a circular formation and their leader, the one who’d choked me out, deployed a shield generator that ensconced their entire squad in a bubble of glowing blue light. The shield was one-way. From within, they fired out at the Dragoons at their leisure. The bubble was utterly impervious to beamcaster blasts. Lances bounced off the shield and did absolutely nothing.

One of the enemy’s rifles struck a Dragoon dead-center and she was flung backwards, the chest plate on her exosuit shattered. Another Dragoon immediately seized the casualty and swiftly evacuated her while the remaining five continued to engage.

The Vargr leader touched his earpiece. “Komand, rekvist varmhuul!”

With a bright flash, the enemy squad blinked out of existence, the Dragoons’ lances falling on the empty space where they’d stood moments before. Some manner of teleportation. The lances had been driven with such anger, they almost surely would have shattered the barrier were it still present. Instead, only the burnt-out husk of the disposable generator remained, black smoke rising from its charred casing.

Wraithwood dueled with the Beast for a few moments, its massive body quick and sinuous for its size. It dodged her lance, moving with unnatural speed, as though it could read her intent before she executed her attacks. A tentacle lashed out and wrapped around her body. She didn’t even have time to scream. With a ripping motion, a crunch of armor and a spray of blood, the Beast made Wraithwood into a literal wraith. I watched as the monster tore her soul from her body. Her glowing blue essence floated in its grasp, struggling, screaming silently. The two halves of her armored body dropped from mid-air and splashed the snow with red. Unnecessary flesh. The soul was the only sustenance the Beast required.

It yawned open one of its terrible maws, and in she went. The brave, gentle, and skilled thestral warrior who’d saved my life twice and personally rewarded me for my service was gone, in an instant. I’d never even known her. Her spirit’s scream of terror as it was absorbed into the Beast resonated through the gestalt, tearing at my psyche.

Layer Cake screamed a challenge at the Beast, angered by the loss of her superior. Four sets of overdriven beamcasters fell on the monster. It howled in pain, spurting black blood, pressing its body flat to the ground and retreating in a blur of motion, darting over the hill and out of sight, weaving like some horrid snake.

The two Vargr tanks moved up to take the place of the infantry. Their weapons were vicious. Each one bore four gimbaled antimatter repeaters and some sort of continuous-beam cannon. Columns of deadly light lashed out at the Dragoons, who proved far too swift of targets. The terrain was quickly peppered with craters deep and wide enough for entire infantry squads to use as cover. I was deafened by the noise and half-blinded by the flashes. Small antimatter blasts were going off all around me. We were accumulating rads.

I crawled through the snow, back towards the nose of the Vulture, panting and yelping in terror as my world exploded. My friends were there. They would save me. I just knew it.

I gagged and hurled, the Beast’s filth erupting from within me and staining the snow black. It dripped off my chin. It filled my sinuses. The taste of rotten seaweed, overwhelming. I threw up a second time. And a third. And a fourth. Every last drop of everything that was in my stomach came racing out. I mustered the energy to keep crawling, not caring that I’d dragged my gut across the patch of vomit-streaked snow.

“I’m so sick—of throwing up!” I whimpered.

When I finally reached the Vulture’s nose, they were indeed waiting, alive and well. I could see the looks in their eyes. Pity. Shame. Remorse.

They saw. Everything.

“So,” I coughed and sputtered. “You all just—stood there and watched?”

“Storm,” Bellwether said, his face a mask of pain. “I tried. They would’ve killed us.”

“That’s not what I meant. You could’ve looked away. But you didn’t. You had to see me like that.”

Mardissa ran up and pulled me into her warm embrace, cutting through the wintry chill. I felt filthy. Too filthy to be touched by anyone. I hated this. I hated being vulnerable in front of her, of all people.

“Sergeant,” Mar said. “I am so sorry. If I had my armor, I swear, I would’ve done something. I don’t know what. Probably something suicidal. Had I the power to act, I would not be able to stand idly by when faced with such wickedness. I give you my word on that.”

“I’d—like to think I’d do the same for you, Mar.” I smiled softly and touched my hoof to her jaw, watching as a lone tear traced its way down the satyr’s cheek.

Commodore Cake marched up to us. “We gotta go! Two enemy tanks, advancing on our position!”

The other Dragoon had returned. The five of them quickly scooped us up in their forelegs before we could even react, one bearing both Ketros and one half of Wraithwood’s corpse. Another one had grabbed both me and Wraithwood’s other half. I supposed that the Dragoons never left a mare behind, even if she was in pieces. They flew us away from the crash site with alarming haste, the tanks firing antimatter bolts after us the entire time as they receded into the distance.

I looked over my shoulder and watched as the hundred-meter-long transport lifted off, followed by the Orca. Their entire hulls faded and vanished from sight, their cloaks engaged. I was in a complete daze, my mind a morass of contradictory emotions. On the one hoof, I was happy to be alive. On the other, I wished I was dead.

We were flown through the air at breakneck speed, what felt like several kilometers, until we encountered a friendly transport, nestled in a valley to the south. I noted that the livery of the Roc was black, with Conclave markings. The Dragoons flew us into the open rear bay of the hovering Roc, setting us down on the cold metal deck inside.

“Throttle up!” the Commodore shouted. “Go, go, go! Get us the bloody hell out of here!”

The Roc’s fuselage rumbled as the nacelles tilted and it picked up speed. Magister Cicatrice was waiting on the deck of the Roc, flanked by a pair of Pegasus Stormtrooper bodyguards, a dismissive sneer on his face. He was wearing dark robes that crisscrossed over his chest, his beard neatly combed. Another pair of Stormtroopers took up positions beside the cleomanni, quickly patting them down for weapons before assuming escort formations beside them. It was made abundantly clear that there would be no mischief allowed from them.

“A nuke,” Cicatrice said. “The biggest fuckin’ boom, short of a grimoire. Unauthorized. Danger close. Bellwether, my boy, you are getting a bit too big for your britches. Bold, I’ll give you that. Fair warning, Admiral Crusher and Captain Garrida are both going have your ass on a plate with a side of cheese and whining. I’ll tell them there were extenuating circumstances, but still, you keep this up, you’re cruisin’ for a bruisin’.”

“Garrida is still alive?” Bellwether said.

“Alive and already evacuated, along with the rest, yes. Me and the Stormtroopers just finished mopping up. The rest of the most important supplies have been salvaged, along with the entire wreck of the destroyed Vargr ship. Pur Sang is being scuttled by demolition teams as we speak. There’s gonna be a much bigger boom when we set off that fifty-megaton charge. We’ve just been trying to figure out how to lure the Vargr into the explosion, too, but they keep cloaking and running off, the cowards. Were you hoping that nuke would take the Captain out? Hah! Agent, I don’t think there’s a bomb big enough in the whole damn galaxy to do the job. That old hen is too angry to die.” When Cicatrice saw me, he was visibly, increasingly agitated and chagrined. “Oh. Oh no. Fuck. Fucking fucking-fuck! Storm, what did you let that fucker see?”

“Nothing. I gave—I gave that thing as little as possible. Irrelevant shit.”

“Good. Very good. You use that little trick I showed you, way back when? Hell, if you’re still breathing and not speaking in tongues, you must have.”

“Yeah. It helped. A lot. Until that thing decided it would be easier to have its meal if it chewed me up a little, first.”

“What? Oh, you mean—”

“Yeah.” I drew in a deep breath and shuddered. “That.”

“Shit. You hearing any voices?”

“Yes. Continuously.”

“Well, that’s not good. That requires a pretty complicated ritual to fix.”

I shook my head in confusion. “Cicatrice, what the fuck was that thing?”

“C’mere. Into the lounge. All of you. The cleomanni, too. They need to hear this.”

We gave each other a few concerned looks before following him into the Roc’s spacious accommodations. This was definitely not a standard configuration for a Roc. A good third of the bay had been replaced by a lounge area with a circular table and sofas, a kitchenette, and a bathroom way off in the corner. We all sat down on the couches, except for me. I was filthy. My hooves were leaving black, inky marks all over the place. My ass was like a loaded rubber stamp.

“Okay, listen up.” Cicatrice turned to Mar and Ket. “First off, do you two know who I am?”

Mardissa nodded. “One of the Magisters, yes.”

“That is correct. I am Cicatrice, whose domain is dark magic and forbidden incantations. I specialize in soul transference, among other things, and my name is on several papers relating to the creation of Anima with the use of bound souls. Our division specialized in the production of high-grade AIs for use in Chargers, as well as the advancement of our understanding of dark magic in general.”

Mardissa winced. “Great. We just had to run into the scariest fucker in Equestria.”

Cicatrice smiled and nodded. “Right you are. Now, I want you, all of you, to listen close. This war is not what you think it is. The actors behind it are not who you think they are. I saw everything on the Dragoons’ helmet feed, including Star Cross Wraithwood’s demise. Damned shame, that. She was one of our best. That creature? That thing that molested the Sergeant’s soul, and other parts besides? That was a Lesser Archon of Thuax.”

“Well.” I smirked half-heartedly. “I’d hate to see what a Greater Archon of Thuax looked like.”

“You wouldn’t be able to see them,” Cicatrice said. “They’re the size of a star system and you need thaumatic sensors to pick up the glow. The loss of the Highwind colony out on the rimward frontier back in 2142 was because our early warning system failed, and we couldn’t evac the planet before the Archon engulfed the whole world, instantly swallowed every soul on Highwind, and left behind cities full of rotting ponies. Took a lot to cover that one up. Oh, and since it was a pegasus colony, a lot of them fell and went splat. Made it a bitch to ID the corpses.

“The search and rescue teams were pissing their uniforms in fright at the idea that the Archon might come back to eat them while they were on Highwind looking for the bodies. Kept insisting that we use telepresence equipment. Instead, we had picket ships track the thing and told the rescue teams to head for orbit if it so much as twitched in their direction. It was a huge shitshow. The good news is, even though the Archons can project their will over great distances, their actual incorporeal forms move at sublight speeds, so it’ll be eons before they reach the more populous regions of the galaxy.”

My jaw slowly dropped. There was a kind of a pregnant pause, where we all just stood there in complete shock, trading horrified glances.

Cicatrice nodded. “Right. The Vargr, as best as we can tell, based on previous engagements and some newly gathered information, are something like their thralls. Willingly, out of fear and respect, or unwillingly, through dark magic, we don’t know. We believe that those simians and their masters are the chief instigators of this conflict. They have corrupted both the Confederacy and the Empire’s bureaucratic structures, using misinformation, assassination, sabotage, mind control, and various other clandestine methods to keep the war going.

“The Conclave has been continuously tasking specially-chosen members of BASKAF and various special-forces units to detain or kill the individuals who’ve been corrupted. Depends on how deep the corruption goes. The Sergeant, here? She’s infected. She already hears the whispers of the Archons. They’re something like a hive mind, and the Archon’s Kiss is how you get in the club.”

Mardissa shrugged. “I don’t know magic stuff. Is that bad?”

“Ordinarily, it would be a death sentence, however, provided that the tainting can be reversed in time, I think she’ll be fine. I hope. Oh, on the plus side, the tainting process permanently enhances your dark spectral attunement. You should be able to cloak at least twice as long, now, Storm. What’s that for you, like almost half an hour? Lucky you. Next time, why don’t you guzzle the whole fucking Archon? You’ll probably get another half an hour out of that.”

I didn’t want that. I didn’t fucking care that it made me more powerful. I was disgusted beyond words. “I think I’m gonna be sick.”

“Well, go be sick in the toilet, not here. I know. Alien cum tastes like shit, doesn’t it? Maybe you’ll run when you see the Vargr from now on, instead of hiding from assholes with thaumovision using an invisibility spell, you idiot. You must’ve looked like a Hearth’s Warming tree. Would’ve been stealthier if you’d doused yourself in gasoline, lit yourself, and ran straight at them. As a knock-on effect, I’m pretty sure the Archon would’ve passed you up if you were on fucking fire.”

Lieutenant Ketros Armagais stepped up, puffing on a cigarette. Cicatrice was very displeased by this.

“Put that out at once, you stupid imp!” Cicatrice said. “There are no combustibles allowed on deck, and I don’t want the smell in my personal fucking lounge!”

Ket sighed before stubbing his cigarette out on the arm of a couch, making the rest of us gape in shock at his audacity. “You know, the rest of these folks may take shit from you, but I don’t have to. Based on everything I’ve heard, it sounds to me like you didn’t give your guys any fucking intel on these bastards at all. You gave them fuck-all, and now, you’re acting like they should’ve gotten it out of you with fuckin’ telepathy or something. You may be the Magister to them, but you ain’t the Magister of a fuckin’ porta-potty to me. The little lady just had the worst day of her life. Cut the Sergeant some slack, necromancer, or you’ll taste my fist!”

Cicatrice and Ketros had a staredown for a few moments, each glaring at the other. The Magister knew he could break Ketros like a fallen twig, and that was without magic. With magic, he could’ve made Ket reach behind the back of his head, grab his other arm, and intentionally try and fold himself into a pretzel. However, Cicatrice’s expression softened first. He realized he was in the wrong.

The Magister turned to me, his contrition evident. “Sergeant, I’m sorry you had to go through that. The enemies we face, they’re not kind. They’re cruel beyond all reason. You need to learn how to protect yourself. I will teach you. There is also the matter of the ritual that must be done. After that, I want you to go get a checkup from Argent and a clean bill of health. Then, once you get some rest, go see Weathervane. Don’t bottle it up, you understand? It’ll destroy you.”

I was shaking. I was shaking and crying, my head meekly dipping towards the deck. I slowly nodded in agreement with Cicatrice, but I couldn’t meet his eyes. I didn’t want anyone’s condolences. I wanted their understanding. If I’d known what was going to happen to me, I would’ve used that beacon right away. I would not have delayed. I felt like a fool.

“I’ve made my choice,” Mardissa said. “I’m defecting to the Equestrian Liberation Front. If my country is the puppet of those horrid fucking things, then I have no home to return to. My father is either in grave danger, or he’s already in their grasp. I—I know it’s selfish of me, but in exchange for lending you my sword arm, I want us to rescue my family. That’s all I ask. Lieutenant Armagais, are you with me?”

Ket nodded. “I go where you go, ma’am. I lost all my brothers in this war. Some, brothers by blood. Some, brothers-in-arms. If these Vargr bastards are the reason why the war has dragged on for a millennium, then I want payback as much as you.”

“Good.”

Cicatrice squinted at her, before shocked recognition spread across his features. “You’re Mardissa fucking Granthis! Holy shit. I didn’t even recognize you with all those bruises! You want us to go pick up ol’ Sal and the rest? That’s a tall order, considering they’re deep in Confederate space, behind a whole armada, and we’ve got fewer warships than I have hooves. C’mere, let me show you guys something.”

Cicatrice motioned us over to a table where he unrolled a laminated map of the galaxy. “Now, Bellwether, I see you’re being mighty quiet over there, son. A few days ago, I wasn’t entirely forthright with you. I did withhold some things that you should probably know, now that you’ve seen these fuckers and what they do. There are three main divisions the Vargr are split into. The Linvargr, the Hastavargr, and the Estoravargr. The Linvargr are science, espionage, unconventional warfare, and artifact reclamation. See a brain in a circle? That’s them. The Hastas are military. The Estoras are logistics. The Linvargr are the main threat to our operations.” Cicatrice tapped his hoof against various locations on the map, pointing to several star systems on the periphery of our space. “Everywhere that we’ve set up dig sites, trying to claim artifacts of what we presume was their prior civilization, the Linvargr have appeared in force, murdered our science teams, confiscated all our discoveries, and destroyed our research. It’s like they’re looking for something in specific, but we don’t know what, only that it’s very important to them.”

“Do we have any clue what that thing that they’re searching for might be?” Bellwether said.

Cicatrice shook his head. “None. We haven’t even begun to narrow it down. These raids have killed many of our very best Dragoons and Stormtroopers, along with hundreds of our brightest scientists. The Vargr know where these artifacts are. They’re hindering us from recovering them because they don’t want us to have their technology. I’m sure you can plainly see why.”

“Two of their tanks just turned that forest back there into a cratered moonscape,” Bellwether said. “If we had that kind of firepower, no one would fuck with us ever again.”

“You mean you intend to profoundly upset the balance of power in the galaxy?” Mardissa cocked an eyebrow.

“Oh, come off it,” Commodore Cake spoke up from the corner. We hadn’t even seen or heard her enter. “We need an edge, or we’re through. You tossers can’t keep us from doing what is necessary to survive. I just watched a mare that I looked up to for well over a decade lose her life to an enemy that we scarcely even understand. If you knew what was good for you, you’d seek an alliance, because once the Archons are done eating us, there’s no telling what they’ll do to you.”

“Those Linvargr tanks aren’t even considered combat vehicles,” Cicatrice said. “Those are mobile sensor stations and research escort vehicles that just happen to have defensive weaponry. The front-line hovertanks the Hastas use are scarier. Much, much scarier. That’s why we need to take the fight to them. They’re complacent, believing themselves safe and secure in their technological advantage. They’ll never expect it.” Cicatrice turned to the satyrs. “Rest assured, we have no intention of nuking Confederate military bases, shipyards, or, Celestia forbid, cities. We intend to use those weapons in raids against the Vargr, hence our interest in recovering as many as possible.”

I let out a chuckle. “So, what you’re proposing, Your Excellency, is that on top of fending off the Confederacy, the Liberation Front—without the backing of any functioning, intact nation-state, without our supreme leader, and with a tiny hoofful of salvaged warships, Chargers, tanks, and WMDs—should engage in outright warfare against a league of soul-eating Elder Gods and their pet apes with antimatter rifles?”

“Well, it’s either that or extinction, so yes, that is what I’m suggesting.”

“Great.” I threw my hooves in the air. “We are so fucked.”

Cicatrice walked over to me and put his hoof on my chin, lifting it and inspecting the mess the Archon left all over me.

“You need to wash that off,” Cicatrice said. “All of it. It’s highly psychoactive. The longer you leave it on, the worse the hallucinations get. Go clean yourself up.”

I pulled away from him angrily. “Yeah, I’m fuckin’ going. Thanks a lot for being supportive, guys. Especially you, Ket, except unironically.”

As I tromped off to head for Cicatrice’s oh-so-special flying bathroom, Ket called after me, “The word you’re lookin’ for is sarcasm!”

I slammed the door behind me, planting both my shaking hooves on the sliver of counter in front of the sink. I looked myself over in the mirror. My legs were swollen. My heart was pounding. I had a great stain of black ooze running down my chin and the front of my neck, like I’d been dipped muzzle-first in a barrel full of tar. When I reared up and looked down at myself, there was another, similar stain. Far lower. Where I wished there wasn’t. My whole underbelly and groin were slathered in the Archon’s filth.

My ears rang violently. I lost my balance and stumbled face-first towards the sink.

The other mouth, the Archons’ voices whispered in a mocking chorus. The one that speaks children. The gun that fires stallions at men. Every birth, a death. Every cradle, a grave. Poor matter-child. Better to never be born into the realm of flesh. Certainly better not to be responsible for bearing others into it as well, you pathetic, miscreated mare. We await your doom with bated breath, when you will join us in oblivion and we will dominate your very soul. You are hardly even fit to eat, but the sweetness of your dying screams will at least provide us with some temporary amusement, womb-thing.

I whimpered and curled up into a ball on the deck, my sobs echoing in the transport’s cramped bathroom. “Oh, Celestia. Oh, fuck. Why?” I slammed my hoof into the bulkhead. “Why?!”

Bellwether was wrong. They were waiting. On the other side. Only, instead of dead soldiers and bereaved widows, it was legions of demons too terrible to name. Any misstep, anything that could lead to my death, would send me hurtling straight into their clutches.

There was no escaping it. The noose was around my neck. The penalty for my sins was clear. My soul belonged to them, now.

The chorus of the Archons rose. Ndras Thuax. Ndras Thuax!

Hail Thuax! Hail Thuax! HAIL THUAX! HAIL—

// … end transmission …

Record 15//Ritual

//HOL CRY ADV
//CHECKSUM READ
//CHECKSUM GOOD

// … decoding …

Desert Storm

There was a shower in the Roc’s bathroom. It was stylish and opulent, albeit cramped. One of the fancy ones with an enchanted water-cycler. Removed solids were zapped away with magic, and then the water was purified, heated, and then cycled back into the shower head. This meant the entire system only needed a couple gallons or so of actual water to operate, saving on weight. A major consideration for any aircraft.

That was a good thing, too, because I felt like showering for the next several hours.

It wasn’t out of any mere psychological need to feel clean, although that was a factor. Rather, it was the practical matter of removing a kilo of black gunk that was welded to my fucking fur and quickly taking on the consistency of chewed gum.

The tap water back in Dodge was a touch on the hard side. Our old house had a water softener with a brine tank. The inky black shit in my fur smelled exactly like the bacterial sludge from the bottom of that thing. The unmistakable rotten-egg smell of hydrogen sulfide peeled off of me in waves. It was practically sewage. It was all over me. It was inside me.

I sat in the shower pan, hugging myself and sobbing as I shivered under the water. I had the heat turned up so high, it felt paradoxically cold. The inside of the shower was like a sauna, hot clouds of water vapor surrounding me. The whispers of the Archons had subsided into a faint scratching in the back of my mind.

Through the small viewport installed in the shower wall, I gazed outside at the Crystal Mountains. We passed over the nuke crater below Pur Sang. I could see the skeletons of the Ifrit walkers far below, or what was left of them. They’d been reduced to barely recognizable charred black splinters, sticking up out of the dirt along the rim of a crater a good hundred meters wide or more.

I saw the signs of continued fighting, next. Anywhere from one-fifth to a full third of the attacking Confederate unit had the misfortune not to die from the blast instantaneously. They had been shielded by terrain formations and the hulls of their heavy vehicles. Even doomed to die of radiation poisoning as they were, they’d fought on, attempting to advance closer to Pur Sang. Every single one of those vehicles bore the marks of ATGM fire, the tops of their turrets marred by concentric scorches. The Stormtroopers, heedless of the risk of fallout exposure, had swept down on them from above, armed with Tatzlwurm missiles. It was a slaughter.

As we hooked around south, we linked up with a few other Rocs, assuming formation with them. About half an hour later, after we’d reached a safe distance, the range to the north was lit brilliant white by another, even more tremendous explosion than the one that we’d caused. I closed my eyes and braced for the shockwave, which came three whole minutes later and was muffled by the sheer distance.

The fifty-megaton scuttling charge beneath Pur Sang took the top of the mountain off, leaving behind a jagged hole that practically split the Crystal Mountains in two. The mushroom cloud from the explosion reached well into the stratosphere. I hoped it had obliterated the Vargr scum that had hounded us for days, but deep down, I knew the truth. They were much harder to kill than that.

I felt so fragile. I was in a complete daze. Reality felt unreal. Every few seconds, my heart would hitch and squeeze in my chest. If it gave out now, that was it. My soul was marked as the Archons’ property. I was as good as theirs. All they had to do was come claim me. I had no idea what that would be like. I wasn’t particularly curious, either.

Was it a cliché cavern of fire and brimstone? Was it a black void of nothingness, with those things and their immense souls floating through it? What did the Archons even do with their captives, if we had no bodies left to torment?

After half an hour and a lot of lathering, the inky sludge finally began sloughing off. I went through one bottle of shampoo, and then another. When the third and final one emptied and I was only half-clean, I screamed in frustration and hurled the empty bottle at the bathroom door.

“I can’t believe this!”

Cicatrice opened the door and poked his head inside. I was absolutely furious, dragging the magnet-tipped shower curtain around my body and cocking my foreleg back with a bar of soap in my hoof.

“Get the fuck out!” I shouted.

“I was going to tell you where I keep the rest of the shampoo, but that’s okay,” Cicatrice said. “I guess I’ll leave you be.” He looked over his shoulder, addressing the others. “Oh, and none of the things we discussed are to leave this room. Period. Very security-sensitive! Captain Garrida knows a few things. You can discuss it with her, but no one else.”

When he feigned leaving, I dropped the bar of soap and reached out a hoof to him. “Wait, Cicatrice!”

“Yes?” His tone was patronizing in the extreme.

“Where do you keep the rest of the shampoo?”

“Push on the wall, right behind you.”

I did as instructed and a section of the smooth black metal wall clicked and then slid open with a whine of sealed electric motors. Behind it were another dozen bottles of Rarity’s Touch. I bundled them up in my forelegs. “Oh, thank you! Thank you, thank you, thank you!” I literally kissed the bottles.

“I’ll leave you to it, then,” Cicatrice said. “Don’t take too long. The curse progresses to its next phase after about eight to twelve hours, depending on how hard you resist it. If that happens, well, I’ll have to kill you. Everyone we’ve rescued from the Archons’ clutches, we got to them a few moments after the Kiss happened. Everyone else? They weren’t so lucky. You’re a ticking time bomb. Finish up as quick as you can. The ritual can’t wait.” He nodded, and then turned to leave.

“Cicatrice, wait.”

The Magister looked over his shoulder at me, concern evident on his face. “Yes, Storm?”

“Thank you, Your Excellency. For getting the Dragoons to us in time. The Vargr would’ve killed all of us. Hell, if the Archon wasn’t satisfied with interrogating me, it might’ve gone for Bell or the satyrs, next. Seeing that thing go through a Dragoon’s exosuit like a hot knife through butter, I now realize, you know, that fucker could’ve popped my head off like a bottle top at any time, if it wanted to.”

Cicatrice huffed. “I didn’t do anything. I’m just as useless now as I was during the war. They had me fucking rip souls out of death row convicts and terminal cancer patients that signed waivers, stuff ‘em in great big golems, and send kids like you to go into battle in those coffins, and all for what? We still lost. Never forget that.”

He slammed the door behind him, leaving me to ruminate on his words. I opened another bottle and kept lathering. My face, my neck, my pits. I didn’t stop until I saw orange, and even then, I kept going. That shit had gotten everywhere. Once I’d finished doing my forward half, I moved on to the part I dreaded the most.

I cried the entire time. Everything burned and stung. I was sore inside and out. I rummaged around for a bit, looking for the right products, but Cicatrice didn’t have any mare stuff. I resolved to levitate the shower wand and use it as a substitute. The whole base of the shower was stained black. Through my tears, I burned with rage.

“I’m gonna find that motherfucker,” I said. “We’re all gonna see what that smelly sack of seagull shit looks like when it’s turned inside-out and pasted across the motherfucking countryside. Do you hear me, Seneschal Arka-Povis? I’m going to fucking kill you. What you did to me, what you things have done to ponykind, it ain’t for fucking free. You’re gonna pay. You, your Archon buddies, and all those fucking Vargr monkey fucks are gonna pay. We’ll get our motherfucking pound of flesh out of your hides one way or a-fucking-nother!”

My spiel felt hollow. I was riding high on a wave of righteous indignation that guttered out and gave way to yet more melancholy. I had no idea where the Vargr maintained bases, I had no confirmation from Cicatrice as to whether or not the Archons could even be killed in the first place, and I had absolutely no clue where to even begin when it came to finding a weapon or spell or anything suitable for the monumental task of defeating either of them. This was completely uncharted territory.

The Vargr were an implacable enemy with technology that made both the Empire and the Confederacy’s weapons look like children’s toys, supported by the patronage of vile supernatural forces. The voices in my head seemed to giggle, as if they knew I’d concluded that we faced an impossible task.

I grabbed a washcloth in my fetlock and gave myself a wipe. No matter how many times I folded it and dipped it into myself, it kept coming up black. I let out a sob. Every cell in my body felt contaminated. I wanted to scrub all my fur off, and then, my skin. I wanted to scrub and scrub until I exposed an unsullied version of me on my inside that was a millimeter smaller in all dimensions.

Do it, the voices cooed. Scrape off the fur. Abrade the skin. Reveal the true color of the flesh within. It is the only way you will ever be clean again.

With an angry growl, I threw the wet washcloth at the shower wall and it fell and plopped in the shower pan. I leaned my head back against the shower wall. My eyelids drifted down, and I fell asleep. Practically passed out from exhaustion. I woke up an hour or two later to the rumble and the slam of the Roc touching down. Someone was banging on the door. The whispers were louder. Much louder. There was a beehive inside my head, little legs crawling, wings flicking, mouthparts scratching. I felt like I was sinking in a peat bog, surrounded on all sides by the swarms of decay and the stench of death. I let out a panicked yelp.

“Oh gosh. Cicatrice. Help me. Help me! Fucking help me!”

Cicatrice’s voice was muffled as he spoke through the door. “You gotta get out of there and we’ve got to do the ritual right the fuck now, before you start to turn.”

I grimaced. “Turn? What the fuck does that mean?”

“After eight hours, you start subtly obeying the hive mind’s commands. After about five years, your every movement is controlled by them, but you’re conscious that your body has been completely taken over. After ten years, you grow the tongue and can convert others into obedient ghouls with a lesser form of the Kiss. After twenty, your own thralls bring you a great big pile of dead people to gorge yourself on. Once that’s finished, you cocoon and incubate into a fucking Prime, after which they perform a ritual to summon an actual Archon into what used to be your body. If you must know how we found this out, BASKAF agents used a micro-aerial vehicle to inject a nanite colony into one of the Archons’ victims and our scientists spent decades tracking the whole process from beginning to end.”

“Wh—what?”

“That’s how their life cycle works. They consider it a gift to their followers, because you remain fully conscious even though your body is no longer your own. You can live for millennia like that until the Archon trashes the Prime harder than a student driver behind the wheel of an exotic supercar, gets ejected back into the netherverse, and needs to be summoned into another. That black shit is a retroviral genetic contagion. If you swallow large amounts of it, it changes your chromosomes and your germline. Any foals you have will suffer the same exact fate as the curse manifests in their bodies as well. We’ve interviewed many of their victims. The Archons never fully explain how the Kiss works to their enemies, because they’d rather you not kill yourself before you become a spare body for one of them.”

My eyes widened. “Oh shit. Oh shit!”

“That is the correct reaction, Sergeant,” Cicatrice said. “Well done. Now you realize the gravity of the situation.”

I’d never left a bathroom faster before or since. My eyes scanned the lounge for Bellwether, Mar, and the others, but they had long since departed. Cicatrice nodded and motioned me over to another door on the Roc. “Come on, ritual chamber’s this way.”

We stepped into a darkened room bordered in black and gold. A necromancer’s laboratory, for certain. There was a magic circle drawn on the floor, its points nailed down by black candles. I’d never seen the diagram, before. It made me ill just looking at it and deciphering the lines and angles.

“Cicatrice.” I frowned. “That is some vile fucking magic right there.”

“Can’t be helped. Only way to hold off the curse. Here, take this.”

He gave me a small orange pill bottle the label of which had been partly torn off. I turned it over, inspecting the contents through its transparent exterior. There appeared to be a couple dozen large capsules inside.

“What’s this?” I muttered.

“Anti-Archon gene snipper pills. Selectively reverses the edits the black sludge makes and installs a nanomachine colony that prevents further unwanted changes along those lines. Very rare. Our stocks of those are low. Don’t lose that bottle, or you’re fucking fucked. Take the entire course. One pill, once a day, for the next few weeks. Do not miss a dose, period. If everything goes right, you will never actually mutate into a Prime, and you won’t need to take any more of those ever again.”

“Wow, that’s very reassuring.” I chuckled.

“Don’t be a snide ass. This is serious shit. Do you realize that the actual curse cannot be undone and that you will hear the voice of the Archons in your head for the rest of your life unless you perform the ritual to suppress it at least once a month? Do you know that there were—well, I’d hesitate to call them ponies—some colleagues of mine who thought it would be a good idea to summon the Archons on purpose and intentionally taint dark magic users to increase their dark spectral attunement, and then use this medication and the ritual to suppress the negative effects while keeping the enhanced magic power? I refused to sign off on that, because the moment we start doing shit like that to ourselves, we’ve already fucking lost. Do you understand me?”

I slowly nodded, my lips trembling with fear and disgust. “Yeah. I get it. Let’s just get this shit over with.”

Cicatrice hoofed over a glass of water. “Take one of those. Immediately.”

I popped open the pill bottle, lifting one of the capsules in my magic and examining it closely. If I eyed it close enough, I could almost see the cloud of active nanomachines swirling around in the gel. I popped it into my mouth, took a swig of water, and swallowed, letting out a relieved sigh.

“Lie down in the circle. I need to find the stigma.”

I did as directed, lying flat on my back in the middle of the diagram, even when every instinct told me to do the opposite.

Cicatrice lit his horn, his eyes glowing a hellish green, purple flames wreathing his head. “Vingt Sanctu, morreamardi, sutaye, gellig vos angit tur rosk ingfel hjeire.”

It was no language I had ever heard before, but I recognized the first two words. The Archon had spoken them. It must have been their tongue that he was performing the spell with. It made sense, in a sickening sort of way. To undo what they’d done, one needed a working knowledge of their principles of magic. A wave of pure void energy washed over me. I gasped, my entire chest spasming, my back arching, my whole body gripped with agony.

“Neave mest vos iricas!” Cicatrice shouted.

There was a searing pain just below my navel. I stifled my screams through gritted teeth.

“Ahh, there it is,” Cicatrice said. “Wow, that’s a shitty spot.”

I looked down at the bleeding mark beneath my belly button. There was a red sigil there, permanently etched into my body. It was the shape of a four-pointed star within a broken circle.

“Every stigma means something different depending on its location. Neck, fear of death. Chest, over the heart? Fear of abandonment. Near a fetlock, fear that one’s deeds will never amount to anything. If it’s on your lower abdomen, that means a lack of sexual fulfillment, or fear of dying and leaving no issue. This, right here? This means that you want to be a mother, but you’re afraid that you’ll never get the chance. How pitiful. The soul never lies about what it wants. The brain does, but never the soul.”

“What the fuck is that thing? What the fuck?”

“That, my dear, is the hole through which the Archons will draw your soul when you die. That’s going to happen regardless of anything I do. I was a little dishonest when in earshot of your friends, back there. I didn’t want them looking over their shoulder at you for the rest of your natural life.”

“What are you talking about? What do you mean by that?”

Cicatrice sighed. “The curse can only be suppressed, Sergeant. It can’t be undone completely, to our knowledge. Not without binding your soul to something else, like an Anima, to keep it anchored to the physical universe and prevent it from slipping over to the other side. The problem with that is that you lose all your memories. Old soul, new brain. Well, the soul does retain some echoes of one’s memories, but nothing like a complete connectome map. We had some—experiments that we were working on, to take care of that little problem. If our prototypes had worked as intended, they would have granted our species immortality. Sadly, it never quite panned out. Now, hold still.” Cicatrice applied a strange oil to the mark. It was a fairly sensitive spot, and he used his hoof. Next, he gave me the jar. “Put this on your lips, under your forelegs, and in your—well, uh—your genitals. Do not swallow any of it. It’s very poisonous in the GI tract and you’ll get sick. Let it pass through the skin.”

I frowned. “Is that really necessary?”

“Yes, I’d say so. The skin’s thinner down there. It absorbs faster and you’ll get really fucking high really quick. We’re in too deep, now. If we stop at this point, you’re turbo-fucked.”

I did as directed. When I got to the last part, I turned my head away from him, my eyes welling up as I worked my hoof over myself. I could see in my peripheral vision that the old codger was kind enough to turn his back, at the very least.

I sighed, stifling my tears. “Now what?”

“We wait.”

A short while later, I began to feel the effects. I closed my eyes. My legs felt light. I felt like I was floating, or flying, like a pegasus. My ego dissipated. I was one with my environs. I felt flushed and feverish, my forehead beading with sweat. When I opened my eyes, I screeched in horror. Dark tendrils were crawling out of glowing holes in the walls.

“Cicatrice!” I shouted, my chest gripped with fright.

“You see them?” he said.

“Yes!”

“Good, that means it’s time for the last part.” Cicatrice struck his hoof out over my abdomen, his horn flashing bright green. “Rewarso!” Cicatrice stood back. “That’s it. We’re done. You can stand up, now.”

With a burst of nausea and disorientation, the whispers stopped instantly and the hallucinations disappeared. I slowly rolled upright and stood, taking a deep breath. “Wow. Okay. That felt weird.”

“Let me explain how the ritual works,” Cicatrice said. “First phase, you bid that the Holy King focus his attention on you, but also, that he must stay his hand from you. He is bound by the laws of the spirits to obey the ritualist’s commands if the request is spoken properly, but if you mess this part up, he’ll jackhammer-fuck his way right into your mind and then you’re screwed. Don’t mess it up! Second phase, you ask to see the stigma, the mark. Finally, for the third phase, you apply an oil made with henbane directly to the mark and to the mucous membranes, and then, once you’re intoxicated by the alkaloids and have successfully cleaved your soul from your body, you draw the will of the Archons away from your brain and towards the mark.”

“Eww, is that what that shit in that jar was? Does it have to be henbane?”

“Datura, dimethyltryptamine, and scopolamine also work, but you usually get too high to perform the last part solo, which is why we use henbane. The last part of the ritual makes you sober up almost instantly because when the Archons flee from your mind, it temporarily alters the balance of the cholinergic activity in your brain. Well, long enough for the henbane to wear off before you get high again, anyway. Feel that itch? That’s them. Bound up in your guts. When they’re not in your guts? When you let them back in your brain? They cause micro-seizures. That’s how they talk to you. Perform the ritual at least once a month, keep them in the mark, and they can’t influence you at all. Only cause mild discomfort.”

If I focused ever-so-slightly, I could feel a strange tickle in my abdomen, right where the mark was. I took a few shuddering breaths, trying not to break down crying in front of him. “Oh, Celestia. Thank you, Your Excellency. Thank you!”

I wrapped my forelegs around the old-timer and he patted me on the back. “You’re welcome. I’m sorry this happened to you, Sergeant. On the other hoof, this would be a perfect opportunity to teach you more about dark magic. The stuff I wasn’t allowed to teach my students when I worked in an official capacity. The real dangerous stuff. You interested?”

“Of course. I can’t tell you how many times I wished I could just mind-fuck a satyr and make him blow his own head off.”

Cicatrice glared at me. “See, that attitude is precisely why I wasn’t allowed to teach my students how to do it. You have to be very fucking careful with that shit, or you’ll turn into a drooling maniac. All dark magic deals in souls, one way or another. To control the mind, your soul must dominate the soul of another being. The process is addictive. The thirst for more power, insatiable. The more unreasonable your commands, the more pleasure you get out of it, but also, more blowback. You know why I’m still sane? It’s because I don’t mind-control people into killing themselves or others.”

“Oh. Really?”

Cicatrice shrugged. “Why bother, when it’s much simpler and less damaging to make someone obsess over something to the exclusion of everything else, including bathing or eating? That’s the trick to keeping your mind intact as a dark magic practitioner. If you want to kill someone, make them focus on some irrelevant object forever. Then, let nature take its course. Their friends will leave them. Their family will leave them. Their doctor will unplug their life support in the hospital, and that’s all she wrote. Cruel, but effective. You can kill people with mind control, yes, but don’t do it directly. Cheat. If you command a guy to just walk out into traffic, you’ll fuck your mind with the blowback. Instead, get him immensely interested in some shiny bauble on the other side of the road, and he’ll do the rest to himself. A few days ago, I could’ve rolled my self-rolling stone off the cliff and down into the valley below Pur Sang, and you would’ve followed, plummeted to the bottom, and broken your fucking neck. Still wouldn’t count as killing you directly with mind control.”

“Oh. Well, damn. Thanks for not doing that, I guess.”

“Distracting a former student of mine and murdering them are two entirely different things. That’s another thing, right there. You were totally fucking helpless. You didn’t cast a ward. You didn’t do anything. You just let it happen. I expected no less, miss naps-in-class. The time for your remedial education is now. I don’t really have that many other students, nowadays. Hardly anyone around with any dark magic aptitude, anyway. You’re a reasonably good Illusionist, but I know for a fact you waste most of that talent doing nothing but invisibility cloaks. High-quality and rather complete cloaks, yes, but still, you don’t wanna be a one-trick pony forever, do you? It’ll be interesting, if nothing else. You’ll be my little experiment.”

“Experiment?” I frowned.

“I want to see what a pony touched by the Archons can do with a Charger and its locus. Never seen an infected pilot before. This is totally new to us. I’ll give you all the documentation for the Invocation of the King and walk you through the steps. You’re going to need to do it on your own, on a regular basis, from now until the day you die. Also, take the damn pills, until that bottle is empty. After you’ve received care for your injuries and had some time off to recover, we’ll begin work on your studies. You should be honored. It’s not every day a Magister takes on a personal student.” Cicatrice grinned evilly.

“Does the ritual always hurt like that?”

“It hurts less each time. In fact, you lose the ability to feel any kind of pain. Permanently. That can be a bad thing. Pain is important. Lets you know when and where you’re injured so you can react accordingly. For a soldier, I guess it might be a blessing, until you finally notice your blood loss when you collapse and die from it.”

“Cicatrice,” I muttered, deep in thought.

“Yeah?”

“Who or what is Thuax?”

I felt my heart clench in my chest. It was entirely involuntary and it took my breath away. It felt like an alien hand had reached under my breastbone and squeezed with all its might. I felt a great pressure, as if from an unfathomable distance, bearing down on my very being and rendering me utterly incapacitated. I let out a ragged exhalation and nearly collapsed face-first into the deck of the Roc before Cicatrice caught me and helped me to my hooves.

The Magister stared at me, his eyes wide and unblinking. “Do not say that name, ever. Do not think about it, ever. Do you understand me?”

“Yes.” I coughed, my breath hitching in my throat. “Of course.”

“Definitely avoid saying it so soon after the damn ritual, anyway. Sergeant, listen to me, and listen well. I have spent decades of my life pondering the existence and the nature of these beings. I have carried out in-depth research, archeological and thaumatological. I have even presided over ceremonies the whole purpose of which was to gain more knowledge about the Archons. Do you want to know something? I wish I knew less than I do now. Much, much less. As a scientist, as a magician, and as a researcher, professing a desire for ignorance is the very antithesis of everything that I am.” Cicatrice gripped my shoulders. “Every piece of knowledge that I gained constituted a fresh, new horror. Moreover, it brought with it tremendous risks, both personal and professional. Use epithets and euphemisms for evil spirits. Do not use their actual names, especially not when you’re joined at the fucking hip with them. Do not let them tempt you with promises of power. Unless they are threatening you directly in the physical realm, you are to pretend that they don’t exist. Please, please tell me you understand. Please!”

“Yes, Your Excellency. I understand.”

“Good. We’re here, outside Crazy Horse. Go see Argent. Get fixed up. Bell said you were in a bad way. How are you feeling?”

“Better than last night. I was at death’s door until—until that thing—oh, no.”

“It’s the Kiss. The ooze has a nourishing and healing effect on the body, restoring it to balance, but we can only speculate as to the purpose. I conjecture that it helps their freshly sired victims recover, escape, and isolate themselves so that the decades-long process of producing a Prime may begin. Over time, the infected become unnaturally resilient and hard to kill. I’ve seen them take dozens of beamcaster hits center-mass and not die. If it were easy for them to perish to violence, disease, or old age, it would interrupt the process. Therefore, the curse preserves them alive until the seeds planted by the archon can bear their terrible fruit. Rest assured, you aren’t gaining superpowers. The drugs will prevent that. They’ll also prevent you from turning into a three-meter-tall tentacled monstrosity possessed by the spirit of a dark god, so keep taking them as directed.”

“Why would the Archons do this to an enemy if it makes them stronger?”

“Simple. The Archon planned to kill you right away once it used the curse to extract what it needed from your mind. Instead, you got away. Either you’re one of their worshipers and you’re blessed with a very long life trapped inside a Prime, or you’re one of their enemies and you’re cursed with a very long life trapped inside a Prime. Either way, the Kiss serves their purposes. The Archons are beings of the darkest Void magic. Their knowledge of souls and their exact nature is unsurpassed. The conversion process is both magical and viral in nature. The genetic changes brought about by the Kiss create a sort of vicious cycle, allowing the hive mind more control over the basic physical structures of your body, which accelerates the changes, which increases their grip, and so on. Your soul energy is what feeds the transformation. They don’t need to actively cast on you, only guide the process while the stigma siphons your soul like a junkie sticking a garden hose in a gas tank.”

“Fuck me,” I whispered.

“Exactly. Run along now, Sergeant. I have some very important business to attend to. We’ll meet up a fortnight from now, and if you’re feeling up to it, we’ll begin your lessons.”

“Thanks again, Your Excellency.” I offered him a curt bow.

“Oh, please. None of that. Remember, the suffering makes dark magic stronger, and where would I be if I didn’t have to suffer you half-wits and your lack of decorum?”

“Fuck you too, you old fart.” I grinned.

Cicatrice smiled. “That’s more like it. Now, off with you.”

When I stepped outside, down the ramp to the Roc’s cargo bay and onto the hard-packed dirt that made up the floor of Ghastly Gorge, I was still completely disoriented. Every shadow in the corner of my eye felt hostile, like there might be something lurking in it, eager to jump out and devour me whole. That was why when Lieutenant Armagais—who was leaning against the outside of the dropship and having a smoke—decided to call my name, I nearly leapt out of my hooves.

“Hey, Sergeant Storm.”

“Whoa, fuck!” I startled so hard I practically fell over. I held my hoof to my chest, trying to catch my breath. “What the hell is it? Don’t fuckin’ sneak up on me like that!”

“Nice dropship.” Ket flicked the ashes off his cig before taking another puff. “Seen Rocs before. Never been in one, though. Everything’s a little short on the inside, but nice.”

The Lieutenant was accompanied by a pair of Stormtroopers who never left his side. They were very quiet and did not respond to my presence, or our conversation.

I looked the transport up and down. “Well, not all Rocs are this nice. This one belongs to the Conclave. Most of ‘em have pretty basic interiors.”

“Nah, not all that luxury shit. I mean they ride smooth and solid. They don’t rattle or shake your brains out like a Vulture does. This bird right here? Over-engineered. Probably costs a fortune.”

“Imperial Army,” I said. “Everything costs a fortune.”

“Quantity is a quality all its own, you know. If you can only bring ten transports to the fight, and your enemy’s bringing twenty, that means he’s got the edge, rough ride or not.”

I threw my head back and howled with derisive laughter. “Dude, I’ve blown up a good hundred Conquerors before in a single fucking sortie. Quantity doesn’t mean shit when your tanks and gyrodynes are popcorn and my Charger is the fuckin’ kettle.”

Ketros decided to ignore that comment and change the subject entirely. “So, what does the Magister mean? All this Vargr this and Vargr that?”

“That’s what they’re called, as far as I know.”

“Bullshit. I saw that guy what gave you a beating. I don’t care what they call themselves now. Those were the Makers out there, Sergeant. Like in the old legends. They’ve returned.”

My blood ran cold, but I laughed his little comment right off. “I don’t care what they are. If they choose to make an enemy of us, then I’ll fuckin’ kill ‘em. We know they’re not unstoppable. It takes gobs of firepower to bring them and their toys down, but their shielding isn’t limitless, and the hulls underneath can be broken. We can bloody their noses if we go all-out. I don’t give a fuck about your old legends. Only the present. Only the now.”

“But that’s what they looked like! Like us cleomanni, but different. Who else but the Makers would have such terrifying weapons? Such terrible prowess in battle?”

“Right. Half a dozen of those pricks came at me while I was injured, naked, and unarmed. Then, when the Drags brought the hammer down on them, they hid behind a squad-level energy shield, and then, they up and ran. Teleported right off the field and left their tanks unsupported and vulnerable. I didn’t see any prowess last night. You know what I saw? I saw a bunch of fucking psychopaths with fancy equipment. That’s not even getting into that immensely fucked up thing that they brought with them. That disgusting piece of shit that they kneel to like it’s their fucking god! They must be fucked in the fucking head!”

“How you holding up?” Ket said.

The meaning was clear to me, right off. Still, I demurred. “You mean how am I handling the knowledge that my kind is being targeted for complete annihilation by immensely powerful supernatural beings that can’t be killed by conventional means and that my nation has been engaged in a shadow war with them for decades or even centuries without the public’s knowledge? Great. I’m feeling just great about it. Thanks for asking.”

“No, I mean, well—you know.”

I scowled at him, making it clear that I wanted the subject dropped. “As far as I’m concerned, that didn’t happen. I’m not gonna think about it. I don’t wanna talk about it. With all due respect to your rank, Lieutenant, by which I mean none, I don’t want any of you morons spreading it around, either. I am not going to be placed on a fucking pedestal. I am not going to walk around everywhere with everyone giving me those commiserative looks and gossiping about me like I’m some poor little piece of fucking meat! I can’t fucking live like that! I’m gonna do what I’ve always done. I’m gonna walk it off.”

Ket put his hand on my shoulder. “Sergeant, you don’t just walk off shit like that. You’re hurting, I can tell. Can see it right in your eyes. If I can see it, that means everyone can.”

“Oh, here we fucking go,” I said. “Go to the therapist, they say. Go get your pills, they’ll all say. Well guess what? I—”

“—want to make a fool of yourself by letting your wounds fester where everyone can see it? Because that’s what you’re planning to do. Mental wounds are the same as physical ones. The brain is an organ, too. Don’t wait. Don’t put it off. Listen to your big boss. Go to the fucking head-shrinker at the earliest opportunity. You need to manage it before it becomes a problem.”

I stood there, shaking. Shaking and crying. “Don’t you touch me, asshole!” I was completely livid as I shrugged off his contact. “I’ve gone twenty-seven years of my fucking life perfectly fine without taking advice from a fucking imp. I’m not about to start, now.”

“Oh, cut the crap. I care about you, too. You know why? It’s because the first time I’ve ever seen the Captain truly happy is when she’s around you. That means something to me.”

“I spent all my formative years watching my people go nearly extinct, because of what you and your kind did to us.” I seethed. “I am not Mardissa’s moral support. I am not here to make her feel better about herself and all the ponies she’s killed. I am interested in only one fucking thing, and that’s the preservation of ponykind in the face of alien aggression. If she wants to get in the trenches and help us with that, she’s more than welcome to, so long as you two aren’t planning on double-crossing us.”

“Yeah. That’s fine. Saving my people from destruction is exactly what I’d be interested in if I was in your shoes. Having goals is a good thing. Didn’t say it wasn’t. Now, how are you gonna achieve them when your brain ain’t in the game, Sergeant? You’ve got to preserve yourself, first. Otherwise, anything else you can do won’t be nearly as effective. Do what the Magister said. Go see the shrink once you’re healthy enough. If they’re anything like ours, they’ll take good care of you. Furthermore, Captain Granthis has already promised you her aid, and she means it. Don’t you ever doubt the lady’s word in front of me ever again, or I’ll bust your fuckin’ lip.”

“Fair enough,” I said. “Lieutenant, walk with me. I have some things I want to show you. Some ponies I want you to see.”

We left the empty motor pool where the Roc had landed and approached Camp Crazy Horse’s massive doors recessed in the cliff face, walking through the gap and into the cavernous hangar beyond. The Stormtroopers tagged along, moving in lockstep.

“Whoa,” Ketros said. “How did you keep all this a secret for so long?”

“I have no fucking idea. It’s definitely not the smallest base we have. I think Bell might’ve told me once about how we avoid being scanned, but I don’t know. You’d have to ask him, if he feels like telling you about it.”

“So, this is one of the fabled Charger labs?” The Lieutenant keenly eyed the heavy equipment that was used to produce spare components for our mechs.

“Yeah, it is. The whole gorge was used as a proving ground for Chargers, years ago. This was where my machine was assembled and tested.”

As we kept walking, past the dormant duostrand loom and its huge drum rollers, we made our way into the base facilities proper and their drab halls of concrete. We walked through the infirmary, past Cloverleaf’s door. I doubled back and we peered into the room through the narrow fire door window.

“Who’s she?” Ket said.

“Cloverleaf. Militia mare. When we conducted that raid on Dodge over a month ago, the dingoes got to her.”

“Dingoes? Oh, you mean the fucking damarkinds. Creepy fellows at the best of times.”

“Mmm-hm. You know why she’s lying in that bed? Well, that’s because of them. Because of what they did to her. I shouldn’t even have to say it. The fact that one of her legs is metal should tell the whole story.”

Ketros winced. “Gods, that’s terrible.”

I nodded. “You haven’t seen anything yet. Come on.”

We kept walking, past the windows to the repurposed office space that was being used as an extension to the infirmary. The place was packed with moaning, squirming casualties. Hunks of tattered flesh, writhing on their cots. For some of them, these would be their deathbeds. They were missing so much of their bodies, and yet, they clung to life. That was one of the downsides to being a pony. We were too stubborn for our own good. We didn’t know when to die.

One mare had three of her legs amputated and one eye clawed out by the Vurvalfn attack. Her body was wrapped in bandages like a mummy, many of them soaked with ooze from her nearly week-old wounds. Her lone exposed eye was wide and bloodshot, her head shaking side to side in steadfast denial of her body’s ruined state. Her last remaining leg—her right foreleg—was slamming into her cot over and over as she struggled to breathe with a punctured lung, her diaphragm straining to draw in air. Her pain wasn’t being managed properly. Probably the opiate shortage we were struggling through. Without a miracle, she was as good as dead.

If she was a cleomanni, she would have died that night. She would have succumbed almost immediately. A quick, merciful death. Instead, she had the poor sense to be born as one of us. A tonnanen. Indestructible, until we weren’t.

“Oh dear gods,” Ket said. “What happened?”

“The Vargr happened. Those pricks did this to us. More dingoes, but fucking chromed up hard, until they’d completely lost themselves, living out their brief existences from that point on as disposable weapons. Some sort of experimental combat platform the Linvargr were testing. The survivors holed up at Pur Sang couldn’t even fight back. They got torn to ribbons. These are the casualties we evacuated, right where I expected to find them.” I watched, shaking my head as the overworked staff played whack-a-mole with more than ten times their number in patients. “These were the ponies we were trying to save when you bastards started raining mortars on us.”

Ket stood there in shock, staring into the room full of dying and maimed ponies, his expression discomfited as he took a shaky puff from another cig. “I always knew that something didn’t feel right about all this. I had buddies I used to go clubbing with back home. They told me not to do it, y’know. Not to enlist. Years ago. No choice. My wife died. My daughter, you know, she’s just a little tiny thing, and she’s sick. Needs lots of meds to stay alive. They ain’t cheap. My sister’s taking care of her while I’m on deployment, but I haven’t seen her in too long. She misses her daddy. She used to write me, but her messages have been getting farther apart. I think she’s getting sicker.” Ket let out a puff of smoke. “Point is, I needed the money, and flying is all I know. The private courier business ain’t what it used to be.”

“What’s your point, Ket?” My voice was so low, it was almost a whisper.

“I have never seen anything like the bullshit I’ve seen in the past few days in my whole life. Between, y’know, the Archons and all the rest of this shit, I’m starting to feel like Mar. I’m wondering what the hell I was doing with my time. There’s something out here that’s bigger than both of us. Bigger than this war. Something that threatens to drain the whole fucking galaxy of life. And it’s right on our doorstep. What kind of future do any of us have, if we don’t fight back? Gods, what a nightmare that would be.”

“Ket, do you see, now?” I said. “Do you see why I don’t want any sympathy from anyone? I am still intact. I still have all my fucking legs. My wounds are nothing by comparison.”

Ket turned towards me, shaking his head. “First off, that’s fucking grotesque, that you would use these people and their pain as a vehicle for your argument. If you want people to respect you, then don’t spout narcissistic, self-serving drivel like that in front of them. Secondly, your wounds aren’t nothing. In fact, you’re centimeters from breaking and you don’t even know it. It’s worse than I fucking thought.” The Zinsar poked his finger in my chest, hard, making me stumble and fall flat on my sore ass. “You get some fucking sense through that thick skull of yours, Storm, and you go get healthy.”

“Nuke?” We heard her long before we saw her, her voice echoing down the halls. “Nuke?! Nuke! Nuuuuuuke!”

Captain Garrida stamped down the hall, making a beeline right at me, looking no worse for wear after what she’d just lived through. She latched her claws around my throat and began to literally throttle me on the floor. “Nuke, nuke, nuke, nuke, nuke!”

“Bl—glrk—Bellweth—hrk.”

The Captain’s eyes were wild and threatening. “I am going to take a big steaming shit over all three of you. They will need hydraulic excavators to unearth you three little hooligans from my shit! After that, I’m gonna shit on you again, and then they’re gonna dig you out again, and that cycle is gonna continue until you resign yourselves to your fate, give up on life, and subsequently drown in my shit!”

“And I thought my boss was tetchy,” Ket said. “Geez, Storm. You sure know how to pick ‘em.”

Garrida gave Ket the side-eye for a moment before returning her full, baleful attention to me. “You lunatics nuked a fucking Confederate formation without authorization. And to top it off, as if paying a fucking dummykin for info wasn’t bad enough, now, you’ve brought actual imps into my base, you numbskull! Weee-ooo, here comes the shit truck with a great big smelly load of my shit! The gear lever is in reverse, the back-up lights are blinking, the bed is being raised, and the shit is sloshing, sloshing over your head! Give me one reason why I shouldn’t bury you!”

“Why—does it have sirens?” I coughed out.

“Because anyone with any sense will get out of its fucking way or get shit on, that’s why!” Garrida let go of me. “Do you realize how much heat you, Bell, and Sierra just brought down on our heads? Do you? Because the entire fucking Fifth Fleet is rolling in, and they’re bringing Behemoths! Big fucking erect Behemoths, Storm! You’re gonna go out there in your little tiny scout Charger, barely the size of one of their toes, and they’re gonna fuckin’ fuck you so hard you’ll be begging to have your pussy stapled shut just to escape the pain of being constantly fucked!”

Ket’s eyes widened. “Oh hell.”

I couldn’t take it anymore. I couldn’t take Garrida’s abuse. Not after what happened to me. I snapped. “Captain, I’m a sick mare. My implant’s failed. I had a fucking heart attack from being nearly fucking electrocuted. My legs are all swollen up from electrolyte imbalance. I had a big fucking chunk of shrapnel take out my ribs, I took a tumble when the Skimmer crashed and was knocked out, I dislocated one of my forelegs, I was beaten and choked, and then, I was ‘fucking fucked’, by something out of your worst nightmares, sir! On top of all that, I had the pleasure of finding myself caught in the blast radius of a thermonuclear fucking warhead. I have had a bad fucking week!”

Ket grunted with disapproval at the scene. “This is another reason why you guys lost. Ya treat your bloody finest heroes like fuckin’ criminals. You hate war. We fuckin’ love it. We’re always itchin’ for a fight. If Storm had the sense to be born a cleomanni, she’d make fuckin’ Colonel fast enough to make your head spin. Instead, she got assaulted for her trouble, trying to keep us all from getting caught and killed by the Vargr.”

The Captain glanced over at him, the gears turning in her head. “You don’t mean—did they actually—”

Ket nodded. “Yes, I do, and yes, they did.”

Garrida stood up, her brow knitting as she gazed down at me with those sad, apologetic eyes that I couldn’t bear to see. “I—oh. Shit. Shit, shit, shit! Are you okay, Sergeant?”

I was crying. It was messy. Snot was involved. “No, sir. No, I’m not. I’m not okay. Nothing is okay!” I began having a panic attack. I tried holding it off. Tried keeping it together. It was no use. The shot of adrenaline made my hooves shake. I hyperventilated, reaching out and hugging Garrida’s leg tightly. “Oh Celestia, I don’t wanna die! I don’t wanna die! Don’t let them take my fucking soul! Help me! Help me! Help!” I screamed. I screamed my lungs out. I screamed like I was being killed. Over, and over, and over again. Then, just as quick, like a rubber band snapping in my head and releasing all the tension all at once, the adrenaline left, and in its place came a mixture of embarrassment and shame at having openly lost control in front of the Captain. “Oh no. Oh no. You—you didn’t see that, sir. Please tell me you didn’t just see that.”

“I did,” Captain Garrida said. “Storm, you’re in the right place. Report yourself to medical immediately. That is a direct order. If you want to serve your country, you will do as I say.” Garrida hunkered down and rested her talons on my shoulder. “We’re under a lot of pressure. All of us. There is no shame in admitting you’re broken, because damn if this war isn’t breaking us left and right. You need help to piece yourself back together again, Sergeant, and you need it not tomorrow, or a week from now, but right this instant.”

“I need—I need to fight,” I said. “It’s all I have left!”

“No, Sergeant. Your fight is over, for the time being. I am removing you from the active roster until you’re declared fit for duty. After that, I will evaluate you personally, and if your condition is not to my satisfaction, you’re going back to medical. As many times as it takes.”

“Don’t,” I whimpered. “Don’t take my battlefield from me. It’s the only place where I’m whole. It’s the only place in my life where I have any power at all. I couldn’t keep my family from falling apart. I couldn’t hold down a job in civilian life that was worth a shit. I need this. I need to fight. I’m a fucking mutant, sir! I’m a fucking carnivore! I love the smell! I love the smell of cooked flesh! I love the way they smell when I fucking cook them alive in their machines! I was never a fucking pony, and that’s why my daddy hated me! He could see it! He could see I had sharp teeth! He could see my claws dripping red! I’m a killer! I send people to fucking hell, and I love it! I love it!”

As I writhed on the floor and cackled like a maniac, the Stormtroopers shared some uneasy looks, their expressions only half-readable under their reflective visors. Captain Garrida pinched the bridge of her beak. “Aw, crap. Not another one.” She looked up at Ketros. “This inevitably happens when a pony fights long enough. ECAD. It happens quick. They’re good fighters, at first. But then, it starts to sink in, how everything that they’re doing is against their fundamental nature as herbivores. Then, they crack. They crack way more frequently than us predators. Statistically speaking, they’re over three hundred percent more likely to just up and lose it. I thought the Sergeant here was one of the stronger ones, but it seems she’s reached her limit.”

“I love it!” I screamed and thrashed as the medics rushed in and held me down. One of them was already bleeding air from a syringe. “I’m not a fucking grass-chomper! I’m a meat-eater like you! I fucking love it! I love killing! I’m gonna kill you, too, seneschal! You have no idea what you signed up for, Seneschal Arka-Povis! I’m gonna turn you into a wet stain on the pavement! I’m gonna—I—”

The needle pierced my skin. The sedative poured inside.

// … // … // … // … // … //

My eyelids were heavy as they opened, my eyes a pair of lead spheres rotating in my head like gun turrets. I was lying on my back, wearing a hospital gown. I tried raising a limb, only to find it bound to the bed by heavy straps. I was catheterized. Again. My blood was flowing out of me and into a monolithic machine in the corner, and then right back in.

Instead of using a central line, they ran the tubes right into the access ports in my back. The implant had my blood supply plumbed into it, like an actual pair of kidneys. That meant that it could be used to tap off my blood either into sample vials or an external dialysis machine, in case the one inside me failed. Various kinds of IV drugs could also be introduced directly into the ports, if necessary.

The heart monitors emitted a steady beep. Proof I was still alive. I hated it. I hated how medicalized my life had become.

I smirked, smug as hell. They knew I was right. They knew what I was. I was nothing more and nothing less than what they’d made me into. A monster. All I had to do to make them scared of me was to shamelessly admit it.

Gauze Patch was the first to speak, sighing as she flipped through the sheets on the clipboard. “Patient is female, age twenty-seven. Multiple injuries. Contusion to the orbit of the eye, with mild swelling. Minor contusions all over. Two fractured ribs with major penetrating trauma as the apparent cause. Notable edema in the legs secondary to kidney failure. Toxicology report came back with traces of opioids, but they were apparently taken hours and hours ago and haven’t cleared out due to poor renal function. Subject has prosthetic kidneys, of course, but the implant has failed and will need repacking. Her blood pressure, O2, and heart rhythm all look good. She’s stable, but the swelling is very concerning. We have her on dialysis right now.”

I heard Argent’s voice, next. “Why the fuck has the Sergeant been restrained?”

“We have reports back from debrief that she suffered some unspecified sexual trauma. She had a severe mental episode when confronted by a superior, and we had to sedate her. The restraints are there because we think she’s at risk of self-harm, but she hasn’t been evaluated, yet. She has so many injuries, there’s no way to tell which one precipitated the mental breakdown, but her acute renal failure is the most likely candidate.”

“Right. Kidney failure and toxin buildup is associated with the onset of severe depression, anxiety, mental confusion, and so on. Not to mention the recent history of sexual assault. Oh, Celestia. Sergeant, you poor thing.”

Ketros was sitting across from me, reading a magazine. “Can’t you two see she’s awake and looking right at us? Crack easily, my ass. That griff was wrong. What ponies lack in the head, they more than make up for in the body. Look at her. She’s like a fuckin’ cartoon character. Any cleomanni I know would be fuckin’ dead three times over from all that. She’s not even in shock. She has good fucking vitals and looks like she’s ready to get right up and go. Geez, you ponies are some scary fuckers.”

“What the fuck is that asshole doing in my infirmary?” Argent swore. “Get the fuck out, imp freak!” After Ketros tossed the magazine on the end table and stormed out, Argent continued her spiel. “My wife was a photojournalist. She didn’t let the war get her down. She said there were so many beautiful places in the galaxy, and she wanted to see them all. She lived out in a prefab colony of nine hundred ponies, way out on the frontier. They found her body mowed down in a fucking trench! I don’t have to suffer the presence of one of those monsters! Not in the only place where I feel safe!”

Oh great, I wondered. Is my doc cracking, too? I kinda need her.

“He’s good,” I said, my voice thin and raspy. “He’s one of the good ones.”

Argent Tincture shook her head. “There is no such thing as a good cleomanni, Sergeant. They all deserve to be shot.”

“Not all of them,” I said. “Some of them are good. I want some of them to be good. If they weren’t, I’d have to kill ‘em all. I don’t want to have to do that, Argent.”

“Did he rape you?”

I winced. “No! No, not him.”

“Then who? Nopony will cough up with even a vague description of the attacker! I want to know that me and my other patients are safe in here. I have a responsibility to them, too!”

“None of us are safe.” I looked both of them in the eye. “None of us ever were.”

Argent and Gauze shared a look of unease.

“What is in this?” Argent Tincture lifted the pill bottle that Cicatrice had given me.

“I need that.” I said. “The Magister gave me those and I am taking them with his permission. Go see him if you don’t believe me.”

“Are these opioids? Have you been abusing them?”

“No. They’re not. It’s a gene snipper and nanomachine colony pill in one.”

Argent’s eyes widened. “What for?”

I let out a low chuckle that sounded crazy even to my ears. “To keep me from turning into a vessel for a demon.”

“O—kay,” Gauze Patch said. “I think I’m going to call it a fucking night.”

Gauze grabbed her long, white coat, threw it over her withers, and stepped out of the lab, slamming the door behind her.

Argent was obsessed. She didn’t stop prying. She practically demanded to take a sample of my blood and swab my nethers. At first, I protested, but she was so insistent that after a while, I relented. She was obsessed. Driven to uncover the truth. I had never seen her like this before. I watched as the vials went through the centrifuge, the machine humming away as each part of my blood was separated. After spending a few more hours with slides of my tissues under a microscope, the good doctor came to her conclusions, and they weren’t particularly rosy ones.

The increasingly paranoid Argent Tincture came up to my bedside, staring down at me, her eyes wide with fear. “What in the hell are you?”

“Come on, Doc. That’s no way to do me. You know what I am. I’m a fighter. I’ll get through this. I need to get through this.”

“Sergeant, your nanomachine colony is of no design that I recognize. I’ve identified various kinds of large, unknown structures that float freely through every drop of your blood. Are you a fucking Con-fed mole? Are these some kind of transmitter? That’s not even getting into your genome. When I sequenced it, I found evidence of non-pony genetic material. So, I’ll say it again. What the fuck are you?”

“I’m a pony,” I said, my brow knitted. “Just a pony, ma’am. It’s all I ever was.”

“What is this?” Argent held up a vial with a tiny quantity of black ooze in it. “I put it under all our instruments, and you know what? This is the most fucked-up thing I’ve ever seen in all my years in the medical profession! It’s like something a mad scientist would make. Nothing like this could have evolved by accident. It has to be a product of synthetic biology. This was inside you, Sergeant. What—what in the hell is going on, here? Why can’t I get a straight answer from anyone?”

I slowly shook my head, grimacing, biting my lip hard enough to draw blood. “I don’t know. I don’t fucking know! I don’t know anything! I was hurt, Argent. I was hurt real bad. And now, you’re hurting me, too. Why—does everyone—” I let out a sob. “Just—just talk to Cicatrice. He’ll explain everything. I’m sick, and I need to follow certain complicated procedures that he specifically prescribed for me, okay? Now, can you get me out of these damned restraints? I’m not going anywhere. I’m not gonna hurt myself. I’m not crazy. I’m just sad. I’m very fucking sad, okay?”

“Sergeant, I—”

“I’ve tried keeping it together for so long, and for what? I keep getting fucking hurt, and it’s my own stupid fault! I’m a fucking idiot!”

“No, Sergeant, you’re not an id—”

“Why didn’t I run?” I interrupted her. “I should’ve fucking run. I should’ve kept running until I ran out of land. Then, I should’ve swam. I should’ve—I shoulda—” I started hyperventilating. The faux-leather cuffs encircling my legs and my barrel started feeling like the iron grip of the Archon’s tentacles wrapping around my body. Touching me. Too close. Too much. I couldn’t. I couldn’t take it. “Get—get these fucking things off of me!”

Argent slowly undid the straps, her eyes watery and her lips trembling. “I’m sorry, Sergeant. It was for your own protection. We had no idea what you were going to do, or if you were a suicide risk or what.”

After I was freed, I leaned up and worked my hooves over the sore spots where the tight bands dug into my flesh. “Argent, what’s it going to take to repair my auto-dialysis implant so I can get this fucking hose unhooked from my back and get back to the fight?”

“Well, we’re going to have to cut a flap of your skin, swap out the components in-situ, and then stitch it back. I’ve never actually done this before, so I don’t know exactly what it will entail, only that there might be some unsightly tissue damage from it. The skin might end up being unsalvageable, in which case, we’re going to have to put in the big external titanium cover plate.”

“What will that look like?”

“Your back will have a metal rectangle on it above where your kidneys are, in the loin area, about twenty centimeters across, roughly where the fluid access ports are located.”

I shrugged. “Do it. If this happens again, I’d rather you have easy access instead of having to go through skin.”

“Okay. I’m gonna have to give you a few shots for this one. You good?” Argent put a reassuring hoof on my shoulder.

“Yeah. Let’s do it.”

“Gonna need your back for this one, Sergeant.”

I nodded and lay face-down in the bed, wincing as the needle went in and lidocaine was injected around the perimeter of the surgical site. I could hear the cutting. The peeling. The whine of an electric screwdriver. I could feel the shuffling of the components in my back as Argent carefully extracted the core of the unit. The bloody hunk of titanium was set aside on a tray, and another core, freshly unpacked, was inserted in its place.

After that was done, she installed the hinged cover plate, tossing the scraps of my flesh in the medical waste bin. The unicorn gave me a mirror with her silvery levitation magic, and I took it in my own orange-hued glow. Just as described, there was a slightly curved rectangular cover plate in my back, right in the lumbar region. I flipped it open. The access ports were right underneath, ready to be hooked into a next-generation Charger’s waste evacuation system. I shook my head, sighing and flicking it shut.

“Okay,” Argent said. “Time for the function test. Hold still for a minute.”

Argent ran a data cable to the port in the back of my neck, checking the diagnostic readouts as she initialized the replacement core. I felt a whirring sensation in my lower back. The silver unicorn smiled.

“It works. Perfect. Okay, now, about this great big hole in your barrel. What the hell caused that?”

“Chunk of shrapnel,” I said. “Fuckin’ Con-fed motherfuckers blew up a Roc right next to me.”

“You guys used Hemogel to close it up? Yeah, that’s going to have to come out and it’s going to need stitches. Lots of stitches.”

I hissed in pain as Argent applied the dissolving agent to the Hemogel patch and it liquefied and ran out into a drip tray she’d propped under my side.

“Fuck,” Argent said. “This has been in way, way too long. It’s gonna take ages to heal up right. For future reference, if you have to plug a wound like this, for fuck’s sake, get it stitched the same day, if you can.”

Out came the lidocaine needle again, around the perimeter of the area she was about to suture shut. She carefully debrided the dead tissues in the wound and cleaned it out, making it weep blood. A suture needle like a fishhook went under my skin, and then crisscrossed to the other side, the wound slowly pulling shut. I needed fourteen fucking stitches to close it up completely.

“Fracture wasn’t so bad.” Argent waved a terahertz wand over the injury to inspect the bones. “Barely even cracked. Bed rest, six weeks. No strenuous activity. No falling on them and re-injuring them. It should heal on its own.”

Six weeks. I slowly shook my head. “Fuck. Things have been going to shit lately. Do we even have six weeks to burn?”

“In all honesty, Sergeant, no. We don’t. I hear things are pretty bad out there.”

“How many ponies came back from Pur Sang? Did the recovery teams make it out alright?”

“I don’t know very much about it,” Argent said. “I heard they made it out okay. In the debrief meeting, they said something about a nuclear explosion?”

“Actually, two nukes,” I said. “One was because of Bellwether, Sierra and I, and an even bigger one scuttled the whole damn base. Lots of fireworks.”

“That’s no good. That’ll draw more Confederate attention.”

“Yeah, Captain Garrida was kind of upset about our nuke. We took out a big Confederate force with it. Probably the only reason why the Captain and the recovery teams are still alive. You know, did I—did I ever tell you about what I saw in Dodge?”

“No, Sergeant, I don’t think you did.”

“They were selling ponies, Argent. They were selling ponies into slavery. I was afraid that was going to happen to me. I think that was part of why I went along with Bell’s plan so easily without trying to talk him out of it.”

Argent sneered. “Those mangy mongrels. They weren’t—they weren’t selling mares to fuck us, were they?”

I took in a deep breath, unsure of how to break it to her. “That’s exactly what they were doing. And worse. Much worse.”

“This galaxy doesn’t know how to treat mares,” Argent said. “Between that stupid heat suppressor bullshit that I was forced to give to my patients and the things our enemies do to us in captivity, it’s enough to make me so mad, I could scream. Fucking altrenogest. Who the fuck came up with that idea? I bet you a hundred bits they didn’t have a uterus.”

I giggled a bit. “Yeah, well, I don’t mind it. Better than being horny all the time.”

“You know, Storm, some days, just looking at stallions makes me sick. If they bring one in, sometimes, I’ll have Gauze take over for me, because I just can’t handle it. I know my patients aren’t exactly complicit in any of this other shit, but for fuck’s sake. I see so many mares coming through my office who’ve been hurt the way you have, it’s disgusting. I’m sick of feeling like this. I’m sick of feeling like my gender is painting a great big bullseye on my ass, you know? I don’t want to be preyed upon because of that. I’m sure you know what I’m talking about.”

“Yeah.” I sniffled softly. “I do.”

Argent nodded. “It’s not normal. Mares are supposed to lead. We’re supposed to be treated with honor and respect. Whenever you let males rule, it always leads to problems. If the Confederacy let their women take a turn at the wheel, this war would’ve been over long ago, and we could’ve had time to heal, together. Instead, it’s just, attack, attack, attack. Psychotic male aggression everywhere. Girls being treated as something to be abused and consumed. It’s repulsive!”

“It totally is. I agree.”

It was a noncommittal response. I wasn’t exactly down with her dislike of dudes, but her whole thesis wasn’t far off the mark. What we were experiencing was systemic. It wasn’t just a few isolated incidents. It was a concerted campaign of deliberate demoralization. Our enemies’ blatant sexism was a weapon they wielded against mare and stallion alike; towards our males, for not being able to protect us from grievous harm, and towards us, for not being able to protect ourselves.

The bastards couldn’t fight us when we were at our best. They were too cowardly. They had to soften us up by assaulting our collective psyche, first. Attack a people’s values, break their cohesion, sow confusion and hopelessness, and any military campaign against them would be certain to succeed.

In ponies, the mind was the weak link. Breaking our bodies when we were hearty and hale and ready for the fight was a tall order. Forcing us to wallow in despair and then crushing us when our spirits had already been broken was much, much easier. This wasn’t just a war with strictly material consequences. This was a war for our actual souls. Sanity was just another front. Another battlefield.

I felt sorry for Mar and Ket. They had no idea how cruel their species had been to us. They weren’t actively malicious. They were oblivious. One does not normally endeavor to know the names and desires of every ant they ever stepped on, and until recently, that was what we were to them. Insects. It was only when they noticed our personhood that the full extent of their misdeeds stood out to them in sharp relief.

I had discovered Equestria’s ultimate weapon against the Confederacy. Cognitive dissonance.

Argent Tincture let out a heavy, wearied sigh. “Well, Sergeant. Looks like Corporal Shooting Star and her partners in crime have another checkmark to add to the Rape Wall.”

I blinked a few times, my perturbation evident on my face. “The fucking what?”

// … // … // … // … // … //

I stood before the chalk graffiti in complete shock. In the hall to Weathervane’s office, Corporal Shooting Star had elected to write down the names of every mare on the base who was involved in a direct combat role, in various different colors of sidewalk chalk. Cloverleaf’s name was on there. So was mine. So were dozens of others. Each checkmark next to a name indicated the number of times that particular individual had suffered some form of sexual assault at the enemy’s grubby mitts.

My jaw hung agape. There were an alarming number of marks. Dozens of them. There was one right next to my name, too. Word was already spreading. If I didn’t strangle these rumors in the crib, soon, everyone on the fucking base would know.

I glanced over at where Shooting Star sat in a circle with a few other mares. They had piles of bits on the floor. “I bet a hundred bits Cherry Sundae is the next one to see Weathervane,” one mare said. “She’s completely losing her grip on reality. Forgetting basic stuff. I saw her ask for her glasses once when they were right on her fucking head.”

I was completely speechless. A fucking betting pool? Are you fucking kidding me? This was sickening. One way or another, it had to stop.

“You pieces of shit.” I marched right up to Shooting Star and put my hoof on the fiery-looking unicorn’s chest. “You especially, you dumb motherfucker. Do you have a walnut between your fucking ears? Do you think this is funny? You think you have a right to profit off of other ponies’ misery, is that it?”

The four of them stood at attention immediately. “Ma’am!”

I waved my hoof at them. “At ease. I want an explanation, and right the fuck now.”

One of the grunts sighed, shaking her head. “Looks like the pilot here doesn’t know how all this works.”

Shooting Star nodded. “Number one, it’s not for personal gain, it’s to raise awareness about a major problem. Namely, the mental health issues on base and the shit that keeps happening to us on patrols and raids. Number two, the winner of the pool has to buy a great big care package for the last one who got a checkmark. And by care package, I mean liquor and sweets and other good, expensive shit. You’re next in line, Sarge. We were going to surprise you. Three, you don’t actually have to make a bet. You can always just make a donation instead. We just like distracting ourselves with this shit. It’s how we cope. Notice something? My name’s on there, too. So are these other fine ladies.”

I looked over at the chalk graffiti. Sure enough. Shooting Star’s name was there and had a check next to it. Two out of the three others who were present did, as well; Holly Thorn did, Raspberry Punch did, but Periwinkle didn’t. The whole thing was bookended with two messages of protest that I hadn’t noticed before. How many will it take? and When will our suffering be enough?

Some joker had done a chalk drawing of a damarkind with a huge erection, leaning his head back and howling, with a caption underneath. I have a problem only mares can help me with. I get hard, all the time, and then, I get extremely entitled.

I was gripped by remorse. I’d misunderstood their intent and been a little harsh on them. What they were doing still didn’t sit right with me, however.

“You?” I said, raising an eyebrow at Shooting Star. “But you’re one of the toughest mares I know!”

Shooting Star grinned, but her eyes weren’t smiling along with her. “It was a couple years ago. My whole fucking squad, KIA. One little mare pissing herself, covered in her friends’ blood and fumbling with her caster, surrounded by bodies. What do you think the dummykins did? All that meat, lying right there. Soft, warm, tasty meat. Good to fuck, good to eat. Shit, they were thorough. I don’t think they left a single part of me un-fucked. That’s the thing with those horny bastards. If they run out of holes, they’ll start fucking the pits of your elbows and your stifles, too. Some mares call it the Crush, because it feels like you’re in a trash compactor. Why do you think I like cuttin’ their fucking heads off so much?”

“How are you still alive?” I said.

“The Captain and Thumper, how else?” Raspberry laughed. “That’s why they call it the Dork Destroyer, you know. Some call it the Dinner Bell because it’s interrupted a bunch of damarkinds’ dinners. I think she’s stopped like five actual EFKs so far with that Grover of hers. Geez, poor Garrida. She’s seen a lot of shit through her scope.”

“So, was it dingoes for you, too, Sarge?” Holly said. “It usually is. That’s why the Confederacy keeps ‘em around like living minefields, you know. It’s because they know we’re too scared of ‘em to just rush their positions. Damarkinds don’t give a fuck if they’re still under fire. They’ll just grab you, whip their dick out, and fuck you on the spot. They’re fuckin’ crazy. I think like a good four-fifths of the marks on the wall are because of dimbulbs. The remaining one-fifth is an even split between mares who got turned into brood sacs for Karks and ones who got dicked by a bored imp with a key to their holding cell. So, which was it? Well, obviously you didn’t get an IVF wand in the puss, or you would’ve been gone longer. So, you’re not a Karkbelly. Imps or dingoes?”

This was beyond messed up. I wasn’t in the mood for their flippant attitude. Not when I was a patchwork of skin and bone being held together with cellophane tape. I didn’t even know what to say to them. I never had to deal with anything like this before. I had no idea how one could hold a meaningful conversation with a group of ponies so deeply damaged that they’d deliberately put our shared pain on display for all to see, wearing it as a gruesome trophy.

This just wasn’t right. Being victimized in such a fundamental way was surreal enough without everypony around me going nuts and acting out like this. It was as if everything in my environment had been transformed by some powerful and profoundly evil magic.

The familiar had become uncanny. The innocuous, hostile. The private, public.

“I—” I briefly held my tongue. What should I tell them? A three-meter-high octopus? They’d think I was fucking with them. “It was neither. I’m not at liberty to say what it was, either.”

“Ooo!” the four of them rang out in a chorus.

“Spooky classified rapist,” Holly Thorn said. “Jackpot!”

Raspberry held her hooves up as if framing a picture. “If you look closely at this grainy photo, you will see that what appears to be a twenty-dicked alien fuck machine is actually a mylar weather balloon.”

Periwinkle laughed. “You will be visited by the tuxedo-wearing BASKAF agent of good fortune, but only if you repost this meme on the datasphere.”

Shooting Star pantomimed some weird alien creature with eyestalks sprouting from the top of its head, making a wah-wah-wah-wah sound.

“This is one hell of a weird fucking way to cope,” I said. “You gals aren’t right in the head.”

“No! You don’t say?” Shooting Star was merciless with the bitter sarcasm. “We drew this shit outside Weathervane’s office to remind her daily of how fucking useless she is. You’re gonna go in for therapy, too, aren’t you? That’s because you’re like me. You’re a predator. A raw, cold-blooded killer. A cut above the rest of the herd. That shit scares them, so that’s why they’re gonna force you to go in and get evaluated and treated, when there’s nothing fucking wrong with you except for the fact that you’ve pierced the fucking veil and realized that you have to be one tough cookie if you wanna live in hell’s flaming, hemorrhoidal asshole.”

“Since when have we not?” I said.

“I know what you’re thinking, ma’am,” Thorn said. “What mare in her right mind would do this? Well, nopony here has been in their right mind for years. We’ve all basically been on endless deployment for-fucking-ever, with our only downtime being when we’re in recovery from our injuries.”

I pointed my hoof at the wall with the chalk marks. “That’s irrelevant. This is fucking unacceptable! If this is what passes for normal behavior around here, then we are so far from the mainstream of society at this point, the average civvie would find all of us terminally fucking deranged!”

“Right, so, here’s what’s gonna happen,” Shooting Star muttered. “Weathervane is gonna give you a bottle full of SSRIs and send you on your merry way, just like she did for all the rest of us. That doesn’t get to the root of the problem. The problem is, we’re being sent in with no fucking armor and no air support and we’re getting overrun. You know the rest, Sarge.”

“So, you’re bullying our base’s only therapist into doing her job marginally better, when she isn’t even the cause of the problem?” I said.

“She doesn’t fucking care!” Shooting Star yelled. “She’s not the one who has to go out there and fight those fucking assholes! She gets to sit around here all day, behind several feet of concrete, safe and un-fucked! You’re a pilot, Sarge. You don’t experience the same shit that we do. You think we’re fucked in the head? You have no idea, ma’am. Did you know, I once had to rip an imp’s neck out with my teeth? He hit the power supply on my caster and I couldn’t get a shot off ‘cause the damn thing malfunctioned and refused to fire. I tackled him, I latched my chompers around his fucking throat, I bit down, and then I ripped his fucking carotid artery right out of his fucking neck.”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah. I was green as shit and I thought he was gonna die quick from that. He kept bleeding all over the place and struggling and screaming and shit, so then, I did a side choke on him while both my forelegs were getting splashed with rivers of fucking blood. I kept squeezing harder and harder like a fucking anaconda until he passed the fuck out and never got back up. Every single one of us has had to do fucked up shit like that, just to survive. With all due respect, ma’am, what have you done that compares?”

“Firstly, when I said seriously, I didn’t mean your stupid little anecdote, Corporal,” I said. “I was asking you if you seriously just acted all bitter and resentful that Weathervane isn’t in the shit with us, getting hurt the way we have, because that’s fucking scummy as fuck. Second, I had to pull a knife out of my dead sister’s chest and use it to kill five fucking damarkinds. Well, actually, that’s embellished a bit. I killed the first one with the knife, the next three with levitation, and the last one technically survived, but after I beat his eye out of its socket and broke all his fingers, he probably wishes he was dead.”

The four mares got a little quiet after that, sharing looks of unease.

“You loved your sis very much, didn’t ya’?” Shooting Star said.

“Yeah. I did. Still do.”

“Damn, Sarge. Damn.”

“How long has this chalk been up?”

“About a week. We had a little booklet we used to use, before that.”

“And why hasn’t the Captain had it taken down?”

“Because she wasn’t on base.”

“She didn’t say anything when she got back?”

“She’s been too busy. I don’t think she even noticed.”

“Well then, wipe that fucking crap off before she sees it and takes a great big shit on all of us, Corporal,” I said, pointing at the wall. “It’s not a good idea to have something like this in a public location on base. It’s not respectful to your sisters-in-arms, either. If you wanna give somepony some booze and sugar to drown their sorrows and stress-eat the pain away, keep it on the down-low. If you want our tactics and doctrine to change to try and prevent shit like this from happening in the future, bring it to your squad’s NCO and have him or her pass it on to the Captain. I know we could use another therapist on base, but trying to shame Weathervane into doing her job? With as overworked as she is? Totally unacceptable.”

Holly stood, her body tense and angry. “But, ma’am, we all agreed to do this. We’re all hurting, and we’re not gonna take this shit anymore! We’re trying to be your advocates, too! You deserved better. I deserved better. We all deserved better than this!”

I walked up and got in her face. “You fucking what, Private?”

The Corporal rose to her hooves. “No, Thorn. The Sergeant’s right. This was a waste of our fucking time.” It was clear she was displeased, but she nodded and did as ordered anyway. “We’ll get it cleaned up right away, ma’am.”

While I supervised them, the four of them dismantled their little art installation with the help of some spray bottles and scrub brushes, gathered up their money, and made their way back to the barracks. Shooting Star cast a glance over her shoulder at me, her gaze hollow. When she and the others rounded the end of the hall and disappeared from sight, I pounded my hoof on the chalk-smeared wall in anger.

“Fuck,” I whispered. “We’re all going fucking nuts in here. Fuck!”

I needed her. I needed the Corporal’s skills, her glaring character flaws notwithstanding. What I didn’t need was to make an enemy out of a prospective candidate for my recon squad.

// … // … // … // … // … //

I slowly shook my head as I looked over the materials the recovery teams had brought back. After I’d given Garrida my full report on what had occurred during the mission, she told me to go have a look in the hangar for a little surprise.

Laid out in one corner, on a blue tarp, was all of my gear. My saddlebags and armor. My Orbit, Lucky. Even the medal-beacons that Wraithwood had given us. Also present were Mardissa’s Eliminator, which was inexplicably damaged beyond recognition, the ruined and tattered remnants of her muscle suit, and the various Confederate weapons, rations, and first aid supplies we’d gathered. The flechette guns and their ammo were laid out flat in neat rows, unlike the pile we’d tossed together in the wreck of the Vulture.

While the Dragoons and Stormtroopers lured the enemy away, the recovery teams had gone back and swept the Vulture crash site before the scuttling charge took out Pur Sang, even when there were confirmed Vargr contacts in the area. There was only one conclusion that could be drawn from this; those ponies had some great big brass balls.

I sighed and began gathering up my stuff, but I was interrupted by one of the actual recovery team members. “Hold on, there, Sergeant!”

The light pink pegasus stallion strode up to me and grabbed my saddlebags right off of my back and set them back down. “That stuff is part of the investigation. It’s all slightly radioactive and needs to be decontaminated.”

I couldn’t exactly meet his eyes. I was ashamed I’d left my equipment behind and they’d had to risk their lives to retrieve it, but if we’d stayed around a second longer, we would’ve all died.

“Sergeant Major Flamingo Flair.” We shook hooves. “We spoke, a few days back. Me, Bo, and Cross were goofing off on comms, remember? Salvage jobs can get boring as fuck, but the work is absolutely necessary, as I’m sure you can appreciate.” The stallion’s brow knitted. “I heard about you, Storm. I’m sorry that happened to you. You’re a good fighter. Shit sucks around here. You ladies have it rough, and I mean that. Honestly.”

“See, this is what I was afraid of,” I said. “This is exactly what I was dreading before I even got back to base, sir. Everyone feeling sorry for me. Everyone being nice. I can’t fucking handle it. I’d rather we just picked on each other as usual. Routine is nice. This shit? This sympathy shit? It’s just too fucking weird.”

“I hear you. Back to business, eh? I like that attitude. You know, we got a really nice haul this time. The techs are telling me they almost have enough shit to fix your Mirage outright. Just need a few more components. They also had some other ideas you might find interesting. We keep finding partial overhaul kits for full-size Chargers, but for some missions, even a Courser is too conspicuous. I’m not sure about all the details. You’d have to ask Crookneck Squa—”

The canary-yellow, elderly engineer popped his severely caffeinated head over the top of a tool board, fixing his bloodshot eyes on us. “You rang?”

Both of us jumped nearly a meter straight up.

“Fuck!” Flamingo shouted.

“What have I told people about fucking startling me like that?” I said.

“Palfreys!” Crookneck leaped over the top of the tool board and landed on the workbench, rolling off onto the floor with surprising grace for his age. He presented a big printout to us, waving his hoof over the plans to a new type of Charger. “Hybrid biped-quadruped units. About the size of a Confederate Battlesuit, like a Rak. They’ve been in the planning phases for years, but we never got around to actually producing any functioning prototypes. They’re simpler and easier to maintain than a full-size Charger. We can build them from scratch if we’ve got the right stuff.”

I glanced over the plans, my lips slowly drawing into a smile. It was like a Battlesuit. No more than about three or four meters in height. Compact and deadly, fitted with medium beamcasters and Tatzlwurm missile launchers, with the ability to mount additional weapons like thirty-millimeter autocannons and light mortars on the shoulders for fire support purposes.

One drawing showed off a type of rotary weapons carriage that allowed it to swap shoulder weapons on the go. Another one featured salvaged contragrav harnesses and pyrojets for vertical hops. It could both run on all four legs like a pony and rear up on its hind legs like a biped to fire its weapons over obstacles and vault over buildings.

“This is fantastic!” I said. “I mean, for urban combat, in tight quarters, this would really give the dingoes something to think about.”

“That was exactly what I was thinking when I came up with the idea,” Crookneck said. “Those mercenaries think neuterized armor will protect them? Let’s see how they like a few automatic cannon rounds to the chest!”

I hoofbumped the old stallion. “Build it, dude!”

As Crookneck and Flamingo Flair ambled off and started chatting, my smile melted from my face. The whole affair seemed so superficial. At one time, it would’ve brought me joy to think of our latest and greatest armaments and their combat potential, but now, my jubilation felt hollow. There was a little voice in my head. Not the Archons, thank goodness, but my own subconscious. That voice was mocking me.

Yeah, that’s it. Pick the right metal penis. Fuck the enemy back with it. That’s what makes the world go ‘round. You’ve been hurt. You’ve been damaged. Now, the only thing that can make you feel better and regain confidence in yourself is to damage someone else in their turn.

I looked over my shoulder at the mountain of wooden crates. Automatic cannons. Heavy beamcasters. Nerve gas missiles. This little penis ejaculates HE shells, and this bigger penis, over here, spits a big purple column of death, and that last penis is filled with poison. A great big poison dick for your enemies to suck. Does it even matter which one you pick? They’re all ready. Ready to fuck.

You’re not a pony. You’re a predator. Predators don’t just whine and lie back and get fucked like prey. Predators do the fucking.

I walked it off, electing not to think too hard on the matter. I stopped by the paint booth for a little custom job, pushing the white tarpaulin aside and explaining to the boys what I wanted. The material was roughed up to accept a coat of paint. Several of the Charger techs stood in a circle around me, hooting and cheering as one of our best painters stenciled out and airbrushed the letters in big block print on my titanium ass-hatch.

I grinned as I held up the mirror to see over my shoulder. “Acuat ia Ridislaet.”

Piss & Vinegar.

// … // … // … // … // … //

I sat in Weathervane’s dimly lit and homey little office, my hooves shaking as I recounted the events of the week before. I couldn’t tell her everything. Much of it was highly classified and involved the Vargr activity in and around Pur Sang Peak. I had to be vague. Weathervane idly twirled a pen in her wingtips and nodded, listening with rapt attention as I unloaded on her.

“Shortly after we made contact with Tiamat, the base’s Anima, everything went to shit,” I said. “Things had been looking good up until that point. We popped two enemy gunships on the way in. We bypassed the turrets without dying messily. It looked like we were doing fine. That was when the hostiles showed up.”

“The Confederacy?”

“No, not the Confederacy.” I shook my head, sighing with disappointment. “I’m not allowed to talk about who or what they were. Magister’s orders.”

“Can you share any general characteristics of this new enemy?”

“In a word, terrifying. When I was in contact with them, I feared for my life like I never had before. It wasn’t a fight. It was a struggle for survival. We were the prey caught in the spider’s web. All we had left was to squirm and beg.”

Weathervane sighed. “That sounds very traumatic.”

“That’s because it was. You see all those ponies torn to pieces out in the infirmary a couple weeks ago? That was all because of this new enemy and their gruesome weapons.”

Weathervane’s face warped into a mask of despair. “Celestia preserve us.”

“Anyway, after we secured the base, the Confederacy started rolling in with a sizable force, bigger than could be repelled by conventional means. Bellwether decided to use one of the salvaged nukes against them. The EMP knocked out the Skimmer’s control electronics and we crashed.”

“Good grief. You used a nuclear weapon?”

“Three hundred kilotons, yes. Wiped out thousands of Confederate troops in one go. Took out all their mechs and most of their tanks, with very few exceptions. Our guys mopped up the rest.”

“Do you feel responsible for this in any way?”

“Yes, of course. I helped cloak the damn thing so we could emplace it.”

“Well, there’s another thing that’s highly damaging to the psyche. What happened after that?”

“We went down. Lost the Skimmer. We were being pursued by a Vulture piloted by Lieutenant Armagais. Mardissa Granthis, the daughter of President Granthis, was onboard as well. They came in hard, too. Those two were the only survivors. Mardissa found us shortly after the crash. We fought, hoof-on-fist. It was some kind of honor thing for her, I guess. I beat her silly, twice. After that, we made up. It was fucking hilarious. She thought I looked like a nice body pillow, for fuck’s sake.”

“Oh wow. So that’s who that woman is? The president’s daughter is here? Now?”

“Yep, that’s her. The Demon-Breaker walks among us.” I waved my hooves in a circle like I was describing something spooky. “Weird, I know, right? Anyway, our little peace wasn’t to last. Because that’s when we were attacked. Again.”

“That new enemy?”

“Yeah. Them.”

“What did they do?”

“They found us. We hid in the wreck of the Vulture and they found us right away, right through my damn cloak!”

Weathervane leaned back. “So, that’s when you were—”

“No. It wasn’t the one who dragged me out. Ugly bastard he was. You see, they brought something with them. Something I am not allowed to talk about or describe in any detail. A monster.”

“Like something out of the old Everfree Forest back in ancient times, before the whole thing got bulldozed?”

I laughed derisively, more a snort than anything else. “If only it were so cute and cuddly. No, not like one of those.”

“Like something from Tartarus?”

“Something far, far more vile.” My legs were trembling with fear as I gripped the armrests of the easy chair with my fetlocks. “A creature of absolute darkness.”

“Oh. Oh dear.”

“I had never felt like that before. I had nothing to contextualize it with and no way to meaningfully resist what was happening to me. My mind and body were completely plundered. I was just a spectator to the violence that was done to me. I couldn’t do anything.”

“But—surely, you had some magic you could use to repel it?”

“I tried that. It only pissed it off. That was when—it—it—” I took a deep breath and let it out as a sob.

Weathervane reached out with her forelegs and gave me a reassuring hug, rubbing circles into my back. “You don’t have to say it, Sergeant.”

I didn’t have any verbal response to that. I was trying to take deep breaths and steady myself.

“What happened after?” Weathervane said.

“The Dragoons showed up and saved our asses, as usual. They drove those bastards off and evacuated us. One of them died in the rescue attempt. That thing killed her right in front of me. Ripped her in half.”

“It—ripped—” Weathervane was shaking in fright.

“Oh, right. It’s not every day we get a visit from something that casually rips Dragoons and their exosuits in half, do we?”

“No, it isn’t.” Weathervane shook her head. “That’s not normal. You were a hair’s breadth from death if that thing had you in its clutches.”

“I know.”

“What happened when you got back to base?”

“I gave Ket a little tour. Captain Garrida got on my ass over the nuke. I completely lost it. Started screaming weird shit about being a killer. A predator.”

“Ah, there it is,” Weathervane said.

“There’s what?”

“Sergeant, based on what you’ve told me, it sounds like you have a severe case of ECAD.”

“ECAD? The fuck is that?”

“Equestrian Combat Anxiety Disorder. It’s a form of species-specific social anxiety. Happens when ponies are in battle for too long. They start developing the delusion, or irrational fear, that they have become a predator and no longer have any place in society.”

“How is that a delusion?” I frowned. “I mean, isn’t it true? We’re not like the other successful species out there in the galaxy. We aren’t hunter-gatherers. We simply aren’t meant to kill, unless there’s something wrong with us. It’s not natural. If we do kill, doesn’t that make us hunters, like our enemies?”

“When was the last time you ate meat?” Weathervane smirked.

“Well, to my knowledge, basically never.”

“See?” Weathervane held out a hoof. “Herbivores can and do kill in self-defense. It’s perfectly normal. You’re not a carnivore, or an omnivore. You have nothing to worry about. You do have a place in society. A very important one, in fact.”

“Oh, great.” I scratched the back of my head idly with my hoof. “Well, what else should I know about it?”

“ECAD is often secondary to—or even a direct cause of—post-traumatic stress disorder, general anxiety disorder, and major depression, and in your case, it seems like you also have all of the above, in spades. This is not unique. It’s actually very, very common, sad to say. There are several other ponies on this base who have it, too.”

I suddenly had an image pop into my head of a mare growling as she sawed a damarkind’s head clean off his shoulders and then cast it at his compatriots just to intimidate them.

Why do you think I like cuttin’ their fucking heads off so much?

“Like Corporal Shooting Star?” I said.

“I can’t comment on my other patients, so I will neither confirm nor deny that. You have eyes, Sergeant. I’m sure you’ve seen some strange things around here. They don’t call it Crazy Horse for nothing.”

“So, is that all this is?” I said. “I’m sick? Well, what do I do to get well?”

“None of these conditions can be cured. They can only be managed. I’m gonna put you on a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor. Sertraline. A hundred milligrams, once a day. All it does is make sure you have more happy chemicals in your brain. Should sort these problems right out. Medication on its own isn’t very useful. You need cognitive behavioral therapy, as well. I know that if I give you a clean bill of health, then Captain Garrida is going to send you right back out into the fray, so you won’t always have access to me, and that’s a problem. I strongly suggest that you make regular visits to my office while you can.”

“You know, Garrida and the rest would be dead if it weren’t for what we did,” I said. “I feel like I’m being blamed for something that wasn’t even my fault. Bellwether ran the whole show and I just followed his lead, like I thought I was supposed to do. Sierra got hurt. I got hurt. And then, we come back, and we’re berated just for doing what was necessary. I’m sick of this shit.”

“That’s just how it is. The lower rungs see lots of things being done wrong that you can’t do or say anything about, except when you’re venting to a counselor. I can imagine how frustrating that must be.”

“Look,” I said. “I’m not used to this. Any of this. In the Army, there were procedures. There were rules. Almost everything seems to have been thrown out the window. Every rule that wasn’t tossed out is being applied inconsistently. It’s not fair. Even my own discipline has suffered greatly.”

“That’s a fairly popular sentiment around here, believe it or not. The thing is, this isn’t the military. We are not in the employ of any state. We are a rebel militia composed of a mixture of civilians and former military personnel. As such, we play it fast and loose with the rules. However, that does not extend to the careless use of WMDs. Bellwether should have known this. There are dire consequences for this sort of thing.”

“We did what we had to do,” I said. “Fuck, we got Salzaon’s own fucking daughter to defect to our side, at least. That has to count for something. I bet if he knew, he’d be shitting bricks.”

“If she went back to her own people, she’d be quarantined,” Weathervane said. “The standard protocol in the Confederacy is to assume that any defectors have been mind-controlled and to treat it as a medical issue. They lose all their rights and freedoms and are sectioned indefinitely. She has no negotiating power. She’s just another one of us, now. She’s not the only cleomanni to express an interest in helping the resistance, you know. I heard some of the Janissaries applied to join the ELF, about a year back. Never heard about how that went. The gang frowns heavily on supporters of loyalists on both sides. They’re not just Confederate deserters, you know. Many of them are ponies who think the Empire brought all this on ourselves, because we didn’t sue for peace hard enough.”

“Fuck,” I whispered.

“Well, that’s all the time we have for today. I need to see my next patient. Oh, and Sergeant?”

“Yeah?”

“Thank you. For giving Shooting Star a good talking to. I don’t really care if they don’t like me, but my other patients don’t need to be reminded of their trauma on the way to my office. They were way out of line. They wouldn’t listen to reason. You straightened them right out. Congratulations.”

I smiled. “Just doing my job. For what it’s worth, I’m sorry. About the first time we met. I was a little hard on you, too.”

Weathervane grinned. “I have literally had a brawl with a patient in my office. Lamps and coffee mugs getting thrown around and stuff. That wasn’t anything. Anger is completely normal, especially when ponies have lived through the things you soldiers have. I’m just here to help you all manage a bit better.”

“Thank you,” I said. “Have a nice rest of your day, Weathervane.”

“You as well, Sergeant.”

When I stepped out into the hall, there was a long line of ponies waiting to get in to see the therapist. Gauze Patch was there, too. Dealing with the wounded coming in from Pur Sang couldn’t have been easy.

I made my way to the infirmary. I had a pony to see. One who’d just woken up and was extremely pissed off that she didn’t get to nap the rest of the year away.

// … // … // … // … // … //

Sierra thrashed on the bed like she was possessed. “You cunt-sucking cockmonger shitfuck cunt, cunt, cunt! Ow, my head! My fuckin’ head!”

“The hell’s wrong with her?” I said.

“Patient confidenti—”

I grabbed Argent’s collar. “I was there when I saw her crack her fuckin’ skull! You’re gonna tell me what the hell’s wrong with Sierra, dammit!”

I let go of Argent and she straightened the collar of her white coat. “Sergeant Sierra seems to have sustained some brain damage from her little accident,” Argent said. “After she awoke from her coma, it became immediately clear that she has some diminished faculties. Her motor control isn’t all there. She’s reported some very concerning numbness in her extremities. My diagnosis? Severe concussion secondary to skull fracture. Probably some frontal lobe damage, judging by her unrestrained manner and general aggression.”

“How bad is it, Doc?”

“We were able to control the swelling, but we don’t have the equipment or the training for the proper regenerative therapies to reverse brain damage. There’s only a small window of time before even those would have limited effectiveness. Once it starts to heal naturally, magic healing techniques aren’t as potent. It could be years, if ever, before she regains normal function. That means no piloting Chargers! Brain damage is cumulative. It could become chronic if she gets repeatedly concussed riding a mech.”

“Shit!” Sierra screamed. “Motherfucker! You can’t keep me outta the fuckin’ cockpit! I’ll fuck your mother! I’ll hoof your fuckin’ mother you santorum-suckin’ cockbite!”

That poor, writhing figure on the bed wasn’t the Sierra I knew. That was her alter ego speaking.

Sierra had gone into a deep, deep sleep.

Hissy Fit had awoken.

// … // … // … // … // … //

I stayed in the infirmary with my fellow Charger pilot for hours, watching over her as the drugs they gave her started to calm her down. We dimmed the lights, because she complained they were bothering her eyes.

“You doin’ better, Sierra?” I said.

“They gave me something for the headaches. I’m comfortably fuckin’ numb. This is a rare moment of luce—uhh—luci—um.”

“Lucidity?”

“Yeah. That.”

“How’re you feeling?”

Sierra smiled, giggling madly to herself. “I’m scared.”

I took hold of her hoof. Held it close. “Of what? Come on, Sier. You can tell ol’ Stormy anything.”

“Losing myself. I’m not afraid of death, Storm. Never have been. Before all this, I used to snowboard down dub—duh—dammit—double black diamond slopes. I wasn’t afraid of anything. I’ve broken damn near every single fucking bone in my body, and I still come back strong. It’s just, you know. Never hit my head so hard before.”

“You’ll be okay.” I smiled. “You’ll be back to your normal self in no time and cleared for Charger duty.”

Sierra shook her head. “I forgot my fucking name earlier, Storm. My fucking name. We all die someday. It’s just that some of us have the luxury of not dying while we’re still alive.”

My lip trembled. My eyes misted with tears. I reached down and embraced my comrade, my sister. Felt her shiver and shake. The way she moved was uncoordinated. It was hard to believe this was the same mare who managed to bullseye the cockpit of a helo with a thrown mortar.

“I know, Sier,” I said. “I know.”

“I don’t want this to be the rest of my life,” Sierra sobbed out. “I wanna win this. I wanna win this fucking shit and go home. I wanna go home, Storm!”

“We are home,” I said. “This is our home. This is Equestria. And we’re going to take it back, no matter what it takes, no matter what price must be paid.”

“But we have paid! We’ve paid a hundred times over, and nothing ever gets any better! I’m going to die in this hell. I’m going to die having accomplished fucking nothing. I’m staring into the eye of the black hole that used to be my life. All my buddies are gone. Sunny. Barrage and Barricade. Comet. All gone. There’s fucking nothing.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. I elected to simply hold Sierra tightly in my legs as I gently rocked her back to sleep, my cheeks damp with tears, my heart filled with regret that there was nothing I could do for her.

Deep down, beneath the surface of my skin, I could feel them. All of them. Laughing. At me. At us. Our pain fed them. Our misery empowered them. Our joy, however fleeting, was their fine cuisine. They had done this to us. This nightmare in which we lived was all according to their design.

They had been doing it, unchallenged and undefeated, for millions and millions of years. The universe was nothing more and nothing less than their buffet table. There was no telling how many great civilizations had opposed them, nor how many had perished in the attempt. All there were, from the dawn of time until now, were fields of bleached bones, eroded monuments, and broken dreams. The Archons stood above it all. Unreachable. Invincible. Laughing and dining on us at their leisure.

“Sierra, I’m gonna show you something beautiful,” I said. She was already asleep and didn’t hear it. I tucked her in, kissed her bandaged forehead, and then gently nudged aside the door to the infirmary.

I glanced over my shoulder. “I’m gonna show you how to hunt, kill, clean and butcher a god.”

// … end transmission …

Record 16//Consequences

//HOL CRY SWT
//CHECKSUM READ
//CHECKSUM GOOD

// … decoding …

Desert Storm

I placed the two pills in my mouth, one right after the other. First, the sertraline. Then, the gene snipper. I levitated the glass to my lips, slurped a slug of water, tilted my head back, and swallowed. There was an annoying momentary sensation of pain, like swallowing broken glass, from the rough edges of a too-large caplet.

I let out a long, low sigh. The anti-depressants made me feel surprisingly normal. Not good. Not bad. Just okay. In my case, being in a mildly satisfied haze was better than screaming in the halls or having nervous breakdowns in front of a superior officer.

With normalcy came a strange sense of confidence. Arrogance, even. I felt like I could take on the world by my lonesome. That foolhardiness had to come with some drawbacks. There had to be a catch. I hadn’t felt like this since I was a blank flank. Only when the tension had soaked out of my body did I realize that I’d been struggling with anxiety for years and years, tightly wound from head to hoof like a twisted rubber band.

To make matters worse, we all had minor anemia from radiation exposure. Physically, I felt a little on the weak side, even over a week later, but there was no telling how much of it was rad poisoning and how much of it was my other ailments combined with plain ol’ blood loss.

While I was mulling over the day’s plans for the stretches and light activity I aimed to do in order to help me stay limber, heal, and recover, Commodore Cake barged into the barracks, holding one of the Sterling Lance medals in her wingtip. It was weird to see her out of her armor. She was wearing a gray hooded vest. She looked surprisingly normal except for the visible aug ports in her hips and shoulders.

“Never, ever lose these, you stupid git!” She marched up to me, teeth bared as she tossed the medal right into my face. “They have priority aetherbits in them and they’re worth more than you are!”

I shrugged. “I wasn’t exactly in any position to retrieve them, as I’m sure you can appreciate.”

“Two Dragoons are dead because of you glory-seeking morons!” the Commodore roared.

“Two?” I raised an eyebrow. “But I thought—”

“I know what you thought. I know what you’re thinking before you even think it, because your body twitches one way or another and it gives away the plot.” The Commodore circled me in an intimidating manner as she spoke, carrying herself like some leopard ready to pounce. “Did you know that not all Dragoon exosuits are equipped with barrier fields? One must be Commodore-rank at minimum to qualify because of how scarce they are.”

“Hey, hold on,” I said. “Her armor stopped it. It didn’t go through.”

“Officer Dart took a hit dead-on in her chest from a Lupus. A Vargr positron rifle. You don’t live through that. The moment she got back, she started throwing her guts up. A few days later, she went into a coma and her skin started peeling off. This morning, they pulled the plug. There was nothing that could be done for her. A direct hit is like putting your head inside a nuclear reactor. It doesn’t matter if your armor stops it. You’re completely bathed in intense gamma radiation. You’re fucked!”

“Wow.” I smirked. “You actually swore!”

The Dragoon slapped me with her hoof, hard enough to whip my head to one side.

“You bloody fool. I had to watch two of the Empire’s very best—first, my mentor and now, my apprentice and best friend—die in the worst ways imaginable, and then, I have to put up with your lip, you cheeky fuck. Your disrespect is going to cost you dearly, one of these days. That’s the problem with you. I know your kind. You don’t believe in anything.”

My brows curled into a frown. That wasn’t fair at all. Not after all we’d done to try and save the Crazy Horse cell from total destruction. “Ma’am, if there’s any way I could make this right, I—”

“Stow it, you contemptible little nitwit. You didn’t just kill two of my closest friends. You killed the whole resistance with that weapon. The Confederacy is sending in the entire Fifth Fleet. We’d been able to stay under the radar until what you and Bellwether did. It would have been better if Captain Garrida and all the rest had died on that mountain. They would have accepted their own sacrifice. There are other cells that would have carried on in their place. Instead, you went right up with a feather duster and tickled the dragon’s tail!”

“I was just—”

“I don’t care. You’re bad luck, pilot. Things have gone pear-shaped since you showed up, and now, you’ve escalated the conflict in a manner that we are completely unprepared to handle. Thousands of rebels will die because of what you’ve done. Their blood is on your hooves. Don’t ever ask me for any favors, Storm. The next time you hit that responder’s button, guess what?” Layer leaned in close, squinting at me. “I’m going to watch you die, and I’m going to bloody well enjoy it.”

I smiled. She was so close that I could smell what she ate last. I had no idea what came over me, but in that moment, I wanted her. I latched my lips over hers and pulled her into a deep, aggressive kiss, tonguing the inside of her mouth. Her name was apropos. Layer did indeed taste like a fine strawberry cake. The Commodore was so shocked, she didn’t react for three whole seconds, even with those enhanced reflexes of hers. With surprising force, she shoved me off of her and onto my back. She pressed her hoof into my muzzle as she stood over me, her body coiled and taut as if ready to mete out retributive violence.

“The fuck is wrong with you?!” she shouted.

It was a fair question. The rational side of me questioned whether or not it was wise to deliberately provoke somepony who could crush me like a bug in an instant if they desired. And yet, I didn’t stop there. I took up that figurative shovel and kept on digging myself deeper, all the way down to the bedrock.

I grinned wide. “I could be Dart’s replacement, if you like, gorgeous.”

Layer was so shocked, it took a few seconds for her to formulate a coherent response, her face warping into a contemptuous scowl. “You sick little cunt. I said she was a friend, not my lover. Furthermore, who in their right mind would share themselves with a rotten bitch like you? One little push and I could pop your head like a grape. Try me again, you twisted little cockroach. Do it!”

“You were right,” I said. “I don’t give a fuck about anything anymore. My sisters are gone. My mom and dad are probably dead. My fiancé’s almost certainly dead. I got mind-fucked and fuck-fucked by a manifestation of pure fucking evil, and now, I’m being scapegoated for something I didn’t even do. Really, why should I give a damn, anymore? About anything? Just fuck me or kill me already, you big, dumb turkey!”

The Commodore gritted her teeth, her eyes alight with rage as she raised her hoof to stomp my brains out. Those weren’t eyes I’d seen on any mare. There was murder in them. In those hollow pupils, there was the kind of reflexive, primal hate that I thought only a stallion could have. Hatred pure. The Commodore let out a savage cry as her leg came down.

She smashed her hoof into the concrete beside my head, leaving a spider-webbing pattern of cracks. I was shaking with fear, my eyes slowly tracking to my left, where her right forehoof had left its mark. The air was filled with concrete dust. If she’d been wearing her exosuit, she would’ve buried her leg in the foundation.

“Dartwing knew she was doomed.” The Dragoon’s eyes filled with tears, her anger melting away. “She was so scared. I kept trying to talk her down and reassure her that she’d make it as they removed her ruined armor from her broken body, but all she could say was ‘I’m dead’, over and over. I knew she was right. I lied. The last time I saw her conscious, and I lied to her! I fucking lied!”

The Commodore sobbed softly as she turned and departed the barracks. After a few moments alone, I regained my nerve, rising to my hooves.

“That’s right,” I said. “Fuck off, Test Tube.”

// … // … // … // … // … //

I stared up at my Mirage, sitting pretty in her bay. The last of the robot arms retracted as the final reassembly was completed. A few pegasus technicians were milling around on the top surface of the Courser’s torso with diagnostic instruments, performing various tests. They used laser scanners to make sure the plating was aligned correctly, which was important for aerodynamics. A raised edge could create drag. They also had several access panels open and had plugged in hoof-held readers to check each system one by one.

“Finally.” I fell on my gaskins melodramatically. “Fucking finally!”

“She ain’t quite completely back together, yet.” Wind Shear walked up to me, his hooves clicking across the concrete as he grinned one of those shit-eating grins.

“Well, what in sweet Luna’s perky blue tits is left, Specialist?”

“You.” Wind Shear reached out and hoofed over the keychip to my Charger. “With this, you can bypass the voiceprint analysis and open any of the hatches or start ‘er right up, of course. She’s hull-complete, painted up, and ready to go. Still a few things left to do, rearming-wise. The cannons are in for servicing and the HBCs have to go through requalification before we can mount ‘em. It’ll take a few more weeks for that. So, what kind of loadout were you looking to have installed?”

“Two forties, two HBCs,” I said. “Normal ammo load. A couple drums per cannon. The standard for the type. Why would I need anything else? Oh, that reminds me. Are the casters in the head ready to go?”

“Yep, they’re all squared away, but they’re currently locked out. Captain’s orders.”

I nodded. “I understand. She still hasn’t cleared me to touch a caster, yet. Apparently, I’m too fucked in the head.”

“You seem pretty normal to me, Sergeant.”

“Well, it’s the meds. I’ve been feeling a bit better. To be honest, I had no idea how sick I was. I guess this shit really does work, sort of. Maybe. Not sure if it’s any better than a placebo, but it feels like it’s doing something. Just not sure what.”

“Well, that’s pretty typical,” he said. “Something like more than a third of all Charger pilots ended up sucking down an anti-depressant of some kind. No big surprise, there. Being a Charger pilot is depressing. Just watch out. You definitely don’t want to be drowsy or intoxicated while in the saddle.”

I looked up at my machine’s dark, inky composite curves. “She’s black. The fuck? Where’s my old tan paint job? Where’s the damn nose art?”

“All that armor had to be replaced.” Wind Shear gestured at the great big pile of scrap LAMIBLESS in the corner of the hangar. “Not even one single bit of it was sound enough to stay on the frame. We didn’t have enough paint in that color, either. Black, red, and blue are all we got, and mixes thereof. Wanna try purple?”

“Well, she can’t be Dust Devil if she’s not dust-colored, can she?” I said.

“What do you mean?”

I grinned as I admired my Charger’s grim visage, framing her with my hooves. This was the instrument of my vengeance. Equestria’s last howl in the dark. “Black Devil. From now on, you’re Black Devil!”

The Mirage’s head rose slightly, her five eyes glowing red. “Affirmative, Sergeant. New designation, Black Devil, accepted.” Her Anima’s booming voice echoed through the hangar. “Shall I go get the mascara and the hair dye?”

Wind Shear and the techs broke out in peals of laughter.

“Sick burn!” Wind Shear said.

It took me a few moments to regain my composure. “Fuck you, BD!”

“We dug out some other stuff you might like,” Wind Shear said.

The pegasus tech dragged a pallet jack right up to me. On the wooden pallet were several large, brightly colored polymer hard cases. Using my magic, I curiously flicked the latches open on one of them. Neatly packed inside was a syncsuit in my size. Like a kid opening Hearth’s Warming presents, I gleefully unlatched one case after another. I pulled out a slightly wrinkled brown bomber jacket, my eyes widening in surprise. Tucked inside, a light tan beret bearing the sword-and-eight-ball patch of the Eighth Cavalry fell out on the floor. I quickly scooped it up and set it aside before returning my attention to the garment held aloft in my magic.

“My old jacket! My beret! Where the hell did you find ‘em?”

“They were in a locker on the Mirage. Kinda flood-damaged, so I had one of my upholstery goons clean them up. There were some mage rank badges in there, too, miss Silver Illusionist.” He winked, hoofing over my Illusionist and Arcanist cards.

I frowned as I took them in my magic. Last I remembered, I’d left my jacket in my quarters on our unit’s old Charger transport. It could’ve been a simple oversight on my part. Left ‘em in the Charger and forgot to bring ‘em back. In any case, I was glad to have them. I donned the green-plated syncsuit, finding with great satisfaction that it fit like a glove. I threw the bomber jacket over my shoulders, slipping my forelegs through the arms. Finally, I tossed my cards in my pocket and donned my old beret.

“How do I look?” I said.

Wind Shear smiled. “Like a real fuckin’ pilot, Sarge.”

// … // … // … // … // … //

In one of the common rooms of the base, Mardissa Granthis sat at a table, playing cards with Ket and teaching the rules of the foreign game to an interested Stormtrooper guard. She was wearing her suspendered overalls, fidgeting by kicking her legs under the table. It was clear that she was quickly becoming bored out of her mind. I aimed to correct that.

As I walked into the space in my full pilot’s garb, Mardissa’s eyes lit up when she saw me. She immediately tossed her hand of cards aside, got up and strode towards me. “Storm! What’s that you’ve got on? You look cool!” She knelt slightly so she could throw her arms around me in a hug.

Her childlike cheer never ceased to amaze me. The Demon-Breaker was a sweetheart when her augs weren’t making her froth like a rabid dog.

“Hold on, now,” I said. “Let’s not get too excited about that. I had a little proposal you might be interested in.”

She let go of me, her expression curious. “What sort?”

I walked over to the counter, levitated the coffee pot and poured myself a big, steaming mug. I stirred in a few teaspoonfuls of sugar, but otherwise left it black.

“Well, Mar, my Charger’s ready for a test run, and Captain Garrida wants me in the saddle in the next fifteen. I’m going to assume you’ve never ridden one.” I chugged the mug of still piping-hot coffee in one go, getting strange looks from Ketros as a result. “Wanna take a ride with me?”

Mardissa was so delighted, the corners of her mouth rose and her eyes glimmered, like I’d just told her we could each eat like a pound of MDMA and rub coochies for the rest of the night while tripping balls.

// … // … // … // … // … //

I’d spoken with the Stormtroopers and we agreed that I’d be Mar’s security escort for the time being. Cicatrice’s orders, apparently, were that Mar and Ket should be treated as guests of the Liberation Front until they could be interviewed and cleared to enlist, but they couldn’t go anywhere without eyes on them at all times. They knew about the Archons and the Vargr. That meant they were part of the circle of trust, now. Their own people would surely persecute them for what they now knew to be the truth.

I’d set my jacket and beret aside with the rest of my belongings and me and the cleomanni woman had donned helmets. Mine was a typical syncsuit helmet with its transparent half-face visor to keep debris and spalling out of one’s eyes, while hers was an ill-fitting Bulwark armor helmet with the chinstrap tightened all the way for her tiny head, extra foam padding on the inside to fill the gap, and a couple openings drilled into it with a hole saw for her horns. Safety first.

Mardissa and I crossed the boarding gantry and ducked into the Mirage’s hatch, entering the darkened cockpit beyond. Mardissa was awestruck as she peered around the space, taking in every little detail.

“So, this is what they’re like,” she said. “Exquisite. No expense spared on your engines of death, I see.”

“Should be,” I said. “Each one of these babies cost as much as a whole tank battalion. Also, this is far from exquisite. This is a rough, low-rate initial production prototype.”

“Gods. Are you joking?”

“I wish.”

I pushed the key into the console and gave it a twist. Immediately, the viewscreens and MFDs lit up. I was treated to a panoramic view of the hangar through my machine’s eyes, spread over three large monitors. I reached up and raised the backup periscope just to make sure it was working, lowering it and folding up the handles when I was satisfied.

“BD, you there?”

The holotank flickered as my Mirage’s demonic-looking Anima materialized, startling Mardissa. “Right here, Sergeant.”

“Okay, I’m taking you out for a spin in the gorge. A little mobility test. Basic shit.”

I got in the saddle and put my hooves in the hoofcups, cracking my neck from side to side. “Ready for the sync arm.”

The arm lowered from the cockpit’s overhead and clicked into the ports in the back of my suit, securing me in place. There was a momentary stabbing sensation from the synchronization, and then, I felt my Charger’s limbs with surprising tactility.

“Eighty-seven percent sync rate,” Black Devil reported. “Not your best, but it’s been a while, hasn’t it, partner?”

It was a much better sync rate than with the Coloratura and Tiamat, but it wasn’t perfect. I gave BD a curt nod. “It’ll do, for now.” I looked back at Mardissa. “You’re gonna have to sit on the saddle with me, scoot your ass forward, and hug my back real tight for this, like you’re riding bitch on a motorcycle. Otherwise, you’re going to bounce around in this thing like a microwaved cat.”

Mardissa giggled. “That’s a horrible analogy, Sergeant, but I get your meaning.”

Mar sat down on the rear edge of the saddle, leaning forward and hugging my back, ducking to one side to keep her head out of the way of the sync arm.

“BD, initiate startup sequence,” I said.

There was a soft hum as the polywell began the beam injection and plasma formation process. “Reactor online. Electrostatic conversion efficiency, nominal. Ready to close.”

I pressed a few buttons with my levitation, watching the frequency gauges and waiting for the output from the inverter to stabilize. “Okay, we’re good. Close the breaker and shift the load from batteries to the reactor.”

“Closing,” BD said.

There was a loud pop and Mardissa jerked as she was startled again. “Damn, this thing’s scary!”

“Relax, Mar. It’s just the main breaker. It’s got like a hundred fucking megawatts of juice going through it.”

“Why so much?”

I snickered. “Chargers are hungry fuckers, that’s why.”

The cockpit was filled with the hum of transformers, and then, the ascending whine of the electro-magical transducers. My Charger slowly rose to its full height as the gantries retracted and the battery chargers were disconnected. Yellow strobe lights flickered and sirens blared through the hangar, warning the hangar crews that there was an active Charger in motion and to stay clear.

Wind Shear’s mug appeared, picture-in-picture, in one of my viewscreens, seated at an operator’s console by our main servers. Captain Garrida was leaning over his shoulder, looking tense and concerned.

“Okay, Sarge, Captain says you’re clear to take her into the gorge. Take it slow at first. This is the first time she’s moved in years.”

“Got it,” I said. “Hey BD, status!”

“Reactor output is nominal. Self-diagnostics indicate operational readiness rate of sixty-seven percent, but you can ignore that. It’s mostly because the metrics take into account the lack of armaments. With that aside, I’m basically in near-pristine shape. They did a damn good job.”

“Good to hear,” I said. “Alright, we’re heading out. Someone get that damn hangar door open!”

The doors to Camp Crazy Horse’s hangar slowly began to part, revealing clear skies and the perpetual evening light beyond. I rolled my shoulders and stretched a bit in preparation for what was to come.

“Here we go.” I nodded. “Hold on tight, Mar.”

I started off with a light walk, getting her up to about thirty klicks an hour. We cleared the hangar doors, the augmented-reality readouts shifting to track the terrain contours and provide me with attitude indicators and other helpful information.

“This is so fucking cool!” Mar said.

“You haven’t seen anything yet.” I grinned.

I lined us up with the gorge’s length, a long straightaway in front of me, at least a few kilometers from one end to the other. I twisted the hoofcups and the pyrojet boosters barked.

“What’s that?!” Mardissa was shocked by the noise and the flashes on the viewscreens from the engines’ exhaust plumes.

“That’s the sound of the fastest mech in the universe clearing her throat.”

I pushed the hoofcups forward. A walk became a trot. A trot, a gallop. The hoofbeats came so fast, they blended from one into the next, the saddle gently heaving up and down from the Charger’s motions. The speedo quickly climbed to a hundred and fifty, the canyon walls becoming a blur. We were already moving far faster than any Ifrit ever could.

“Holy shit!” Mardissa said. “Holy shit! Holy Shit!”

I clicked my tongue dismissively. “Fuckin’ grandma’s fuckin’ pony-drawn carriage. Rouncey speeds. Here we go for fucking real.”

I slammed on the boosters, the acceleration forcing me back into the sync arm.

“Whoa, whoa!” Mar screamed. “Fuck, fuck, fuck! Slow down! My legs! My legs are in the air!”

I looked back, and sure enough. Mardissa was a flapping cape wrapped around my shoulders, her legs dangling behind the saddle in mid-air from the sheer acceleration. I’d made plenty of satyrs fly with my forties and casters. I’d never made one fly inside the cockpit before. It was the funniest fucking thing I’d ever seen.

Soon, the acceleration leveled off as we entered a bounding gait and we topped out at three hundred and twenty kilometers per hour. My Charger wasn’t actually galloping across the ground at this point. Its hooves were briefly touching the ground as it leapt in graceful parabolic arcs. We were airborne for a couple seconds. Wham. The thrusters fired downward to loft me skyward again, and then braked my descent a couple seconds later. Wham.

“This is incredible,” Mar said. “It’s unthinkable that any walker could move this fast.”

“Well, she ain’t just any walker,” I said. “She’s mine. That means she’s the very fucking best. Ain’t that right, BD?”

“Damn straight,” Black Devil said.

Mar pointed ahead of us at the cliff face that we were mere seconds from smashing into. “Oh fuck, oh fuck! Dead end, dead end!”

“Hold on tight!”

I fired the pyrojet thrusters downward, jump-jetting us over a hundred meters into the air. We cleared the rim of the gorge, landing in the clearing beyond and skidding across the ground. As we continued to skid, I fired the rear boosters to lift the ass-end of my machine up, turning and pivoting on my Charger’s front hooves like a ballerina. I pulled a one-eighty, my hind legs coming down with my machine facing the opposite direction. A hoofstand turn, something every Courser pilot needed to practice dozens of times. I then poured on the boosters to brake us to a stop.

Mardissa was hyperventilating, her face dripping with sweat. “What the fuck? What did they pay you suicidal maniacs to drive these contraptions?!”

“A whole lot less than you’d think,” I said.

I leapt back down into the gorge, braking my descent with the thrusters and coming to a soft landing that kicked up a huge plume of dust. Then, I began picking up speed again on the way back towards the base.

I shook my head. “You’re gonna have to hold on real tight for this one.”

Mardissa’s arms gripped me tighter. With a complicated dance of thruster power, I shifted towards the wall of the gorge, my thrusters defying gravity as I leapt towards the vertical surface.

“No, no, no!” Mar whined.

“Aww, quit being a big baby,” I said.

The Mirage’s hooves connected with the cliff face and I rode up onto it, my thrust vector shifting to keep me aligned with the surface and forcing me downwards relative to my new orientation as I galloped along it.

I was now tilted ninety degrees to the right and running along the wall of the gorge, kept from falling by the sheer power of the Mirage’s vectored pyrojets, bright blue streams of exhaust knifing into the canyon floor.

“You can run on walls?” Mardissa clung to me for dear life. “You can run on fucking walls?!”

I laughed, looking over my shoulder at the panicked woman. “Yeah. Can run straight up ‘em, too.”

“What the fuck is that?!” Mar pointed at the viewscreen.

An eel had stuck its head out of a hole in the wall of the gorge, its scales glinting red. Its eyes tracked towards me, its jaws widening in what must have been horror as it realized its mistake.

“Dammit!” I yelled. “Quarray Eel!”

Before I rammed the damn thing’s head clean off and splattered its guts all over BD’s glacis plate, thus earning the eternal enmity of my technicians, I boosted away from the cliff face and did a torso roll, momentarily inverting us before landing with all four hooves down and continuing to smoothly gallop down the gorge.

“This is insane!” Mardissa laughed. “You’re insane!”

I grinned wide. “I know!”

Captain Garrida’s visage appeared in the viewscreen, and she wasn’t happy. “Hey, I can see what you’re up to on the feed! Cut it out with the showboating, you moron! We just got that fucker back together!”

I sighed with disappointment. “Yes, sir.”

“I think that’s pretty much it for the mobility test.” Wind Shear coughed a bit as he went over the numbers. “We got some good telemetry data and I think I can see where we can make some adjustments to accommodate your—uhh—unique piloting style. Nice moves, Sergeant.”

I nodded. “Good, very good.”

I brought the Mirage back into its bay, the gantries automatically connecting and the battery chargers locking in place. I transferred the load from the reactor to the batteries and then shut down the polywell, the transducers letting out a soft, descending whine as the Charger’s systems spooled down. When Mardissa and I disembarked and headed down the gantry and onto the hangar floor, she was very disoriented and stumbled around a bit.

I helped her stay upright, nudging her with my forehooves. “You okay? I didn’t overdo it, did I?”

Mardissa looked up at my Charger, transfixed. “Is this the machine you used to murder my countrymen with chemical weapons, pilot?”

My smile fell. “Yeah. The very same.” I swapped my helmet for my beret and donned my jacket to ward off the hangar’s chill.

Mardissa shook her head, her arms crossed over her chest. “It’s such a damn shame it had to be a weapon. It’s so finely made. Piss on the war. With this, you could go anywhere. See the world from every angle.” Mardissa giggled. “What do you think? Too sappy?”

I took in a deep breath. “You think we can beat the Vargr, in the shape we’re in?”

Mardissa scanned the hangar. The empty bays. Night Terror’s Selene, off in the far corner. Sierra’s piece of junk, Scofflaw. The salvaged Chargers, sitting under heavy tarps. The battle tanks and artillery recovered from Pur Sang. The piles of recovered ordnance. Not nearly enough. Any of it.

“We have to be clever,” Mardissa said. “In our culture, there is the legend of Zurak the Small. He was pursued all his life by giants the size of mountains, their bodies shot through with tree roots, leafy branches sprouting from their shoulders. He set traps for them. He lured them into ravines and dropped boulders on them. He set their trees aflame with fire arrows. He entangled their legs with heavy ropes. After thirty days and thirty nights, the giants fell, depleted by the struggle. One by one, he crawled into their mouths and took their gemstone hearts, and they troubled him no more.”

“And he had a pile of sweet-ass gems, too,” I said. “Lemme guess. He got all the pussy afterward?”

Mardissa turned beet red. “He lived as a king and had many concubines, yes.”

“Yup, it’s definitely a cleomanni story,” I said.

Mardissa frowned and crossed her arms. “Well, you got any better ones?”

I looked up at Black Devil’s expressionless face. “My mom always used to tell me about the story of Nightmare Moon’s redemption. Over two thousand years ago, Princess Celestia’s sister Luna betrayed her and became a creature of darkness. Celestia had no choice but to seal her sister in the moon with her magic. For a thousand years, she remained in exile, until she returned to bathe the land in eternal night. Six mares and a baby dragon traveled to her castle deep in the Everfree Forest to challenge her. They used the Elements of Harmony, six powerful magic artifacts, to purify Luna’s spirit and cast the Nightmare force out of her body. The Princess of the Night returned to her sister’s loving embrace.”

“That’s such a pony-like myth.” Mardissa grinned. “So sickly-sweet.”

“Ast neim argennan,” I said. “Ast hiactas. Laroa oskenne. As enkefte ut kovan tonnase astebre Havoro Hazka, Yanakii Ulnu, Soelesanna, Ustakaberen, Lanasnei, ia Renleus Tika.”

Not myth. Fact. It actually happened. The names of the six mares were Rainbow Dash, Pinkie Pie, Fluttershy, Applejack, Rarity, and Twilight Sparkle.

Mardissa eyed me with a concerned look on her face. “Twilight Sparkle? The Twilight Sparkle? As in, Empress Sparkle?”

“The very same.” I nodded.

“Who was she? Back then, I mean.”

“Apparently, she was Princess Celestia’s personal student and protégé. I think she ran a library? Our history is kind of fuzzy on the details.”

“How did she live so long?” Mardissa scratched her head.

“She’s an Alicorn. How else? They live practically forever. It would take a fairly extreme act of violence to end her life.”

“I don’t know how to break this to you,” Mar said.

I smiled. “If it’s you, my friend, I’m sure I can handle anything you throw my way.”

“You serious about that?” Mar’s long, elfin ears perked up. “We’re friends?”

I nodded. “I know. Who would’ve thought? A Charger pilot and Salzaon’s own daughter. We’re an odd pair, you and I.”

“The reason why I’m worried, Sergeant, well, uh, it’s because you might not want to be friends anymore after you hear what I have to say.” Mardissa nervously scratched her sideburns.

“What is it?”

Mar swallowed hard, her voice thick with emotion as she spoke. “I watched Twilight Sparkle die.”

The corners of my mouth slowly fell. The hangar got a few degrees colder. Any cheer I’d felt had basically evaporated into the ether with those five words. Then, there was naught but growing dread and panic, my stomach doing somersaults in my guts.

“What? What?!”

“Hanged. Shortly after she was captured.” Mardissa’s contrition was evident on her face. “You didn’t know?”

I thought back to Bellwether’s words. The radio transmissions mentioned an ‘Aubergine’. That’s Confederate military code for Twilight Sparkle.

“Impossible. There are still ongoing encoded communiques that we’ve intercepted that make mention of Aubergine. That’s Twilight Sparkle, Mar. It has to be. She has to be alive!”

“Don’t believe me?” Mar said. “See for yourself.”

Mardissa produced a small, circular holoprojector and held it upright in her palm, tapping a few invisible haptic controls that only she could see. The recorded vidstream started to play, the news cameras zooming in on Twilight’s face. She’d been beaten severely, her face black and blue. They’d gagged her and bound her wings. She wasn’t even allowed the satisfaction of any last words. The noose went around her neck and was pulled tight. She struggled. She was afraid.

With the pull of a lever, she was no more.

My ears drooped flat and my legs collapsed from under me. In that one, single moment, my entire world had been turned upside down.

“I’m so sorry,” Mar said. “This must be difficult for you to accept, I know.”

“How could you?” I whispered.

“What?”

I rose to my hooves, fixing my enraged, teary-eyed glare on Mardissa. “She was the last living Alicorn. A divine being. A link to our past. To what we used to be. We used to be pure. We used to be kind. We weren’t—we weren’t this!”

I ripped my beret off, tossed it on the concrete floor and stamped it flat, grunting with exertion.

“Storm, I—”

“Why didn’t you bastards kill us all? Why didn’t you do the right thing and bombard every square centimeter of this planet to end our suffering? Why? Why did you let us live?” I reared up and clapped my hooves on Mar’s shoulders. “Why?!” I buried my sobbing muzzle in her shoulder, the tears soaking into her overalls. “Why? It’s not fair. It’s not fair! I fought so hard. I failed. We failed. Just kill us. Just get it over with.”

Mardissa wrapped her arms around me, running those gentle hands of hers through my mane. We stayed like that for what felt like forever.

“You showed me the truth, so it was my turn,” she said. “I couldn’t keep it from you. It wouldn’t be right. For what it’s worth, Storm, I—I can’t even begin to apologize for what my people have done to yours. I was fooled. We all were. I was taught that your lives were worth nothing and that you would destroy everything we held dear if not kept in check. Then, I met you, and I discovered the horrifying truth. You’re lovely people who’ve been tarred with the most insidious propaganda. I felt so hurt and so betrayed, I lashed out at you with anger. I hurt you, too. Everyone who taught me all those lies—I trusted them. I trusted them with my life. I aided in their crusade. I spilled Equestrian blood without hesitation. So many times. It makes me sick.”

I could have told her the truth. I could have told her I felt exactly the same way, word for word. Instead, coward that I was, I selfishly turned her words back against her.

“I was told that none of you could be trusted,” I said. “I was told that, to a man, every single one of you sought to do us harm. I had no reason to doubt that. You, on the other hoof, had every reason to believe we were people, by the cities that we’d built, by the tools that we used, and by the language we spoke. It wasn’t ignorance that kept you in the dark. It was callousness. We reached out to you, time and time again, begging for peace, only to be ignored. Only to be victimized. Again, and again, and again. And now, the one mare who could have saved us is gone. We are surrounded by monsters that want nothing more than to devour and torment us and strip us of our dignity. I’m sick of hurting like this. I want to die. I want my rest. I want it. I deserve peace!”

“Storm, please, you’re—you’re my friend! I—”

I pushed her away, giving her a dead stare. “You never cared. You don’t care about us. You don’t care about me. I’ll probably be dead within the year. Your father will come rescue you and carry you back to your lavish palace or whatever the hell you live in. You have hundreds of boring years to look forward to. Plenty enough time to forget I ever existed. To forget all of this.”

Mardissa tossed her modified helmet away, grabbing me and pulling me into a hug. “Storm, I will never forget you. I promise you that. I will stand by your side and I will fight the Archons and their lackeys to my dying breath. When we go, we’ll go together.”

I let out a wearied sigh, my hooves cradling the woman’s back. “I wish things had been different. I wish we could have met under better circumstances.” I sniffled and leaned back. “I need some time. I need a little time to be alone.”

I slowly backed away from her, retrieving my crumpled beret and straightening it out before donning it.

“Storm,” she said. “Don’t go.”

I ignored the shaky hand that reached out to me with entreaties of peace and kindness, and I turned and departed the hangar. I couldn’t do this. I couldn’t afford to lose it in front of her. In front of everyone. Not when I’d been doing so well.

I stumbled into the passageway to the brig. The hall seemed to stretch into infinity. There was nopony here, except me. I was all alone. Being alone, my thoughts began to wander. My environs became unreal, like watching a movie through my own eyes. Reality briefly became a shoddy imitation of itself, like I was a film camera on a tripod and the walls were made of plywood. Everything around me was cast in plaster. A prop. Set dressing, and nothing more.

An indescribable sense of dread and paranoia began to consume me. I felt like I was being watched, like some deity would notice that I was a misplaced, shoddy figurine in their diorama, reach down with their giant hand, pluck me off the floor, and cast me into the abyss in a fit of anger. I struggled to steady my breathing, sweat beading up and dripping off my brow. Don’t panic. Don’t panic! It’s nothing. There’s nothing here.

I held a hoof to my chest, taking a deep, shaky breath. I allowed myself a smirk of self-satisfaction. I hadn’t collapsed in a screaming, crying fit. I’d held it off. I’d kept it together.

I had to go see Bell. I had to know the truth. They’d tossed him in a cell, somewhere around here. It was the price he’d paid for saving us all. I navigated the maze, eyeing the slots in the doors.

I slid the shutter to one of them aside. “Bellwether?”

Inside was a mare with a light coat and a stringy white mane. She was rocking back and forth, her eyes wide and bloodshot. One could’ve confused her for Placid, but this was an earth pony, not a pegasus. “Not him, not here,” she said.

“Well, did you happen to hear which cell they took him to?”

She looked up at me with those crazed eyes of hers. “You’re gonna die, you know. I’m gonna die. We’re gonna die. All of us are gonna die. Your first mistake was being born. Your second mistake was having the gall to be optimistic about it.”

I slid the shutter closed. “Right. Not helping.” I walked a little further down the hall. “Bell? You in here?”

“Over here, Storm,” Bellwether muttered, his voice muffled.

I slid open another shutter, peering inside. Bellwether was amusing himself by bouncing a ball off the floor, then the wall, and then back into his hoof, over and over again.

“What are you doing?” I said.

“What does it look like? I’m working on my chemical engineering degree.”

I sighed. “Bellwether, I have a few very important questions to ask you.”

“Shoot. Not like I have anything better to fucking do.”

“How much did you know about the Vargr? Before Cicatrice told us everything he knew, I mean?”

“Plenty enough. Enough to know they were bad news, anyway. Enough to know that Cicatrice knows more, and he’s not telling us. Instead, he’s feeding us full of bullshit. Even at the Empire’s height, we were never a serious threat to them, and right now, we’re less than a gnat next to those bastards. Crusher’s little gambit is more than just desperate. It’s insane.”

“That’s what I was afraid of.” I shook my head. “Another question. Did you know the Empress was murdered in public by the Confederacy?”

Bellwether quit bouncing his ball and shot me an irritated glance. “Oh, great. You saw that video.” He shrugged. “If you look real close at the pixels over Empress Sparkle’s shoulder, you can just barely make out the faint white outline of Celestia’s ghost.”

I stamped my hoof. “Bell, this is serious! What gives, dude? Why has this info been suppressed?”

“It’s fake, that’s why. Her scars aren’t in the right place and she’s not the right build.”

I threw up my hooves in exasperation. “Then—wha—who—who did they hang?”

“Beats me. Probably spray-painted some poor mare and sewed wings on her back to look like her. It’s a pretty close imitation, but there are noticeable discrepancies. Our verdict? They executed a very half-assed body double. So, we decided it’d be better not to spread it around.”

I didn’t know whether to be relieved or furious. The Confederacy’s lies were so flagrant, they beggared belief.

“Last question. Why are you in here? What in the hell are they doing with you?”

“Crusher has ordered a special tribunal. He wants to know how the hell I even set off a nuke in the first place, when they ordinarily require dual authorization to arm them. He doesn’t know that BASKAF furnished their agents with a backdoor, or that this backdoor involves the access and usage of unencrypted, plaintext nuclear codes stored in every Anima’s memory banks.”

I held a hoof to my mouth, my horror barely disguised. “Fucking hell.”

“Yeah. It’s not like it’s a security risk or anything, or our enemies couldn’t discover and exploit that.” Bellwether’s tone was acerbic. “I mean, it’s just a random-looking string of numbers that you can only access if you have an Anima handy and know the exact voice commands to read out the exact memory block, and then, you need an actual Imperial nuke to be physically present next to you in order to enter the code. It’s so unlikely that any Satyr would have the aforementioned combination of things in their possession.” Bell shook his head. “Actually, it is pretty unlikely, but dammit, it’s still a security hole in our nuclear arsenal that we, ourselves, created.”

I winced. “Why?”

“Simple,” Bellwether said. “A backup in case the standard authentication methods aren’t available and you need to blow some fuckers to Tartarus. We used aetherbit-based communications for almost everything. Some of the finest security in the galaxy, except if your base with your fancy-ass quantaetheric mainframe gets blown to fuck and all your bombs become paperweights. We wanted a way around that, and oh boy, we got it.”

“That’s a lot of power to entrust to just one agent,” I said. “Weren’t they worried it would be misused? Say, if somepony went completely off her rocker and decided to set off a nuke because her hubby was cheating on her with her best friend and she no longer had the will to live. What then?”

“Not my call. The higher-ups made the decision. The Liberation Front benefited from it, however temporarily. We’re probably gonna get fucked hardcore when the Confederacy wakes up and decides to do something about a whole division getting nuked.”

“I had a very, uh, heated encounter with Commodore Cake. She repeated what Captain Garrida told me a week ago. Apparently, the Confederacy are sending a whole fleet.”

“Well, there’s your answer.” Bellwether reached out a hoof and let it fall and illustratively smack his flank. “We’re fucked.”

“We’ve got to be able to do something,” I said. “There has to be somewhere we can hide while all this blows over.”

Bell shrugged and looked me in the eye, his expression strained. “Where? Under Canterlot Castle?”

I let out a chuckle. “Not a half-bad idea.”

“Good luck. That’s ganger territory, now.”

I took a deep breath, letting it out with a huff. “Bell, my Charger’s back in action. Just took her out for a test run.”

“Yeah? Well, how did that go?”

“She runs perfect. Took Mar for a ride in the cockpit. That was fucking dangerous. No rumble seat, no restraints or anything.”

“Did you at least make her wear a helmet?”

“Oh yeah. No way I was gonna be responsible for busting her fucking skull open. Besides, I’m pretty sure the techs would make me wipe her brains off the dash if that happened.”

“How you holding up?” Bellwether said.

The question came completely out of left field, and I wasn’t in the right headspace to receive it. Those four words had a sort of angularity to them like knives in my head, and I wasn’t prepared.

“Fuck off, Bell. I’m sick and tired already of people asking me that damned question.”

“You know it’s different for me.” Bell shook his head slowly. “It’s not just out of courtesy that I’m asking you this. I was there. I felt like I could’ve stopped it, if the stars had been aligned right.”

“You could’ve done something, Ket could’ve done something, Mar could’ve done something, and I could’ve done something. We all could’ve done something, and one or more of us might’ve died.” I took a deep breath through my nostrils and let it out in a huff. “Whatever. Fuck it. We’re all still alive. I call that a win.”

“Are you upset with me?”

I set my jaw, my ears pinned, looking down my muzzle at him. “Who gives a fuck about you? Don’t you dare try and make this about yourself, you fuck. I don’t give a fuck what you saw, I don’t give a fuck what you think, and I don’t give one solitary fuck about your feelings of inadequacy or powerlessness. You think that’s the only time I’ve ever had to deal with shit? I had my cry. I’m done. It’s just one more thing on my plate. Just one more motherfucker I have to kill. If you expect me to stand here and mope about it and validate you and your insecurities, you don’t know me very fucking well!”

“Oh fuck,” Bell said. “You’re bottling harder than a soda factory.”

“Just drop it. Just let it go. Don’t make me get any nastier than I have to be. I’d rather save it for the fuckers I need to kill, you understand?”

“I do. More than you know, Sergeant.”

“You better come back from your little meeting with the Admiral in one fucking piece, ‘cause we ain’t finished,” I said. “You and I, we have more fuckers to blow to bits, and I don’t know anyone else who’s such an artist with CycloHex.”

Bellwether grinned devilishly, his teeth seeming to glow stark white in the darkness. “You got that right.”

Without another word, I slid the shutter closed.

I could’ve told Bellwether the truth. I could’ve told him that the world seemed a little more drained of color. I could’ve told him I that I couldn’t stand being alone for more than an hour at a time without feeling like the walls had eyes and they were going to close in on me and swallow me up, or that there were moments where everything around me seemed as if it was a poor imitation made of cardboard. He had enough problems without me adding to them. He wasn’t my hero, my knight in shining armor. No one was. I had to push them all away. I had to keep them safe. If I let him, or Mardissa, or any of the rest get too close, they’d fall right in the pit with me. I would never be able to forgive myself if I let that happen.

I made my way back to the barracks, passing through the infirmary along the way. As I turned and glanced through the window into the converted office space beyond, I saw Mardissa, accompanied by a pair of Stormtrooper escorts. She was comforting the dying mare from Pur Sang who’d had three of her legs amputated by the Vurvalfn and their vicious attack. She had the pony’s hoof clasped in her hands and was saying something to her. I pushed the door open a crack and eavesdropped on their conversation.

“Did we—” The mare broke down in a coughing and hacking fit. “Did we do it? Is the war over? Are we at peace?”

Mardissa nodded slowly. “Yeah. It’s over.”

The mare slowly smiled, her one remaining eye misted with tears of gratitude. Her neck went slack on the pillow, her eye rolling back in her head. The heart monitor flatlined. Mardissa swept the mare’s eyelids shut and placed her limp foreleg on her chest, the satyr’s shoulders heaving with silent sobs. She and her escorts left the infirmary, passing me on the way out. She cast me an enigmatic look, but we said nothing to each other.

I continued on my way, and once I was back in the barracks, I undressed, stowed my gear and belongings, and threw myself into my bunk. I stared at the underside of the upper bunk, shaking my head, my teeth gritting with anger as I took deep breaths through my nostrils.

“Why didn’t she have the courtesy to lie to me?” I muttered.

Eventually, I drifted off to sleep.

What felt like hours later, I was roused from sleep by the uncanny sensation of someone looming over me. I peeked open one eye, and then the other. Mardissa was standing over me, her face unreadable, her escorts not present.

“Mar?” I said. “What is it?”

As she coldly gazed down at me, she reached out a hand. Her arm blossomed open and a pulse gun appeared from within. I didn’t even have time to gasp.

The flash of light consumed my whole world. The light resolved into a terrible scene, a crowd chanting and jeering at me as I stood atop the gallows.

Salzaon was there, too, giving a grandiose speech. Finally, the enemies of our great nation will be dispatched! Finally, after centuries of bitter conflict, justice will prevail, and we will be safe and secure once more!

The rope was drawn tight around my neck. I looked to my left, and Bellwether was being prepared to be hanged, his stare fixed on the horizon. On my right, there was Twilight Sparkle. She was shaking her head and grinning, her eyes downcast.

Her gaze met mine. “You can’t trust a fucking imp, you idiot. This is what happens, Sergeant. This is what you get. You get fucked!”

The lever was pulled. I fell. And I fell. And I fell. I fell headfirst. Down, into the darkness. Down, and down, and down. The shadowy forms of the Archons were laughing all around me as I descended into hell.

A soul. A mortal soul.

Our food. Delicious food.

Ravish her. Ravish her eternally.

I went splat in the muck and filth at the bottom. I was sinking up to my neck in black ooze that smelled of decaying seaweed. The sunless sky was filled with roiling clouds of ash and smoke, and yet, everything was bathed in an even, dim light, such that nothing could cast a shadow. The far shore was littered with bones, the earth stained a dark brown. There sat the great, rotting carcass of a creature the size of house. Black, oily birds—alien things that were like a cross between a gull and a manta ray—swooped down and plucked the putrefying flesh from the dead giant. Great obsidian manses of decadence towered in the distance, their columns and statues a dire warning to any who would dare approach. The air was filled with a sonorous, distant groan that seemed to come from everywhere at once—an unending tone of pure misery.

This was their realm. The Archons’ plane of existence.

The Seneschal of the Second Legion was there, towering over me, its tentacles slowly extending towards me. Its flickering, cyclopean eye centered itself on me. The shifting multitudes of other eyes and mouths that made up its face seemed to draw into an unsettling rictus.

Did I not tell you, child? You are my property. You pathetic worms should safeguard your lives more adeptly if you wish to delay the inevitable.

Hands and hooves reached up out of the sea of black, their owners a chorus of moaning, agonized voices. Their limbs wrapped around me, dragging me deeper into the soup of death and rot.

No, I cried out. Please, no! Plea-hee-heese! Somepony, help me! Celestia!

A star erupted as if from nothing, its orange glow tearing a hole in the heavens. The Archon growled in anger, shielding itself with its tendrils. Purifying and holy flame washed over me, burning away the filth and decay, leaving an endless white expanse of nothingness punctuated by a brilliant star. Deep within the light, there was a voice, gentle and soothing.

Oh, my little one. It was never my intent that any of you should suffer so terribly.

I shielded my eyes from the light with a foreleg. Who are you?

Do not be deceived. Twilight is not dead. She lives. If my student had passed this way, I would know, for she would be at my side.

I turned and gazed into the light, and there, in the center of it, was the Martyred Maiden. Her glory had faded, her soul in tatters. There was a hole in her chest, a beating heart squeezing rhythmically within it, surrounded by the barbed rows of her shattered ribs. Her eyes were the crimson of a blood-filled tick ready to burst, her lips decayed and her teeth showing through the side of her muzzle.

I gasped and squeezed my eyes shut. Celestia was terrifying to behold.

Don’t look away, she said. Please, come closer.

I slowly approached the alicorn’s spirit, my hooves shaking with trepidation. She was seated on a white marble throne surrounded by golden vines. She radiated such immense power, it felt like I was being pushed back, like two identical magnetic poles repelling each other. The light that radiated from her ghost was blinding. Still, I struggled to reach her. I knelt before her mighty form, almost overcome by emotion. The warmth that emanated from her was so unlike anything I had ever experienced before in my entire life. For the first time in a long time, I felt safe. Truly safe. If I was crying, it was with tears of happiness. This was an honor I did not deserve.

Close enough. The Sovereign stood from her throne and approached me effortlessly, placing her hoof on my chin and raising my head to meet her judging, penetrating eyes. Her lips drew back in a snarl, her eyes aflame with anger. A murdering wretch. Anathema to everything our kind was meant to be. My first visitor in eons, and this is what I get. Scum!

Celestia shoved me to the ground, or floor, or whatever the endless field of light was. I was so upset at having been rejected by her, I could do nothing but whimper breathlessly for a few moments. I was—I was only following orders!

Do you think it’s in any way acceptable for a pony to use her strength to kill and maim like this? The Martyred Maiden drew her hoof in an arc over her head, filling the space with visions—glimpses of my own memories, I realized. Me twisting the arming key and depressing the ignition pushbutton for my Charger’s surface-to-surface missiles, dozens of times. The vandals I’d methodically shot dead. The scavenger I’d killed. The concentration camp staff I’d ordered slain. Emlan’s son, breaking under my hooves. Well? What do you have to say for yourself? Speak, reprobate!

I—I don’t—

It is one thing for a soldier to kill in defense of innocent lives. It is another thing entirely to revel in senseless bloodshed as you do. Sergeant, there is no excuse for one of our race to do the things that you’ve done. You should know better, damn you.

I had no choice!

There is always a choice. You have consistently made the wrong ones. With every life you take unjustly, you grow closer to becoming like one of them. The Night Princes. The Great Devourers. The Lords of Matter. The Archons corrupt and pervert everything they touch! There were tears of blood welling in the eyes of Celestia’s tattered spirit, spilling trails of red down her cheeks. The white field surrounding us began to fade, morphing into the ruins of a bombed-out city, Chargers marching beside us in neat rows while artillery shells exploded in the distance. I sacrificed everything, just so that we could become this? Centuries of teaching my little ponies the ways of harmony and peace. All for nothing. The shame. The shame of it! Celestia clutched at her ruined chest. For me to have failed so profoundly. It hurts!

I scrambled back as the ground beneath me lit aflame with Celestia’s rage, yelping and patting my singed fur. The orange glow slowly resolved into individual symbols that were inscribed in the air with trails of fire. I recognized it as a spell of some sort, the Old Equish words as clear as day. I quickly committed it to memory before it was washed out by the blinding aura of Celestia’s light as the illusory battlefield faded from view. The endless, blank field of white was disorienting. There was no way to tell which way was up or down. It felt like my head was spinning.

I was mad. Unutterably, incandescently angry. I don’t need this. I don’t need your fucking—opprobrium or whatever the fuck this is. You’re going to heap this shit on my head, after all I’ve been through? Who the hell needs you, anyway? Where were you, when our planets were invaded and our cities were razed? You know, it’s silly. When I was a child, I used to cling to a fucking toy of you and beg you to whisk me away into the distant past whenever my life got to be unbearable. To this day, ponies still fall down and pray before idols of you, when you barely rate a footnote in the history books, for all the good that you did. If you’ll make an enemy of me, then guess what? Guess what, you old bag? I’ll crush you, too! Who needs goddesses? You never did anything that forty tons of titanium and a battery of casters couldn’t do better. To hell with you!

The Alicorn’s apparition nodded slowly. I’m already there, you petulant foal. Take the gift of my light, given with the utmost of scorn. Use it to pacify rather than kill. The Martyred Maiden leaned back in her throne, resting her chin on her hoof. Now, away with you. At least have the decency to let a dead mare rest in peace.

I was dragged from Celestia’s light, the white plane slowly resolving into colors as the base’s sirens lulled me back to the world of the living. I reflexively patted myself down. No pulse gun wounds. I breathed a sigh of relief. I’d dreamt it. Nopony would believe what I’d just experienced if I’d told them. Perhaps Placid Gale would, seeing as she was a Starrie herself, but the rest would’ve said I was crazy. I wasn’t even sure if it was in any way real, or if it was a figment of my own frayed psyche. I had to keep this encounter a secret, for the time being. One thing was for certain, and that was the fact that her rebuke had cut deep. I was blinking away tears as I struggled to right myself.

The green blob next to me slowly began to resolve into a pony. Sergeant Sagebrush was shouting directly in my ear, holding out my Bulwark armor and communications helmet. “Storm! Armor, caster, now! Tack the fuck up!”

The heaving rumble of an explosion nearly shook me from my bunk. “What the fucking fuck?!”

“We’re under attack! Gaffs and Karks in the fucking base!”

“Oh shit,” I whispered. “Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit!”

I practically leapt into my armor and saddlebags and threw my helmet on. My home was no longer home. Just another target. They had not yet invented a word or phrase to describe how screwed we all were. Fornicating with the pointy end of a jackhammer? No, too long. It needed fewer syllables and more angularity. Drinking the dourine dick? No, too soft and round. The harsher a word sounded and the more hard consonants it contained, the more profane. That was why fuck was so popular. One could chain fuck as many times as they wanted. Fucked. FuckFucked. FuckFuckMcFucked.

As I mulled over the problem at hoof, I hurriedly stuffed my Orbit, syncsuit, jacket, and beret into a polymer hard case at the foot of my bunk and hefted it in my magic. No true pilot would ever leave their syncsuit behind, especially considering that they didn’t make ‘em anymore.

“I need to get to my Mirage!” I said. “I can hold them off!”

“With nothing but casters?” Sagebrush said. “I saw your machine, Storm. They didn’t even mount the fuckin’ cannons yet. No fucking way. You get in that thing, you’re running. You’re running and you’re keeping it intact and away from the enemy.”

It was then that I realized that I still had my machine’s casters locked out, too. My Charger was completely useless.

“Bellwether,” I said. “Bellwether’s in the fucking brig!”

“Good, let him rot! Fuckin’ prick brought this on us.”

“I have to go get him,” I said. “Either you come and fucking help me, or fuck off!”

“Dammit, Storm! Alright, fuck it. Let’s go get the geezer. He’ll know how to bring this place down on those fuckers’ heads.”

“Watch out!” I shouted.

Sagebrush ducked as a Karkadann swung its bladed tail right where his head was a moment before. I had no idea what came over me; I screamed and tackled the abomination in the side, pounding its armored head with my hooves. It quickly gained the advantage over me, twisting out of my grip and pushing me back against a wall, drooling and snarling in my face. It bared its armored prick, the one that liquefied their victims, and thrusted it towards my exposed belly while I tried desperately to push it back.

I thought of Celestia’s light. How brilliant and blinding it was. Laus, Iastowa, Bankina. I closed my eyes, filled my horn with her light, and it, in turn, filled the world. The entire barracks was bathed in a magnesium-white flash that practically burned my corneas right through my eyelids. The Karkadann stumbled back, disoriented. Sagebrush pulled his knife from its sheath with his teeth and rammed it into the Kark’s neck, right through a chink in its armor. He mounted the creature’s back, gripped the blade in a fetlock and drove it downward into the monster’s spine with both of his forelegs. The Karkadann collapsed, dead.

Sagebrush flicked the blood off his blade and stowed it. “Bell ain’t the only one around here who knows his knife work. Nice going with the flash. If you had such useful magic, why do you only do cloaks?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I just figured out how to do it!”

“Just now?” Sage said.

“Yes.”

“Right. Well, good fuckin’ timing, anyhow.”

We hastily departed the barracks. I could hear the deafening report of Thumper. We followed the sounds of gunfire all the way to the brig. Captain Garrida was firing her weapon at a GARG trooper, the armor-piercing rounds denting his heavy ballistic shield and knocking him down. She followed up with a grenade that consisted of a bundle of regular frags wired together on a stick, throwing it overhand. The fearsome device landed within a few meters of her target. He tried crawling away from it. He failed and was utterly engulfed in the blast.

I gasped as I watched another GARG trooper flank her from a side hall and run her through with his sword. Garrida grunted in pain. Without hesitation, she dropped her rifle and grabbed his forearm with one of her claws, immobilizing him and keeping him from withdrawing his blade. While he struggled to free himself, her other claw latched around his helmeted head. With a mighty roar, she lifted him up, armor and all, and slammed him into a concrete wall. Once she had him pinned, she struck him over and over, the steel studs of her fingerless sap gloves crushing his helmet’s faceplate inward. Eventually, he released his blade and collapsed, unconscious or dead.

“Holy fucking shit,” I muttered. “Captain! You okay?”

Captain Garrida shook her head. “I’ve been fucking stabbed. Do I look okay, you moron?!”

The big griffon winced as she pulled the blade out, removed a syringe from her kit, and injected the wound with Hemogel. As I approached, she reached out with a keychip in her claw.

“Sergeant, take my fucking key and you and Sage go get the prisoner. You know the one. We’re gonna need him. I’ll hold ‘em off.”

I nodded. “Yes, sir!”

Me and Sagebrush headed deeper into the brig, the far-off, muffled sounds of a firefight echoing through the halls. There was danger potentially lurking around every intersection of the passageways. If a Karkadann or GARG Trooper charged us from one, we wouldn’t even have time to react.

I peeked around one corner and scanned with my casters. “Clear! Move up!”

Sage bounded to the next corner, nodding and waving me over. We encountered no resistance on the way to Bellwether’s cell. When we reached him, I pushed the keychip into the slot, turned it, and the door’s bolts slammed open.

I walked inside the empty cell’s confines, scanning for any sign of my favorite saboteur. “Bell? Where are you?”

When I turned around, the old stallion was standing perched on the narrow ledge atop the door frame, ready to ambush anyone who came inside. I practically jumped in fright. “Fuck!”

“Miss me?” Bellwether grinned.

“Fuckin’ Gaffs and Karks in the base, dude. We gotta fucking go, now!”

Bell’s smile fell. “How did they fucking find us?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Fuck, I don’t know!”

“Probably one of the satyrs,” Sage said. “You can’t trust ‘em.”

“Mar and Ket wouldn’t do this to us,” I said. “No way.”

Sagebrush shrugged. “Yeah, maybe they wouldn’t. Or maybe you just don’t know ‘em as well as you think. Shoulda never let ‘em near here. That was reckless.”

“We need to move, right now,” Bellwether said. “I need my explosives. And some armor and a caster. Not much use to anyone without ‘em.”

“Fuck, Bell,” I said. “The base is fucking compromised. They’re gonna keep coming until we’re all dead. What do we do?”

Bellwether nodded tiredly, his weariness evident in his expression. “We survive, and we keep fighting. Don’t give those fuckers an inch. You got it?”

“Shit. Our home, Bell. All the fucking supplies. All these injured ponies. Fuck!”

“Griping about it won’t fix the problem,” Sagebrush said. “Kill the enemy now. Grieve later.”

I took a deep breath and let it out as an exasperated huff. “Fine. Fuck. I guess we’re just gonna have to clear the fucking base.”

“You said Gaffs and Karks?” Bellwether said. “We’ll get murdered out there if we just run out and start shooting. Both of those are very dangerous close combatants. We can never stop moving. If you get stoppered up and they outflank you, you’re gonna get stabbed. Or eaten. Or stabbed, dissolved, and then eaten. Pay attention to their movements and keep them at a distance. Cloak if you can. Use the structure as concealment if you can’t. Follow close, stay sharp, and let’s move out.”

We nodded silently, sticking to Bellwether like glue as we slipped out of the brig. We made our way back to where Garrida was, but there was no sign of her, or the Gaffs. Only blood on the floor. I cursed under my breath. The Confederacy’s finest were tough to put down for good.

“We need to regroup with the others,” I whispered. “This isn’t just some search and destroy op, or they would’ve dropped bunker busters on us already. They’re looking for something. Or someone.”

“You think Mar or Ket sold us out?” Bell said.

I shook my head. “I fucking hope not.”

We burst into the hangar. The scene before us was sheer chaos. A good half of the hangar was a sea of flame, the techs trying desperately to keep the fires away from the ammo and the vehicles. Blue plasma pulsegun blasts and micro-rocket fire streaked across the expanse, answered by green caster beams. GARG troopers were slicing and dicing their way through the militia without hesitation or remorse. Though I couldn’t identify the exact source, I could hear the booming of a Grover. That meant the Captain had to be alive, still.

The sound grew louder, like a beacon rallying us, as we approached a makeshift barricade made from rolling tool chests. To my utmost shock, a wounded Ketros was giving Captain Garrida CPR while Mardissa had Thumper propped against the barricade and was firing it at the Karkadann, even though the recoil caused her considerable discomfort. Every couple shots, she’d shake her hand out and curse loudly.

“How can she stand this horrible fucking thing?” Mardissa scored a hit dead-center on a Kark, practically blowing its guts out. “Oh, I see.”

“What the hell are these things?” Ket blasted away with a captured pulsegun, obviously claimed from a Gafalze member that had fallen.

I dived headfirst, rolling onto my back, the bulk of my armor slamming into the barricade as I took up position. Bellwether and Sagebrush weren’t far behind.

“Karkadann,” I said. “Don’t let ‘em close the distance!”

Mardissa cast a disgusted glare downrange. “So that’s what they look like. They didn’t tell us word one about these things. Not even a peep. Judging by the looks of things, I guess you’ve got to be a Gafalze to be cleared just to know about them. I worked and fought side-by-side with those creepy bastards, and they never mentioned a thing about chromed, transgenic ponies.”

While Bellwether took over trying to resuscitate the fallen griffon, delivering chest compressions with his hooves, Mardissa was rifling through Garrida’s saddlebags, trying to remove the spare thirty-millimeter magazines for Thumper. I used my levitation to quickly undo all of the flaps on the pouches and move the mags to a convenient spot behind the barricade. Mardissa nodded, dropping the giant ATR’s empty mag and slamming in another one before letting the bolt fly home.

“Mar?” I looked her in the eye. “I just wanted to say that I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

“What I said. About you. I mean, look at you. Pulling the trigger on your own people, without hesitation. You’re one of us, now.”

Mardissa smiled. “Don’t worry about it. It’s nothing. What’s in the past is in the past. And these aren’t my people. These are freaks that shouldn’t exist. Eyes forward. Let’s clear these fuckers out!”

I mounted the barricade, taking aim at the nearest Kark. I let loose with the casters, to no avail. The beams simply deflected off their thick, metallic armor. This action drew the attention of six of them. Their warbling cries turned to high-pitched screeches and they charged us in unison. The lead one took a few of Ket’s plasma bolts to the face and went down, its head smoking. The rest were still coming.

Mardissa kept missing her shots, her arms worn out from shouldering the Captain’s ridiculous rifle without the assistance of her power armor. “Come on, dammit!”

I scrambled back, panicking. “Oh shit, oh shit!”

I heard Garrida gasp loudly, her eyes fluttering open. “Some waste of cum is using my rifle without my permission!”

The Captain stood and shoved Bellwether aside, running up and plucking a freshly reloaded Thumper right out of Mardissa’s hands. The griffon shouldered the massive anti-tank rifle and leaned into it. Five rounds sailed downrange. Five Karkadann fell.

Garrida reached back without even taking her eyes off her targets. “Ammo, now!”

“Aye!” Mardissa grabbed a mag from behind the barricade and fed it up to the Captain.

A few seconds later, Thumper went loud again, this time, suppressing a squad of Gaffs who were trying to move up on our position. These were lower-ranked Gafalze, not like the spec-ops leader who’d given the Commodore a run for her money. Their pauldrons were striped gray instead of yellow. They were no less of a threat, however. They advanced in unison, letting out a war cry and beating the pommels of their monomolecular swords against the backs of the heavy ballistic shields they held overlapped before them. It was a primitive display that was meant to inspire morale among their own numbers while intimidating their foes.

It was working.

“Fall back!” Garrida shouted. “Everyone, fall back!”

The Captain was in a bad way, and as she stumbled during our retreat, she ended up leaning on Bellwether for support as she fired her weapon at the approaching formation, its thunderous reports rattling my teeth. There was a click as Thumper ran dry. The Gaffs charged us, swords raised high.

Then, there came a loud buzz of sirens, the hangar bathed in yellow strobes. The sounds of the firefight grew quiet, everyone freezing in place.

We all knew what it meant. A Charger was in motion in the hangar.

Night Terror’s Selene-type Destrier, sleek and insectile, its shining blue armor imbued with the dark iridescent sheen of a beetle’s elytra, slowly walked through the flames, looking like a demon straight from Tartarus. We were like toys next to the towering monstrosity, its hoofbeats reverberating through the hangar like gunshots.

A purple halo formed above the Charger’s head, coalescing and brightening and humming with energies arcane, before spewing forth as a shock-front of eldritch flame. When it passed through the Gaffs, seemingly to no effect, their fate was sealed. There was no reaction from them, at first, but seconds later, it began. Some dropped their weapons, their arms shaking in fear. Others fell and writhed on the floor and screamed in agony. I winced as I watched one take his sword and lop his own arm off. Another put his blade right through his comrade’s chest. Hardened men—indomitable alien super-soldiers imbued with the finest in cleomanni technology—hacked each other to bits right in front of us while screaming bloody murder.

Mardissa was shocked and appalled. “What—what is this?”

I shook my head. “Nothing I would ever do.”

If I knew anything about how Night Terror’s magic worked, they had all experienced extreme, vivid, lifelike hallucinations of their bodies mutating out of control. Outwardly, they looked no different. Inwardly, their world had descended into a phantasmagoria of horror and madness. Without any understanding of what was happening to them, they’d turned their weapons on themselves and on each other.

I’d seen the Lieutenant do this to a whole battlefield, many years ago. In mere moments, an entire enemy battalion had reduced itself to a sea of gore.

“Well, what do you think, Sergeant?” Lieutenant Terror used the public address system in his Charger’s head to amplify his voice. “I had to modify it a little bit for these Gafalze Arresgrippen. They’re so unemotional because of those implants of theirs, it’s hard to give them a scare. I had to figure out a method to restore their emotions, and then some. Our esteemed teacher was in town. He helped me out with that part. Works like a charm, doesn’t it?”

“Gruesome,” I said. “Nice save, sir. We were kinda fucked for a second, there.”

“Nice save?” Mardissa said. “What the fuck did he just do?”

I raised my brows, giving Mar a lidded stare. “Magic.”

Mardissa cringed and shuddered visibly. “Yeah, fuck everything about that.”

“I’m right with you, there. Come on, let’s keep moving!”

As we left the chaos of the hangar behind, there were ponies scrambling around, trying to use low-slung electric cargo movers fitted with firefighting equipment to combat the blaze. Having run out of ammo, Garrida abandoned her rifle and pulled out her double-barreled shotgun. We headed towards Crookneck’s office. The sirens were deafening, fire suppression sprinklers running continuously.

“Crookneck!” I yelled. “You old geezer, get out here! We gotta go!”

There was no reply. I saw a militia stallion panicking and running from a side hall. Just as he turned around to face his attacker, hot lead splashed across his chest armor, knocking him down. Another booming report sounded and the second round blew his face open like a watermelon.

“Mardissa!” A voice boomed. “Where are you? Where are you little rats hiding my daughter?”

Mardissa froze, shaking in fear. We all came to a halt and a few of the others took cover as a broad and heavy figure rounded the corner. The cleomanni was wearing a suit of assault power armor painted bright blue and orange, the traditional Confederate colors, its legs clanking and whirring with powerful hydraulics as he approached. The heavy power armor was much smaller than a battlesuit, but thicker and more protective than anything that the Gaffs wore. Standard kit for high-ranking officers in hot combat zones. The suit had no helmet of any kind, instead featuring a broad, headless torso with a large, clear polycarbonate window on the front, framed with a tubular crash cage. Communications antennas sprouted like a small forest from its shoulder.

The water raining down from the overhead misted up the suit’s armored canopy, a small windshield wiper scraping it off to reveal the angered countenance of none other than Salzaon Granthis, the president of the Cleomanni Confederacy, his square cranium and salt-and-pepper beard unmistakable. The weapon he carried was some manner of oversized double rifle, its wooden stock and gleaming barrels covered from end to end in gaudy engraving. A tool befitting an accomplished hunter. He depressed the lever and broke it open, the smoking shell casings clinking against the concrete floor. By the looks of them, they were at least a few millimeters larger than even the giant cartridges that Garrida’s Grover took. Salzaon loaded another two shells from his bandolier and then locked the hand cannon closed.

We were so awed by the display, none of us had the courage or the presence of mind to even react as he raised his weapon and took aim. None except Mardissa, who, lacking any armor or weapon, rushed in front of us, her arms outstretched at either side.

“Father, please! Stop!”

“Mardi?” Salzaon said. “My sweet, what is the meaning of this? Have they meddled with your mind? Damn them! Damn that fool Veightnoch! I should have killed you all!”

“No, Father! Isn’t it enough? By the gods, haven’t we done enough to these people?”

“What manner of trickery is this?” Salzaon said. “What have you done to my daughter?”

I trotted up and stood at Mardissa’s side, my casters disarmed and the lens covers snapped shut. “Nothing. We did nothing. All I did was tell her the truth.”

“Mardissa, listen to me.” Salzaon knit his brow as he spoke, choosing to ignore me and address his daughter directly. “You don’t know how dangerous these creatures are. You can’t even begin to fathom the powers that they wield.”

“I can,” Mardissa said. “I’ve seen them in action. I know exactly what they can do. I also know why they do it. I know the sheer desperation and fear that drives them to act. Father, we’re pushing them to the brink of extinction. We’re wiping out the ones who resist, and enslaving the rest, and for nothing! What would you do, if you were in their place? They are already beaten. These people have nothing. Are you going to take what little they have left from them?”

Salzaon was visibly panicked. “Mardissa, you don’t understand! These creatures, they must already have you in their power! They warp minds. They warp bodies. They are inconceivably dangerous!”

Mardissa advanced on him, her brow furrowed in anger. “If they’re so deadly, then why are we selling them like a product? You’re willing to commercialize what you perceive as dangerous wildlife, and yet, you also want them contained and corralled. Can’t you see the contradiction, there?”

“I never agreed with the Corrector’s plans!” Salzaon shouted. “I always thought the Equestrians were too dangerous to keep alive. He acted out of his own greed, and he exceeded his authority. He has been chastised. From now on, the ground forces here on this backwater will be acting under my command, and we will contain the Equestrian problem once and for all. Now, are you going to continue to break your father’s heart, or are you going to come with me?” Salzaon reached out an armored gauntlet, his fingers curling in a come-hither gesture. “I didn’t have them put a tracking beacon in your implants for nothing, you know. Did you think me fool enough to let any of my investments out of my sight?”

Mardissa appeared visibly perturbed. Just a glance at the look on her face, and I could tell that she had no knowledge of this violation of her privacy whatsoever.

“Hey, I’m talking to you, asshole!” I stepped out in front of Mardissa, turning to face her father. It was time to twist the knife. “Your daughter is a grown woman. She can make decisions for herself. Face it. She doesn’t need you anymore.”

Salzaon shook his head, chuckling madly. “This is why we don’t send little girls to war. They’re too soft to do what needs to be done. They’re as likely to kneel before the enemy, give them a warm milk and tuck them into bed as they are to kill them.”

“Listen to me, you patronizing ass,” I said. “This is what needs to be done. This. Right here. This talk. What did you expect, that this would go on forever until one side or the other was completely destroyed? That’s not a war. That’s an extermination. You know what sets wars apart? They have an end. Eventually, people discuss terms, they hash out a treaty, the fighting stops, and then we go back to what’s left of our lives. I cannot believe I’m having to explain this to a head of state like you’re an overgrown foal, while you’re holding whatever the fuck that big metal dick is.”

“The sheer impertinence of these creatu—”

“Look at you.” I cut him off. “You’re more of a cartoon than we are, and we ponies come in every color of the fucking rainbow, so that’s saying something. Carrying a weapon like that to the battlefield—did you think this was another one of your hunts? For you, this is obviously leisure. For us, this is something completely different. It’s a matter of life and death.”

“I am the leader of the wealthiest, most powerful, and freest nation in this sector of the galaxy,” Salzaon said. “I don’t have to use substandard ordnance if I don’t want to.”

“That’s not the point,” I muttered. “You could have chosen any weapon you liked, and yet, you brought the most impractical artillery piece imaginable to the field of battle. Like it or not, that says something about your character.”

“Isn’t it the same for you things? How much does a Charger cost? Or a beamcaster? I watched the Empire bankrupt itself with that nonsense, and now, you have the gall to lecture me about my luxuries? Why shouldn’t the victors enjoy the spoils of a long and successful conquest? Did you expect a shaven-headed monk? Some sniveling, toothless rube that you could proselytize to and force into retreat with his head bowed and his tail between his legs?”

“What do you want from us?” I growled.

“I’ll tell you what I want.” Salzaon curled his hand into a fist. “I want to reduce this entire planet to a sheet of glass!”

Mardissa advanced a few steps. “Father, there are bigger things happening, here. Things that make centuries of war look trivial by comparison. These ponies have evidence of egregious violations of the Stellar Code. Someone has been kidnapping and augmenting damarkinds and stripping them of their free will. I know about the Vargr and the Archons, and based on the things I have learned, I am forced to conclude that we are all in grave danger. Father, you have to come with us! Please!”

Salzaon’s eyes grew wide with horror. “Vargr? You can’t be—oh dear lords above. You’re serious. Thrice-accursed humans. Here, on this world. Oh gods.” There was a burst of radio traffic in Salzaon’s earpiece and he appeared briefly distracted. “All forces, withdraw immediately. We’re done here.” He turned to Mardissa, tears in his eyes. “If you would take sides with these beasts over your own father, then Silassa will get your share of the will. There is no one for me to rescue, here. As of today, I am one daughter poorer.”

“Father, please, I—”

“You’re not just dead to me. You’re dead to the entire Confederacy. All record of your existence is to be erased, nameless one. I will give you a head start. Forty-eight hours, no more. Then, this sorry excuse for a base will be struck with earth-penetrating weapons and reduced to rubble. One final mercy. After that, there will be none, for I am going to hunt you all to the ends of the earth.”

As Salzaon slung his weapon and departed with haste, his armored footfalls echoing down the halls, Mardissa fell to her knees, sobbing loudly. While the rest slowly stood from cover, I walked up to the crying woman and gently draped a foreleg over her shoulder. I pressed my forehead into hers, taking care not to knock horns. It felt almost like I could grasp what she was thinking, what she was feeling, right through her skull. It was no magic power, this. It was simply the communion of two mammals in pain. She returned the embrace, her arms locking behind my back as she cried into my shoulder. I patted her on the back with my hoof.

I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know any words more profound than our shared touch. Anything that I could have said would have been cheaper than the value of silence.

The sounds of the firefight in the hangar outside were dying down, the blaze nearly extinguished by our diligent crews. When we got to Crookneck’s office, there was nothing that could be done for the old Charger engineer. The Karks had gotten to him. There wasn’t even enough of him left to pile together. It was going to be a closed-casket funeral. I wasn’t sure if I’d ever seen Captain Garrida cry. She had a claw over her beak and was facing a corner, her shoulders trembling. It was clear she didn’t intend for anyone to see her tears. Bellwether wasn’t doing too well, either. He’d been friends with the old codger. The techs came by about fifteen minutes later to solemnly pack up all the documentation and technical information Crookneck had possessed, taking special care to wipe the blood off the drafts he’d tried to save. None of us said a word as the body bag was zipped up.

Commodore Cake and the Stormtroopers ended up being the real heroes of the day. They’d kept the enemy away from the infirmary and the wounded from Pur Sang. There were barricades with a dozen Karkadann piled up in front of each one, surrounded by the unmistakable scorch marks of high-power spec-ops beamcasters. The Commodore and I had shared a look, but her exosuit helmet’s faceplate revealed nothing about her emotions. I scanned her body language, instead. The dismissive twist of her head. It was subtle, but I’d picked up on it right away. We still weren’t on speaking terms and probably wouldn’t be for quite some time. I’d shown her grave disrespect. I had to ask Weathervane about that, later, if she was still alive. There had to be something wrong with my meds. Kissing random mares on the mouth was a pretty bad side effect.

Casualty figures were still coming in, and they were looking grim. We’d brought down dozens of Karkadann and a hoofful of elite GARG troopers. At least five times that number of ELF militia members had been slain. Even with the home field advantage, we’d suffered a devastating blow. If the firefighters hadn’t kept the flames away from the arms stockpile, the whole base would’ve been blown sky-high.

We had been that close to being wiped completely off the map.

// … // … // … // … // … //

Captain Garrida stood atop a makeshift podium in a corner of the hangar that had remained untouched by the battle, surrounded by the surviving members of the Camp Crazy Horse cell. She paced back and forth as she fixed her steely gaze on all of us.

“We’ve suffered a loss, today. One that cannot be replaced. Crookneck Squash, a close friend of mine for many years, and a brilliant mind in the field of Charger design, was killed in the fighting. So were many of the militia. President Salzaon Granthis himself was daring enough to show up right on our doorstep to deliver an ultimatum. We are to abandon Camp Crazy Horse within two days, or else be buried in it. We have no choice but to assume that he will make good on this threat. That’s why we need to pack up everything. All the high-value materiel. The duostrand loom, all the technical data, all the Chargers and Charger components, all necessary tooling, vehicle ordnance, personal weapons, body armor, medical supplies, everything. Everything has to go with us when we leave. Everything we can carry.”

One stallion raised his hoof to ask a question, and Garrida pointed at him and nodded. “Speak, soldier.”

“Where will we go?”

Garrida stiffened, her back ramrod straight. “With the assistance of the Vanhoover Cell, we’re going to evacuate Camp Crazy Horse and move our operations to the mines of Tar Pan. Two days. No time to waste. Pack it all up. Leave nothing but an empty hole for those bastards to fuck. Let’s move!”

A cheer went up, but it was half-hearted. No one wanted to leave our only real home behind.

// … // … // … // … // … //

I rode my Stampeder alongside the convoy of tanks, artillery, personnel carriers, cargo trucks, and Bull Runners. Black Devil and Scofflaw had been partly dismantled and placed on the Runners we’d recovered from Pur Sang. Night Terror’s Destrier was pacing the convoy, ready to spring to its defense should the need arise. My motorcycle’s modifications had been completed as of a few days ago, which was a good thing, since they’d called upon my levitation magic to help with the evacuation and I would’ve been too busy otherwise. In addition to the matte paint job I’d given my bike, it now had a quieter exhaust and a blackout cover over the headlight to keep it from giving away our position. Mardissa rode pillion behind me, her hands at my hips. My mane and my bomber jacket flapped in the wind. I was on autopilot, my mind wandering dark places.

I looked down, briefly. Mar had a small scar on her arm from where Argent had dug out the tracking beacon. The cleomanni swore up and down that she had no knowledge of it. I shook my head. One tiny little lapse in security had cost us our whole base. Placid Gale, Wind Shear, Cloverleaf, and Shooting Star were riding on top of a Minotaur tank that Sagebrush was driving. Someone, probably Sage, had painted Four Legs Good, Two Legs Bad on the sides of the 120mm gun barrels.

A few hours into our journey, scout reports had confirmed it. Camp Crazy Horse was rubble. Confederate jets had flattened the whole area, leaving nothing intact. We’d had to leave a lot of materiel behind. At least half of the chargers we recovered from Pur Sang had been scuttled with thermite, while the rest had been broken down for transport. We’d taken only the essentials. We looked to the skies warily, the pegasi and Rocs patrolling above us and keeping an eye out for enemy aircraft.

The skies darkened as we headed northwest on a long, abandoned stretch of highway. Many exhausting hours later, we arrived at Tar Pan, the lights of the city gleaming through the fog. The Runners pulled into the quarry on the edge of town, descending earthen ramps and entering the mines.

The exhaust note of my bike turned into a hollow echo as we rode through the yawning black mouth of the mine and deep into its cold, damp, dark confines, surrounded on all sides by white caverns of salt that stung our eyes.

This hell-pit was to be our new home.

// … end transmission …

Record 17//Assembly

//HOL CRY ADV

//READ FAILURE – CHECK DRIVE AND REINSERT MEDIA

//HOL CRY ADV
//CHECKSUM READ
//CHECKSUM GOOD

// … decoding …

Desert Storm

Several hours after we arrived at Tar Pan, the crews from Vanhoover had finished setting up most of the work lights. The harsh diode lighting pooled in the cavernous tunnels, Centaur armored cars and hoof patrols making their way up and down the mine and keeping a lookout for any signs of enemy infiltration. We didn’t want a repeat of the complete fiasco we had a couple days ago. Not when we were in such a fragile state. And what a fiasco it was. The president himself, in the flesh. It was the stuff of drunken wagers. Even my memories of it seemed unreal. A week ago, if somepony had told me I’d be verbally sparring with Salzaon fucking Granthis right in the middle of our own base, I would’ve told them to lay off the crack pipe.

We took a heavy cargo lift down into the mine shaft. One big enough for a fully laden Bull Runner. More specifically, the Bull Runner the bed of which I shared with Black Devil, Mar, and Ket. The three of us sat side-by-side on the edge of the bed with our legs hanging off, my Charger at our backs. The platform squealed and ground all the way to the bottom, thudding against the stops on the lowermost level of the shaft. The Runner’s turbine rose to a shrill whine and its tires dug into the dirt as it drove off the platform and deeper into the mine.

The walls of the mine were layers of smooth salt that formed beautiful banding patterns. Not only did I have to resist the urge to reach out and touch them, I reflexively pulled my legs in to avoid getting them crushed should our driver be imprecise. We came to a halt in the largest cavern, the one we were hastily repurposing into a Charger laboratory. The duostrand loom had to be recalibrated after being moved. They’d poured an instacrete slab for it to sit on, because apparently, the thing had to sit exactly level to work correctly, and the bottom of the mine was far from it.

When we came to a halt, I stepped off the bed of the truck and dropped a couple meters to the dirt, rolling to absorb the impact and rising to my hooves. Mardissa and Ketros climbed down and followed me.

“Ten-shun!” I called out.

A set of hoofbeats rang out as my new unit assumed two neat rows. As I’d requested, Privates Haybale, Jury Rig, and Hexhead were all present and accounted for, along with Corporals Shooting Star and Cloverleaf. Ginger Snap was KIA in the fighting a couple days previous, and with Crookneck’s death, Wind Shear was sorely needed elsewhere. I needed replacements, and I’d got ‘em. Ketros and Mardissa took their place at the end of the formation. Their faces were darkened in the dim lighting of the mine, but I could still make out their features. They were nervous. Maybe even a little afraid. We all were.

“Alright, people,” I said. “Listen up. We got a couple new recruits joining us, today. Private Armagais and Private Granthis. Yeah, yeah, I know you two were probably hoping to keep your commissions, but that’s not how this shit works. You’ve got to start all the way from the very bottom like everyone else. Ponies, you see Private Granthis, here? Her father showed up, in person, both to threaten all our lives and to disown his daughter. She has a new family, you understand? That’s us. You are to treat her with the same respect as anyone else, and that goes for Private Armagais as well. When we were attacked, they both fought bravely to defend our home, not hesitating even for a second to take up arms against their own homeland. The truest sign of loyalty is a willingness to spill blood in the defense of a nation, and that is a test that the two of them have passed with flying colors.”

A couple ponies stiffened visibly at the name Granthis, but otherwise, they didn’t move a muscle or even take a peek at the newcomers as I paced up and down the formation and inspected them. Good. That’s what I need. Discipline. I’d been short of it, myself, as of late, and I hated the mess that I was becoming. Rather than me setting an example for these ponies to follow, I hoped a little of them would rub off on me. I quickly dismissed such notions, however. If I looked up to them rather than the reverse, this whole affair was destined to result in disaster. I had to be stronger than that. I had to be a pillar of strength for them to lean on. I had to remake myself.

I would begin with the truth. It seemed to have served me well, as of late.

“I have never been a leader.” I looked each of them in the eyes as I paced up and down the line. “I am, first and foremost, a pilot, wedded to my machine and little else. Since I joined the resistance, I endeavored for one thing and one thing only, and that was to see the inside of a cockpit again. With the infantry, fighting side-by-side with the militia, I gave it my all, but I also did things that I’m not proud of. I acted rashly. I acted shamefully. During the raid on Dodge City, I got emotional, seeing my old hometown in ruins and with hardly a soul in sight. I got careless. Ponies died because of my actions. I let you down. For that, I apologize.

“We’ve been through some hard times, lately. We lost our home. We lost ponies who were close to us. Ponies who were invaluable to the resistance effort.” I came to a halt, turning and addressing all of them at once. “All of you are here because I have requested you personally, to be my own team. To be my eyes and ears on the battlefield. Chargers are not invincible. Like any ground vehicle, we need support assets to cover us and fill the gaps in our awareness. This is going to be dangerous, difficult duty.

“Charger support teams are part forward observer, part saboteur. You’re gonna be in the thick of it, calling out targets, setting up forward observation posts, breaching into structures, compromising enemy perimeter security, and sabotaging critical enemy equipment, like radar dishes, comms, and anything else that could give them the edge in command and control. Our roles are complementary. You call out the big stuff—enemy troop formations, vehicles, bunkers, the major targets—so I can engage and destroy them. Likewise, I use my rig’s electronic warfare package to tell you where enemy emissions are coming from, so you can engage and destroy the sources. We put out their eyes, we jam pencils in their ears, and then, when they’re blind and deaf, we cut out their spleens. That’s the Charger Corps way. I want all volunteers for this. If anyone has any reservations, any at all, feel free to step back. I won’t hold it against you.”

None budged. I smiled. “Are we going to kneel before our enemies and meekly place our necks on the executioner’s block? No, we will not! Will we accept brutal colonial rule and become their property? No, we will not! We are going to survive this, together. We’re going to fight, and we’re going to win! You got that?”

“Yes ma’am!” they rang out in a chorus.

I nodded. “Rest up, get some chow, and unseal the information packets I’ve prepared for each of you. Briefing’s at 1300 hours tomorrow. Get your shit packed up and be ready to move. Dismissed!”

The formation broke up and they each dispersed to their stations, but Private Granthis paused and turned around when the others weren’t looking. The cleomanni woman blew me a kiss and gave me a parting wink. I sharply inhaled and held my breath in mild shock. I stood there, blinking a few times, rooted to that spot, until she was no longer in eyeshot. I let go of the breath I’d been holding and glanced over my shoulder a couple times before I also departed that particular chamber of the mine.

There was a faint sound of dripping water in some of the tunnels, almost like a natural cave. It had to be leaky pipes or drainage from the surface or something, or groundwater—no, perhaps condensation from the cool air deep underground. I couldn’t quite identify the source. My hooves were shaking as I retrieved a couple plastic pill bottles from my saddlebags and popped one each in my mouth, grimacing as I swallowed without the aid of any water.

Out of mild curiosity, I approached one of the walls of tantalizing-looking salt. I stuck out my tongue and gave it a lick, before spitting vigorously and groaning at my stupidity. It tasted less like salt and more like dirt. As I continued along my way, following the canary-yellow electrical cabling and work lights strung down the tunnel, I encountered a small side chamber.

The pegasus super-soldier by the name of Layer Cake was wearing neon green leg warmers and doing calisthenics in a section of the mine that she’d converted into an improvised gym. The place was full of heavy junk and scrap parts that the techs had thrown out after the move. Things that could be lifted for exercise, if one was so inclined. In addition, there was a full set of weights, although I honestly had no idea how our teams had the time or the wherewithal to bring those along.

My jaw slowly went slack as I watched her switch from doing push-ups to bench-pressing two entire synfuel engine modules out of a Minotaur tank that she’d stacked and banded together with steel bands. The engines dwarfed her. They massed over a couple tons, easy. She was making a pony-shaped depression in the ground.

“Aren’t tank engines a bit expensive for that?” I said.

“These ones are no good. Bad valve seats. The techs don’t have the stuff to hone ‘em.”

“Oh.”

“Got designs on these lips of mine, Sergeant?” She glared daggers at me. “Back for another taste?”

“That was—” I sheepishly rubbed the back of my neck with my hoof. “Ma’am, I have no fucking idea what the hell that was, really. I just started these new meds and I’ve been having weird mood swings that I’m unaccustomed to.”

“You might consider adjusting the dosage, then.”

I winced with the sting of her words, but I would not be deterred so easily. “I came to say I’m sorry, ma’am. For what I said. For what I did, as well. It was conduct unbecoming of a former Army NCO, and of a member of the resistance.”

“Sorry won’t bring back Star Cross Wraithwood, Officer Dartwing, or Crookneck Squash, nor will it magically reconstitute our obliterated base.”

“There was something I had to say about that.”

“Speak, then.” The Commodore’s tone was acidic.

“I think there may be an upshot to all this.”

“Oh? And what may that be?”

“That thing. The Archon. Seneschal Arka-Povis.” Just naming it made my guts churn.

Commodore Cake raised an eyebrow. “So, it has a name? Where’d you hear that?”

“It spoke to me, somehow. Some form of telepathy. Really did a number on my head. It said that the reason why the Vargr were more active than usual was because the Confederacy were going too easy on us. Now that the Confederacy are here in force, what if the Vargr pull back? At least we won’t have to go up against them as often, right?”

Commodore Cake did a series of stretches, rolling her shoulders and cracking her neck. “Possible. On the other hoof, it’s just as likely that they’d use the added pressure to their advantage, attacking us more frequently, not less.”

“What if we can play them against each other? Draw the Vargr and the Confederacy into a fight that neither can conclusively win. Have them wear each other down.”

The Dragoon sighed and shook her head. “Leave the strategizing to your betters, Sergeant. Realistically, we can’t make the Vargr do anything that they weren’t going to do already. They’re smart. They always think several steps ahead and they never leave themselves open. That’s why your downing of that dropship’s got them all pissed off. They never had that happen before, ever. They don’t leave behind intact specimens of their tech. We broke it down, packed it up, and sent the remains straight to Admiral Crusher. Got our top boffins looking over it, now.”

“It just grinds my fucking gears, you know?” I said. “We’re already spread thin as it is, morale is in the shitter, and everypony is losing their marbles. We’re basically on our fucking lips. Oof, no pun intended.”

The Dragoon chuckled. “If there was a way that you could weaponize your idiom sprees, Sergeant, we would have a rather potent addition to our arsenal. I’m sure ol’ Crook would’ve found a way to affix them to your Charger with stencils.”

I gave her my best smirk. “Did I ever tell you about that time I walked in on Crookneck and Sierra fucking on the couch? I seriously wondered, out loud, if Argent could set me up with a new pair of cyber-eyes to replace my ruined organic ones.”

We both had a giggle at that. “Oh Celestia,” the Commodore said. “What a terrible mental image.”

“I’m gonna miss that caffeinated old fuck,” I said. “Died trying to save his work. Guy had some real dedication.”

“That he did, Sergeant. That, he did indeed.”

“Fuck.” I sighed. “Fuckin’ Granthis is coming on to me.”

Commodore Cake cocked an eyebrow. “What? Really?”

“Yeah, seriously,” I said. “She’s crushing on me pretty hard. Not ideal if she’s gonna be my subordinate.”

“Well, there is also the matter of her being a completely different species. One that, historically speaking, we haven’t gotten along with too well, to put it lightly.”

“Pfft, never stopped us back in the old days.” I laughed. “Where do you think all those hybrids came from? Hippogriffs? Yeah, somepony loved the griffon dick.”

Layer Cake frowned. “I’m not too sure if that’s how hippogriffs came about.”

“Well, best guess I had.” I shrugged. “Now if I was gonna fuck anyone on base, it’d probably be—” Should I tell her? “Never mind. Point is, you know, she’s a sweetheart and I don’t know how to tell her it’ll never work without breaking her heart and getting her all maudlin and shit, and the last thing I need is to start screwing my new unit’s morale in its very fucking inception.”

Commodore Cake did a few more stretches, arching her back and tugging on her forelimbs. “It’d be even more cruel to string her along and let her think you’re interested when you’re not.”

I watched, mesmerized, as she flipped her pinkish mane out of her face and braided it into a ponytail with her wingtips. How in the fuck? I wondered silently to myself.

“I’m already taken,” I said. “Should I tell her?”

Cake huffed, rolling her eyes. “You’re still on about that Barleywine lad? The one that was last seen alive in Everfree City? Give it up. He’s bones, darling.”

I shook my head. “You don’t know him like I do. He’s a tenacious fucker. He has to be alive, somehow.”

“I sincerely doubt that, but hey, if you aren’t keen on fucking anyone else, that’s your loss. Celestia knows we all need a good fucking in this lonely hell.”

The both of us had a laugh and I patted her on the back. “You can say that again.” I stiffened and saluted. “I mean, uhh, ma’am.”

“Oh, come off it. We’re a knightly order, not the Army. You can give me exactly the level of respect that I command you to, no more, no less. And I’ve been in the market for a new friend since my last one got rad-sick and died.”

The two of us looked each other in the eye. I slapped my hoof into hers, closing the deal.

“Fuck those Vargr pricks,” I said. “We’re gonna teach them a lesson, too, someday.”

“I see we’re on the same page,” Cake said. “Just don’t cock things up any more than you already have.”

I averted my eyes from the Commodore’s intense gaze. “I don’t know what happened on that mountain. Everything broke down. Discipline broke down. The chain of command broke down. When mortars started raining down on the base, we radioed the Captain for orders, but we couldn’t make contact. So, we went looking for one of the lost convoys, we found a nuke, and Bellwether, well, he made an executive decision he shouldn’t have, and here we are.”

“I heard about what happened to you.” The Commodore’s voice was soft, consoling, her eyes fringed with worry. “You okay?”

Slowly, little by little, I began to shake. My body didn’t feel like my body. It didn’t feel real. Nothing felt real. It felt like I was a passenger inside myself. My eyes misted with tears. My back shuddered with sobs.

“No,” I said. “No, I’m not.”

Layer Cake’s powerful forelegs wrapped around me in a firm hug. “Sergeant, I am so sorry. We came as quickly as we could. So much for being the Empire’s best, eh?”

“You’re amazing.” I sniffled as I held back the tears that threatened to spill forth from my eyes. “The things you do, you know, every time I see a Dragoon fighting, it makes me feel small. Small and helpless. I wish I had the kind of power you did. The power to fight the way you do.”

The Commodore grinned and thumped my chest with her hoof, knocking the wind out of me a little. “Well, come on then! Let’s get you hench.”

“What?”

“Oh, how do you lot say it? Ripped. Yoked. Buff as a yak. Take it from me, all that talk of earth pony strength is bollocks. Anypony can get that strong, even soft little unicorns like you. The only thing you need to do is commit.”

The Commodore leapt to the center of the room, the work lights pooling around her hooves like stage lighting. A jaunty tune began to play. Then, I saw something I never thought I’d ever see.

Commodore Cake broke into fucking song.

With strong sinews, you can be remade, a warrior without compare,

Reborn anew, in our last brigade, a mare beyond despair.

“Where the fuck is that music coming from?” I muttered.

I yelped as Cake’s foreleg wrapped around my neck and she yanked me over to a weight bench and ushered me right into my training montage.

Trials and tribulations, dogging our heels every day,

Wicked alien monsters, who see us as their prey,

Cultivate inner strength, revel in the power that you gained,

Rise up on your hooves, and keep your body trained!

I was sweating my cunt off. She had me pressing eight hundred kilos for reps. The bar was fucking bending in the middle. She had me doing push-ups, sit-ups, and lunges. I was dripping and covered in dirt from the mine floor.

It’s not enough to annoy us, they want to completely destroy us,

Cake pirouetted gracefully. I had no idea she knew how to do ballet.

And dance on our bones,

And live in our homes,

And keep us as pets,

Are you tired of it yet?

Commodore Cake held her hoof to my cheek.

We are better than them, in every conceivable way,

We’re stronger, smarter, and faster, and we are here to stay,

I was doing pull-ups. I hated pull-ups. It was such a difficult maneuver for quadrupeds, and bipeds made it look easy.

With strong sinews, you can be remade, a warrior without compare,

Reborn anew, in our last brigade, a mare beyond despair.

When we were done, the both of us were panting, lying on our backs, side-by-side. My muscles were on fire. I’d never felt anything quite like it before, even in basic.

“A little pony-supremacist, don’t you think?” I said.

“It’s true,” she said. “No other species in this universe holds a candle to us. I mean, think of the average Lesser Archon, of which I’ve been lucky to see only two. Smells like low tide, tentacles for legs, head flared like a stallion’s dick. Do you really see yourself as inferior to that? What about the damarkinds? Stupid furballs that think only with their pricks. The satyrs are weak. Appallingly so. Weak and hedonistic degenerates. Their only solace is in numbers. None of them compare to us. They don’t have magic, they don’t have our strength and endurance, and they don’t have our technological prowess. So, what do they have?”

I was never particularly fond of any of them myself, but this was something else. This was ugly. Too ugly to have come from the Commodore’s pretty mouth. I could see the glint of cold hatred in her eye. I could see the wheels turn in her head as she fantasized about slaying them all. Though I would have readily agreed with her at one time, I wasn’t comfortable with it now, especially not with two cleomanni now under my command.

I turned towards the Commodore. “If they’re all so pathetic compared to ponies, as you say, then why are we the ones living in a Celestia-fucking salt mine?”

“That’s beside the point, Sergeant.” Commodore Cake frowned. “We have much to be proud of, and very little to be ashamed of.”

Honestly, I was scared. I was afraid of what I was. Of my heritage. I reached out with my forelegs and held my hooves in front of my face, turning them over. I had hooves that could crush a satyr’s bones in an instant, and the Commodore wanted to make me even stronger. She wanted to make me into a monster.

“So, ma’am,” I said. “You can sing, you can dance, you’re one hell of a drill instructor, and you also feed Confederate jackholes their own teeth on a regular basis. Is there anything you can’t do?”

“We’re not good at love, darling,” she said.

I looked over at her with concern. “Really?”

“You can always stop taking altrenogest. For us, it’s permanent. We can never quite turn it on, because of our augmentations.”

“Damn. Well, how come there aren’t any stallions in the Dragoons?”

“Not possible,” she said. “The Matrons reproduce by means artificial. To put it bluntly, by artificially fertilizing an egg with another egg. One must attain the rank of Star Cross before even being considered for bearing a Dragoon child. They always select the purest genetic stock. That’s why I look like this.” She waved her hoof over her uncannily, disturbingly beautiful features.

She pulled off one of her leg warmers and showed me one of her legs. Commodore Cake was like a living statue hewn from muscle and bone. She was freakish. I tilted my head in idle wonder at how the muscles rippled beneath her flesh. It was hypnotic, like staring at a spinning top.

“Wow,” I said. “You’re built like a brick shithouse.”

“You could be, too. Why don’t you start training with me every day, Sergeant? Better than ruminating on what we’ve lost. It’ll get the juices flowing in the right direction. What say you?”

I smiled. “Yeah, I think I’d like that.”

We hoof-bumped to seal the deal. I had a feeling I was going to enjoy my time in Tar Pan.

// … // … // … // … // … //

Cicatrice supervised me as I performed the Invocation of the King in his makeshift ritual chamber. I lay down in the circle, applied the henbane, and spoke the incantations. He’d made me rehearse it ten times before doing it for real. I sighed with relief when the process was complete.

“Very good, Sergeant,” he said. “You mess any part of this ritual up, and the Archons will literally make you their bitch. Continue to do it like this, and there won’t be any problems.”

“How long will I have to do this for?” I said.

“Have you not been listening to a word I’ve said, my dear?” Cicatrice frowned. “For the rest of your life. We have never identified a safe, effective method to break the curse. Your soul has been tainted. Permanently.”

I let out a wearied sigh. “At least tell me we’ve got enough henbane and candles.”

“Well, you see, about that.” Cicatrice scratched his head. “My one and only supplier bought the farm, and we’re down to one jar. Sorry, but you’re probably going to succumb to the curse in another month or two.”

I stared at him, eyes wide, swallowing the lump in my throat. “Why?” I squeaked.

Cicatrice let out a thick, raspy guffaw. “I’ve got crates and crates of the stuff. You’re fine.”

I huffed in exasperation. “Jerk.”

The old stallion climbed down from his perch and clapped his hooves together. “You ready for your first real lesson in dark magic?”

“Yes.” I nodded, still a little woozy from the henbane. “Please.”

“Well then, let us begin. First, you know of the six major spectra, correct?”

“Magic 101.” I sighed.

“Well, did you know that they each have their own associated personalities and emotions?”

I tilted my head. “Huh? Really?”

We both took a seat on the floor, directly across from each other. Cicatrice’s magic laboratory in the salt mine had instacrete flooring, unlike many of the others, which were still bare dirt.

“Arcane magic is associated with wisdom and forbearance, while Elemental magic represents unrestrained passion. Light magic is the domain of kindness and generosity, while Dark magic draws on hatred, fear, and envy. Order magic is rooted in honesty, while Chaos magic gains power in deceit. Notice anything?”

“Dark magic involves a wider variety of emotions. Negative ones, but still, wider variety.”

“Exactly. It occupies a larger domain of thought than any of the others. That makes it easier to augment. If you feel hate, you can use it. If you feel fear, you can use it. If you feel envious or covetous, you can use that, as well. Why do you think I demand that my students show me blatant disrespect?”

I shrugged. “So you always have a certain amount of hatred that you can use.”

Cicatrice did a creepy little grin. “Precisely, my dear. Unresolved tension and anxiety are another major source of power for a dark magician, especially illusionists like you. You shouldn’t be taking anxiolytics like you are. That can weaken you. Do you fear death? Do you ever feel like you want to cower and hide from a terrible fate? There is dark power in those emotions. For an illusionist, cowardice is not a weakness. It is a source of tremendous strength. Only those who know the true depths of fear can weave the finest illusions.”

“I—what?”

“You, Sergeant Storm, are capable of concealing yourself for such incredible lengths of time because deep down, you fear. You fear dying unfulfilled, a wet smear on the battlefield, a charred corpse in your cockpit, or whatever fate may come. You want to be normal. You want to raise a family. Your future is much, much bleaker than that, and you know it.”

I let out a dismissive snort. “I feel personally attacked.”

“It’s true, isn’t it? Your fixation on your dead fiancé is because you see him as a thread that you can pull that will unravel the nightmare that is your existence. For you, he represents an escape hatch into another realm; a parallel universe where we won the war and you became a happy wife and a happier mother.”

“Shut—shut up.”

I was getting pissed. He didn’t stop there. He just kept going and going.

“It’s true, isn’t it?”

I stared at the floor, despondent. “Raising foals isn’t everything, you know. It’s silly that it’s expected of mares. And women, I guess, if my little chats with the younger Granthis are anything to go by.”

“Of course. Everyone forges their own path. For some, the life of a mother may seem droll. Generic, even. What a demotion that would be for you. Who in their right mind would give up the excitement and adventure of being a Charger pilot, just to be a housewife?”

“I would.” I looked up at him. “You think being a Charger pilot is so great, why don’t you try it? Yeah, it’s fun to defy gravity. Yeah, it’s fun to stomp around and scare the fuck out of people. But when the fighting starts, you have to commit yourself to the mindset that you’re going to win, no matter what, and woe to any who stand in your way. And then, once you’re all done, what do you have? Rubble and corpses. That’s what I do for a living, Your Excellency. I’ve taken so many lives out of this world, why is it such a mystery that I wish I could put a few back in?”

“And undo your life’s work?” Cicatrice grinned. “Why? Just accept what you are. You’re a pilot. You are a being that sows terror and reaps souls. That’s not something that most ponies can say of themselves.”

I gritted my teeth in rage. “I want—I—dammit! The hell are you pushing my buttons like this for?”

He pointed his hoof at me. “For that. You feel that? That anger? That’s the first step. Now, how do you feel about me?”

When I spoke, it was through grit teeth. “Like I wanna knock your fucking lights out, Your Excellency.”

“Perfect,” Cicatrice said. “Then we’re ready to begin.” Cicatrice tossed a foam practice knife in the air and caught it in his hoof. “I want you to make me stab myself. I’ve let my wards down but put up delayed dispels that will undo anything that you do after a short time. Do it. In old Equish. Hate, Torment, Mind.”

I stood and charged my horn, real hatred animating my movements. “Doz, Karetta, Kayo!”

I could feel his flesh in the grip of my magic. It was as if his nervous system was an extension of mine, like his whole body was a tumor growing from my head. It was unutterably strange. I accessed the bundle of nerves in his shaking, resisting legs and, with some difficulty, drove the point of the foam knife into his neck.

There was a bright flash as the dispel went off, the blowback giving me a splitting headache. I sat down with a pained grunt, rubbing my head. “Dammit, could’ve told me about that part!”

“You’ve got to let go before a dispel or, Luna forbid, a counterspell actually goes off. You’ve got to feel it before it happens. The slight tingle is a warning. You’ll get used to it eventually.”

“What was the point of all that?” I said. “Fuck, dude. I’m not sure I wanna do this anymore.”

“Quitting already? It’s just a little exercise. Not like I expect you to use that move in combat. In fact, I expressly forbid it. You’ll fuck your mind real quick that way. The Body-Seize is one of the most basic forms of mind control. Crude and primitive, it turns the victim into a remote-controlled puppet. Imagine if a man has a gun leveled at you, and right before he can pull the trigger, you nudge his aim a little bit off-target, all without even a hint of levitation magic. The best part is, it’s extremely efficient. If you practice, you can make someone trip over themselves from a hundred meters away while barely exerting your magic.”

“How?”

“Like you just did with me. You make the target’s own muscles work against them. You can even cause debilitating pain and muscle cramping if you force certain regions of the body to contract. You don’t have to resort to killing with it. It can be quite potent in the right hooves, unleashed at the right moment. The best thing about it is that it doesn’t put off a glow like levitation does. Truly skilled practitioners can break a satyr’s arm with his own muscle spasms. No warning, no time for them to react. Only pain.”

“Still didn’t answer my question, Cicatrice.”

The old stallion smiled evilly as he eased back into a smug and lackadaisical reclining posture, resting his chin on his hoof. “I just wanted to see if you could hone your anger into a weapon, and you can. Most of my students don’t actually pass that one on the first try, but you? You hate very acutely, my dear, and you channel it adeptly, too. You’re a natural. You must be bottling something up.”

I cried out in surprise as Cicatrice’s magic struck my horn and began drawing something out of it. A bright red cloud began to coalesce above my head. I felt the anguish and hatred seep out of me, leaving a void of calm and serenity in its place.

“What the hell are you doing?!” I said.

“Oh, wow!” Cicatrice grinned. “Very highly concentrated.”

“Concentrated what? What the hell is that?”

“Your anger.”

Equestria was not a particularly superstitious culture. Yes, magic existed, but it was a known quantity; it was researched, catalogued, and understood practically the same as any other science. This was like something from ancient unicorn myth. He’d pulled my very emotions out of my head.

“How the fuck did you do that?” I was filled with wonder and awe. I couldn’t even get particularly mad, because he’d already torn my anger right from my skull.

“Magic. Real magic, not those pissant parlor tricks they teach most of you kids. Did you know that if you bound this raw essence to something like, oh, a dart, or a throwing knife, or something like that, and then you hit some poor cleomanni bastard with it, he’d go completely berserk? That’s one possible use. A crude and unsophisticated use, but a use nonetheless. It’s even better when used in enchanting.”

Cicatrice pulled out a ruby pendant and I watched in stunned amazement as the red cloud was pulled into the lozenge-cut gemstone like a vacuum cleaner sucking up smoke. The ruby and the hammered brass pendant glowed bright red with congealed rage.

“Ruby and brass,” Cicatrice said. “That is the materia that lies on the same part of the spectrum as hatred, indignation, and zeal for justice. This pendant is highly charged after being filled with your considerable energies. If a spell were bound to it, the enchantment could function at a high degree of efficiency for years and years.”

The old codger levitated the pendant over to me, draping its necklace over my neck and letting it hang from my chest. I could feel my own rage sealed within it, interacting with the thaumatic field gestalt.

“So, you’re saying I can store my anger in this thing?” I said.

“No, my dear. Anger is merely hatred that has not yet fully matured. Don’t stop at anger. Cultivate hatred.”

“Not a problem,” I muttered. “Plenty to hate out there.”

“Now, what I am about to tell you must not leave this room,” Cicatrice said. “Do you understand me, Sergeant?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I mean it.” Cicatrice snarled. “A word of this to anyone, and I’ll make your death look like an accident.”

I swallowed nervously. “Of course, Your Excellency.”

Cicatrice sighed. “Humans, or terrans—those are the words for the species that the Vargr are, by the way—had a different understanding of magic from us. What we call the thaumatic gestalt, they referred to as the noosphere. They knew exactly how the mind produces magic fields, they knew how quintessence worked, and they knew how to manipulate those fields with incredible precision using semi-organic computers that made diagrammatic engines look like toys. All this, despite not being particularly magical themselves. We think they may have had some form of group magic or vague extrasensory perception capabilities, but we’re not sure.”

I blinked a few times. “Wow, that’s, uhh, that’s kind of a big bombshell to drop on me all at once, dude. How do you know all this? I thought all we had were fragments of their text.”

“We have more than that. Actual samples of their tech. Much of it is old and degraded, but the hints of how it was constructed remain.” Cicatrice leaned in towards me, his expression grave. “The terrans were the masters of this region of the galaxy, for who knows how long, but they did something stupid. Their hubris attracted the wrong kind of attention.”

My heart was pounding with fear, my breathing disturbed. “The Archons.”

“Correct. That’s just what we’ve been able to piece together from our artifact digs. As you know, they’re not too keen on telling us what happened to their people over a cup of tea. Now, I ask you, where is the evidence of human civilization? Where are they now? Have you ever even heard of a human before? Does the name Terran Concord ring any bells?”

My eyes traced downward in grim contemplation. There was nothing. Not even a single word about them in our history books. Any ruins or dig sites that existed were black projects well beyond the purview of any civilian academics who lacked proper clearance. Humans were completely unknown, and that meant they practically didn’t exist anymore.

The ruin that befell them must have been apocalyptic in scope.

“Salzaon,” I said. “He used the same word. Human. I didn’t know what he meant, at the time.”

“He knows, too. Most of the wealthier and better educated cleomanni know something or another about the Concord. You think Confederate Military Intelligence are stupid? You think they don’t comprehend what’s lurking out there just as well as we do? They’re compromised. Who knows how many high-level Mil-Int members are already infected by the Archons’ Kiss? Who knows if there’s a rogue faction within Mil-Int that already recognizes this, and is currently trying to purge the infected from their ranks? Do you see where I am going with this?”

I nodded. “There is such a faction. And you are in contact with them.”

“You’re sharper than you look.” Cicatrice waved his hoof at me. “You also understand why you must keep this a secret, correct?”

“There may be infected ponies in our own ranks that we don’t know about.”

Cicatrice’s brows furrowed in genuine worry. “Well, that’s just the problem. There aren’t. Not in this resistance cell. You’ve all had routine checkups and blood tests, but you’ve also had other lab work conducted without your knowledge. The sickness cannot hide. The genetic markers and tissue changes are blatantly obvious in a gene sequencing assay. And yet, there is a mole.”

My blood ran cold. “Who?”

“We don’t know. That’s the problem. You and your squad are cleared of suspicion, however. Even Granthis, that stupid cunt.”

“Hey.” I frowned. “She took up arms against the Confederacy without hesitation. She’s one of us.”

“Is she?” Cicatrice’s voice dripped with sarcasm. “How could she not even know what’s inside her body?”

“She passed a lie detector test.”

The Magister grunted derisively. “Of course she did. She comes from a race of professional liars.”

I rolled my eyes. “Okay, I get it. Satyrs are shitheads. But Private Granthis and Private Armagais are my shitheads. I’ve got them handled.”

“Do you? Are you prepared for disappointment if they’re not as friendly as you think?”

“What, you think they’re deep-cover agents sent to infiltrate us? Really?”

“Well, look at the results.” Cicatrice shrugged. “We’re less a base. If they really were spies, then Salzaon has a couple of deniable assets that have been struck from the Confederacy’s records. Now, why would he want that?”

“Maybe he planned this,” I said. “Maybe he knows about the Archon-tainted in his own ranks and is using this as an opportunity to plant some eyes and ears in the resistance, and to have an asset on the outside. Namely, his own daughter. Someone who, conveniently, doesn’t exist and can no longer be tracked from his side. Maybe he thought she was in danger and he decided to leave her in our care before the Archons got to her. Maybe he thinks he’s manipulating her, and us, into solving his little Archon problem for him.”

“Ah, yes.” Cicatrice grinned wide. “You’re properly paranoid. You’re perfect.”

I raised a brow. “For what?”

Cicatrice hoofed over a thick manila envelope. “Here, your orders for you and your squad, Sergeant. This is all part of your current assignment and amends any previous orders you may have received. I’ve already cleared everything with Captain Garrida, and she’s approved you for caster use. You belong to me, now. Get your people combat-ready as quick as you can. We have a job already lined up for you. Sadly, your Charger won’t be ready in time for it, but you wouldn’t be able to use it anyway. This will require subtlety.”

I performed a curt bow. “Yes, Your Excellency.”

“By the way, your suspicions are probably correct, Sergeant. Scout reports indicate Vargr activity in the vicinity of Ghastly Gorge as of a few hours ago. They traced us back, somehow. They would not have been nearly as merciful as Sal was. Notice how little damage he actually did to us? Let’s not kid ourselves. He could’ve led with a few bunker busters, easy. He didn’t have to attempt a costly infantry assault. He wasn’t trying to kill us. He was trying to drive us out before we got hit.”

“But that doesn’t make any sense. He didn’t seem to know about the Vargr.”

Cicatrice let out a loud, rasping guffaw. “He played you. He played his daughter, too. Everything the satyrs do is an act. Deception is their stock and trade.”

“Fuck,” I whispered. “That’s so fucked up.”

“Indeed, it is. Too bad Sal still has to keep up appearances to his own men, and to the infiltrators in his midst. Now, where was I? Oh, yes. The pendant. Would you like to know how to use it?”

I smiled. “Of course.”

// … // … // … // … // … //

I visited Captain Garrida as she convalesced in the infirmary we’d set up in the mine. She had an infection and was running a fever. She’d needed a complicated laparoscopic procedure performed by skilled surgeons that Cicatrice had flown in specifically for that purpose.

The linnaltan by the name of Edmara Vinhark was present as well. Her crest feathers vibrated in delight as she received a stack of bits in payment for the supplies that our surgeons had needed to treat both Garrida’s wounds sustained during the attack on our base and my own after the botched outpost raid.

The unhinged and obsequiously friendly alien had a three-wheeled tuk-tuk that served as her snake oil wagon, and she’d driven it all the way into the mine, down our lift and into the lower chambers. The auto rickshaw was an uncharacteristically colorful and cheerful thing, adorned with all manner of vials and flasks and topped with a banner that read Mama Vinhark’s Mobile Dispensary.

The alien grinned when she turned and saw me approach. “Ah, Sergeant! It’s good to see you alive and well. You look a little roughed up, though. You doing okay? Need any chemicals only I can provide?”

“Yeah.” I giggled. “I’m having a little problem. Y’see, there’s a little black rain cloud following me everywhere I go, and basically, you couldn’t find one drop of fucking serotonin in my brain even if you tapped my head like a maple tree.”

“I know just the thing.” Vinhark pulled open one of the wooden drawers on the back of her auto rickshaw and tossed me a little plastic baggie. “First one’s free.”

I caught it out of mid-air with my levitation, examining the whitish powder inside. “What’s this? Hey, is this what I think it is?”

“The one true cure for post-traumatic stress.” Vinhark twirled her claws as she gesticulated for emphasis. “And this world has done its best to hurt you, dearie.” Her brow knit with concern. “I can always tell. You on SSRIs? If you have this, you won’t need them.”

“This is molly, isn’t it?” I smiled. One of the favorites of partygoers back in Dodge. That, and coke. I’d been known to partake on occasion, long ago. Went great with sex, loud music, and having sex while playing loud music. Could send a mare straight to the fucking moon.

“Shh, not so loud. Everyone will want one. Gettin’ a little low.” Edmara boarded her rickety little auto rickshaw and cranked up its burbling, smoking two-stroke. “Stay alive, my sweeties! You’re my best customers. You actually pay.”

I watched her conveyance recede into the darkness of the tunnel, its noisy and smelly little engine still audible long after it had disappeared from sight. I smiled at my haul. It wasn’t just a few crystals, either. It was a whole damn bag.

“My very own fairy godmother.” I snickered to myself as I pocketed the divine substance. “She must’ve read my mind.”

I trotted up to the infirmary they’d set up, freezing when I saw Garrida. She was in a bad way, her feathers mussed and her eyes lidded and dazed. Every now and then, the Captain groaned in pain, clawing at the air. Even in their hushed tones, I picked up words like peritonitis and bowel resection from the surgeons attending her. The Gaff’s sword had pierced her gut, giving her a nasty infection. The Stormtroopers wouldn’t let me see her. They shooed me off when I approached.

No one was sure if the Captain would make it. She was in a bad way. The Confederacy were after us. Our entire cell was standing on the brink of annihilation, and yet, everyone kept on doing what they usually did, as if nothing had changed. It was the only way we could cope.

I opened the baggie of white crystalline powder. Ate a little bit. Swirled it under my tongue. Put some on my lips. The high came on quick. It was exceptionally pure. I spent fifteen minutes standing around in a darkened, lonely corner of the base with Lucky hovering over my shoulder playing music, bobbing my head to a tune that was all bass and no melody. After a while, I stumbled into the section of the mine that Granthis had converted into her quarters.

I pushed the tarp aside and proceeded into the room beyond. What I found was like a microcosm of cleomanni culture. A torn Confederate banner was hanging in the corner. Mardissa’s few worldly possessions, including a few liquor bottles and that gaudy tea set of hers, were arrayed on a chipped wooden table. I still couldn’t believe the salvage teams had bothered to recover all our stuff from the Vulture wreck before the second nuke went off.

Private Granthis sat on a cot in the corner, fiddling with the point of a knife and trimming her fingernails with it. She greeted me with a smile.

The cleomanni woman was hilariously direct. “Ahh, so you are down to fuck,” she said. “Well, come on, Storm. No use standing over there.” She patted on the other end of the tiny cot.

“I don’t need sex.” I turned and fixed her with sad eyes. “I just want someone to hold me.”

Granthis’ smile fell. I mounted the cot, planting my forehooves beside her thighs, and gently, we folded into each other, snuggling up close. The pain poured out of my soul as the high intensified. I was crying, but I wasn’t sure if the tears that fell down my cheeks were tears of happiness or sadness or something in-between. It was a necessary purge.

I didn’t want to fuck her. If we fucked, we’d lose something magical. She’d cease to be my surrogate sister and would become something else entirely. What I wanted was far more innocent. More pathetic. I wanted her warmth. I wanted her touch.

As we lay on our sides, face to face, our limbs wrapped around each other, I could feel her breathing. I could feel our souls unite as the barriers between us broke down. The hatred and fear soaked out of my body. My ego fell away from me and the heavens opened up and embraced the two of us. It was wonderful.

“I miss my family,” I muttered. “I miss my home. It wasn’t perfect. We didn’t always get along. My dad hurt me, sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. But it was home. I’m tired of hurting people. I’m tired of being hurt. When does it end?”

“You ponies are full of love,” Granthis said. “Hurting others isn’t in your blood. I see that, now. You’re like perpetual children.”

“I’m plenty grown,” I said. “I know how the world works. It favors predators over prey. Don’t you think that’s cruel?”

“It’s not cruel, ma’am. It just is what it is.”

“All of us were forced to be something we’re not. You said you wanted to paint. Well, I wanted to start a family. I wanted to have happy, healthy foals. I wanted to raise them in a sane and just world where they didn’t have to fear for their lives. I wanted to create that world for them even if I had to fight and kill for it.”

“That’s overrated,” Mar said. “Just accept that the world is crazy and full of perverts and dupes and greedy fools, and learn to deal. If you’re waiting on a just world, you’re going to be waiting a long damn time.”

“Your kind took so much from mine,” I said. “Every day of my civilian life felt like—like an execution. Like I was being led off to the gallows. I had no control over my future. I had no idea when those air raid sirens would go off, or when my house would be turned into a bunch of smoldering sticks strewn across our lawn.”

“Sergeant, I don’t—”

“I enlisted because I wanted power. I wanted power because I was afraid. I was sick to death of living in fear. I have nightmares, Mar. Vivid nightmares. In them, I’m always powerless to fight back. In my dreams, these shadowy figures made of teeth and claws always kidnap me and my sisters effortlessly. That was the future I had to look forward to, before I joined the Army. That’s still the future I still have to look forward to if I don’t give it my all fighting for the resistance. Hell, they already got Hoodoo and Windy. I’m the only one left. I’m afraid, Mar. I’m so afraid, all the time. I’m scared. I’m scared!”

“Storm, what—”

I hugged her tight, the words tumbling out of my mouth as my high began to peak. “I’m scared! I’m scared! I’m always scared!”

“What did you take?” Mar slowly ran her hand through my mane, gently massaging behind my ears. It felt amazing.

“Methylenedioxymethamphetamine.” I was amazed I could pronounce that correctly.

Mardissa’s eyes widened. “You took one of the most powerful anxiolytics in the galaxy and you’re still afraid? Wow. I had no idea you were hurting like this, sweetie.”

“I love you,” I said. “I love you like a sister, Mar. I don’t wanna lose you. I don’t wanna lose any more family. I’m not gonna send you all to your deaths. We’re gonna win this. We’re gonna make it out alive. We’re gonna be friends in whatever comes after. I promise you. I promise you that.”

“Storm. Wow. I’m touched. Seriously.”

“I don’t know who could throw away a daughter like you. You’re family. You’re family to me! To think, that one could throw away such treasure!” I nestled in close to her. I wanted that closeness. I wanted it. We didn’t need anything as base as sex. Our skin and fur communicated everything like electric fire. This was something that ran deeper. We were falling into each other.

“Why the fuck did I ever hurt ponies?” Mar said. “So much nicer to snuggle them instead. I missed my fucking calling.”

It was an unfair cosmos indeed that drove loving creatures like us into the jaws of hatred.

“Love! Love! All I am is love!” I repeated the word over and over in the idiot haze of my high.

All one needed was love. Love, and nothing else.

// … // … // … // … // … //

When I awoke, disentangling my sweaty body from Mar’s sleeping form very slowly to avoid waking her, I hated myself. I hated everything. Hate. Hate and shame. The vestiges of my ego had returned, and with them, all the little fears I’d accumulated over the years that had taught me to despise basically everyone, myself most of all.

The first thing I did was look for a mirror, and upon finding it, I noticed that my mane was mussed and my pupils were dilated. I felt like I had the worst hangover ever, like someone had taken an ice pick to my head and rooted around inside my skull.

I let out a quiet groan. “Fuck. Now I remember why I quit.”

Molly was the greatest thing ever, until the horrid come-down. I wanted to sleep that part away, but I had work to do, and aside from the occasional brain fade and muscle twitch, I was eager to get to it. My brain circuits had been pleasantly rewired. I had several days of elevated mood to look forward to, as soon as the hangover was gone.

I looked at Mar over in her cot as she slept peacefully. Do I really love her like that? Like a sister? I felt guilty. It was strange. Somehow, I wished I really was her sister. I wished that I’d gone to war in her stead. She could’ve stayed home. She could’ve been something else. Someone better. But for that to be true, I would’ve had to be both a satyr and Salzaon’s daughter, and I wasn’t exactly sure who could suffer the indignity of either of those things for very long.

I’d seen Mar’s worst side. I’d been hunted by her with a friggin’ grenade launcher with a sword bolted to it. We’d duked each other until we were a pile of busted noses, split lips, and blackened eyes. It was a strange way to make a friend, and yet, we also brought out the sweetness in each other in a way no one else did.

I allowed myself a small smirk. “Yeah. She is family to me.” My smile evaporated off my face. “I don’t know if I can afford to lose any more, though.”

My strength renewed, my resolve emboldened, I reached into my saddlebags and unsealed my orders from Cicatrice, quickly reading them over.

“Vanhoover, huh?”

// … // … // … // … // … //

2174 SSC

Twilight Sparkle

The Ghastly Gorge Test Range was a whirlwind of activity, groups of Charger technicians milling about as armored security vehicles patrolled the perimeter. Assembly and trials of the first Mirage prototype were ongoing at Site 7.

I stared down into the bowl of oatmeal slop on the table in front of me, stirring it while ruminating idly. It had gotten hard and cold while I was going over reports from the latest test. The parts we were using were below-spec and there had been some issues. We had a joint collapse while out on a run. Our test pilot got banged up and was in the infirmary getting painkillers and an ice pack for the goose egg on her head. The remainder of the frame for production serial number 001 would have to be inspected to check for stress fractures and then recertified.

In a fit of rage, I knocked the bowl of oatmeal off the table, sending it skidding across the floor. I leaned back in my chair and sighed. So many setbacks. Not enough time. Every minute wasted meant countless lives lost. I buried my head in my hooves. The stress was getting to be too much. The eyepatch that I wore over my vintage, first-of-its-kind Argus Oculocycle implant to avoid scaring ponies was itching me. I was too worn out from work and didn’t feel like keeping up a glamor spell to hide my disfigurement.

The HEMAWS wasn’t ready. It wouldn’t be ready for years. The technology to finish it didn’t exist.

The power requirements were beyond anything our reactors could output. Even cutting-edge polywells weren’t up to the task. We needed something with more oomph. A lot more.

Antimatter was out of the question. We didn’t have militarily useful quantities of the stuff. More a lab curiosity than anything else. There were some ongoing experiments I was overseeing that promised things like pocket stars, but working prototypes were always just beyond our reach.

“If only the ancients would let us have a look at their tech,” I whispered to myself. “This war would have been over centuries ago.”

As I stood with a sigh, rolling my shoulders in my black Conclave hoodie, a young Charger tech walked into the empty mess hall that presently served as a glorified break room. He stiffened as he saw me approach. At my full height, I towered over him. He looked like he’d never seen an alicorn before.

“Your Majesty!” The stallion bowed so quickly, he nearly slammed his face into the concrete floor.

“Calm down, dammit,” I said. “I have a name, it’s Twilight Sparkle. Gosh, you look like an anteater digging for termites. Have some pride, will you? We’re all in this together. Now, if you would be so kind as to grab that bowl and toss it in the sink, I’ll get us both something to eat, and we can talk about how the Mirage project is going. How does that sound?”

I grinned and flipped my eyepatch up. I willed my cybernetic eye to rotate the infrared cam to the primary position and bring him into focus, my implant whirring quietly as the oculocycle’s carriage turned. I closed my organic left eye, taking in all the data overlaid in the right half of my field of vision. I could see his body heat in a rainbow of false color. With a little more image processing, courtesy of my exocortex, I could see his heartbeat and his stress level. Elevated, irregular pulse. The next words to leave his mouth would be lies.

“Your Majesty, I have always respected your work, and I would be remiss if I did not show you the deference that you are due,” he said.

“Bullshit,” I muttered. “You hate this assignment. The Mirage A202 is a failure and a boondoggle. You are frightened and stressed out merely by my presence, and you’re eager to be transferred out of here just to escape all this.”

“I—I—uh!” The stallion practically folded into himself as he withered beneath my cybernetic gaze.

I bared my teeth at him. “Stop blubbering you fucking imbecile! I’m not going to punish you. I am not here on parade duty. I am here to do my job as head of the Conclave, and I want real talk from my crews. Clean that shit up, and let’s talk. I am going to fix this Charger if it fucking kills me, do you understand?”

“Yes, Your Majesty!”

While the Charger tech scooped my lunch into a garbage bin, I fixed both of us some instant noodles, yawning tiredly as I levitated a plastic bowl into the microwave. No time for real cooking, and I didn’t bring an entourage, either. I was much too busy for the luxuries commonly accorded to an Empress. I wasn’t about to do all my work from a conference room, ordering ponies around from afar, aloof on my lofty perch. Not when I’d been at this for centuries next to their decades. I stared tiredly at the bowl as it rotated in the microwave, time seeming to lose all meaning. When it was done, I swapped it with the other one.

As the tech sat down, I passed him a piping hot bowl of soup with my levitation, sighing tiredly as I resumed my seat and began to dig into my own meal.

“Wish this place served hayburgers,” I muttered. “So, give me the rundown. Why did it break?”

“Too much load on the frame,” he said. “Snapped like a twig.”

I frowned. “I designed that frame myself. I spent sleepless hours coming up with the CAD drawings that were delivered to this facility in a secure lockbox. It can’t break. Not like that.”

I set a portable holoprojector disc on the table and brought up a diagram of the failure, sweeping through it with my hoof, spreading my forehooves to zoom in and enlarge the break. I raised my eyebrow at what I saw. There was something I hadn’t noticed before. With a pinching motion, I joined the two virtual parts together, examining them in detail, rotating and zooming until I spotted the culprit.

“Stress riser,” I said. “Right there. You see it?”

“Well, yeah, I—uhh—it’s pretty obvious, now that you point it out.” The technician was sweating bullets.

Though I was practically livid already, I kept my tone even, fixing my unblinking stare on him. “That little machined recess right there, next to that boss on sub-assembly 217-A. That wasn’t in my original plans. Why was this material removed? What did you crazy motherfuckers do to my Charger frame? This isn’t repairable! You can’t fill it in. The whole part has to be machined from a solid billet, and this one is already under my specified dimensions. It’s like putting a mustache back on after shaving it. It’s not possible! Did you do this butchery to the other legs, too? Fuck me. Fuck me running!”

The tech looked like he was on the verge of pissing himself. “Material had to be removed. We had to cut weight because we couldn’t get the high-strength duostrand you requested.”

I fixed him with a wide, lidless gaze, my jaw slowly going slack. “What. What?!” I pounded my hoof on the table. “No, no, no, no, no, you can’t just make executive decisions like that! Oh fuck. Oh fuck, it’s ruined! Fuck!” I was hyperventilating. Weeks of machining. Months of assembly and testing. Down the drain. “You can’t use regular duostrand because it can’t handle the load. If you put ammo and weapons on this thing, it won’t even be able to stand up. It’ll be over the tonnage limit. The HEM—uh—” Almost spilled the beans. “My other planned modular weapons systems would rip it to pieces! Why? Why did you guys think this shit would ever fly under my watch?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t even know about any impromptu modifications until today. We assumed it was in the original plans.”

“I can’t believe this. It’s like a nightmare. We’re going to have to scrap the whole damn frame and start over!”

“Your Majesty, I—”

I was anguished. My baby, and they ruined it. “Look, I’m not mad at you. The fucking peabrain who made the decision to screw with my design doesn’t have to answer to me. He has to answer to all the ponies we’ve just let down. I want this weapon system out there, in the hooves of our pilots, on the front lines. Saving innocent lives. Killing Confederate motherfuckers. Every hour we delay, another crowd of ponies is mowed down and bulldozed into a trench. You guys have to answer to them and their families. Not me.” My head hung low. “I’m nothing. Just an old, tired mare. Somepony who’s been doing all this shit for way too long.” Silence reigned between us. After a brief moment spent dwelling on the past, I sighed and took another bite of my soup. “So, where the hell is my high strength duostrand, then?”

“The factory was bombed, Your Majesty. Lost to a Confederate airstrike on one of our facilities on Meadowgleam during one of their most recent raids. I’m sorry.”

I sat still, dejected, dread creeping into my bones. “We’re losing.” My eye welled with tears.

I looked up at the naïve stallion in front of me, noting the lack of recognition on his face. An obvious core-worlder. He didn’t know. He’d never been near the front lines, nor did he know anyone who had. He didn’t know what they did to ponies.

The look of confusion on his face was almost painful. “I’m—sorry? What?”

“So, it really was all for nothing.”

“I’m not sure I follow.” He scratched his head.

“Look at me. You see me?”

“Yes, Your Majesty?”

I took a deep breath. “I have made sacrifices that you can’t possibly imagine. I have tested the very limits of morality and reason. I damned myself. I damned all of us. Look. Look at you and me, and what all of us are doing right now. Does this look like anything a self-respecting pony should be doing? Scheming up ways to gruesomely kill people in a dark bunker? Huh? Because that’s what my machines do. That’s what we’re doing, in the end. I wanted all this to mean something. If our souls are the price, then we ought to get what we’re paying for.

“Never forget what a Charger is. A Charger is for crushing people under its hooves, burning them alive with casters, tearing their faces and their fingertips off with airbursting frag, and poisoning them with nerve gas so their diaphragm is paralyzed and they die of suffocation. I suffocate people. I do it because if I did not suffocate these people, these cleomanni, they would do much, much worse to us.

“You obviously have no clue what we’re doing here or why, and that’s because you have not tasted their evil as intimately as I have. Be very glad that you and your family have never been touched by it. If we did not have the benefit of OA-13, I would have to wring each of the satyrs’ scrawny little necks myself, and it’s not like I have the free time to kill them all with my bare hooves. Have you seen me, lately? I have no life. All I do is work. If I still have the energy to do my job after a thousand years of this miserable bullshit, you nitwits can damn well do yours.”

The Charger tech’s lips trembled with fear. “Your Majesty, I—”

“I don’t care what it takes. Get me my high-strength duostrand.”

I finished my bowl of soup and tossed the soiled plastic in the trash, leaving the nameless charger tech sitting and shaking, staring straight ahead, not daring to even look at me as I departed.

I entered the main hangar, staring at the wrecked Mirage prototype that needed to be completely dismantled and rebuilt, its hulk lying at an odd angle as the techs crawled all over it, its broken leg plainly evident.

I clapped my hooves together to get their attention. “Okay, let’s take this from the top!”

// … // … // … // … // … //

2181 SSC

Mardissa Granthis

Sergeant Storm and I sat across from each other at the table, having a relaxing cup of tea. I’d lost my own native teas in the scramble to escape the murderous rage of the Vargr, but I at least still had my tea set, and the shifty street doc by the name of Vinhark had sold me some of the local varieties to brew up. They were decent enough, but still a far cry from my own stash.

Storm was still shaking off the effects of the drugs she’d taken. I couldn’t believe ponies could do that to themselves. It didn’t make me think any less of her, however. Gods knew I’d probably seek chemical relief too if I’d suffered as deeply as she had.

“I can’t believe your salvage crews had the nerve to go back out and grab all our stuff with the Vargr roaming around out there,” I said. “They have some real stones.”

“They didn’t have much of a choice,” Storm said. “I left a very valuable transmitter in the wreck of your dropship. One that can’t be allowed to fall into enemy hands. I bet they went back for that in specific, and then scooped up everything else they could while they were there.”

“So, tell me about the Equestrian Empire,” I said. “What’s your history? What’s it like, living in your nation?”

Storm looked up at me, a mixture of fear and resentment on her face, slowly melting into a blend of pride and resolve. “The Tonnanen Harredo, you mean?”

I squinted. “Those words don’t translate well.”

“Of course they don’t. Their etymology is rife with symbolism. Tonna means people. Nen means heart. People of the heart. People with a heart. Ensouled people. Or, in some sense, people who are people-shaped. Nen doesn’t just mean heart as in the organ. It means something a person has in their chest that motivates them. The resulting term is a tautology, circularly reinforcing the assertion of personhood.”

“Interesting.” I frowned. “And Harredo? What does that mean?”

“Har. Redo. Great Herd. Well, compounds in Equestrian are written backwards, so it’s more like Herd of Greatness. Other translations include Khaganate, or Empire. Harranftah means Khatun, or Empress. Our armies were divided into Seredo, or Legions. I belonged to Seredo Imrah Vakoseh. In other words, Legion 27.”

“What’s with your number system? What does imrah vakoseh actually mean?

“Imrah means sixteen. Vakoh means eight. Seh means three. Sixteen, eight, and three make twenty-seven. Every new number is the fourth multiple of the last. Thirty-two is vaimrah and forty-eight is seumrah. Sixty-four is not koumrah, there is no such word. Sixty-four is pashna. A hundred and twenty-eight is vapashna. A hundred and ninety-two is seupashna, and two hundred and fifty-six is namran. Get it? The next new word is at a thousand and twenty-four, kel, and then four thousand ninety-six, henran, and so on. Four thousand, one hundred and ninety-three is henran pashna vaimrah lah. Four thousand and ninety-six and sixty-four and two sixteens and one.”

“Oh, it’s in base-four? Oh, I get it! Because you don’t have fingers!”

“Right.” Storm nodded. “Now, count from one to sixteen in Equestrian.”

“I vaguely remember how. Lah, van, seh, koh, uhh—”

“Kolah. Four-and-one makes five.”

“I see. Kolah, kovan, koseh, vakoh, vakolah, vakovan, vakoseh, seukoh, seukolah, seukovan, seukoseh, imrah.”

“One four, two fours, three fours, and then sixteen. Very good.”

“I imagine that made algebra a bitch.” I laughed.

“For you, maybe. For us, it’s normal to break numbers down into fours. We do it without thinking very hard about it.”

“So, what was your life like before you joined the military?”

“I never told you? I was a waitress and a bartender. It was crap. The pay was terrible, the customers made me wanna throw up, and the owner was a sleazebag. I shopped around for jobs for ages before settling for one of the worst. Bartenders are part therapist, you know. I don’t know how many drunken confessions I’ve had to listen to. I lost count. One unicorn actually fessed up to robbing a convenience store at knifepoint, right in front of me. We didn’t get paid enough for that shit.”

“So, you did enlist to escape a boring life after all.” I nodded. “We have something in common, ma’am.”

Storm leaned back in her chair, her gaze averted, her eyes upset but not angry. “You still don’t get it, do you, Mar? None of us had a life. It was all just drudgery and self-medication. If any of us had a culture, it was dead and buried long before I was born. Imagine a whole nation of people so traumatized that all they do is drink, fuck, smoke, and get high. You’re a painter. You ever see Blue Bristles’ Lament series?”

“No, I haven’t, ma’am.”

“That crazy mare painted pastoral and upbeat scenes with blood that was donated by ponies who’d lost someone they loved in a Confederate massacre. The only reason I knew about it was because it was on display at the Baltimare Museum while I was out job-hunting.”

My breath hitched in my throat. “Oh.”

“Every band was a tribute band, because most of the real ones were dead. Every book, every movie, every piece of artwork, everything we made—it was full of pain. I grew up reading children’s stories that were propaganda about satyrs snatching us in the night. I did school reading assignments on maudlin existential novels written by ponies who spent their whole lives cooped up in their Manehattan apartments and contemplating the benefits of a rope around their neck. Every filmmaker aspired to craft the perfect war movie, planting false visions of triumph in our heads. Nationalist messages were everywhere, all-pervasive. Whatever the hell ponies used to be, I never got to see it. I was born too late. Too close to the tail-end of our civilization.”

“Oh, gods.” My eyes welled up with tears, threatening to spill over. “I remember how you told me the Empire dedicated most of their gross domestic product to the war effort. What was your economy actually like?”

“Externally, we mostly exported textiles and cut gemstones while accepting payment in gold. Bits are not a fiat currency, like your credits. They’re gold coinage. Always have been. Hard to imagine that ever changing. There was a sizable black market in our enchanted artifacts, and many Equestrian smugglers made a killing off that, but the Confederacy specifically forbade such trade.”

“Roguetech.” I nodded. “You naughty little devils.”

“That’s you naughty little devils ma’am to you, Private.” Storm smirked. “Well, I may be a unicorn, but I never got any of that sweet roguetech blood money. Saved barely a few grand from my bartending days. Anyway, where was I? Oh, right. Internally, our economy was highly militarized. We were in a state of total war. Most of our GDP went into war materiel and R&D to make better war materiel, and so on and so forth. From one end to the other, our worlds were studded with universities, laboratories, and factories wholly dedicated to cranking out scholars and engineers of warfare, along with the products of their genius. In deep and dark ritual chambers, our most skilled battlemages worked new and deadly magics, fully intending on using them to kill.”

“Sounds shady,” I said.

“Well, it wasn’t like we had much choice, what with the war and all. I know from my history lessons that the old Kingdom of Equestria was a far more peaceful place. Hell, we barely even had a standing army. Any of our neighbors could have steamrolled us, to say nothing of an interstellar invasion. It was the newly crowned Empress Sparkle who, over a thousand years ago, disbanded the Royal Guard and established her Dragoons in their place, subsequently leading our society towards a technological and engineering renaissance that culminated in the Zeppelin War.

“For the first time, we knew the horrors of machine guns, field artillery, and dying face-down in muddy trenches. Millions perished, but the Equestrian Empire eventually conquered the globe, rendering all other nations into our client states. Equus was renamed Equestria, to reflect our global dominion. This is why ponies are the dominant culture in our society. We didn’t do the prey thing and bend down and present our asses. We bitterly fought a war of conquest over our planet, and we won.”

“Wow. Okay ma’am, you’re gonna have to tell me more about that one, sometime, because that is amazing.”

Storm giggled a little. “I guess it’s your turn, now. Where the hell did the Confederacy come from?”

I stared down into my tea, not sure how I should answer. “We were slaves. Of the old Terran Concord, many tens of millennia ago. We rose up and overthrew our decadent masters. We cast them down. That was how the Cleomanni Concord came to be, in the old Concord’s image.”

Storm’s face slowly warped into a scowl, a glint of terrible recognition forming in her eyes. “Humans. Humans enslaved the cleomanni. For their own benefit. I see. It’s all starting to make sense, now. So, the emancipated slaves became the galaxy’s most brutal slavers. Ironic.”

“Don’t say that word!” I shouted.

“What word?”

“Human,” I hissed. “It’s bad luck! Don’t you see what’s happening, ma’am? The Makers are back. They’ve returned. They serve new masters, and they are vengeful, and they intend to claim all our lives!”

Desert Storm gazed down at the floor of the mine, contemplating what she’d just heard. When she looked back up and her eyes met mine, her countenance was fearful. “Well, what happened to the Cleomanni Concord, then? Last I checked, that ain’t what you call yourselves nowadays.”

I sighed. “Our golden era was not to last. Shadow Nemrin cultists unleashed an unspeakable horror upon the galaxy. The Yomgorin. Necromantic golems that assimilated all in their path, fashioning living ships from the flesh and bones of the dead. Trillions died. Whole civilizations, exterminated. The Concord fell to ashes, and the old League of Protectors was swallowed up. Only by the sacrifice of the great nemrin shamans—the ones who opposed their dark brothers—could the tide be turned against this unstoppable foe.

“The Confederacy and the FTU arose out of the fragmented martial states that survived the unimaginable death and chaos of that time, over ten millennia ago. Many of the Concord’s advanced technologies were forever lost. We never regained our former glory. In case you were wondering, this cataclysm was also the reason why we banned magic in general and golemancy in particular, except for the anti-magic prowess of the modern-day nemrin, who still regret their species’ role in that ancient calamity. Chargers may be impressive pieces of engineering, but they are still soul-bound golems, one of the most illegal things I can imagine.”

Storm’s eyes were wide with terror. “Oh fuck.”

I pulled my sketchbook from one of my overalls’ large pockets, licking the tip of a pencil and fiddling with one of my sketches. “As one of the Confederacy’s elite, I had the benefit of private tutors and a quality education. I know my history. Sergeant, that thing that was on the mountain with us, that night? That was a Yomgor Prime. Their final evolution, before they disappeared entirely. There’s no mistaking it. That was exactly what they looked like in the old legends.” I showed the Sergeant what I had drawn, and she visibly cringed. “Towering things, as black as pitch. One great and terrible slitted eye, surrounded by many lesser eyes and mouths. A head like a mushroom and many grasping tentacles for legs. They were rare and impossibly powerful creatures. It was said that if one saw you, you were cursed to die.”

Storm was visibly upset, her legs shaking. “Private, I would thank you not to show me an image or illustration of that horrid fucking thing, at least not without prior warning.”

“Sorry.” I blushed.

“Continue.”

I ran a hand through my hair nervously. “The Shadow Nemrin weren’t just trying to make a weapon. After what Cicatrice said, I see that, now. The last pieces of the puzzle have finally clicked into place. All this time, and no one ever suspected the terrible truth. Those gods-accursed nemrin cultists were trying to make living, corporeal hosts for their true masters, the Archons. Through the crucible of war and the many chaotic mutations that their creation underwent, they somehow succeeded in that goal, inflicting something truly hideous upon all of us; the actual presence of the Archons in our midst, with bodies of flesh and blood.”

Storm stood up, sweating, terrified. “We have to stop them. We have to. We don’t have a choice.”

“What if we can’t?”

“Then we’re all fucked,” she said.

I stood and paced the room with my teacup. “You know, the reason why my father ran for president in the first place was because he believed the Empire had murdered a longtime family friend of ours, an artifact hunter by the name of Sonnem Bertag. A valuable investment of ours was ruined in the process, namely, the sizable cost of his last expedition. My father campaigned to end the armistice and resume the war, and he used Bertag’s death as a sob story to win his office. I now think this was a case of mistaken identity. The Vargr hunt your scientists when they pry into the old relics of the Makers, don’t they? Well, I’m starting to think the Vargr may have been the ones who killed Bertag, likely with the full intent of reigniting our two nations’ conflict and keeping him from the relics he sought, thus killing two birds with one stone.”

“Fuck,” Storm spat. “They played us all real good, didn’t they?”

I snickered and took another sip of my tea. “Payback time, ma’am.”

“You’re damn right it is, Private.”

// … // … // … // … // … //

Desert Storm

I gazed up at the shadowed form of Black Devil, standing tall in our makeshift Charger bay. Her twin forty-millimeter cased-telescoped autocannons had been oiled up and wiped down so well, they shined a glossy black. All that was left for the technicians to do was mount the twin heavy beamcasters on the back, and she’d be combat-ready again. For that to happen, the casters needed to be range-tested and certified, a complicated process that involved placing the weapons on fixed test mounts and carefully calibrating them for hours.

Improperly calibrated HBCs were very, very temperamental and were known to occasionally fire highly divergent shots and strike the vehicle that they were mounted to, or even explode with considerable force. They needed to be kept in tune to operate correctly.

In the meantime, we had a job to do.

I turned and faced my troops, who’d lined up for the briefing at 1300, as I’d instructed. There was worry etched on a couple of their faces, but the ominous, looming form of my Charger inspired courage in most of them, and it showed.

“People, listen up,” I said. “Magister Cicatrice has assigned us to a special mission. By now, you will have read your packets. You will also know why this briefing is going to be kept short. We’ve been given a Centaur for this op. This vehicle has a special mission-specific configuration, as described in your packets. This vehicle is to be kept camouflaged and out of sight, near the objective. We’re going plain-clothes for this one. Light barding, casters, knives, and grenades. Keep the emitters and the radiators under your outerwear unless we need to go loud. Private Armagais, Private Granthis, I assume you’ve trained with your gear?”

The two of them were wearing some modified armor and beamcasters that took into account their bipedal nature. The two of them nodded in affirmation.

“Yes, ma’am,” Ketros said. “A little weird, but they’re nice when you get the hang of ‘em. The radiators make it hard to wear a pack, and they jut out a little bit. Not sure how well I can move in close quarters with this thing on.”

“Unacceptable,” I said. “Consult with the armorers to get some more adjustments done until you can carry all your gear. I want all of us in tiptop shape for this. You all know what to do. Be ready to board that Centaur at 1700. Dismissed!”

The squad filtered out of the Charger bay, heading off to get their gear in order. All of them except for Corporal Cloverleaf.

She waved her prosthetic leg at me, grinning broadly. “Hey, Sergeant, ma’am.”

“How are you holding up, Corporal?” I smiled.

The green earth pony looked down at her cybernetic foreleg, admiring its paint job. “You saved my life, Sarge. I was gonna fucking end it all. But you? You showed me something different. You showed me I still have something left to live for. Thank you.”

“Not at all, Corporal. Just trying my best to keep us all in one piece.”

Cloverleaf teared up a little, smiling sadly. “I heard they got you, too, Sarge.”

The hair on the back of my neck stood up and my posture became more guarded. “Yeah. What of it?”

The Corporal hocked a loogie and spat on the floor of the mine. “Sick fucking bastards. Was it dingoes?”

I didn’t want any more rumors going around about the Archons. “Yep. Dimbulbs.”

I lied. I could tell by Cloverleaf’s eyes that she knew I’d lied, too.

“But, Shooting Star said—”

I cut her off right there, glaring at her. “I don’t care what she said. Drop it, Corporal. We’re not discussing what happened on that damn mountain, do you understand?”

Cloverleaf looked confused and hurt. “Y—yes, ma’am.”

I offered her a little smile, relaxing my shoulders. “You wanna hit the gym a little? Commodore Cake has been putting me through her own regimen. Really helps clean all the stress and the bullshit out.”

The Corporal’s spirits lifted immediately. “You sure, Sarge? Don’t we need to save our strength for the mission?”

“We can recover from any soreness once we reach the AO. We won’t be seeing any action for a bit until we’ve been there for a while, anyhow.”

“Let’s do it, then!”

“Race you there,” I said.

“You’re on, ma’am.”

Our giggles echoed as we broke into a gallop through the dark tunnels of the mine. I figured, if somepony was in hell, they ought to make the most of it.

// … end transmission …

Record 18//Signal

//HOL CRY ADV
//CHECKSUM READ
//CHECKSUM GOOD

//DIGISIG

-3312C2CA5EDAAA8F1508041304EBEF0F745DACE622AC7697679B80F74FDE4592-
-D1E6B35E01822F605DF738F1BCC67A61B807FB42B2735858A3B966CF6AEFFD0D-
-1A0DE6F3250F348ED455CC6E9ED392E2804CD832491CB2F517D999B9ADE982D9-

//MSG BEGIN

[09,

If you’re reading this, you’ve taken receipt of the flowers I sent you. I’m sorry for your loss. My condolences to your family.

You caused quite a stir when you presented Colonel Glowheart’s findings from the Highwind and Minchir expeditions to the Conclave. I was in attendance at the time. Remotely, if you must know. I’m telling you right now, there are two things you need to do.

One, proceed no further. You have an inquisitive mind and a love for science, as do I. As do we all. You see a troublesome problem, and you want clear, immediate solutions. What you don’t realize is that the thread you’re tugging leads right off the edge of a cliff and into a bottomless abyss.

Two, you and I need to talk, in private, at the earliest opportunity. There are no channels secure enough for the things I am going to tell you.

This is a matter of national security. If the public knew how far the enemy’s reach was, they would abandon all hope of victory. If they possessed a dim awareness of the resources our foes have marshaled against us, their knees would quake and they’d grow faint from fear. If they had even the slightest inkling of the enemy’s intentions for us, they would find a rope and a sturdy beam in the ceiling.

No one outside the Conclave can know the truth.

Pray.

-RT]

// … decoding …

Desert Storm

When Corporal Cloverleaf and I were finished working out, we were sore as hell. I was having second thoughts about having wasted so much energy right before the mission. I sighed as I stumbled towards the personnel carrier that was warming up its engine in the motor pool. The Centaur was outfitted for a SIGINT role, its roof studded with antennas. The retractable main antenna was in the stowed position, lying flat beside the roof, protruding slightly forward of the frontal ballistic viewports. Its asymmetry was almost like the refueling boom of a transport gyrodyne, or perhaps the tusk of a narwhal.

This was the surveillance vehicle that Cicatrice had permanently assigned to my team. During the war, Charger operations often involved the use of detached forward observer teams that utilized drones and mobile surveillance stations to pinpoint enemy radio transmissions, triangulate their position, and relay intel to Charger lances so we could go in and decapitate enemy command posts and raise hell. These operations typically employed elite light infantry in a supporting role, such as Airborne Pegasus Commando units, Dragoons, and other special forces like BASKAF’s SpecComSec.

I happened to be staring right at two such operators at that very moment in time. There were two solidly built unicorn mares flanking Bellwether as he approached. They didn’t even need to say anything. I could tell by the way they moved, the sunglasses that they wore in a pitch-black salt mine, and the slight bulges in their jackets suggesting a great deal of concealed armor and weaponry that these two were not to be fucked with under any circumstances. One of them wore her dark mane in a bob cut, and the other had a yellowish ponytail and was chewing on bubble gum, periodically blowing a bubble every now and then.

Bellwether turned to me as the three of them came to a halt a couple meters away. “Sergeant, these two don’t exist, just so you know.”

“Yep, already figured that out.” I nodded. “What else should I know about them?”

“Cicatrice is sending them with you. They’re tagging along and providing backup to your team, just to make sure everything goes off without a hitch.”

I let out an exasperated sigh. “Great. Tourists.”

Blondie chose that moment to speak up. “If that’s what you wanna believe, you’re welcome to, Sergeant Smart Ass. Doesn’t make any difference to me. I’m Prima and this is Secunda. Not our actual names, but they’ll suffice for the sake of this particular operation. We’ve been detached to provide specialized support and to keep an eye on things.”

Secunda grinned creepily, flicking her hoof at her pitch-black mane. “You need somepony to run the surveillance truck. Too bad you couldn’t find or train up your own signals intelligence analyst in time for all this. That would be me. Prima mostly breaks things. And people. Maybe you, if you disappoint the Magister.”

“I don’t think that’s going to be a problem,” I said. “I know my orders, and I know the operation plan.”

Prima took a few steps closer, her figure imposing. She was at least a head taller than I was, and she had a terrifying killer’s aura about her. “No plan ever survives contact with the enemy, Sergeant. The battlefield is chaos, and individuals like me and Secunda bring a modicum of order to that chaos.” She lowered her glasses with her magic, her green irises pitiless pools of poison.

I let out a chuckle. “Wow, lemme guess. Next, you’ll start speaking entirely in metaphors? You sure are talkative for someone who doesn’t exist.”

A chill ran down my spine as she began circling me like a hungry shark. “Sergeant Desert Storm, Charger pilot and former tank driver. Took part in numerous combat operations spanning several of the beleaguered inner colony worlds, as well as deep strikes into enemy-held territory. You’ve been from Meadowgleam, to Kabelaced III, all the way to pathetic shitholes like New Isfahan. Your combat record is impeccable, with many, many confirmed kills, but it is marred by episodes of alternating unnecessary aggression and gun-shy timidity.

“You have a reputation for innovative tactics, but a disobedient streak a mile wide. You were brought before a military tribunal in 2177 for failing to pursue and neutralize a stolen transport full of deserters but skated out on a technicality over the rules of engagement. You have severe ECAD, you recently suffered a battlefield trauma so extreme that your symptoms temporarily disqualified you from active duty, and your psych profile reads like the portrait of a deranged scatterbrain.” She stopped circling me, invading my personal space and pressing her chest up against mine as she craned her muzzle down towards my ear. “Well then, mental defective. What makes you think you’re qualified to lead this op?”

I took a reflexive step back, glaring at her. “I didn’t come here to be psychoanalyzed by a couple of spooks. I have a job to do, I’m going to do it.”

“Oh? As opposed to not doing it? Who do you think you’re trying to fool, here? You wrecked a perfectly good Destrier on that mountaintop. You’re washed up. We give you your Mirage back, what are you gonna do? Wreck it, too? If you don’t stop being a liability and start being an asset, well, I’ve seen what happens to ponies who cross Cicatrice. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.”

“I didn’t wreck jack shit.” I snarled. “I downed a type of dropship I’d never seen before, deployed by an enemy I’ve never fought before, in a situation that I was neither briefed nor adequately prepared for. We were lucky to salvage what we did. If me, Bell, and Sierra hadn’t acted, we wouldn’t have recovered anything from Pur Sang. The three of us would’ve been KIA and all the survivors at the base would’ve fucking died.”

Prima grinned unsettlingly wide. “Two of your team members are, themselves, cleomanni, one of whom happens to be both Salzaon’s daughter and the reason for the destruction of Camp Crazy Horse, due to her failure to disclose the presence of an implanted tracker. Captain Garrida and the Magister have been exceptionally lenient with them. If it had been me on that mountaintop, you know what I would’ve done?”

I shrugged. “Played pattycake?”

Prima ignited her horn and levitated a dozen objects from under her jacket, sheets of glimmering metal twirling through the air around her head until they raced forward and stopped, hovering right in front of my face. I took a reflexive step back from the arc of razor-sharp levdaggers. They were the type that unicorns used; handle-less, with a rhomboid blade that featured two diametrically opposed points. Part knife, part throwing star, the Triton Bicorn levdaggers were enchanted for better manipulation with magic. Nowhere for an enemy to grip, since it was all blade; that made it difficult for their users to be disarmed in close quarters.

Prima advanced towards me menacingly, her daggers tracking me as we moved. “I would’ve gutted her. Slowly. First, you cut the tendons so they can’t escape. Then, you slice the throat so they can’t scream. Do you think the average pony could manage that, Sergeant? Could just any mare off the street manage to slit a defenseless satyr’s throat without hesitation? No. Of course not. They let their emotions control them. Oxytocin floods into their head and they revert to being a stupid, kowtowing, neurotic little herd animal. Our enemies don’t have that problem. When they look at us, they don’t see a person. They see meat. Any damarkind would eat your liver and chase it with a tankard of beer and not even think twice.”

“You know, if this were the fucking Army, I’d have the MPs arrest you for brandishing a weapon and threatening personnel on base,” I said.

Prima ignored me. “What do you suppose the first step to true strength is, Sergeant? Fraternizing with a disgraced Dragoon like Layer Cake, who was once considered for the rank of Grand Commodore—one of the youngest to ever attain it—until she failed her advancement test and then went off on a profanity-laced tirade in the Council Chamber?”

“It wouldn’t hurt to get in shape,” I said. “Keeps the hormones in balance, y’know.”

Prima’s unblinking stare fell upon me. “No, Sergeant. True strength comes when you put aside the loathsome weakness that comes with your equinity. Every impulse in your brain, screaming at you to run, to flee, to avoid becoming prey, you have to ignore them. You have to become an all-kicking, all-stabbing bundle of death. You have to become the subject of your enemy’s worst nightmares. It’s not how many weights you lift, or how much you practice on the firing range. It’s a state of mind. You have to see the same thing in our enemies that they see in us. You need to see them as something to carve into a dozen pieces. Can you do that? When the time comes, will you hesitate, Sergeant?”

“Hesitation isn’t a problem that I have.”

“Obviously not, or you wouldn’t have ordered the slaughter of dozens of CSF civilian support staff in Dodge,” Secunda piped up. “We’re still not sure if Garrida’s orders called for that kinda carnage, but you sure did impress a few ponies with that stunt. All the wrong kinds of ponies.”

“You’re a weird little liar, you know that?” Prima smirked. “A weird little screwball fuckhead who tells some tall tales. I’ve read the after-action report from the Pur Sang mission a dozen times, and I’ve looked over the data recorder from your armor, and I still don’t get it. How does a mare put defib probes on herself without assistance? You should’ve been unconscious.”

She was backing me into a corner. If she wanted to end me, she probably could’ve done it in a split-second. Even the new tricks that Cicatrice had taught me might not have been enough. The Body Seize could’ve put her down quick, if my control of the spell was good enough. I was far from having mastered it, however, and I didn’t know if she knew a counterspell.

“I didn’t pass out,” I said. “I have no clue why, either. I felt like shit, but I was completely lucid and awake the entire time my heart monitor showed I was having a heart attack. So, there you go. It wasn’t a lie. It was a fact. I defibrillated myself.”

Prima levitated over a holoprojector which flared to life and displayed an image of a strange, spherical object. It had innumerable pores all over it, seeming like a grotesque blend of biology and technology in a single device.

“What is this?” I said.

Prima gave me a blank stare. “Doctor Tincture relayed her findings to us. This was in your blood.”

My eyes slowly widened. “How many?”

“Thousands of them. Millions. They’re a few microns in size. It’s not part of any approved nanite regime, and it’s dissimilar to anything else in your nanite colony. We’re not even sure what it is or what it does, yet. That’s why we’ve been assigned to watch you, and watch you close. We aren’t sure if you can be trusted, Sergeant.”

“First of all, couldn’t this have waited until after the mission was over? I’m already under enough pressure as it is without thinking about what kind of unidentifiable nanotech might be crawling around under my skin. Secondly, Cicatrice seems to trust me enough to send me on his errands, so how about you trust his judgment and back the fuck off?”

Prima gave me a deadly look, but she didn’t say another word. She stowed her knives, did an about-face, and joined Secunda in the Centaur. I swallowed nervously, breathing a sigh of relief.

BASKAF had a secretive elite division of their own, numbering a few hundred in all. Operatives drawn from the ranks of commando units and trained to be the most lethal a pony could possibly be. Dragoons were a force of nature on the battlefield, but the SpecComSec were each a living, breathing nightmare made flesh. They had augs that none of us had ever even heard of, and many of the unicorns among them supposedly knew spells that were once thought extinct.

“Sorry about Prima,” Bellwether said. “She can be a little tetchy. Most SpecComSec are.”

“Don’t say tetchy, Bell,” I said. “That word is totally not you. You coming with?”

“No. I’ve got some business of my own to attend to.”

“How’s Sierra holding up? I didn’t get a chance to check in on her. She doing okay?”

Bellwether’s expression turned grim. “She’s not taking Crookneck’s death very well. It took everything the nurses had to restrain her. She was going to fire up Scofflaw and go on a suicide run, which would’ve been completely pointless because—aw, fuck it. You’ll figure it out.”

“What?”

“Nothing. Didn’t say a word. Oh, and don’t fuck up this Centaur! It’s the only one we’ve got in this configuration.”

The rest of my unit showed up right on cue. Private Haybale looked agitated. He remembered my behavior in Dodge. How emotional I got. How I flew off the handle. He wasn’t sure if he trusted me, yet. I could tell. I had to win him back. I had to play it cool.

Jury Rig was a dark blue pegasus colt with a cutie mark of a roll of duct tape and a can of oil. He was the youngest of us, perhaps in the whole cell. I grimaced with distaste at the idea of the resistance using child soldiers. He had to be in his teens. He was bright-eyed and eager, full of a strange, youthful cheer that seemed to contrast our dismal surroundings. Whether it was naïveté or indifference, I couldn’t tell.

Hexhead was a big, silver-coated unicorn mare with a mane and tail the dull hue of bare steel. With the exception of her stern magenta eyes, she had a look like somepony forgot to color her in. Bell had that look about him, too. So did Cicatrice. Actually, a lot of resistance members were monochromatic and with dour personalities to match.

Cloverleaf was a little tired from our strength training but was otherwise mostly chipper. Shooting Star had that typical feisty look about her like she was annoyed at the lack of things to shoot in her immediate vicinity. She eyed the cleomanni pair dangerously. I hoped I could keep her insatiable bloodlust in check.

Private Granthis and Private Armagais had their armor fitted to their bodies a little bit better than before after a visit to the armorers. They wielded flechette guns in addition to their casters and had spare mags held in load-bearing chest rigs that had been modified to keep the straps clear of their beamcaster emitters. They were as alert and as ready as they’d ever be.

“Looking much better, you two.” I nodded at the cleomanni pair. “You don’t want your gear to snag on shit. That’ll really ruin your day. I suppose we need a name.” I huffed. “We’re a unit that doesn’t officially exist. That calls for some undead theme naming, don’t you think?”

“Phantasm?” Mar helpfully offered.

“Wisp?” Clover said.

“Zombie. Demilich.” Shooting Star shrugged. “Fuck it, may as well try ‘em all, right?”

“I know,” I said. “Revenant. Team Revenant. That should do it.” I scanned their faces and noted a mixture of approval and trepidation. None of us were eager to become vengeful spirits anytime soon. “Prima and Secunda are here on temporary assignment. They’ll be Ghost One and Ghost Two. Time is short. We’ll discuss the rest of your assignments along the way.” I waved my hoof in the direction of the Centaur. “Squad, board the vehicle. We’re moving out!”

Me and my unit filed into the armored car. I boarded last, setting my helmet aside with a sigh as the ramp’s hydraulics whined and the vehicle was buttoned up. Secunda took the driver’s seat and Prima sat next to her, operating the 30mm RWS on the roof of the vehicle.

“Here goes nothing,” Secunda muttered.

The Centaur’s synfuel engine roared to life as we rolled out of the motor pool and headed for the lift that would take us out of the mine.

// … // … // … // … // … //

Granthis and I sat across from each other in the Centaur’s cramped bay, trying not to knock our heads on the fancy monitors and surveillance equipment that took up the center of the troop bay as the vehicle ran over bumps in the road. She eyed me silently, a knowing look on her face. I was thinking about what Cicatrice had told me about Salzaon, about his little hunch. I just knew that Mar’s father was using her as a pawn in his schemes, even now. And yet, I couldn’t tell her, or the tapestry would start to unravel. It wasn’t fair. She had a right to know. She was going to kick my ass when she found out, and by that point, I’d deserve it.

I’d taken to wearing the knife used to murder Hoodoo on my shoulder as a grim memento. Shooting Star’s pyrokinesis had ruined the heat treat on it, so I’d given it to the techs to repair and sharpen up. After re-annealing, re-normalizing, re-quenching, and re-tempering the blade, they finally delivered the finished result of that arduous work. I used my levitation to pull it out of its sheath and examine the blade in the dim light of the Centaur’s compartment.

It was a monster of a knife. The blade had to be almost thirty centimeters long, with a straight edge and a tapered point. The knife had a sub-hilt that was of no use to a species without fingers and a pommel with a lanyard hole. It also had a full tang and the grip scales were made from horn.

With the faint magic signature that exuded from it and the spiral grooves that they bore, there was no mistaking it. Each grip scale was clearly made from bleached unicorn horn. A gruesome trophy that had been fashioned into a weapon. My levitation clung to it wistfully, as if in remembrance of the nameless pony who’d been killed to make it. The knife was exceptionally responsive to magic. Ironically, that made it the perfect weapon for a unicorn to wield, a feature that the blade’s smith had likely never taken into account, having crafted it with body parts taken from my species with nothing more than decorative intentions.

Text and floral ornamentation had been engraved on both sides along the blade’s spine, as per my instructions. Akeo Sprenni Eiren Kator. Remember What They Stole.

I was the first to break the silence. “So, the yomgorin were the reason for the Concord’s collapse.”

“Still are,” Mar said. “They’re not actually called yomgorin; that’s an Ardunicization of the actual nemrin words, which, depending on dialect, are something like eo’maggrhin or yeomagrin. It means devourer. A fairly accurate descriptor. They spread like a virus. Every living thing they come in contact with, they infect and absorb. Plants, animals, people, everything.”

I cringed visibly. “Charming.”

“They’re still out there, you know. We run into pockets of them occasionally. Left over from the war thousands of years ago. Sometimes, a whole colony drops out of contact. Assimilated into a yomgor hive. That’s when the carpet-bombing begins. Thermobarics, usually. If that doesn’t work, the kinetics come out.” Mar held her fingertips a millimeter apart. “In the past hundred years, we’ve come this close to inadvertently letting them grow a bioskiff and hop worlds. Just our luck that most of the frontier colonies didn’t have enough sapient biomass for that to happen. If they reached a populated world, billions would die. If they so much as touch a biosphere, it’s ruined. It can take years—centuries, sometimes—before the infestation becomes apparent. The only way to fix it is to evacuate, nuke, scour, and re-terraform. Every last centimeter.”

I slowly shook my head. “Geez. The shit I learn every day. If they unleashed such horrors on the galaxy, why did the nemrin get a free pat on the ass while the Confederacy tried exterminating my kind? Isn’t that a little unfair?”

“Because they helped undo their mistake. I don’t know. It’s complicated.”

I stared at her unblinkingly. Complicated, she says. She doesn’t know what it’s like for her species to be bought and sold like commodities.

“So, how come I’ve never seen or heard of one of these devourer things before?” I eyed Mar with skepticism.

“You guys are on the wrong side of Confederate space, ma’am. Go out on the trailing frontier, out in the direction of Minchir. You’ll see some of the worst poverty imaginable, and more than a few things that go bump in the night.”

I let out a sigh. “No thanks. I’m good. Got plenty of shit on my plate right here.”

“Some call that region of space by the name Hydra, but that’s rather archaic. Sometimes, you hear rumors of the Makers out that way.”

My ears pricked up and my voice dropped to a whisper. “The Vargr?”

“No. Not Vargr. The Backlotters. Refugees from various armed conflicts over the centuries who banded together into a multi-species group of nomadic, rootless travelers.”

I grinned. “Private, you just said vagrant three times.”

“I know, right? Every now and then, you’ll hear whispers of weird cleomanni with short ears, no hooves, no tail, and no horns.” Mar gesticulated for emphasis, miming the lack of those features. “When we send people to investigate, there’s hardly a trace of them left, other than smoldering campfires, abandoned prefab structures, and the occasional discarded cigarette butt. They always leave behind a signature, however. A distinct genetic profile.”

“Humans,” I muttered. “The fucking boogeymen.”

“Pretty much. Good luck finding them. They don’t want to be found, either by us or the Vargr. They know better. They’ve prioritized their own survival above involvement in the rest of the galaxy’s affairs.”

“Cicatrice knows more than he’s telling us. A lot more. I can’t talk about it, but he’s shared some spicy intel.” I heaved a wearied sigh. “We’re going to cross paths with those Vargr assholes again, eventually. I’d much prefer it if things didn’t go like they did last time. That was fucking disgusting.”

Mar nodded. “The only tentacles I like are the ones in my Vostian Calamari, ma’am.”

“What’s the appeal of eating meat?” I said. “Don’t tell anyone this, Private, but I’ve tried it once. A long damn time ago, on a dare. Some kind of smoked fish? It was all greasy and gross.” I stuck my tongue out.

Mar leaned back and grinned, toothy and bestial, every bit the carnivore that she was. “It’s tasty. Don’t griffons eat meat? Pony rations suck. I’m getting really sick of instant oatmeal. When’s the Captain gonna cough up with some samples from her private stash?”

“Yeah, griffons had fisheries and stuff, but they didn’t keep sapient ungulates as livestock, obviously, unlike a certain other species I know.” I winked at a very uncomfortable-looking Mar.

The cleomanni woman scratched her chin, her brow knit in confusion. “Now that’s another thing that bugs me, ma’am. Before coming here, I had no idea that fucking deer could talk. Are ponies not the only sapient, hooved animals on this world?”

“There’s buffalo, sheep, cows, and plenty of others, too,” I said. “They just don’t have particularly high technology or civilization or anything like that. We kept them in reservations, pretty much.”

Mardissa smirked. “Well, I see there’s a dark side to your culture, too. What rationale would your kind have for not granting them citizenship?”

“They don’t have magic.” I shrugged. “You can’t really meaningfully participate in our society without some form of magic. Most of our advanced tech runs on it in some form or another. Griffons, minotaurs, and other species with advanced dexterity and institutional technical know-how are the exception.”

“What about the ponies without horns or wings? Earth ponies, right? Don’t they lack magic?”

“No. They’re strong, they make plants grow faster, and they have a natural affinity for the earth and for geology. They make excellent laborers, engineers, and sappers.”

“Weak,” Mar said. “You unicorns are the real scary fuckers. Nothing quite like watching a bunch of Gaffs stab themselves and each other to death ‘cause they went mad from being spelled. You never used any of your mind tricks on me, I hope.” Mardissa frowned.

“Not a single one.” I sighed. “Your mind is your own, Mar.”

“Good. I guess that settles that little conundrum, ma’am. So, if you don’t mind me asking, what’s it like?”

I eyed her warily. “What’s what like?”

“Ket told me. About your panic attacks. I was simply curious.”

My breath hitched in my throat. “Don’t talk about it. Thinking about it can set one off.”

“Really?” Mardissa frowned. “Is it really on a hair trigger like that?”

I reached into my saddlebags with a shaking hoof and popped out my pill bottles. “You see this? This one, right here, is the only thing holding up the bridge between me and sanity. And this other one? This is so I don’t turn into that fucking thing.”

Mardissa’s eyes slowly widened. “You’re infected?”

I drew in a long, slow breath, my chest growing tight with discomfort. “Yep. If this pill works, though, I won’t be.”

“That doesn’t—how?”

“Gene snipper. Don’t you cleomanni have pretty advanced genegineering skills? I’m surprised you’ve never heard of something like this.”

“Of course we do.” Mar waved a dismissive hand. “Like many of the guilds, Guild Marbo traces our lineage all the way back to the old consortiums of the Terran Concord. Thirty thousand of your years ago, MOREBO—one of the most powerful of the Makers’ corporations—was behind the big colonization push into the trailing expanse. Up until as recently as a few hundred years ago, we were still neck-deep in biotech and genegineering, but the guild has shuttered a lot of laboratories and opened more arms factories over the years. Business is booming, and the Army aren’t our only customers. Mercenaries and independent frontier worlds love our small arms, artillery, and aerospace products.”

I cocked a brow at her. “What the hell is a MOREBO?”

“It’s an acronym. Three ancient names; Monsanto, Remington, and Bosch. Agriculture, firearms, and tools. Everything one could conceivably need on the frontier.”

“Was there a point in that whole spiel, Private?”

Mardissa leaned in close. “My guild used to specialize in biotech, and I’ve never heard of a gene therapy pill that cures Gorblight. It’s incurable, to my knowledge.”

I began to sweat nervously, my heart racing. “Maybe this is something different. Maybe this is curable.”

“How can you be sure?”

The other occupants of the Centaur were giving us strange looks. Even with our hushed tones, I was afraid they’d hear something they weren’t supposed to. I signaled to Mar by jerking my head slightly towards the rest of them and scanning the crew compartment with my eyes. She got the hint immediately, responding with a quick nod.

“What’s first on the agenda, ma’am?” Corporal Shooting Star said.

“Quick stop in town. Somepony we need to talk to.”

I glanced out one of the Centaur’s viewports, just barely making out the outlines of Tar Pan’s mid-rise buildings silhouetted against a dark blue sky. This shitpit was one of the last free cities on the surface. A dark and dreary nest of old brick buildings and steel latticework holding up disused cranes and conveyors, polluted irreparably by decades of careless mining without any consideration over what to do with the tailings.

As we drove through town, the locals puttering around on the sidewalks regarded our conveyance with dark scowls. Nopony wanted us here. Harboring the Liberation Front meant trouble. It meant Confederate reprisals. These ponies wanted to live out what remained of their lives in relative peace. What they didn’t want was for a pack of armed and armored dimbulb mercenaries to rip through this place with a column of Ravagers, knocking down everything in sight with their windmilling dicks or whatever. I could sympathize.

“So, Corporal Cloverleaf, I’ve been meaning to ask you a question,” I said.

“Yes, ma’am?” The big green mare leaned forward in her seat so she could see around the pony sitting next to her.

“Where the hell do the ponies of Tar Pan get food? Electricity?”

“Same place the mine does.” Cloverleaf shrugged. “Sharecroppers run the hydroponics facilities, but the local oligarchs own ‘em. There’s a small fusion plant somewhere in town. There are also a few hydroelectric dams in the region that are still functional, kept running by a skeleton crew. It’s how the outlying farms get their irrigation water. They’re pretty self-sufficient out here. I should know. My dad used to live in these parts.”

I smiled. “Does he still live here?”

Cloverleaf shook her head, her eyes telling the whole story long before she opened her mouth. “Nope. He’s dead. Couple years ago. I was in his truck when we got stopped by a Confederate patrol. I was riding in the bed of the pickup, and there was a bunch of junk back there, and the Con-fed scum thought he was with the resistance and they straight-up shot him.” Cloverleaf shot a glare at Mardissa. “I hid under all that crap before they could spot me, but I heard everything that happened. They searched the vehicle afterward, but they didn’t search very well.”

It was hard for me to hold back tears. “That must’ve been very difficult, Corporal.”

“It was.” Clover focused all of her attention on Mardissa, next. “You know what they do to ponies out here, Imp? You know what fuckin’ dingoes do to us? Oh, I bet your daddy knows, Private Granthis. I bet he knows all about it.”

“Hey, ease off, Corporal,” I said. “She’s proven her loyalty to the cause.”

“Has she? Two satyrs walk into our lives, ma’am, and then the fucking president of all people shows up, and nopony sees anything suspicious about all this?”

Mar looked visibly hurt, her gaze fixed on the vehicle’s floor. It was clear that she wanted to fit in, but we were already off to a horrible start. Ket was completely ambivalent, as usual. He occupied himself by daydreaming and peering out a viewport and making it abundantly clear that he cared little for our bickering.

I narrowed my eyes at Clover. “Look, Corporal, I like you, so I’m going to break this to you gently. Most ponies, I’d tell them to shut their fucking yap and do as they’re told, but I’ll make an exception in this case. There are things going on here that you do not understand. Things that go beyond the war.”

“Like the thing from Pur Sang, ma’am? The thing everypony’s been talking about?”

My breath hitched in my throat. “What thing?”

“That weird wrecked alien ship nopony’s ever seen before. That thing.”

I breathed a sigh of relief. “Oh. That. Yeah, it was tough to bring down. One on its own, unsupported, was a major problem. If a few of those showed up in the middle of an actual battle, we’d have to withdraw at once.”

Cloverleaf frowned. “What about the stories from the survivors, of chromed up dimbulbs ripping through them like living buzzsaws? Fucking damarkinds are bad enough on their own. Now, those soulless Con-fed bastards are sending chromed damarkinds after us? Does their evil know no limits? What next? Dummykins with spiked metal cyberdicks that cum sulfuric acid?”

I grabbed Clover’s chest protector with a fetlock and dragged her close. “What did I fucking tell you, Corporal? There’ll be no more talk about what happened on that fucking mountain. None. Zero. Period. It’s fucking classified. You do it again, any of you, and I will personally slap your shit!”

Cloverleaf looked like she was on the verge of tears after I let go of her. “Ma’am, I’m sorry, I—”

“Corporal, we have enough shit to do without dwelling on the past. Ponies more capable than you and I are already on the job. Let Admiral Crusher’s people sort that shit out. Concentrate on the mission.”

Cloverleaf nodded meekly. “Yes, ma’am.”

Ket grinned like an idiot, chewing on an unlit cig and peering around at the vehicle’s interior. “Centaurs are pretty fuckin’ crazy, aye? I’ve read the specs. Twice as much power-to-weight ratio as they need, more fuel consumption than a Pursuer, and a much shorter maintenance interval. The Empress wasn’t much for pinching pennies, was she?”

“What’s a penny?” Jury Rig said.

“Fuck if I know.” Ket shrugged. “It’s just an old saying.”

“Quality hardware is an essential part of our doctrine,” I said. “Our stuff’s fast and tough and puts out gobs of firepower. We can pull off lightning raids no one else in the galaxy can manage. What’s not to like?”

“Yeah, you can.” Ket shook his head slowly. “By breaking the bank and putting your maintenance crews through literal torture. I can’t really picture what it’s like to undo an engine from its mount without fingers, but it doesn’t seem like it’d be a very pleasant experience.”

I scoffed at his naysaying. “They have robots for that.”

“Yeah? And who fixes the robots, ma’am?” Ket looked over at Hexhead. “I’m starting to get the feeling you poor bastards were sold a bill of goods. Am I wrong?”

Hexhead smirked lightly, since she had the emotional range of a brick and wasn’t the type to ever break into a full smile. “As somepony who’s spent all her life fixing broken government shit, from backup generators to toilets, you don’t know the half of it. If there’s one thing Equestria’s good at, it’s eating gold-dusted hayburgers and shitting gold-plated turds.”

“Hear, hear.” Haybale turned to Ket. “You know this bugger runs on synfuel, right? We take a bad hit, we’re all gonna burn to death. Seen it happen myself.”

“So how did a mechanic end up with the militia?” Mar said.

The big mare shifted a bit more upright in her seat so she could see Mardissa eye-to-eye. “They wanted me to fix Chargers. Fucking Chargers, of all the Celestia-cursed things. I said gimme a fucking caster and send me to the front.”

A cheer went up, either out of solidarity with her desire for simplicity, or out of a shared enmity for Chargers and their demands. Not an ideal attribute for a Charger support crew. Jury Rig was gazing at the seat next to me, his eyes shining like gemstones. He looked like a puppy dog eyeing a bag of treats.

“The fuck is it, Private?” I said.

“Is that a Juke thirteen-hundred?”

I looked down at the seat next to me, and sure enough. Lucky was sitting right there. I hadn’t recalled bringing the little bugger along, but he liked to show up out of nowhere, sometimes.

I beamed proudly. “It sure is, Private. Wanna take a look?”

I hoofed over the Orbit, and Jury Rig turned it over and over, utterly enraptured by it. “There’s a little trick with these things. Very few ponies know about it.”

He retrieved a tool set from his saddlebags, gripped some drivers in his wingtips, and went to work popping open the casing on my Orbit.

I blinked a few times, too shocked to act. “The fuck, Private? Did I say you could touch my shit?”

“Technically, you did,” Jury Rig said. “Just watch the master at work, ma’am.”

Everypony in the Centaur craned their necks over to take a look, watching with slack-jawed amazement as Jury Rig pulled a spare PF-27 from the rack, gutted it, and mounted the power module and gimbals in newly-opened recesses on my Orbit. He whipped out a soldering pen and a spool of solder. White smoke wafted from the Orbit’s logic board. The crew compartment smelled like lead, tin, and rosin. When he slapped the cover back on several minutes later, the caster’s radiator loop protruded through the top, and he adjusted the cover to make sure it fit perfectly.

“What do you think, Sarge?” Jury Rig hoofed Lucky back to me.

I turned my Orbit over, inspecting it. Lucky had a couple of brand-new additions to his face. Lethal ones. As I inspected them, the gimbals flicked from their parked position to active, the emitters facing forward. I reflexively ducked since I didn’t particularly like staring down the muzzles of a caster.

I could hardly believe my eyes. “Did you just arm my Orbit?”

“My uncle used to work for Juke.” Jury Rig scratched his head sheepishly. “There isn’t much difference between the Juke 1300 and the Juke MT-X. They’re the same thing, produced on the same assembly line, for ease of manufacturing. Strategic resources, and all that. No room for unnecessary luxuries like opening another line. You just gotta stuff the guts out of a PF-27 in it and solder it to the logic board, and then bridge a couple connections that are left unsoldered in the civilian version, and it basically converts from civilian to military in the blink of an eye.”

“You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me. That looked so easy, I could’ve done it myself.”

“Anyone can, if they know the trick to it. The civilian version has no ballistic plating, but with the crystal all juiced up from the caster’s power pack, it should be faster than an MT-X and have a much longer run time between charges than before. You won’t wear out your horn keeping this baby aloft.”

“Well, shit!” I said. “Nice job, Private. See that? The little fucking kid was the only one of us so far who not only hasn’t bitched and complained two seconds out of the base, he showed he can carry his own weight. Follow his example, and you’ll go far.”

As soon as the words left my mouth, I could see the silent, contemptuous stares that were starkly juxtaposed with Jury Rig’s idiotic grin. I feared I’d just painted a target on his back.

The Centaur ground to a halt and the ramp dropped with a hydraulic whine. With the exception of Prima, Secunda, and the cleomanni duo, who stayed behind to keep tabs on the vehicle, the rest of us filed out.

I gave my freshly armed Orbit a charge before booting it up. “Lucky, on me.”

The rain had started pouring hard in the past few minutes. The locals were too busy sheltering from the elements to pay us much heed. I visored my eyes with a hoof as I gazed up at the glowing neon sign of the Wild Mustang saloon. Secunda drove onward, pulling the vehicle into a side alley and out of view. Me, Hay, Hex, Rig, Clover, and Star moved up in a loose formation.

“Move in, keep it casual. Don’t flash any weapons. Keep your casters under your longcoats. Hold your fire unless shit goes south. We’re here to see a contact, got it?”

They nodded and fell into formation. I pushed open the old-timey saloon doors. There were at least a couple dozen patrons inside. They all turned and stared, like a bunch of meerkats. So much for subtlety. There was a stallion playing piano in the corner. His singing was a little off-key, but his playing wasn’t bad at all. He looked over his shoulder at us and did a double take, his emerald green eyes widening. He stopped playing immediately, rising to his hooves and striding over to us. I gasped a little in surprise as he emerged from the darkened corner of the saloon and into the light, promptly throwing his forelegs around me in a hug.

“Cuz! Oh my gosh, I can’t believe this! You’re alive? You’re alive! Bell didn’t say anything about this.”

I leaned back, mildly stunned. “Briarwood? You’re our contact? Really? Never would’ve guessed.”

He looked around at the ruckus he’d raised and how all eyes were upon our group, more than a few of them sharpening with resentment. Everypony knew who we were. With the bulk of our gear, it was obvious.

Briarwood shook his head. “Not here, Dez. Upstairs.”

The seven of us ascended the old, creaking wooden staircase to the upper floors of the saloon, stealing glances around us to make sure we weren’t about to be ambushed.

“Nobody calls me fuckin’ Dez anymore,” I muttered.

“Yeah, I can imagine. So, how’s your new lease on life?”

“Been better.”

“How so?”

“Hoodoo’s dead, Bry. And they took Windy, too.”

Briarwood looked over his shoulder, his concern evident on his face. “Really? Who took her?”

I shuddered a little at the recollection. “Who do you think? Fucking dimbulbs.”

“Shit. It’s always them, isn’t it? You got any leads on where they took your sis?”

“A name. Gormos Ralfas.”

Briarwood drew in a long, hissing breath through his teeth. “Oh fuck.”

“What? What is it?”

“Literally the sickest fucker in the galaxy.”

I set my jaw as a discomfited tingle ran down my spine. “Great. Fuck. You think she’s still alive?”

“Don’t count on it,” he said.

When we reached the upstairs room, the seven of us shuffled inside its wood-paneled confines. Me and Briarwood took seats opposite each other while the rest elected to stand.

“Clover, Star, guard the door.” I gave them a stern look. “Anyone comes knocking, I wanna know yesterday.”

The two of them nodded and took up positions outside, gently shutting the door behind them with a click.

I eased back into my seat, trying to get comfortable in the rickety wooden chair. “So, I don’t imagine Cicatrice had us meet up just for a little family reunion. My orders indicated that our contact here in Tar Pan would have intel for us. That’s you, apparently. So, what’s the word?”

“Okay, this is big.” Briarwood gesticulated for emphasis with his forehooves, his features grave. “We’ve caught wind of an enemy trafficking operation. They call themselves the Basement.”

I snickered, looking over my shoulder at the rest of the squad. “Well, that doesn’t sound shady, or anything.”

Everyone had a laugh at that. All except for one. Briarwood’s face may as well have been chiseled from stone, for all the expressiveness his countenance bore.

“They sell drugs,” he said. “And they sell ponies. To off-worlders.”

I looked up at him with what must’ve been eyes like hot coals, judging by the way he recoiled. “Oh, gee. Fancy that. Looks like more motherfuckers who’ve got to die. Who is it? Cleomanni? Fucking damarkinds?”

“Well, that’s just it.” Briarwood scratched his head. “It’s not aliens. Best as we can tell, it’s ponies selling ponies.”

I felt a pang of dread. “Oh fuck. Are you serious?”

“Dead serious. Now you know the reason for this cloak and dagger shit. These fuckers have become a real problem. Hundreds of ponies have been trafficked by this particular group. Thing is, we don’t know who these ponies are. We have some leads, but that’s all we’ve had so far. Leads. Until recently, that is.”

“What happened?”

Briarwood smirked. “They got sloppy. One of their captives picked her cuffs and escaped.”

“Where is she now?” I said. “That’s who we need to speak to.”

“She’d gone batshit, Dez.” Briarwood shook his head. “She attacked a rebel patrol with her bare hooves like a madmare. The Liberation Front hauled her in for questioning a couple weeks ago. That’s how we found out she’d been kidnapped by the Basement.”

I winced. “Did she say anything useful?”

“Not at first. Took quite a lot of persuasion, I hear. Finally, they questioned her on a day where she was lucid and coherent enough to start making a little sense. These bastards have their hidey-hole hidden behind a network of dead drops. Anyone who wants to drop off slaves needs a Confederate GPS receiver, since all our own satellites are down. They’re given a coordinate, and they’re expected to arrive there at a precise time to collect a spike cache containing the coordinate for the next cache, and so on.”

“For what purpose?”

“Presumably, the Basement have spotters or snipers set up to keep an eye on each cache. If they don’t like what they see—y’know, like, if they have suspicious customers on the way—apparently, they start jamming GPS signals to keep them from locating the next cache. Every now and then, they reposition the drop-off point and distribute new caches. Not a very high-tech or complicated setup, but very paranoid.”

“Not paranoid enough,” I said. “Jammers can be located very easily with the right gear.”

“I assume that’s where you guys come in. I wasn’t given any specifics, but I’m sure you’ve been properly equipped for the task at hoof.”

“Was there anything else?

Briarwood hoofed over a small holocrystal drive. “Use your Orbit to play this, first chance you get. Top secret. Your eyes only. Show it to absolutely no one else. Don’t ask how I got this. Don’t tell anyone where you got it. Everypony who’s supposed to see it already has, and they’re not going to discuss it with you, either.”

I stuffed it in my saddlebag, letting out a stressed sigh. “You gonna be okay? I saw the way ponies were looking at you. If they think you’re with us, then—”

I heard a knock on the door. Two stiff raps. Trouble. I immediately stood and went for the door, my Orbit following along. I opened it cautiously and peeked outside. There were some rather unpleasant looking characters down the hall, advancing on me, Clover, and Star. There were five earth ponies surrounding one unicorn stallion who wore a tacky striped suit. A bunch of street toughs and their boss, by the looks of them. They were all armed with casters.

“Briarwood!” the unicorn shouted. “Come on out, you dumb cocksucker!”

Their leader fidgeted angrily as he slicked his mane back with pomade while holding up a hoof mirror, but try as he might, he couldn’t take care of that one last stick-up. Judging by his growls of dismay, it really ticked him off.

“What stereotype even is that?” I muttered under my breath. “Oh well, just one more prick who needs to die.”

Briarwood dragged me inside the room. “Dez, listen to me! Don’t kill him!”

“And why not?” I shrugged off his hoof, almost too pissed off for words. “No motherfucker talks about my family that way. I blow their fucking heads off.”

“He answers directly to one of the guys who run this town. And he’s one of my clients. Or used to be.”

“Client? You don’t mean—”

Briarwood blushed fiercely. “Yes, I do. If you kill him, I’m dead. Deader than dead.”

“Couldn’t you just go into hiding with the resistance?” I said.

“Oh yeah, sure! That sounds like a great life! Hiding in a fucking cave from the Confederacy. No thanks.”

“Relax, I’ll handle this shit,” I said. “And I’ll try not to kill, uhh—”

“Cookie.” Briarwood sighed. “Cookie Crumble.”

“Wow.” I scratched my chin with a hoof. “Does—does he have a nice cream filling, at least?”

Briarwood groaned. “Dez, really not the fucking time!”

“Relax, cousin.” I snickered. “I got this.”

I marched out in the hall and fearlessly strode up to the six ponies who’d unwisely chosen to antagonize us, clearing my throat. “Hey, Cookie Crumbs or whatever the fuck your name is. Let’s talk. I need to make a few things very clear to you.”

“I ain’t jawin’ with no ELF cunt,” he said. “You shouldn’t even fucking be here. That little bitch in the room behind you knows better than to say anything to you assholes. We’ve warned him before.”

“That ‘little bitch’ is a relative of mine who I haven’t seen in years. This wasn’t official business. Just a family reunion.”

“A family reunion with you, five militia packing heat, and a fucking tank?” Cookie Crumble narrowed his eyes. “Do you think I’m stupid?”

“Yes, I do think you’re stupid, because you can’t tell a tank apart from an armored car, apparently. Your mouth is writing checks that your ass cannot cash. Do you think this is all of us? I could have this place surrounded in a split-second. If we don’t walk out of here alive and unmolested, what makes you think you will?”

“But—”

I advanced on him, the toughs surrounding him stiffening with apprehension and lining their casters up with me. “But nothing. If you don’t fuck off this instant, I’m going to ram my hoof so far down your neck, they’ll need the jaws of life to get us apart again. Get the fuck out of my sight before I make you.”

Cookie Crumble was frightened enough by the odds to back down, but he was clearly angered by my tone. “Nopony talks to me that way, you despicable whore. I hope the little fag was worth it, because I’m gonna find some way to run you fuckers out of town. Come on, boys. Let’s go.”

Him and his goons moseyed out of sight, stealing vengeful glances over their shoulders. I let out a sigh of relief as the confrontation came to an abrupt end.

Corporal Star came up and patted me on the shoulder. “Wow, ma’am. Your subtlety knows no bounds.”

“Shut it.” I was so mad, I was shaking. “I wanted to kill that son of a bitch so badly, I could taste it. We have what we need. Let’s get the fuck out of here.” I clapped my forehooves together. “Briarwood, you’re coming with us. I’m not gonna leave and risk them coming back and fucking with you, got it? We go together. I ain’t letting any more family out my sight.”

“Oh shit, oh shit!” Briarwood whimpered.

He was clearly distressed and exasperated. Disasperated? Extressed?

“You’ll be fine.” Star grinned unsettlingly wide. “We don’t bite.”

Briarwood smirked. “Easy for you to say. I’m seein’ way too much estrogen here.”

“Plenty of test back at base if that’s what you’re after,” Hexhead muttered.

“Bellwether’s a fucking asshole,” Briarwood said. “He’ll be so pissed if I can’t snoop around for him anymore because of this shit.”

“I think the utility of spies in this city is running out fast.” I let out a sigh. “Shit’s about to go down. Can’t you feel it? How about you guys? You feeling it, yet?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Hexhead said. “Locals are getting antsy. Con-fed closing in. It’s only a matter of time.”

“We’d better move,” I said. “Time’s a-wasting. On to the next objective.”

The seven of us filed out of the Wild Mustang saloon, my Orbit bobbling along through the air beside me. The Centaur pulled up and dropped the ramp, and we climbed inside. With as many of us as there were, things were getting a little cramped.

Briarwood’s jaw slackened a bit when he saw the cleomanni pair. “Wha—wha—fu—fuckin’ what?”

“We picked up a tourist?” Mar said. “Really?”

As the Centaur pulled away from the curb and picked up speed, I elected to introduce Bry. “Private Granthis, Briarwood, my cousin. Briarwood? Private Granthis.”

“Granthis?” he said. “As in the Granthis?”

“Yep, that’s me,” she said.

“How the fuck did this happen?” He threw his hooves in the air in defeat.

“To make a long story short, I showed her the way the world really works.” I shrugged. “I don’t think most people in the Confederacy even know what the hell is going on down here. It’s enough to shock anyone.”

“We’re not going all the way to Vanhoover, I hope.”

I shook my head. “No, Bry. We’re not. We’re dropping you off at our new digs.”

Secunda turned around and shouted back into the troop bay. “We picked up a tail, Sergeant!”

I peeked out the rear viewport, and sure enough. Twin lights like a pair of accusatory eyes in the dark. We were being followed.

“Probably friends of that asshole back at the saloon.” I said. “We gotta shake ‘em. Punch it.”

Secunda stepped on the accelerator and the V12 roared in response, the electric motors on the front axles rising to a shrill whine. The headlights of our pursuers receded into the distance. I turned and opened my mouth to say something, but as we crossed the intersection, time seemed to slow as light filled the troop bay of the Centaur through the side viewports. With catlike reflexes honed from years of piloting Chargers, I had just enough time to dive out of my seat and tackle Briarwood to the floor, shielding his screaming form with my body.

The armored city bus struck the Centaur broadside, sending us careening into a brick building. The APC’s nose rammed through the outer wall of the structure, half-burying us in rubble. When I slowly stood, I was dazed and half-concussed, my ears ringing. The troop bay was filled with groans of pain. When I looked towards the nose of the vehicle, Prima was slumped to one side in her seat, her head dripping blood.

“Move, move, move!” I shouted. “Back us out, now! Squad, weapons free! Everyone on the fucking guns!”

I muscled up to the front of the vehicle as Secunda slammed us in reverse, the facade of the structure collapsing as we withdrew. I avoided moving Prima in case her spine was injured, crawling over her immobile form and seizing the control yoke for the Centaur’s RWS in my hooves. I swung the thirty-millimeter autocannon around, sighting in our attackers. The enemy contact was an ugly, jagged thing, all barbed wire, belt-fed machine guns, and corrugated siding welded onto a converted transit bus. Some real shadetree mechanic work.

Before I could squeeze one off, a yellow magic glow levitated a car into my line of fire, blocking the bus from view. I swore vociferously. They had a unicorn, one very skilled at levitation. The car would’ve pre-detonated the rounds, rendering them less than useful. I growled with frustration as I flicked the lever for the smart-feed system, switching from high-explosive to semi armor-piercing high-explosive incendiary rounds and listening for the action to cycle. When the bounding box appeared around the target and the arming light winked on, I pulled the triggers on the yoke and let a few rounds fly.

The Centaur shook as the autocannon thumped away. The 30mm SAPHEI projectiles punched holes in the roof of the old sedan, quickly igniting the upholstery and the gas tank and engulfing the armored bus’s floating shield in a raging fireball. The enemy vehicle reversed directly away from us, trying to hide behind the conflagration and reduce their visual profile. The rest of my unit, having shaken off the grogginess from the crash, quickly took up positions at the medium beamcaster stations, sighting in several targets closing in on us from all sides. Angry columns of green caster fire lanced out from the sides of the Centaur, suppressing the maniacs who charged at us, heedless of their own safety.

“Who the fuck are these ponies?” Mar had to shout to be heard over the din of caster fire, her weapon tucked into her shoulder as she stood in a half-crouch.

“Vandals!” Hexhead said. “Riggers, looks like. The Everfree gangs are all cannibal bastards. Show no mercy!”

“Oh, you’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” Ket muttered. “People-eating ponies?”

“Why are they so far from Everfree City?” Cloverleaf peeked through one of the viewports.

I switched from firing at the armored bus to aiding in the suppression of the foot-mobiles, turning more than a few of the vandals into sprays of gore with direct hits. I switched to IR and the hostiles were lit up as bright white silhouettes. Many of them were armed with chainsaws, concrete saws, and other improvised weapons. One of them cocked his foreleg back to lob a flaming synfuel bottle, and I was a split-second too late to cave the stallion’s chest in with a 30mm projo. The firebomb left his hoof and arced through the air, growing in my field of vision until it landed on the roof of the Centaur, engulfing the RWS in flames.

“Fuck! Fuck!” I wiped the sweat off my brow.

A couple of vandals clambered onto the hood of the Centaur. Secunda yanked on the hoofcups and pulled us into a J-turn to try and throw them off, our tires squealing as we spun hard. One of them slid off the hood, his makeshift hazard-yellow armor composed of industrial bits and baubles clanking as he rolled across the pavement. The other screamed a battle cry as he brought his gas-powered pavement saw down, sparks flying as he drove the ad-hoc weapon into the roof of our vehicle with all of his strength.

“This crazy’ fucker’s trying to cut his way inside!” I yelled.

Prima stirred beneath me as she regained consciousness. In the process of getting on the gun, I’d ended up hunched over on the edge of the seat, sitting in her lap like a foal. The awkwardness of our close contact had only just made itself apparent. I turned and looked back at her. She was seeing red.

“Sergeant. What. The. Hell?”

“Vandals, lots of ‘em! They’re all over us!”

As the cutting wheel pierced our roof, showering us with sparks and rainwater, Prima’s muzzle warped into a hateful scowl, punctuated by the angry red streak of blood tracing its way down the middle of her face. Without a word, she ignited her horn and teleported right out from underneath me, leaving me scrambling to steady myself. Something in the corner of my vision caught my eye. There was a dent in the edge of the Centaur’s heavy-gauge metal dashboard. A dent that happened to be shaped exactly like a pony’s forehead. I reached out and touched it with a hoof, quickly finding my frog coated with specks of what was presumably Prima’s blood.

“Holy fuck.”

Through the remote weapon station’s gun sight, framed in flickering flames, I saw Prima pop into existence in a flash of green magic and wrap her foreleg around the Rigger’s muzzle, drawing his head up and away to expose the soft flesh of his neck. He let go of the pavement saw, leaving it embedded in the Centaur’s roof as he pawed defensively at his throat. As her opponent struggled in her anaconda-like grip, one of Prima’s levdaggers zipped out from under her longcoat, quickly joined by a second and a third. The three blades rhythmically pumped into the Rigger’s neck, coating his chest in a spray of arterial blood. With a savage cry, the SpecComSec agent threw her opponent from the roof of the moving Centaur, her balance unaffected by the vehicle’s motion.

Without even looking inside the vehicle, Prima teleported a fire extinguisher from the Centaur’s interior, hefting it in her levitation and spraying down the roof of the vehicle with a blast of halon. The flames guttered out and I regained an unobstructed field of view. Prima flinched as she took a round to her armor from a unicorn on a street corner hefting a belt-fed machine gun. She quickly sighted in the offender and sent three of her daggers sailing towards his head. As he leapt out of the way and rolled to his hooves, the guided levdaggers curved through the air and struck him in the spine, where his armor was the thinnest. Paralyzed from the waist down, the vandal screamed in fury as he abandoned his weapon and dragged his front half across the pavement with his forelegs. Prima teleported above and behind him, pumping her blades into the back of his neck and swiftly decapitating him.

A pair of ambushers appeared on the roof of a nearby building, taking aim with rocket launchers at Prima’s position. With the IR on the RWS, I was able to detect and engage them before they became a problem. I pulled the triggers and the 30mm thumped and sent more explosive projectiles downrange, blasting away the roofline of the structure. The vandals scrambled back, injured by fragments of flying masonry. They would not soon repeat that mistake.

Prima teleported atop the Riggers’ armored bus, pulled four grenades out from under her longcoat with her levitation, pulled the pins, and then teleported the grenades inside with a flash of magic. She dismounted the bus with a backflip, landing gracefully on the street and crouching low, pressing herself flat against the pavement. The grenades went off seconds later with a bright orange flash that blew out all of the bus’s windows, shredding its interior with frag. Prima promptly teleported inside the ruined vehicle and presumably went about the sordid business of using her daggers to dispatch every vandal inside it who was still alive.

“Fuck me.” I looked over my shoulder. “Are you guys seeing what I’m seeing?”

Mar’s wide eyes were fixed on one of the Centaur’s viewports as she took in the carnage that Prima had wrought. “How could a species so cute be so fucking terrifying?”

Another wave of Riggers moved in on the downed bus. A whole swarm of them. An angry yellow mob of hollering earth ponies, hefting chainsaws. A couple of them towed chariots with belt-fed machine guns that peppered the bus with sheets of staccato fire. When the incoming rounds slackened, Prima got on one of the bus’s own machine guns and opened fire on the mob, but there were too many of them. Her rounds pinged uselessly off their heavy body armor, only felling a couple of them when they found chinks near their necks or their joints.

“Shit. Prima’s in trouble. Private Armagais, you take the gun!” I muscled out of my seat and into the crew compartment. “Squad, disembark!”

Longcoats were shed, and with them, any pretense of discretion. Ket slipped past me on his way to the front of the vehicle as he moved to trade places with me. The Centaur came to a screeching halt, the ramp dropped, and hell poured from within its bowels, me and my Orbit in tow.

I cast my hoof out at the hostiles. “Contact, dead ahead, one hundred meters! Squad, engage!”

Mardissa’s flechette gun rattled away as she opened fire on the vandals, soon joined by a swarm of green beamcaster fire. We slowly moved up the street in a loose formation, pouring forth an unending stream of walking fire while we still had the upper hoof. The rain seemed to let up at that point, as if the skies themselves feared our charge.

“Lucky, fuck ‘em up!” I yelled.

My Orbit carved through the enemy formation like a scythe, methodically sweeping deadly arcs of beamcaster fire over them. It wasn’t the way a pony would use it, focusing on one target at a time. I couldn’t help but burst out laughing. Left, right, left, right. It looked like a little ol’ lady casually watering her flowers with a garden hose. It was like a 3D printer that printed death.

Corporal Shooting Star was very precise with her caster, landing one shot to the vitals after another. The enemy’s equine wave attack was blunted by our surprise counter-offensive. The survivors got wise, turning their attention from the bus to me and my squad. Supersonic snaps of machine gun fire rang in my ears and I reflexively ducked.

I had to react before the tide turned against us. “Revenant Two, take Four and Seven and move up on the left. Revenant Three, you and the rest are on me. Go!”

Corporal Star, Private Haybale, and Private Granthis crossed the street and took the left flank as ordered, while Corporal Cloverleaf and the remainder stayed with me. We moved up the street in a bounding overwatch, one half of the squad laying down covering fire for the other as we advanced. The Centaur slowly shadowed us, letting off a few explosive rounds every now and then to keep the enemy thoroughly pinned. I caught a flicker of movement to my left. Hostiles moving along the roofline. Another ambush. The vandals revved their chainsaws as they leapt from the roof and landed on the awning over the bus stop, right next to Star and the others.

“Mar!” I shouted across the street. “Above you!”

With surprising quickness and discipline, Mardissa turned, aimed high and engaged the first attacker with a few well-placed shots. At close range, the effect of the sintered metal flechettes was devastating. The vandal’s head burst like a melon, showering the roof of the bus stop with blood and brains. The bolt on Mar’s weapon locked open as her magazine ran dry, and there was still one ambusher left. The maddened earth pony stallion leapt from the awning of the bus stop, revving the chainsaw he held in his mouth for a downward slash as he fell. Shooting Star turned around, a shocked expression on her face as her eyes traced upward, following the two-stroke roar. Haybale leapt back with surprise. It all happened so quickly.

Mardissa parried the enemy’s swing with her flechette gun, slapping her weapon into the chainsaw’s bar as she rolled away from the blow and slipped behind her attacker. She snaked a finger into one of the pull-rings for her caster and unleashed a volley right into the back of his head. The vandal’s braincase was reduced to a steaming heap of cooked flesh. He stumbled forward a few paces, his eyes wide and expressionless, before he collapsed face-first on the sidewalk in a mess of death spasms.

Mar gave a quick thumbs-up and swapped mags, continuing to advance. The incoming fire began to slacken. Most of the main wave was dead or fleeing for their lives.

“Squad, regroup and form on me,” I said.

We moved up on the bus. The thing had all kinds of odds and ends welded or lashed to it. A hellacious mishmash of road signs, I-beams, cut up tires, and all sorts of ad-hoc armor. The doors were heavily damaged and bulging outward because of Prima’s grenades. I wrapped them in the orange glow of my levitation and tried wrenching them open, but they were jammed tight. Trying to apply a torque to an object with levitation was more difficult than lifting by far. I pulled out the locus pendant that Cicatrice had given me, retrieving some of the stored energies inside and lacing them into my spells. My old, congealed anger augmented the force of my levitation, tinging my magic red. The sliding doors tore open with a screech of metal on metal. Prima was lying on her back on the floor of the bus, her breathing shallow.

“Shit. Ghost One, report! Are you injured?” When I got closer, I could plainly see the small bullet hole in her neck, right above the line of her chest protector. It wasn’t bleeding very much, however, and there were strange, raised grayish fibers underneath. “The fuck?”

“I’m fine,” Prima said. “Took a bad hit. Subdermal armor stopped it. Just taking a breather. Really fucking hurts. Got any morphine?”

“Nope, but I’ve got some fent.” I hoofed over a Confederate snail dispenser.

“It’ll do.” She popped one of the sublingual tablets out and placed it under her tongue with a long, painful sigh before she returned the dispenser. “You’re gonna have to help me walk, Sergeant.”

Prima hissed in pain when I dragged her up to her hooves and rested her right foreleg over my withers, acting as a crutch for her. As we left the destroyed bus, I saw Mardissa and Prima share a knowing look; an unspoken rapport between the two killer cyborgs. They lived in a different world from the rest of us. I felt an itch under the plate on my back, silently praying that I didn’t end up like them. I liked my equinity right where it was.

The Centaur dropped its ramp and me and my squad hurriedly boarded the vehicle, with Mar covering us until she was the last one to jump in. I gingerly set Prima down on the floor, checking her over. I grabbed the medic bag and applied some disinfectant and a dressing, but it didn’t look like she needed it. She wasn’t even bleeding at all.

Prima grinned. “Jealous?”

“Hardly,” I said. “I already have plenty enough metal in me, thank you very much.” I put a hoof next to my muzzle to amplify my voice so our driver could hear. “Ghost Two, we are withdrawing from the area, right the fuck now. Mission’s on hold until further notice. Get us back to base, pronto.”

Briarwood was jumpy as hell, hyperventilating as he peered out the viewports. “Oh my fuck, cuz! Oh fuck. You just killed those ponies!”

“Them or us, Bry.”

After a few minutes spent at full throttle, with Secunda peering through her mirrors every now and then to keep an eye out for more hostiles, we arrived back at base without further incident. We hurtled through the checkpoint the militia had set up at the entrance to the mine, descending into the tunnel network. We came to a halt fifteen meters away from a gaggle of gawking ponies. As we exited the vehicle, Bellwether came waltzing up to us, a smug look on his face as he surveyed the damage to the Centaur. The thing still had a small pile of bricks sitting on the hood and a hole in the roof from where a vandal had literally tried sawing through it.

Bellwether let out a low whistle. “Wow, great job. Fuck Up Our Only Signals Wagon, speedrun, any percent.”

I shook my head. “Vandals. In town. Lots of them. There may be some heading this way.”

Bellwether frowned. “Fuck. Really? This complicates things. The fuck did you guys do?”

“I don’t know.” I shook my head. “Nothing, as far as I know. You don’t think the locals would call in vandals to give us trouble, do you?”

“Not likely. They hate the pony-eaters as much as we do. Usually. Stand by for further instructions, Sergeant. I’ll get a repair crew up here to look over the Centaur and see what needs patching up. Maybe you lucked out. Maybe the surveillance equipment is still mostly intact.”

I rubbed my head sheepishly, my eyes darting around. “Knock on wood.”

As Bellwether left to summon the technicians and a few squads of sentries scrambled to defend the mine entrance from any incursions, some nervous-looking militia members led an earth pony mare past me, deeper into the mine, her hooves in cuffs. It was the prisoner with the stringy white mane who I’d seen in the brig at Camp Crazy Horse. Our eyes made contact as she approached. She let out a low, mad chuckle as she snaked her neck towards me, whispering in my ear as she passed.

Her voice was as soft as velvet when she spoke. “Ndras Thuax.”

I froze in place, my eyes widening in shock as I stared straight ahead. “What?” I turned around and marched up to her, grabbing her withers and turning her to face me. “What the fuck did you just say to me?”

One of the militia stallions was agitated that I’d accosted their prisoner. “Hey!”

I waved him off. “I need some answers, right now. Where did you hear those words?”

“You mean you still don’t understand?” The mare smiled creepily, her eyes glassy and psychotic and devoid of anything that could even remotely be called a soul. “We are but divers in the world of flesh. Sooner or later, we all come up for air, one last time. And when we do, he and his mighty host await us.”

This mare had been touched by them, somehow. I could just feel it. There was an overwhelming aura of wrongness that radiated from her, and it made me sick to my stomach. Most ponies—most people—had an intangible quality, a je ne sais quoi, a presence that one could feel. This mare had nothing. It was like I had been confronted by a walking, talking corpse. It was as if a volume of what felt like empty space inexplicably had a pony centered in it.

“Who the hell are you?” I said.

Her lips split in an unsettling grin. “There is no escape. There is no way out of this rotten world, this entropic prison. You have to shed your body, and with it, all of your lingering attachments. Only then will you be free. Or you would be, if you weren’t already someone’s property.” The crazed mare reached under me and touched her hoof to the invisible stigma on my abdomen. “Eu scandlei. Feska sendes wroe, ia feska sendes bidue!”

How fitting. A slave in life, and a slave in death!

I decked her, lashing out with a hoof to her muzzle. As she fell, I kept raining blows on her, my rage beyond my ability to control. Even as I bloodied her muzzle, she just kept laughing the entire time. The militia stallions quickly moved to restrain me before I could do her any serious harm, wrapping their forelegs around me and dragging me off of her while I did my best to try and brain her with my hooves.

“Let go of me!” I yelled. “She’s dangerous! She’s a threat to everyone here!”

While the stallions let go of me and quickly escorted the still-cackling prisoner beyond my reach, Cicatrice chose that moment to rear his ugly mug, stepping forth from the shadows and into the light, his midnight-black caparison draped around his legs.

“What’s going on, here?” he said. “Having another of your fits, Sergeant?”

“That prisoner, she’s—”

“A recipient of the Archons’ Kiss? No.” Cicatrice shook his head. “This is something different entirely. While I understand your trepidation and your aggressive reaction to her presence, she is a valuable article of study and I’d rather you not damage her. Rest assured, we have her under control.”

“You didn’t tell me about the Yomgorin,” I said. “The Devourers.”

Cicatrice scowled. “Where did you hear about that?” His expression softened. “Oh. Mardissa. Of course.”

To say I was crestfallen would be an understatement. This was something that had significant ramifications for all ponykind, and it had been omitted from the curriculum entirely. Another censored topic.

“What the fuck? Why weren’t we told? These fucking things are crawling all over a whole region of space, and we’ve never even heard of them?”

“That’s quite deliberate,” Cicatrice said. “Devourers are an O-11 topic. PSWD. Prevention of Species-Wide Demoralization. Expressly forbidden from academic or journalistic dissemination. There used to be BASKAF Anima agents on the datasphere that would sever or scramble public nodes that even made mention of the topic. Even in the Confederacy, only the wealthy families and those most directly affected by Devourer infestations even know much about it. The rest of the public is fed a cover story about people coming back from the colonies needing to be quarantined and tested for diseases. Sergeant, how much did Mardissa tell you?”

“She said they consumed living things, somehow.” I scratched my head. “I don’t know.”

Cicatrice sighed. “The Devourers are ancient constructs both of advanced genegineering and incredibly twisted void magic. If one was standing in front of you right now, it would not hesitate to slit your belly, crawl inside you, and puppeteer you from the inside out. How do you think most ponies would react if they knew those things were out there? Isn’t the Confederacy bad enough as it is?”

I winced, bowing my head in defeat. “Oh.”

“Yeah, ‘oh’. This isn’t a game, Storm. Billions of lives are at stake, here. There are compartmentalized operations happening right now that you will never know about.”

I raised a brow. “How many?”

Cicatrice shook his head. “I can’t even tell you the number. All I can tell you is what our enemies already know. Archon-worshipers have infiltrated Confederate Military Intelligence. We are in contact with a friendly splinter faction. The good guys are losing. They need our help. If the cultists win, well, you’ve met an Archon yourself. What do you think?”

“Not good. Unbelievably bad, in fact.” I looked over my shoulder at the way the prisoner had gone, before jerking my hoof in that direction and lowering my voice to a half-whisper. “So, who the hell is she?”

“She won’t tell us. Her cutie mark and DNA profile don’t show up in any of our databases, either. We rescued her from the Basement. Or to be more precise, she attacked one of our patrols while foaming at the mouth like a rabid dog, and then later admitted to escaping from their grasp after she’d regained some measure of lucidity.”

“Oh. So that’s the one Briarwood was talking about.”

“Yes. That’s the one. Run along now, Sergeant. You have a mission to carry out.”

“What about the vandals? We just gonna let them take over Tar Pan without a fight?”

“We have others working the problem right now. Don’t worry your pretty little head about it. Your mission takes priority. Carry out your orders as instructed. Quickly. We’re running out of time.” Cicatrice turned to leave, facing his back to me.

“You know more.” My voice was low and dark. “You know more, and you’re not telling me.”

The Magister turned to face me, his glare threatening as he advanced on me. “You’re not ready to hear it. No one here is. If you did, you would lose the will to go on living, much less fight. I’ve only relinquished as much as I have because you, Sergeant, are to be groomed into my own personal instrument. The scythe with which I shall reap. You know the threat we face. You know what’s at stake. You already walk on the razor’s edge between sanity and madness. You would be of no use to me if you were demoralized any further. Do not ask questions of me that you are not prepared to hear the answer to, is that clear?”

Cicatrice’s muzzle practically touched my own. I stumbled back and collapsed to my haunches, staring numbly at the floor of the mine. “Yes, Your Excellency.”

“Good. Keep it that way.”

As Cicatrice slipped into the darkness of the mine and disappeared, I ruminated on his and Mardissa’s words. The world in which I lived grew more unpleasant by the day. It made my skin crawl, thinking about the Archons and the nemrin cultists who had furnished them with bodies. I’d never even heard of the Devourers in all the time I’d been alive. More state secrets. More skullduggery. More hideous truths that had been kept from the public’s awareness so they remained comfortably numb instead of a panicked mess.

A Lesser Archon on its own was a mortal threat, capable of slaying a Dragoon in the blink of an eye. To think, at one time, an army of things like that had roamed the galaxy. Mardissa had casually tossed around words like ‘biomass’, as if sapient beings were merely a resource to these creatures. Images of vile parasitism accompanied by screams and sprays of blood formed in my mind. Absorption. Replication. An orgy of scabrous and twisted flesh.

I silently prayed to Celestia that I’d never meet such a fate.

While the technicians gave the Centaur a once-over, I slipped away from my unit with my Orbit and found a dark, unoccupied corner of the mine. I glanced around a little to make sure nopony was headed this way. Satisfied that I was alone, I took the holocrystal that Briarwood had given me and slotted it into my Orbit’s drive.

“Lucky, playback mode, directional audio on me. Let’s see what’s on this sucker.”

My Orbit featured a directional speaker for private listening, one of the Juke 1300’s nicer features. The holoprojected image was grainy at first, slowly resolving into clear video footage. I saw the panicked face of a helmeted stallion, scanning the terrain around himself nervously, panting, out of breath. The camera turned away from his face and slowly peered out of an alleyway and around a corner. I recognized the street. Onager Avenue, in Baltimare. I’d moseyed down this way after screwing the pooch in a job interview, once.

“Look,” he whispered. “There they are. Son of a bitch.”

What I saw next made me gasp in shock. Hovertanks. Vargr troops. Humans. Not just a few of them, either. Dozens of them marched in neat rows, accompanied by sleek and deadly-looking wedge-shaped armored vehicles that glided over the pavement, as predatory and sinister as everything else I’d seen of their arsenal. There was a break in the convoy, and it soon became clear what they were escorting.

I had to cover my muzzle to avoid audibly yelping in terror. Three Lesser Archons of Thuax slithered across the camera’s field of view, their tentacles whipping every which way. Three avatars of pure evil. Each of them was visually identical. Any one of them could have been the Seneschal. The stallion rolling footage was clearly frightened by their appearance in broad daylight, if the shaking of the camera was any indication. One of the Archons stopped, slowly turning towards the stallion’s hiding place.

The camera immediately pulled a one-eighty as he turned tail and ran deeper into the alleyway. “Oh shit, oh fuck!”

His panting soon gave way to anguished cries as positron beam weaponry practically demolished the walls of the alley around him. With seconds to spare, he managed to hurl his camera into a dumpster, plunging the video feed into darkness. They must have caught up to him soon after, if the screams on the recording were any indication.

“Haiksunta es broetheri!” one of the humans barked. “Kille sza froektaygr!”

Broetheri. Cicatrice had told me what it meant. Breather. Or, more literally, one who wastes a ship’s oxygen. It was what they called lesser species. I could hear the stallion begging for his life, shrieking as they descended on him. Though his exact fate was uncertain, whatever it was, his cries of agony were mercifully cut short.

If the timestamps were any indication, a few hours of blank footage had been clipped out of the video. A few seconds later, an earth pony militia mare retrieved the still-rolling camera from the dumpster, obviously following a datasphere location tag. She turned the camera to face herself. She looked haggard, her mane dangling in her bloodshot eyes.

“This is Sergeant Caltrop, of the Horseshoe Bay cell of the Liberation Front. We are under attack by unidentified hostiles. These bastards came out of nowhere and we’re sustaining heavy casualties. They’re slaughtering us. They have a weapon—something we’ve never—” Her whole body tensed. She dry-heaved a little. “Oh Celestia. Oh no. Not me. Please, no!”

Something was crawling underneath her skin, hollowing out her cheek. There was a wet sloughing noise and a chunk of her muzzle fell off, revealing the rows of her teeth and a dark gray slurry underneath. She let out a bloodcurdling scream, touching her exposed jaw, only for her hoof to start dissolving, too.

“No! By the Martyred Maiden, no!”

Her final action was to wirelessly send a copy of the video through the local datasphere and back to her commanders. The video froze on a still-frame of her ruined, terrified face. The playback ended there and Lucky’s holoprojector went into sleep mode.

I caught myself hyperventilating as I fumbled with my pill bottles, whimpering softly.

First, the sertraline. Then, the gene snipper.

// … // … // … // … // … //

A few hours later, the Centaur was patched up and ready to go. None of the surveillance equipment was seriously damaged in the crash, except for one oscilloscope with cracked display glass. The techs had it swapped out and all the equipment re-tested in a matter of minutes.

We were on the road again. I’d left Briarwood behind at the base. He wasn’t particularly keen on coming with, and I wasn’t keen on risking his life, either. I’d lost enough family already. Prima was fine. Blunt contusion only, no broken bones. They’d extracted the crushed bullet and patched up her subdermal armor with a special titanium filler, slapped a dressing on it, gave her some painkillers to chug, and sent her on her merry way to rejoin my unit. I elected to ride my Stampeder 650 instead of sitting in the Centaur, with Lucky strapped to my back and my saddlebags full of my gear at my sides. I needed time alone to think.

Three Archons. There were at least three of those disgusting things on this planet. Maybe more. Not to mention, the Vargr weren’t just skulking around anymore. There was an active front in the war against them. They’d set up shop in Baltimare. They had something that turned ponies into goo from the inside out. I felt deeply nauseous in the pit of my stomach. The dark cloud hanging over my head was big enough at this point that I manifested physical symptoms. Headaches, mostly. Dulled senses and slight forgetfulness, too. I had to make paper lists or have Lucky give me reminders. I couldn’t cope. I couldn’t handle it. I had to take the edge off somehow. After this mission was over, I was going to buy us all a round of drinks. Fuck drug interactions. I didn’t care at this point. I needed to be numb.

The Centaur followed relatively close behind. I looked over my shoulder and scanned the skyline. Tracer rounds and caster beams laced the sky over Tar Pan, punctuated by the crackle of far-off gunfire. The Oligarchs and the Vandals were having it out. We were situated way off to the northwest of Everfree City, and there were a fair number of townships and small villages in-between. They’d come all the way out here for a reason, and I was probably going to find out why, sooner or later.

We veered off onto the highway out of town, slaloming around abandoned cars as we went. The plains gave way to coniferous forests, the rumble of my bike’s engine echoing through the trees. Soon, the ruins of Vanhoover loomed on the horizon. There was a fine mist in the cold, moist air. Not quite a true rainfall.

I eased up on the throttle and pulled alongside the Centaur. Some technician had stenciled the word Blockbuster on the side of the vehicle’s nose, as well as a surprisingly detailed airbrushed rendition of a brick.

I shook my head in disbelief at the audacity of it. “Cheeky fuckers.”

We pulled into an abandoned gas station that had been marked as a rally point in the operation plan. I dropped the kickstand and shut off the motor. My squad disembarked and we camouflaged the Centaur and my bike under a tarp. I used my magic to levitate bits of vegetation to cover them up with. We were to hold here and wait for no more than twenty-four hours before proceeding with the next phase of the mission.

We took stock of the interior of the synfuel station’s convenience store. A fine dust hung in the air, pierced by our flashlight beams. The place’s windows were smashed and the shelves were empty. Everything had been looted years ago. We set up camp in the back. I assigned two members of the team to guard the entrances in shifts. Those who weren’t on the perimeter amused themselves by sitting around, playing card games and telling each other their best war stories.

I was startled from my reverie by the sound of a honking car horn. While the rest stood by, their weapons at the ready, me, Ket, and Hexhead joined Corporal Star at the front of the store, peering through the windows at the interloper. An absolutely filthy sedan was stopped on the street outside. The vehicle had a few pieces of steel flat bar screwed into the body over the rear side windows. The thing looked like it was held together with more duct tape than actual fasteners. A cream-colored pegasus stallion with a bandanna of the old Kingdom of Equestria’s flag on his head was sitting in the driver’s seat, smoking a cigarette. In fact, he had several more lit cigarettes held in each of his feathers on one outstretched wing.

When he spoke, he yelled in our general direction with a voice like churned gravel. “Fillyrapers! Ya’ fuckin’ fillyrapers!”

After issuing forth a few more incoherent grunts of meth-addled rage, he put his ramshackle conveyance into gear and sped off.

“The fuck was that?” I muttered.

Ket smiled, puffing on his own cig. “My kinda guy.”

It would be another three hours before our next customer arrived, one much more threatening than the last. A quadruped battlesuit of some type galloped out of the mist; a headless horse with one glowing offset eye embedded in its torso. I was on guard duty this time, and I tensed up at the sight of it. The thing reared up onto its hind legs, its forelegs hanging down at its sides like a biped. Its forehooves split and retracted to form gauntleted hands. A rotating weapon carriage on its back spat an automatic cannon into its manipulators and it strode several steps closer, its transducers whining, an electro-optical turret on its roof scanning the area. Missile launcher tubes on its back deployed, swiveling upright to face us with an octet of menacing holes. Caster gimbals on its roof swiveled back and forth, glowing menacingly.

“What the fuck is that?” I said. “Squad, get in formation, we’ve got company. Unknown contact, coming right at us.”

We scrambled into a defensive position, eyeing the four-meter-tall battlesuit warily. The machine took a knee, its visual sensor going dark and its cockpit hinging open. A pony cloaked in a hood stepped out of the saddle and landed on the pavement, approaching our hiding place.

“Just say the word, ma’am.” Mardissa trained her flechette gun on the pony.

“Hold your fire,” I said. “Flash!”

“Sentry!” the newcomer replied to the challenge, the voice clearly that of a stallion.

We breathed a sigh of relief, moving away from the windows and motioning the cloaked pony over. He nonchalantly walked inside the convenience store and approached me and my squad.

“Now, who in the hell are you?” I said.

The stallion reached up with a forehoof and threw back his hood to reveal the yellowish coat and shit-eating grin of none other than Crookneck Squash. Some traded looks of surprise, while others gasped in shock.

I did neither of those things. I ran up and threw my forelegs around him in a tearful hug, nearly knocking him off-balance in my haste. “We thought you were dead!”

“Only one hoof in the grave, Sergeant. Still got the other three on solid ground. Besides, I can’t let you young’uns ruin my legacy by building my masterpiece without my supervision, can I?”

“Is that it?” Hexhead said, nodding towards the hulking machine kneeling in the gas station’s parking lot.

“Correct. Feast your eyes on the Crook, the first-ever Palfrey. Our answer to the Confederacy’s battlesuits. Much cheaper to build and maintain than a Courser, and very handy in urban combat, in theory. The ability to transition from quadruped to biped motion allows it to change its operational profile in a very deceptive manner. The basic systems are so simple, we can practically cobble these things together from scrap. We have plans in motion to construct a dozen of them.”

Hexhead nodded with approval. “Finally, a Charger I wouldn’t mind working on.”

“How the hell did you manage to build that thing so fast?” I said.

“The Vanhoover cell has the necessary resources,” Crookneck said. “I’ve been sending them data and parts shipments for the past few weeks and they did most of the work in my absence. They were swift and efficient. They only needed me for the finishing touches.”

“What about your mangled body?” I said. “I was sure that was you. Hell, Garrida practically held a funeral for you.”

Crookneck grinned. “Sergeant, if anyone had bothered to taste me, they would have noticed that I was delicious and made of cookie dough, food coloring, and corn syrup. Did I ever tell you I won a baking contest, once?”

I snickered at his choice of words. “The only baking I thought you ever did was when you got baked.”

“What, did you think I spent all my time on Chargers? Much too depressing. I have hobbies. I have a life, you know! It’s only mostly Chargers.”

“But why? Why the whole charade of faking your own death? Did you tell Sierra?”

The old stallion’s expression darkened. “Not yet.”

“Why not? Come on. You’re putting her through hell, dude.”

“We have a mole.”

There were murmurs of unease among my unit, everyone giving each other fearful glances. No one liked the idea of a traitor in our midst.

I narrowed my eyes. “Cicatrice told me. Who is it?”

“We don’t know,” Crookneck said. “Someone’s been passing information to the vandals. The Riggers have been foalnapping ponies from areas that we’ve liberated and smuggling them to the Basement. Also, our patrols have come under attack from Confederate Security Force units that seemingly knew our routes in advance. We have a plan for dealing with the traitor, and it involves taking down their associates. The Basement may be in direct contact with them.”

“Fuck,” Shooting Star said. “Well, that explains the vandal attack.”

“The what?” Crookneck cocked an eyebrow.

“Riggers,” I said. “They’re trying to take over Tar Pan. They haven’t made it all the way to the mines, yet, but they probably will, and soon.”

There was a nervousness that crept into Crookneck’s body language as he paced the room, deep in thought.

“I’d venture that’s probably the work of our mole. The Riggers won’t be too keen on losing their cash cow. The Basement runs a very lucrative business. We’ve got to move, right now. I’m one of the very few who’s trained on this new Charger’s systems, so I’ll be piloting this Palfrey.”

“You sure you’re up to it, you old fart?” Corporal Star grinned. “I always wanted to take a crack at piloting.”

“Nonsense,” Ket said. “The Sergeant and I are the only real pilots here, everyone knows that.”

“The controls on this one won’t fit your physiology, Armagais,” Crookneck said. “Unless you’d like to try shoving your hands into hoofcups and curling into a pretzel. No, I’m piloting it. Sergeant, we managed to assemble two Palfreys with the materials we had. There’s another one operated by the Vanhoover cell. That one’s a custom order, specifically for that pilot. Not at liberty to say who, I’m afraid. Here’s the plan. All three of our rigs—the Centaur and the two Palfreys—are fitted with signals intelligence gear. We’re going to triangulate the exact position of the Basement’s sentries, and then, we’re going to tail them back to their base.”

“How do we know if they’re even transmitting at all?” Secunda said.

“We’ve picked up their comm chatter before, so we know they’re out there. We just don’t know where, exactly. The timing for this has to be exact. There’s a slaver convoy coming through tonight. We’re going to be shadowing them. Subtlety is the name of the game. If they know the jig’s up, they’ll radio home, and then, we’ll have a lot heavier and more prepared resistance to deal with.”

“Crookneck, are you okay with shooting ponies?” I said. “You aren’t exactly a soldier.”

“I’ll manage. There are ways to contribute to a battle without causing casualties directly. The Tatzlwurm missiles on my Palfrey are fitted with HESH warheads. High Explosive Squash Head.”

“Soft CycloHex plastique in a thin metal shell. Spreads out after impact. Good for knocking down structures.” I nodded. “So, you’re planning on helping us breach in?”

“That’s the general idea, yes.”

“When are the slave traders coming through?”

“About five hours, Sergeant.”

“Okay, people.” I turned to my squad. “You heard him. We’re repositioning and establishing surveillance, pronto. Let’s move!”

I left my bike camouflaged at the gas station and mounted up on the Centaur, while Crookneck waved to us as he jumped into his contraption, sealed the cockpit, and fired it up, galloping off to the next rally point. We rolled out, navigating the abandoned and gray streets of Vanhoover for several kilometers before pulling off-road. The Centaur brushed the dead foliage aside like it wasn’t even there, the bushes scraping against the armored car’s hull.

I shook my head. I couldn’t believe Crookneck could do this to Sierra. She thought he was dead. It had really fucked her up. However, I saw the logic in the plan. He was a blind spot in the mole’s vision, now. A hidden asset. Cicatrice had roped him into this, without a doubt.

We pulled into a lightly forested clearing astride an old apartment complex. The Centaur’s radio mast went up, tilting upright and telescoping to its full height. We disembarked the vehicle, standing in a loose circle.

“Ket and Secunda stay with the vehicle. The rest of you, on me.” I donned my communications helmet and had Lucky project a map of the area around us so everyone could see our location in relation to our support assets. I pointed my hoof at the green markers on the map that formed an equilateral triangle with our position. “There are two Crooks out there, meshed with the Centaur in the datasphere and scanning for enemy transmissions. Once we narrow down their location, we move in quiet and keep eyes on those hostiles. Do not fire unless fired upon. We don’t want them to know we’re even here. Maintain radio silence unless instructed otherwise.”

“Yes, ma’am!” Revenant Team sounded out.

I smiled. We were always in the shit. The Riggers were knocking on our front door. The Vargr were attacking Baltimare. We had a spy on the inside in the resistance, feeding the enemy intel. Somehow, in spite of it all, I had a strange sense of ardor. A giddiness. The warmth of camaraderie I’d thought lost. The steel of resolve I’d thought broken. We’d be alright. We had to be. We were Equestria’s last hope.

Me and the rest of Revenant moved to our overwatch position, filing into an abandoned apartment block. All around us lay strewn the remnants of Equestrian life as it once was. A sorrowful look crossed Mardissa’s face, her eyes tracing an abandoned teddy bear left in a hallway in the mad scramble of the city’s evacuation. We reached the suite with the best view, which had been marked by our scouts days earlier. I turned my back and busted down the door with a well-placed buck and we moved inside.

Turned out, this unit was occupied. An earth pony mare in the far corner of the room jumped to her hooves, startled by our presence.

“What do you want?” she said. “Don’t you have the sense to knock?”

Her eyes went wide as dinner plates as they settled on Mardissa. She gasped and bolted for the door, trying to slip past us.

“Mar, secure her!” I yelled.

This mare was no soldier. She wasn’t trained for the rigors of combat like us. She made it all of a few paces before Mardissa effortlessly wrestled her to the floor and zip-tied her legs. She started screaming, babbling, begging incoherently for her freedom. She was going to give away our position.

“Gag her, too,” I said.

Mar nodded and grabbed the first strip of cloth she could find in the room, yanked it between the mare’s jaws, and tied it behind her head with a tired sigh. “Sorry about this.”

I advanced on the mare’s prone, shaking form. There were tears in her eyes as she looked up at us. We must’ve looked very intimidating from her perspective, armed to the teeth and wearing our heavy longcoats over our armor. I knelt down and put a hoof on her shoulder.

“Listen to me very carefully,” I said. “We’re with the Liberation Front. The satyr, too. We’re not here to foalnap you. It’s the exact opposite. We’re stopping the bastards who’ve been snatching ponies off the streets. We just need this room for a bit to keep an eye on them, okay? Nod if you understand.”

The olive-coated mare nodded in the affirmative with considerable eagerness.

“If you agree to be quiet and stay out of our fucking way, the gag and the zip-ties come off. It you don’t, they stay on until we leave. Got it?”

Another nod.

With a deep breath, I used my levitation to undo her gag, and then her binds. The mare rubbed the sore spots on her legs as she looked up at Mardissa with fear in her eyes.

“Imps?” she said. “In the resistance?”

“Yes,” Mardissa said. “That’s right. Imps.”

The mare narrowed her eyes. “Since when?”

“Look, I know how it looks, but she’s on our side, trust me,” I said.

“They took everything from us,” she said. “I lost my husband. I lost my daughter. We got separated in the evacuation and I never saw them again. I came back, and—and all their things were still here. It’s all I have left to remember them by. Why?” There were tears in her eyes. “Why would you bring one of those monsters into my home? How could you?”

Anger boiled up within me. Maybe it was the events of the past few days, or maybe it was the nature of our mission. I didn’t know. Something about the tone of her voice made me defensive of Mardissa. It pushed me over the edge. I’d spent years of my life killing cleomanni in every manner that it was possible to kill someone. I’d thought them all irredeemably evil and worthy only of death. For years, I’d hoped for a sign, for something that would give me reason to believe otherwise. That sign now stood at my side.

I put a hoof on the mare’s shoulder, fixing her with a glare. “You don’t know what a real monster looks like. I do. You wanna come and see? You wanna find out what they’re like? Go ahead. Fuck around. Fuck around and find out!”

It was when Mardissa put her hand on my own shoulder that I was shocked to my senses and noticed that I’d reduced the mare to a crying ball, rolled up in the fetal position on the floor.

Mar shook her head. “Let me handle this, ma’am.”

I took a few steps back and touched my hoof to the ruby and brass pendant hanging from my neck, channeling my anger into it. I felt the rage seep out of me, replaced by a soothing calm. The gemstone in the middle of it glowed bright red. Plenty enough energy for a sizable spell. I watched as Mardissa knelt down and gently ran her hand through the mare’s mane.

“Do you have a name?” Mar said.

The gesture of affection promptly backfired. Too familiar. Too hasty.

The mare looked up at Mardissa, her teary eyes glowing with hate. “What if I didn’t? Were you going to name me? Maybe set out a pint-sized bale of hay for me to eat? Maldes rotrkenna! Don’t ever pet my head, you fucking cunt!”

“She can’t help it.” Shooting Star idly chewed a compressed ration bar. “She thinks we’re cute.”

“You can always eat me.” Haybale grinned.

I groaned at the awful pun. “Shut up, Haybale.”

“Still didn’t catch the name.” Mar put a hand to one of her ears expectantly.

The mare pointed to her cutie mark of an inkwell and feather quill. “Quill Dipper. I used to write articles for the Vanhoover Post. Now, I spend all day moping around in the wreckage of my old life.”

I stole glances at her over my shoulder as I helped the others set up a spotting scope. “A journalist? Really?”

“Yeah, what did you expect? Some doomsday prepper nut?”

“There can’t be much to eat out here,” I muttered.

“I try and find canned food every now and then. Whatever the looters haven’t gotten their hooves on already.”

“How many ponies would you say live here, in the ruins?”

“Can’t be more than a few hundred.”

“Why haven’t you tried moving on to greener pastures?”

“Why would I?” Quill waved her hoof dismissively. “There’s nothing for me out there.”

“You sure about that? Maybe we could find a place for you in the resistance.”

“Oh great.” Quill let out a dismissive huff. “You want me to help fix the mess we’re in by acting tough and killing people. Fuck you. You’re just another gang. You can’t bring back the Empire. You have nothing. We’re finished. The noose is around all our necks, and every day, the knot grows tighter. I won’t bloody my hooves for your misguided ambitions.” She turned towards Mardissa. “And you. I know who you are. No self-respecting political analyst wouldn’t. Mardissa Granthis. What’s the matter? Did daddy’s ranch and flower gardens get to be too boring for you? Was our misery too dull and flavorless on the holo? You actually decided to come slum it with us? Or were you compelled to? Whose dog did you fuck on the dinner table? Tell me, did he at least get you off, honey?”

Mardissa clenched her hands into fists. “I’m trying to make things right.”

“Right. You’re going to fix everything. All you have to do is shoot the right people at the right time, and it’ll all fall into place. Someone else will come patch the bullet holes, paint over the scorch marks, and drag away the corpses. Admit it. This is live-action roleplaying, not statecraft. You ponies want to salvage your pride, and your Imp friend here wants to experience something exotic. The reality is that the Confederacy has armadas with thousands of ships, fighters, tanks, and walkers and millions upon millions of soldiers. Equestria has nothing. The smartest thing for us to do at this juncture is to get down on our knees and beg for mercy. It’s the only rational choice. All else is folly.”

“Is that right?” I said. “Well, I’m going to show you something different.”

Quill paced closer. “Like what?”

I climbed behind the spotting scope set up on a table and peered down at the dead drop site in the courtyard below the apartment block. “You’re a journalist. Follow us and find out. Maybe you’ll have enough material for a story. I’ve already got a subject for your first article. One where the ELF takes down some fucking pony-smugglers.”

“You’re going after the slavers?” Quill had a haunted look on her face. “Those bastards took my friend Lancet a few days ago. Snatched him right off the fucking sidewalk.”

“So, you already know.” Corporal Star nodded. “Good. That’ll make things even easier. What else do you know?”

“They’ve been taking ponies by the dozens,” Quill said. “You can’t be out at certain times, or they’ll grab you, and that’s the last anyone ever sees of you. The vandals bring caravans with even more slaves, sometimes. One should be passing through today. Oh, I see. You wanna catch ‘em in the act.”

“Correct,” I said. “Should be a few more hours. We’re all set up and ready. Now, we wait.”

Quill stood by with rapt attention as my team posted by the windows. For hours, we waited, not making a sound. I could hear birds outside, but not much else. Finally, our customers arrived. A few Riggers leading a string of ponies bound in chains. Mares, mostly. A few fillies, too.

“There they are.” Lying prone on the table, I brought the spotting scope into focus. “Fuck. Got eyes on children. Son of a bitch.”

I clicked the aetheric responder a few times to wake up our support assets and have them keep track of enemy transmissions. One of the Riggers raised a hoof and brought the group to a halt, looking around warily to make sure the coast was clear. Then, he rooted around in the ground and pulled out a spike. He withdrew a data chip from the spike and slotted it into his GPS receiver to retrieve the next coordinate. When I took my eye off the spotting scope’s eyepiece, I saw movement on the rooftop in my peripheral vision, nine o’clock. Same building as us. Different wing. I panned the scope upwards and caught sight of the Basement’s spotters packing up their gear and repositioning. One of them fiddled briefly with a radio. Shortly thereafter, Secunda zeroed in on the transmission and sent me a ping over the aetheric.

“There they are.” I sent a few pings back to instruct the Centaur and the Palfreys to reposition if necessary, to continue tracking them. “Let’s move, now!”

After we hastily packed up our gear, we all filed out of the room, made our way to the stairwell, and exited onto the street. Quill was following us, even though she didn’t have any armor or weapons. Clearly, we’d piqued her curiosity.

“Nuh-uh.” I pointed a hoof to my right as we moved north. “Quill, there’s a Centaur three hundred meters east of here, in the woods. If this comes down to a firefight, I’m not gonna have you getting hit and bleeding all over the place. Mar, escort her there, and then rejoin the squad.”

The two of them peeled off from us. It was down to me, my Orbit, Ghost One, and the rest of Revenant to keep shadowing our targets.

Prima chose this moment to speak up, keeping her voice low. “Do you trust her?”

“I think so,” I said.

“Then you’re an idiot. She could be working for the Basement. She sure seems to live pretty cozily out here.”

“I think I’ve had enough BASKAF paranoia to last me a lifetime, thank you.”

“Our enemies are ponies, this time. Can’t readily tell friend from foe at a glance like you can when it’s xeno uglies. Embrace the paranoia, Sergeant. Embrace it.”

We turned into an alley and the squad came to a halt. I had Lucky project a map for us. The Palfreys had deployed drones of their own and were visually tracking the two groups of hostiles. I couldn’t see or hear anything in the sky. The drones were too small and at too high of altitude. Our cordon moved north to keep pace with them as they moved deeper into the city, towards the downtown core. About a minute later, Mar caught up to us, only slightly out of breath. She had her smoothbore flechette gun unslung and was scanning her environment warily.

We kept pace with the hostile contacts, staying out of sight. On my helmet’s display, I watched through the drone feed as the vandals retrieved another drop. The spotter team from the Basement was nowhere in sight. The leader of the slavers motioned for the rest to follow. One mare was reluctant, her head hanging low as she wept. She was rewarded with a savage blow to the hind legs from an electrified stun prod. The mare slowly rose to her hooves as she was urged onward by her captors.

“Motherfuckers.” I bit my lip. “This is going to turn into a hostage situation if we make the wrong move.”

I was a moment too late to realize that I’d just jinxed us with those words. There was movement on the drone feed near the second Palfrey as it moved up a side street. I zoomed in on it and watched in open-mouthed horror as a camouflage tarp was pulled off of a recoilless rifle nest on the roof of a commercial building. And then, another. Then, a third.

I made the decision to break radio silence. “Spearhead Two, ambush! Anti-tank on the roof!”

One of the recoilless gun positions flashed on the feed as they opened fire, striking the Palfrey with an explosive shell.

The rough yet slightly feminine voice on the other end was garbled by the rumble of gunfire. “H—Huertges mere!”

“What? Spearhead Two, say again?”

“Copy! Enemy contact!”

The slavers double-timed it into a subway entrance, checking their six for pursuers before disappearing from sight.

“Dammit, they’re getting away!” I said. “Spearhead One, Ghost Two, you are cleared to engage. Converge on Spearhead Two’s position and back them up. We’re on our way.”

The Centaur dropped its antenna boom and went mobile. Crookneck veered off to assist the other Palfrey. Our quarry would have to wait.

“The fuck tipped them off?” I said.

“I dunno, maybe the great big battlesuits, ma’am?” Haybale laughed. “Just sayin’.”

“Can it, Private. Revenant, we’re moving west to counter the hostiles attacking Spearhead Two. Keep your eyes open and move. Go!”

We dog-legged away from our quarry moving north and shifted towards Spearhead Two’s position. The sounds of gunfire and caster beams filled the air, growing louder as we approached. One of the stores had a loading dock in the back alley. I planted a CH charge on the fire exit next to the roll-up door and we breached in. It wasn’t subtle. We checked our corners as we moved into the darkened structure. There were two well-armed and armored earth pony stallions guarding the ground floor of the furniture store, their purloined Bulwark armor adorned with streaks of red paint. When they caught sight of us, they scrambled for cover.

“Light ‘em up!” I yelled.

So much fire poured forth from Lucky and my squad, everything above floor height was scorched or had holes punched into it. Sofas were lit aflame from the heat of the caster beams. Their cover had proven useless. The two slavers crawled from behind the furniture, moaning and bleeding, the floor growing slick under their hooves with their vital fluids.

“Squad, put out that fire! We don’t wanna burn down the whole block.”

Hexhead grabbed a fire extinguisher in her mouth and raced over to put out the burning upholstery. I could hear the characteristic thumping of the Centaur’s autocannon as it joined the fight outside. Through the front windows of the building, I caught a glimpse of Spearhead Two, transformed into biped mode, blasting away with their own autocannon and letting loose with a Tatzlwurm missile. I didn’t have to see the blast to know it took off the face of whatever structure it hit. The loud bang and the sound of falling rubble was enough of a clue. One of the anti-tank nests was probably swallowed up by the blast.

We double-timed it up the stairwell before busting out onto the roof. The enemy anti-tank team was caught with their hooves on their proverbial dicks. They had barely enough time to acknowledge our presence before the combined caster and flechette gun fire mowed them down. Prima, not to be outdone, took things a step further. As soon as we ceased fire, she teleported into their midst and dispatched the survivors with her blades. She ripped the 105mm recoilless rifle off of its tripod with levitation, swinging open the breech and loading a fresh cartridge from the ammo crate nearby. She walked to the edge of the building with the weapon held aloft. She took aim at another recoilless gun nest that was scrambling to reload their weapon and bring it to bear upon her.

“Fire in the hole!” Prima shouted.

We all pressed ourselves flat to the roof and covered our ears to avoid the backblast as she let loose with a thunderous report that shook our teeth, sending a 105mm high-explosive shell hurtling into the enemy’s midst. When the smoke cleared, there was nothing left of them. They were practically vaporized.

I peeked over the edge of the structure at the junction below. This gun nest had covered a long stretch of city blocks. To my nine o’clock, I spotted Spearhead Two, on fire and limping.

I gritted my teeth. “Shit. Shit!”

I double-timed it back down the stairs with my squad in tow, exiting onto the street. The hostiles were neutralized or on the run, with Ghost Two and Spearhead One hot on their tail. In any case, the coast was clear, for the time being. That left the matter of the burning Palfrey. I broke into a gallop down the sidewalk as the small Charger slumped over, too damaged to go on. The fire increased in intensity. The thing’s gas turbine sputtered and died. It ran on synfuel instead of using a reactor. The fucking thing was a flaming coffin.

The cockpit hatch had popped open partway but was jammed from loss of hydraulic power. I ran towards the flames, heedless of my own safety, using my levitation to wrench it the rest of the way open. I climbed up onto the nose of the machine. Through the smoke, I could faintly see the pilot struggling to remove their restraints. I pulled out my Leathermare and flipped the saw blade open, cutting through the harness as quick as I could. Then, I seized the surprisingly hefty and furry pilot in my forelegs and dragged them out, stumbling back as I pulled both of us into the street. The two of us lay still for a few seconds, unable to do anything but cough from smoke inhalation. When we turned and faced each other, I was greeted by sharp teeth, sharp claws, pointed ears, and predatory eyes.

I reflexively scrambled back at the sight of one of ponykind’s most repulsive foes. “A fuckin’ dingo!”

“That rude,” the pilot spoke in broken Equestrian with a thick accent. “Damarkind not dog. Is rodent.”

I held a hoof to my chest to still my breathing as I realized that the feminine-sounding voice on the other end of the radio belonged to the pilot. “Oh, thank goodness. You don’t have a cock. Wait, you—what?” I appraised the pilot’s slight build, drinking in her unusual features and the angry expression she wore. “A girl? Well, that’s fucking new. Rodent, you say? Not sure being a rat is much better, but hey, you do you.”

She glared at me, shaking her head. “Wow. My savior is asshole. Come. Move from bonfire.”

The damarkind stood up, rising to her full height. She was thin compared to one of the males, but still much taller and thicker than a pony. She wore an odd robe and loincloth that looked like it had been made from Equestrian BDUs that had been cut up and sewn back together. She wordlessly reached into the Palfrey’s cockpit and pulled a belt-fed machine gun of damarkind make from its stowage position inside, slinging it over her shoulder as she approached me.

“Lead way, rude one.” She grinned mischievously, baring her unsettling fangs.

The two of us left the destroyed Palfrey behind and rejoined the squad. The rest of Revenant were similarly shocked and dismayed by the pilot’s appearance, adopting a defensive stance. Mar leveled her weapon at us briefly until she recognized that we were on the same side.

“Stand down, Revenant,” I said. “It’s Spearhead Two.”

Though the others relaxed their posture, Corporal Star and Corporal Cloverleaf were still tightly wound as if ready to pounce. I didn’t blame them.

“Spearhead Two?” Cloverleaf said. “It’s a fucking dick!”

The damarkind touched a fist to her chest. “I Sergeant Teirro Koskas, Vanhoover resistance. We on same side.”

“Well, this is awkward,” Haybale said. “Looks like you ladies have some things to sort out, so I’ll leave you be.”

“Shut up, Haybale,” me, Star, and Cloverleaf chorused.

“So, this is what it’s come to,” Shooting Star said. “Fighting alongside fucking dimbulbs. Nice going with the vehicle. Waltzed right into an ambush and fucked it up good.”

“Corporal, you are being insubordinate,” I said. “You will treat the Sergeant with the same respect that you treat me. We may not be of the same blood, but she fights for Equestria, and that makes her our sister. That is all that is necessary. Consider this matter closed for discussion.”

We received a few glares from the more disgruntled members of the squad as they walked past us towards the Centaur and mounted up. No one liked her species. Not after the things they’d done to us. I had some reservations, myself, but I couldn’t afford to let interpersonal conflict interfere with the mission. I had to nip it in the bud right away.

Crookneck was desperately trying to put out the fire with an extinguisher mounted on the end of a utility arm on his own Palfrey, his voice amplified by a hidden loudspeaker mounted in the Charger’s torso. “Oh no, oh no, my baby!”

“I hope most of it’s intact enough to salvage.” I took my seat on the Centaur with a sigh.

The ramp went up as the last of us boarded. After I set a waypoint on the subway entrance to the north, we rolled out. Sergeant Koskas elected to kneel in the cramped space, gripping a hoof-strap on the ceiling.

Quill was immediately sent into a tizzy at the sight of a damarkind, scrambling away from the new arrival. “Oh fuck! Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck!”

“I not scary,” Koskas said. “Calm. Be tranquil.”

“That’s twice today!” Quill adjusted the collar of her dress shirt. “Twice you fuckers made my ticker nearly explode. Where’s a fuckin’ aspirin?”

“You’ve got a head start if you wanted to join the militia,” Jury Rig said. “You definitely cuss enough to be one of us.”

“Not happening. I don’t kill people. My weapon is the pen.” Quill pulled out her journal and stress-sighed, scribbling a few notes. “The ELF is surprisingly diverse.”

Prima scoffed at this. “Not exactly. In fact, I’d say about a third of the aliens in the whole rebellion are in this armored car as we speak. Helping Equestria get back on our hooves is certainly not in vogue in most of civilized space. They’re as afraid of us as we are of them. The linnaltans are an exception. We have numerous contacts among them.”

“So, what’s your story?” Quill said, peering over at the newcomer.

Koskas rubbed her fingers together, a faraway look on her face. “My papa was heretic. He raise me to be like boy. Give boy name.”

“Why would he do that?”

“Female, no politics. No power. Vow of silence. If break vow, well.” Koskas stuck out her tongue and made a snipping gesture with her fingers, as if to suggest a pair of scissors.

The conversation ground to a halt. We were all stunned into silence, more than a few of us bearing expressions of varying degrees of shock and disgust. I fixed her with wide, unblinking eyes. I’d hoped that I’d misheard her. I’d hoped that I didn’t just hear that they mutilated their own kind on purpose.

“You mean literally?” I said. “They cut their tongues out?”

“Yes.” Koskas nodded.

“For fuck’s sake,” I muttered. “Is this whole fucking galaxy fucked in the head?”

“How’d you end up with the rebels?” Quill said.

“They catch papa. They learn truth. I run away.”

“What happened to your father?”

The damarkind balled up her fist. I’d never seen one of her kind express any feelings other than berserk rage. They were scary even when they were sad.

“Dead.” Sergeant Koskas’ voice wavered with emotion. “Price of heresy, death.”

I would have told Cloverleaf something along the lines of see, she lost her daddy too, now you have something to bond over, but I’d exceeded my asshole quota for the day already.

“Well, sounds to me like if most of the galaxy treated their ladies better, they wouldn’t have ended up runnin’ off to join our little circus,” Haybale said. “No offense, Ket.”

Ket puffed on one of his cigs. “None taken.”

Koskas laughed, wiping away a tear. “Accurate.”

The brakes squealed as the Centaur rolled to a halt near the subway entrance. I stood from my seat and double-checked my gear, electing to grab a couple smoke grenades from a locker and clip them to my rig.

“Alright, these fuckers know we’re coming,” I said. “They’ve got hostages. There will almost certainly be booby traps and other nasty surprises on the way in. We need to do this quick and clean. We take out the slavers and rescue the captives. Don’t get separated. Lucky, on me.”

We double-checked our weapons. I swiped a cleaning cloth over my casters’ emitters and inspected the alignment. We were good to go. The Centaur’s ramp dropped and we spilled into the street, scanning the environment for threats. Secunda, Ket, and Quill stayed with the vehicle, and the rest of the team formed up on my lead.

“Squad, move in. Check your corners, keep an eye out for ambushes.”

We marched down the stairs and descended into Vanhoover’s subway system. It was pitch-black inside, the off-white tile walls of the subway station plastered in apocalyptic graffiti. There were hundreds of tags, mostly of the doomsaying variety, but many of them expressing resentment towards the authorities for what the tagger must have perceived as their own abandonment. A common theme. Our helmet lights swept away the darkness. There was a ruined subway car on the platform, all its windows smashed out. Even from here, my nose could pick up the coppery tinge in the air.

“Ah, shit,” I whispered.

We moved to the edge of the platform and I peered inside the car. The vandals had left the slaves behind so they wouldn’t slow them down. Unfortunately, they didn’t spare their lives. Every last one of them, including the foals, lay dead in the subway car, their throats slit and their blood pooling on the floor.

“Fuckers,” I muttered. “Motherfuckers. Found the captives. No survivors.”

Jury Rig made the mistake of taking a peek, as well. “Fucking animals.”

“Squad, keep moving,” I said. “We’re gonna find these pieces of shit. They can’t hide. These vandal pussies are good at one thing and one thing only, and it’s murdering defenseless children. One pops their head out, waste ‘em. Do ‘em quick. No mercy!”

I waved the squad onward. We hustled down the subway tracks, heading into the tunnels. Only way they could’ve gone. We moved about a hundred meters before Sergeant Koskas grabbed my shoulder.

“No!” she said. “Look!”

Sure enough. A silvery glint in the dark. I’d been mere centimeters from setting off a tripwire. They’d emplaced makeshift landmines between the tracks. A row of pipe bombs. They were probably filled with ball bearings and nails and whatever explosive materials they could scrounge up.

I nodded. “Good eye.”

They’d placed the tripwire at neck-height, and the easiest way through was to crawl underneath. Or, in the case of the pegasus on our squad, flying over it. There was a corrugated metal barricade off in the distance. It appeared deserted, at first, but as we approached, there was a flash and a loud report that echoed through the tunnel. I was punched hard in the chest and I went down with a groan.

“Contact, front!” I yelled. “Engage!”

As my squad opened up on the barricade, I coughed a few times and checked my chest protector with my hoof. No penetration. The round had splattered across my armor and left a dent, the lead fragments digging into my chin. My muzzle bled a little and I had a big bruise forming underneath my rig, but I was fine.

“You hit, ma’am?” Cloverleaf said.

“I’m fine, Corporal. Focus on the enemy.”

Sergeant Koskas fell into a low crouch as she swept the barricade with her machine gun. Mar took careful, aimed shots at the openings. The suppressive caster fire from me, my Orbit, and the rest of the squad kept the enemy’s heads down. Koskas took a hit in her shoulder from a rifle round, sending her staggering back. This only seemed to enrage her.

With a roar, she slung her machine gun over her shoulder and pulled a knife, charging the barricade. “Drokoi, seszlag, diho!”

“Stay in formation!” I shouted. “Fuck!”

Koskas leapt over the top of the barricade and came down right in the middle of them, furiously hacking and stabbing away with grunts of exertion. Wet, gurgling screams echoed down the tunnel.

“Well, she’s definitely a dingo,” Shooting Star muttered. “I suppose there are some benefits to allying ourselves with stab-happy savages.”

“Give her a break, Star,” I said. “We use knives, too. Prima uses knives, Placid uses knives, the Stormtroopers use knives. Everyone uses knives. Just because she’s more than twice our height and weight, that doesn’t make it any different.”

“You clear!” Koskas said. “Move up!”

We advanced to the barricade. It was difficult to tell what species the hostiles had been, what with the piles of gore they’d been reduced to. Blood dripped down the damarkind’s arm. She held her shoulder with her other hand to try and put pressure on the wound.

“You’re hurt,” I said.

“No time bleed,” she said. “Only time for win.”

“Bullshit, come here.” I whipped out my first aid kit and retrieved a pair of pliers, disinfectant, and a Hemogel syringe.

There was no exit wound, so that meant the bullet was still stuck in her. I levitated the pliers over to her shoulder, brushing her fur aside with my magic and gripping around in the wound until I found the chunk of copper and lead inside, yanking it out. Koskas did not protest at all, even without any anesthetic. If anything, she seemed mildly bemused. I ran the disinfectant sponge around inside the wound, and then put the tip of the Hemogel applicator in it and depressed the plunger, filling the cavity with a quick-hardening, biocompatible patch that would encourage clotting.

“You treat good,” Koskas said. “Doctor?”

“No. I’m Sergeant Desert Storm. Pilot, like you. I get fucked up a lot, so I’ve picked up some tips and tricks from the pros.”

The damarkind narrowed her eyes at me. “Bad vibe around you. Bad spirits. I teach ritual for cleanse spirits.” Koskas stood with her legs together and clapped her hands together over her chest. “Omukan!”

“What does that do?” I said.

“Banish spirits. Damark is hunting ground of spirits. Much life, much death. Before hunt, drive away bad spirit. He trip you. Stumble you. When enemy take your meat, he want feed on half they don’t take. He feed on soul. Parasite.”

“Does anyone from your world worship the evil spirits?”

Koskas frowned. “Yes. Some worship Night Princes. The bad ones. Live like mad beast in woods. Some forest, never go alone. If alone, get taken by warlock. Sacrificed. Worse.”

I let out a derisive huff. “Worse than being sacrificed?”

“Warlock make familiar. Break bone. Twist limb. Tie to tree. Feed poison berry. After many day, he untie. Rokoga is complete.”

I blinked a few times, my eyes wide with horror. “The fuck is a Rokoga?”

“Pony tongue lack proper word. To maim, to—uhh—”

“Mangle?”

“Yes! Mangle-er. Mangler. No longer son of Damark. Mind is gone.” She tapped a claw against the side of her head. “Poison.”

I felt a chill run down my spine as I recalled Celestia’s words. The Night Princes. The Great Devourers. The Lords of Matter. The Archons corrupt and pervert everything they touch!

There were Archon-worshipers on Damark, too. Their filthy tendrils reached everywhere.

Koskas grunted with disapproval. “No good. Bad spirit cling to you. You marked one.” She wagged a finger. “Unlucky. Must spend whole life flee from fate.”

“You can sense them, can’t you?” I said. “How? I thought damarkinds couldn’t do magic.”

The damarkind sighed as she reached under her collar and showed me the bone necklace she wore. “Is not magic. Is truth of world. Spirits bind all things together. Close eyes. Don’t think. Feel. They all around you. Modern people think wise with book. Build false rock over soil. Sever life from spirits. They not wise. They bring self to ruin for have temporary material gain. Many of my kind, lost to all reason.”

Koskas unslung her machine gun and took point, sweeping the area ahead of us.

Corporal Star gave me a look of bitter mirth as she passed by. “Unga-bunga voodoo-juju,” she whispered.

I shook my head. We were all going to have to reconcile our differences eventually. I couldn’t let the squad fall apart because of this. I’d grown strangely accustomed to working with the aliens and embracing their unique talents, even though I would’ve thought nothing of killing them mere months before.

After we negotiated a few twists and turns in the darkness, the tunnel opened into an underground maintenance depot. Subway cars littered the area in varying states of disrepair. The cavernous space was dimly lit by scattered work lights. A few ponies converged on the catwalks above us, their weapons lowered. The one in the middle, presumably their leader, wore a caster rig with red pinstripes and a mask fashioned in the shape of a pony skull. These weren’t the vandals we were after. These were actual Basement members, like the bastards operating the recoilless rifle nests.

“Look who decided to show up,” he said. “ELF, poking their noses where they don’t belong.”

“And the first thing to greet us is a walking, talking cliché,” I said. “Even said it all singsong-like. ‘Look who decided to show up’. We don’t live in a teen high school drama, you fuck. You’re selling ponies. That puts you on our shit list. Take off the mask, you pussy!”

“The Cellar Dweller never takes off his mask!” He crowed. “International stallion of mystery, babe. Them’s the rules.”

He certainly had the theatrics down pat. He’d mounted a voice changer of some kind in his skull-helm to make him sound more menacing, but the end result was more goofy than scary.

“I don’t give a flying fuck what you are.” I took my helmet off, shaking my mane out as I walked into the beam of one of the floodlights they’d set up. “I’m not asking you. I’m telling you, motherfucker. Take. It. Off.”

Something about my appearance set him off. “What the fuck? Oh fuck. Oh fuck! Kill her! Kill her, now!”

I rolled to the side and donned my helmet as a mounted machine gun nest opened fire on the floor where I’d been standing moments before.

“Light ‘em up!” I shouted.

Lucky zipped several meters into the air to get a better vantage point over the hostiles before sweeping them with caster beams. The rest of my squad poured forth a sheet of caster pulses and gunfire, a combination I had started to grow fond of. The Cellar Dweller, or whatever the fuck he called himself, stumbled back onto his ass as his compatriots were practically vaporized, before turning and running down the catwalk, whimpering all the while, the steel ringing with his panicked hoofbeats.

“Your ass is grass!” he whined. “Guys, guys! Get your asses up! Intruders!”

I ran deeper into the maintenance facility with my squad close behind, angling around the abandoned subway cars. Two slavers emerged from behind one of the cars, right in my path. I drew out the damarkind knife I wore, pulling from the reservoir of rage in my ruby locus. I hated using my sister’s murder weapon in combat. Cicatrice had told me that was a good thing. He instructed me to harness my hate. To empower my magic with it.

One of the slavers held a piece of plumbing pipe in his jaws and swung it at me, intending to clobber me in the head. He never struck his mark. I lit my horn and channeled a body-seize into his nerves before the blow could land. He tripped and practically fell into my blade, right through his neck. When I turned my gaze to the other one, my magic fell upon him in his turn.

I summoned the image of the murdered foals in the subway car. My anger empowered me. I wanted to crush them all. I wanted to make these pricks beg for their lives. I gritted my teeth and let out a low growl as I channeled the hatred from my amulet and my magic surged into him. I could feel his heart beating in his chest. I directed his own musculature against him. I squeezed, like trying to pop a balloon, and I was rewarded with a rushing sensation, like something tore inside him. He collapsed and rolled onto his back, screaming and convulsing.

I was suddenly struck by a splitting headache. A sick euphoria washed over me. Feelings of invincibility and other grandiose imaginings wormed their way into my consciousness. A little voice in my head began to whisper. Yes. That’s it. Just like that. You are a unicorn. You are a being so far above them, you may as well be an alien race next to the rest of ponykind. Assert dominance.

“Dammit,” I muttered. “Went too far. Blowback.”

Injuring or slaying someone directly with dark magic always had consequences. It wasn’t like striking someone with an arcane blast or smushing someone with a levitated heavy object. It was a far more intimate connection than that. Soul to soul. Nerve to nerve. Flesh to flesh. Such power warped the mind. I mercy-killed him with a quick thrust from my blade, putting him out of his misery. I flicked the blood off to keep the weapon from rusting.

Koskas ran up and dove into cover next to me, her massive frame thudding against one of the subway cars. She wore an enthusiastic look on her face. “That knife! That is Saggor! Look!”

She pointed to one of the inscriptions on the blade, a few angled lines that looked like claw-marks.

I shrugged. “I can’t read damarkind.”

“Saggor Tuvas. Master bladesmith. Is legend among contractors.”

“You mean the Condottieri?” I said.

Koskas glared at me. “Foreigner word. There are good and wise Seg’Jakha and their warriors. There are also exile, bandit, heretic, disgrace. Many Seg’Jakha in space seek reclaim lost honor. Bring trophy. Bring treasure. Kneel to Elders. Give offering. If Elder say worthy, he regain honor. Erase guilt.”

“So, when one of your kind commits a crime or a slight of some kind, and he is of high status, his punishment is that he and his tribe go questing to clear his name?”

“No. Not punishment. Duty. Bring treasure. Pay price of crime. Honor his blood.”

“Sergeant, are you aware that your kind makes sport of hunting, murdering, and raping mine?”

Koskas leaned out from behind the corner of the subway car and popped off a few suppressive rounds before ducking back into cover. “Yes. I know.”

“Doesn’t that bother you?”

“Why would it? Life is struggle. If lose to male, he take meat, enjoy spoils. Is way of things. If you win, he no take. I get tired explain pony who ask same silly question many time. Lose, be eat, be fuck. Win, you eat, you fuck. Simple.”

I stared off into space, haunted by the pure savagery of it. Their morals, though easy to comprehend, were as bizarre and alien as they were. Ponies could be brutal to each other at our worst, but we never rationalized it away as somehow moral for the victor of a fight to completely possess the life of the defeated and have right of final disposition over them. Hunter, hunted. Predator, prey. Their law was the law of the Jungle. Raw evolutionary fitness. No mercy for the weak. Neither charity nor remorse. What we would consider dangerously antisocial behavior, they took for granted as the natural order.

My eyes watered at the sheer barbarity of it. They had no idea they were doing anything wrong. They had no guilt for their actions whatsoever.

“Sergeant,” I said. “Do you think I’m becoming like one of you? A predator?”

Koskas fixed me with a momentary stare before she burst out in rough and hearty laughter. “If you were prey, would not have that blade as trophy. Keep winning, little pony. Find own truth.”

The damarkind let off a long string of rounds from her belt-fed machine gun, sweeping the enemy’s position. With our foes sufficiently suppressed, the two of us rushed from cover and moved to the next subway car. At that moment, a heavy machine gun at the far end of the row of cars opened up, peppering the air with fifty-caliber rounds. The two of us dove back into cover. The rest of my squad was either pinned down further back or trying to get around to a flanking position.

“Tossing smoke. Stand by!” I unclipped a smoke grenade from my harness, pulled the pin, and hurled it around the corner with my levitation. “Smoke, out!”

The grenade’s pyrotechnic reaction released gray clouds of obscurant smoke, blocking the enemy machine gunner’s vision. Prima seized upon this opportunity and charged into the fray, using the smoke screen to get close enough to teleport. Though I couldn’t see it, I knew that she’d popped out of thin air right in the enemy’s midst, hacking and slashing away with her levdaggers. Teleportation was a very advanced spell. Only the best of the best knew how to do it. It would make my life a whole lot easier if I could convince her to teach me. I made a mental note of this and filed it away.

“We’re clear!” Prima shouted. “Move up!”

As we continued our relentless advance, I spotted the Basement leader in the skull mask, beating a hasty retreat into a side passage. I immediately accelerated to a gallop, chasing after him.

“He’s getting away!” I yelled.

“Sergeant, wait!” Prima tried getting my attention, but I ignored her.

I chased him into the darkness, my rig illuminating the space before me. I found myself in an old storeroom that had been converted for the Basement’s purposes. The air stank of blood and viscera. My pace slowed as I scanned around, washing the darkness away with my headlamp beams. My Orbit soon caught up with me, adding its own illumination to the scene. There were stainless steel tables, cots, oxygen bottles, scalpels, and other medical equipment. Several of the tables were covered in blood.

“What the hell? Lucky, hold your fire. Start recording. Get every-fucking-thing.”

One of the tables had a reflective orange tarp with a lump under it. I approached it, hesitantly seized the tarp in my levitation, and then uncovered what lay beneath. The stench of death was intolerable. I reflexively covered my muzzle with a foreleg. It was a young unicorn mare. What was left of her, anyway. She was lying face-down and her back had been flayed open to access her kidneys. Incisions had also been made in the back of her head. Pieces of her skull were missing. It looked like they’d dug into her brain with a sharp instrument. I let go of the tarp, trying to banish what I saw from memory.

“Organs. They’re harvesting organs.”

It didn’t make sense. With our nation in ruins, there were few who could afford a transplant if they needed one, and I was pretty sure the Confederacy preferred live, intact specimens of our species, in any case. The room led to a hallway that opened into another space that they’d converted into their quarters, filthy sleeping bags lying around everywhere. Dead end. I’d backed skull-face into a corner. He was sniveling and panicking, his head darting around as he looked for an exit.

The Cellar Dweller collapsed to his haunches in defeat. “Shit. I just fucked myself! Did I really end up here?”

“Yeah, you did, you sick fuck,” I said.

“This is what you want, huh?” He turned towards me. “You think you’re my fucking karma, is that it? Why do you have to ruin what’s left of my life? Why didn’t you just die like all the rest, you fucking bitch?”

He pulled something from his chest rig with his fetlock and threw it at my face. A small plastic baggie smacked into my muzzle and spewed a glittery powder everywhere. I inadvertently inhaled some. The effect was immediate. The colors in the room seemed to blur and stretch, the dim amber lights pulling taut. There was a black void in the center of my perception, sucking in all the light like a shower drain before it suddenly unfurled and burst into a rainbow spray. I felt memories that weren’t mine. There welled up within me an overwhelming sense of nostalgia for what came before, for what we lost. I heard a scream that seemed to emanate from the dawn of time. I couldn’t tell if it heralded the beginning of one life or the beginning of all life. Reality shimmered, warped. I was having sex. No, she was having sex. Who was she? Who had she been?

Dark tendrils reached out from the void and pulled the sweet memories away. A voice rumbled in the dark, within the confines of my own head. Yes, that is the way, little one. Come closer. Bring your longings with you.

I gripped my head in both my hooves and let out an earsplitting scream. My conscious awareness snapped back to reality. I was behind a stack of metal crates, surrounded by caster scorch marks. My full faculties had not yet returned, but my eyesight was mostly back to normal.

I was still drugged out of my mind. I was stimmed like I was on cocaine, but with a razor-sharpness and a tickle in my skull that I found deeply unsettling. “You wanna play? Huh? You wanna play games with me, you son of a bitch?”

I peeked my head out and a red caster beam sizzled through the air, missing me by inches. I unclipped my last smoke grenade, pulled the pin, and tossed it over the top of my cover, towards the center of the room. As smoke began to fill the space, I fired off a volley of suppressive caster pulses from one side of the stack of crates, and then I turned and darted out from behind the crates on the other side, cloaking myself. I let off a few magic echolocation pings until I found something that felt like the outline of a stallion.

I galloped straight towards him through the plume of smoke and tackled him from the side, smashing his head into a metal tanker desk. As I uncloaked, I saw his caster gimbals try and lock on to my face. I slammed both of my hooves into them, busting the emitters. A hard-driven hoof connected with my muzzle, splitting my lip. He tackled me onto my back, trying to use his size to his advantage.

“Just another little cunt, eh?” he said. “I wish I didn’t have to do this, but you leave me no choice. Buh-bye, sweet cheeks.”

He flicked open a boot knife and tried bringing it down on my neck, but I crossed my forelegs and diverted the blow. The blade bounced off of one of my shoulder protectors. I kicked him in the throat with one of my forehooves, punching right into the meaty part of his larynx. As he gasped and wheezed, I applied what I knew from my CQC training and swept his hind legs out from under him by applying leverage to his stifles with my own. We rolled across the floor and I took the top mount position, laying into him with my hooves. The smoke had begun to dissipate, drawn away by what passed for ventilation in this place.

“I told you to take off the mask, you fuck,” I said. “You didn’t listen. Now I’m gonna take it off of you. The whole world’s gonna know who you fuckers are and what you’re doing down here!”

With a vicious uppercut, I smashed the skull mask off of his face. I reared back to deliver the blow that would’ve knocked his lights out, but as my headlamps illuminated his face, my whole body froze. Nothing I’d seen since I’d escaped captivity had sobered me up so quickly, nor filled me with such a sense of dread. All of a sudden, his choice of alias made sense, and it all clicked into place. I had a suspicion before, but I’d chosen to ignore the little voice in my head. It couldn’t be true. All the strength was sapped from from my body as I stared down at the bloodied face of my fiancé.

My lips trembled, almost refusing to work. “Barleywine?”

“Desert Storm,” he said. “Long time no see. Thought you died. You probably thought the same of me, eh?”

I gripped him by the collar in my fetlocks. “What was in the fucking plastic bag? What did you drug me with? Huh? Who the fuck are you really? Answer me, you fucking turd!”

“It’s called Quint. The vandal gangs love it. We pay them for ponies. They pay us for the drugs. Great deal, until you came along and ruined everything. And no, the high doesn’t last that long. You’re seein’ fine, Storm. It’s me. You happy now?”

“Quint?” I looked around at the clear plastic tubs in the back of the room. There had to be hundreds of the little baggies filled with the glittery powder. Each one was individually marked and labeled with its own name, with the symbols for male or female on them. Each one represented a life that was taken for the sole purpose of getting somepony else high. I glared down at him, a sinking feeling in my guts. “You’ve been—I can’t—you mean to tell me you’ve been harvesting quintessence and selling it as a drug?”

“Now you get it, you dumb cunt. The vandals use it because the trip’s like no other. You get to live another pony’s life. You get away from the present and get immersed in the past. Back when things were still good. A nice little escape, all for the tidy little sum of five hundred bits a bag. Lasts a long while if you stretch it out.”

I shook my head. “No, fuck this. Fuck this! Not you! Dammit, no!”

“Yeah. Me.”

“I can’t believe I—I can’t believe I ever loved you. I can’t believe I was going to fucking marry you. You scum. All this time, I saved myself for you, out of a vain hope I’d see you again, and I find you doing shit like this. I remained faithful!”

He smirked a little, chuckling darkly. “I didn’t. Wow, you’ve gone without a good fucking for the past few years? That’s funny. No wonder you’re so pent up. You always were a dumb, naïve, titty waitress bitch. I got my dick wet with like a dozen mares while you were on deployment.”

I recoiled as if struck. What he’d just brazenly uttered to my face was the proverbial final piece of straw. My blood pressure shot through the roof as I snarled down at the contemptible animal underneath me.

“You motherfucker!” I spat.

I brought my hoof down on his face. I kept hitting him, beating him to a pulp. I couldn’t stop myself. I tried putting my hoof through his head into the floor. Just a few more. A few more blows, and he’d be dead. Firm hands seized around my withers, pulling me off of him. I flailed and struggled as Sergeant Koskas dragged me off of Barleywine’s limp body.

“Let go of me, you dingo furball! I’m gonna kill him! I’m gonna kill you, you fucking son of a bitch!”

“No, Sergeant,” Koskas said. “You lose control. Be calm. Must question. Must interrogate.”

Prima grinned as she caught sight of Barleywine moaning and writhing on the floor. “Ah, and there he is. The loverboy. We’ve had eyes on him since before the end of the war, Sergeant. Underworld connections. Fentanyl smuggling. Tax audits came back dirty. He wasn’t reporting his profits. Now look what he’s gotten himself into. Gee, you sure know how to pick ‘em, Storm. I hope the sex was good, at least.”

I watched, transfixed, as Prima unceremoniously zip-tied my fiancé and dragged him off like a sack of potatoes. I pulled out the amulet that Cicatrice had given me and channeled my anger into it. The ruby locus glowed bright enough to fill the room with red light. The damn thing was so close to capacity, it nearly burst from the energy I poured into it. When I was done, the anger was gone, and I felt sick and sad. My eyes welled with tears as the wretchedness of everything I’d experienced up until this point came crashing down on my head in waves of self-pity. Even though we were the victors, I was utterly defeated. All of my sweetest memories with the love of my life were slipping away from me, crumbling to dust right before my eyes.

“It’s not right,” I muttered. “It’s not fair!”

Koskas hugged me close to her chest, wrapping her arms around my sobbing form with surprising gentleness. “World is not fair, pony. World belong to darkness. We must make right. We must be strong and make right together.”

“I don’t want to be alone,” I said.

“You’re not alone.” Mardissa strode up to us. “We’re here for you, ma’am. Take a minute. Just breathe. Relax.”

I felt fragile in Koskas’ hands, like a broken toy doll. I did one of the breathing exercises Weathervane had taught me. In through the nose, out through the mouth. My heart rate came down. Slowly, the stress seeped out of me, replaced by cold rationality. My unit needed me. I needed to be a leader. I wiped the tears from my eyes as Koskas set me down on the floor. It was unnerving just how strong she was. I had no doubt that she could tote me around in one hand if she wanted to.

“I’m fine,” I lied. “We need to keep moving. We need to get Hexhead in here with that blowtorch of hers and crack that safe in the corner. We should gather up all the evidence we can and get it back to the Centaur.”

I stumbled out of the room and into the hall, all eyes on me as I passed, except for one pair of peepers. Jury Rig was hunched over, his outstretched hooves against a wall as he threw up on the floor over and over. He’d probably taken an ill-advised peek under the tarp, too. I had half a mind to join him, though my own nausea stemmed from a different source.

Nothing made sense anymore. It was too much, too fast. The world I’d stepped out into was completely different from the one I’d just vacated. The context of my actions had been altered irrevocably. Before, I’d been clamoring for the chance to see Barleywine one last time. Now, I hoped never to see that rat-bastard’s face ever again. It was humiliating. I had no idea what could’ve made him like this. I couldn’t believe that he thought so little of our relationship that he’d stoop so low in my absence. After this, I felt like I’d have a hard time trusting anyone ever again.

“Revenant, form up,” I said.

My squad assembled before me, their faces sullen. Many of them had never imagined that ponies could be capable of doing this sort of thing to other ponies. Their foundations had been shaken almost as badly as mine.

I had Lucky project a map of Vanhoover with objective markers overlaid on it. “This was just one site. One single hub of trafficking activity. The Basement and the Riggers aren’t finished yet. There are several other locations in this city where our scouts have picked up on suspicious activity. We are not going to give these bastards a millimeter. We are going to rescue any still-living captives of theirs and we are going to seize all of the proceeds of their criminal enterprise. We are going to root them out wherever they hide, and we are going to bring them to justice. For the Empire!”

“For the Empire!”

The cheer rang hollow. None of us would walk away from this nightmare unchanged. Even though it felt like I was breaking, even though my heart trembled in my chest at Barleywine’s betrayal, I had to keep it together. It was up to me to make sure that this didn’t become another fiasco like Pur Sang.

Celestia help us all.

// … end transmission …

Record 19//Heartbreak

//HOL CRY SWT
//CHECKSUM READ
//CHECKSUM GOOD

// … decoding …

Desert Storm

I sat across from Barleywine in the troop bay of the Centaur, my hooves shaking with barely contained rage as I perused the documents retrieved from the safe. The Basement kept meticulous records. After the howl of Hexhead’s blowtorch had abated and we’d swung open the safe door, we found reams of paperwork and bags of gold. Twenty thousand bits in all. It was only a fraction of their ill-gotten gains, judging by the amount of product they were moving.

We confiscated everything. There was so much contraband that there wasn’t even any room for it in the Centaur. We contacted the Vanhoover resistance cell and had them bring in a cargo truck to load it all up. They also brought a flatbed for Koskas’ Palfrey. The damn thing had nearly burned to the ground. All the most valuable parts, like the control electronics, were still salvageable. It was in good enough condition to be rebuilt, just barely. Unfortunately, the engine bay and almost everything in it was toast.

I’d overheard Crookneck and Koskas muttering some things back and forth about the need for self-sealing fuel tanks and some armoring improvements to prevent catastrophic fires. They’d left about an hour ago. I hoped I’d see Sergeant Koskas again. The big furball had strangely started to grow on me. She was a damn good fighter.

I glanced down at the list of names, reflecting on the grim tally they represented, and then looked up at the swollen and battered face of my former fiancé.

“How fucking many?” I said.

“Storm, babe, I—”

“Don’t you ever babe me, you fuck. Just answer the fucking question. How many ponies did you fuckers kill to manufacture your fucking drugs?”

He sheepishly stared down at the cuffs holding his forelegs together. “I don’t know. Hundreds. Thousands. Five thousand, at least.”

My face hardened into a scowl. “You fucking vermin. I’ve fumigated better people than you, you son of a bitch.”

He huffed dismissively, a touch of evil creeping into his eyes. “So, you’re an imp-lover, now, huh? Oh, I get it.” He waved his cuffed hooves over at Mardissa. “You and her are fucking, aren’t you? Damn. I always knew you were a bulldyke, but I never knew you’d stoop to licking alien trench.”

I lit my horn, enveloping his heart in a body-seize spell and giving it a harsh squeeze. He gasped and doubled over, clutching at his chest and whimpering.

“I can and will make your fucking ticker implode if you piss me off,” I said. “You’re gonna keep your filthy trap shut unless I ask you a specific question. Where are the rest of your little Basement rats hiding?”

“Eat shit, bitch.”

“Wrong answer.”

I changed my target, since I didn’t want to kill him. However, this time, I put a little more force into the spell, making him wrench his own leg halfway out of its socket. Screams, now. Pitched like a mare’s. I wondered if his victims had sounded much the same when they were held down and slaughtered for their quintessence in that dingy hole. My companions kept their eyes averted. They knew who he was, to me. Who he’d been. They knew this was personal.

“Stop, stop!” he said. “You really hurt me, Dez. Fuck!”

“You hurt me worse. It hurts me to know that you’re a fucking murderer.”

“And you aren’t? We’re the same. You kill for the state, I kill for me, what’s the fucking difference?”

I tossed the intel aside, surged up out of my seat and slammed Barleywine against the inner hull of the Centaur, pressing my foreleg into his neck. “The difference is that I’m a trained professional, which means I’m better at it than you are. You should weigh the implications of that, and very carefully consider the next words that come out of your fucking mouth!”

Barleywine spat in my face. “Fuck you.”

I wiped his saliva off my cheek, and then I drove my hoof into his gut hard enough to make him double over in pain.

“I don’t get this,” I said. “It’s fucking absurd. Why is my old life stalking me around? Hoodoo’s dead. Windy’s been kidnapped. Briarwood’s on the run from the oligarchs of Tar Pan. My fucking shitbag fiancé is a serial killer. What next? Is my dad gonna erupt from the earth as a vengeful zombie? Is my mom gonna come screaming down from the heavens in an orbital drop pod? Who else is gonna show up for the party, huh? Who?!”

“Dez, I—”

Barley gagged as I wrapped my hooves around his neck. “You dumb bastard. You cocksucker. I already have all this fucking stress on me. Why do you have to fuck up my life? Why are you even here? Why do you exist?”

Prima snickered. “A couple of textbook narcissists going at it. You really are peas in a pod. Just do it. Just have sex already. Right here. In front of us.”

I turned to Prima, fixing a hateful glare on the cyborg as I turned my attention to her and her disrespect and away from the prisoner. “You are undermining my command. You may answer to Cicatrice, but I don’t answer to you. You’re BASKAF. You’re a fucking civilian. If you try and make a fool out of me in front of my unit, I don’t care what Bell’s instructions are or how many of those silly little daggers you have on you. I will make you regret it.”

“I didn’t have to do a single thing, scatterbrain. This scene you’re making? It’s all on you. You’re completely graceless. I wonder how long before Argent switches you from sertraline to olanzapine?”

I shoved Barleywine against the Centaur’s hull, tossed my helmet onto my seat, and muscled up towards Prima. “You. Me. Outside. Now.”

Prima’s eyes narrowed, her lips curling upward in a sadistic smile. “You really wanna dance with me? You’re braver than I thought.”

The Centaur’s ramp dropped and the two of us made our way onto the sidewalk outside. Me and Prima squared off beneath the twilit sky while the rest lined up to watch, hooting and hollering. Secunda was the only one among us cagey enough to keep her eyes on our surroundings. The city wasn’t exactly secure.

“Any rules for this bout?” Prima said.

“No weapons, no magic,” I said. “Hooves only.”

Prima glared at me. She didn’t like it that I’d negated many of her advantages. I briefly wondered if her augs alone were enough to surmount my adrenaline and rage.

My unit and the civilian were already making bets. Secunda, Hexhead, Haybale, Shooting Star, and Quill bet on Prima, it looked like, while the rest put their money on me. Barleywine was watching from the inside of the troop bay, cuffed to his seat and unable to escape.

“You’re gonna be a few points uglier when I’m done, bitch,” I muttered.

Prima flicked her ponytail mockingly. “Your overconfidence will one day be the end of you, Sergeant.”

The two of us circled each other, our eyes rigidly fixed on our opposite number. After a moment’s hesitation, the two of us surged towards each other. Prima aimed for a running clothesline, but I slipped under it and countered with a jab towards her muzzle. She caught my leg and put me in a leglock, supporting my knee to constrain the mobility of my joints. I delivered a well-timed headbutt, keeping her from following up with the downward hammer-blow that would have invariably broken my leg.

We locked horns briefly. I was treated to a display of overwhelming strength as Prima tackled me onto my back, knocking me onto the rough asphalt. There was cold hatred in her eyes. Without hesitation, she went for the choke, her forelegs wrapping around my neck like an anaconda. The power in her limbs was unnatural. It felt like I was trapped in vise. I couldn’t breathe.

Lucky for me, I didn’t need to. Prima’s expression slowly melted from grim determination into mild shock. She’d expected me to pass out by now. By all rights, I should have. I drove my hoof into her ribcage, levering myself out of her grasp. I grabbed her by the head and shimmied up far enough to lock my hind legs around her neck.

I squeezed with all of my strength, but she didn’t tap. Not even close. Instead, much to my chagrin, Prima stood up with me still latched around her neck, lifting my entire body weight with ease. With a great heave, she threw me several meters like a rag doll. I slammed into the corner of a brick building. Prima charged and I ducked just in time before she put her armored hoof through the brick wall, smashing it to dust as though it offered no more resistance than papier-mâché.

“Slippery slut,” Prima said. “Slipped out of my hooves like a bar of soap. You’ve been doing more running than fighting!”

“Bullshit,” I muttered. “You’re sweating. You didn’t think you could get your ass beat by a pony who’s still mostly meat, did you?”

It was a struggle just to stay one step ahead of her. In spite of my bravado, I had a sinking feeling in my gut that I’d made a terrible mistake by challenging her in the first place. Realistically, I had no way of winning this. Prima had so much titanium in her, her hooves thudded against the ground with the weight of a pony twice her size. She was swift and capable, endowed with speed, strength, and reflexes bordering on the preternatural.

She slammed one of her forehooves into my chest protector, knocking the wind out of me and sending me flying a couple meters from the force of the blow. I realized right then and there that she’d been holding back. If she really wanted to, she could’ve snapped my neck like a twig the moment I let her get a chokehold on me. Such was her irresistible might.

I slowly stood, my legs shaking like jello. I had to do something. This was pathetic. I glanced at the crowd. The ones who’d bet on Prima were cheering her on. My own supporters were booing me. All of them except Mardissa. Her pathetic little puppy-dog eyes as she watched her hero getting her ass beat were heart-wrenching.

Mar frowned, encircling her mouth with her hands to direct her voice. “Get her, Storm! Fuck her up!”

Prima led with a right hook. I batted her hoof away and countered with a blow that landed square on her jaw. I recoiled, my hoof throbbing in pain. It felt like hitting plate steel. Moreover, it didn’t even slow her down. We reared up and our forelegs went around each other’s necks as we wrestled for dominance. My heart hammered in my chest and my muscles strained. She was pushing me back. I smirked as a devious idea entered my mind.

I abruptly ceased all resistance, causing her to overbalance forwards. I rolled backwards underneath her as she dived over the top of me. I lashed out with both hind legs and delivered a blow straight to her lower abdomen, bucking her with enough force to lift her off the ground slightly. If her ovaries had been made out of titanium, everyone would’ve heard them clack against her spine.

Prima exhaled explosively, her muzzle dribbling drool. She crumpled like a wet noodle. I rose to my hooves, dusting myself off, bowing mockingly to the crowd. “Ladies and gentlecolts, please come again to the Storm Kicks Everyone’s Ass Show. Don’t forget to stop by the gift shop on your way out. We’re fresh out of fucks but we’ve still got wounded pride in stock.”

Though she frantically waved her arms in the air, I picked up on Mardissa’s warning too late. A pair of forelegs wrapped around my neck from behind, lifting me off the pavement and choking me with tremendous force. I couldn’t breathe or speak, only gurgle incoherently, lifting my forehooves shakily towards my neck.

“I could kill you, you little psycho,” Prima hissed into my ear. “Is that what you want? Huh? You want me to put you out of your misery?” Her grip tightened even further. “Go to sleep, skank!”

Garrida had put me out like a light with a choke before. I should’ve passed out seconds ago, but I didn’t. I didn’t understand what the hell was going on. I remained alert and conscious as the pressure on my neck became unbearable. I was being strangled by the weight of my own armor and gear, among other things. In spite of my struggles, there was no escaping this time. Me and my opponent both knew that. I reached back and gently tapped twice.

Prima let me go and I collapsed to the pavement, drawing in ragged breaths. I looked up at the disappointed faces of the ones who’d placed their bets on the underdog. Mardissa was crestfallen. Shooting Star, Haybale, and the rest of Prima’s little fan club were hugging each other and jumping for joy. Barleywine’s expression was unreadable in the shadowed interior of the Centaur’s troop bay.

Right then, the sky chose that moment to start pissing a thin trickle of rain on my head. I gave so little of a fuck, I didn’t even blink as the droplets landed in my eyes.

Fuck this year.

// … // … // … // … // … //

I scarfed down a dry oatmeal bar that clung to my aching throat, chasing it with a swig of water from my canteen. I sighed as I leaned back in my seat, trying to keep my food down as the Centaur’s bumpy ride made my guts pinch together. My whole body ached. Another hour had gone by and the rain had let up a little. Crookneck had rejoined the formation in his Palfrey, refueled, rearmed, and ready to go. His machine galloped along beside us as we made for the Port of Vanhoover. Our next objective.

Barleywine’s face looked like a cauliflower from how badly I’d beaten him. I felt a pang of regret as I gazed into his remorseful eyes. I deeply regretted ever knowing him. I regretted that I’d given him the chance to hurt me, or anyone else, so profoundly.

“So, Barley,” I said. “Were the gangs your only customers?”

“Ash far ash I know, yesh.” He struggled to speak with his lips so swollen.

“That’s not what our intel says.” I sighed and shook my head. “I don’t believe you. I don’t believe they could scrounge up this much money just to get high. There’s something else going on, here.”

Barleywine laughed derisively, clearly unwilling to entertain this line of inquiry. “Ish it jush me, or were you alwaysh thish paranoid?”

“You never told me what the fucking organs were for, Barley. Who’d you sell ‘em to, huh?”

“You don’t—you don’t wanna know,” he said.

“Who?”

“They’re not—” He let out a string of agonized coughs. “They’re not good people, Dez.”

I raised a hoof threateningly. “Answer the fucking question, dipshit, or I’ll show you how I’m even worse!”

“I won’t!” There was defiance in his tone, soon turning to fear. “I can’t. They’ll kill me. I’m dead if I tell you anything.”

“Was it the Confederacy?”

“No, not the cleomanni.” Barleywine shook his head.

“Was it humans?” I said. “Huh?”

“What’sh a human? What are you talking about?”

“Like cleomanni, but no horns, no hooves, no tail. Flat feet, small ears. Ring any bells?”

Barleywine’s eyes widened, his face twisting into a mask of horror. “How do you know about them?”

“We’ve met.” I nodded. “The circumstances were far from pleasant.”

Barleywine was beside himself, his head sinking into his hooves. “No, no, no! Fuck, no!”

My muzzle curled into a hateful snarl. “So, it was them. You did business with the fucking Vargr.”

“It washn’t bushinesh! They never paid! They jush came by and took what they wanted. We had no ushe for the organs. We were being extorted. It wash either cut ‘em out and hoof ‘em over or die. It wash jush leftover medical waste. We’d put ‘em on ice, pile ‘em up at the drop-off point, and they’d come by to pick ‘em up.”

“What for?”

“Are you fucking kidding, Shtorm? They never told us a damn thing, other than bring organs.”

“When was your next drop-off supposed to be?”

“Tonight.”

“Barley, you’re gonna need to be a lot more specific than that.”

“Around nineteen hundred.”

I bit my lip. “Where?”

“In the city limitsh.”

I took a deep breath, exhaling my accumulated stress. “Fuck. Fuck this.” I turned and addressed my squad. “Revenant, listen up. We’re on borrowed time, here. We have hostiles incoming, and we don’t want to be here when they show up.”

“What’s a Vargr?” Cloverleaf said.

“Not now, Corporal.” I shook my head. “You will all be fully briefed when it becomes necessary to do so. Not a minute sooner. Just know that if I call out SILVER SCALPEL, we are dropping fucking everything and returning to base immediately.”

My squad looked uneasy, trading a few glances. Clearly, they were displeased with that answer. I was, too. What had happened at Pur Sang was partly because Cicatrice and Bellwether had withheld intel, in some cases deliberately lying about the extent of their knowledge about the Vargr. I didn’t want the same fate to befall my unit.

I bit my lip, sucking in a deep breath. The choice is mine to make, isn’t it? I glanced over and locked eyes with Prima. I could tell by the look in her eyes that she knew exactly what I was about to say. She was slowly shaking her head, patting the spot on her rig where she kept her daggers. I clenched my jaw. I didn’t have a choice after all. Cicatrice had seen to that.

Secunda brought us to a stop in the middle of a public park adjacent to the waterfront. Crookneck stood by in his Palfrey, weapons at the ready. I took a peek out the viewports, shaking my head. I didn’t like this spot.

“Nope,” I said. “Ghost Two, we need to reposition. We’re in the center of a fucking kill zone.”

“No choice,” Secunda said. “I need open air. The buildings attenuate signals too much.”

I scanned the rooftops, looking for signs of more recoilless gun nests or ATGM infantry. If either of those were to show up out of the blue, we were fucked.

“Dammit. Squad, disembark.” I donned my helmet and checked my casters. “Secure the perimeter.”

Earlier, Prima had backtracked to one of the recoilless rifle nests we’d neutralized and retrieved one of the fearsome weapons and a crate of ammo for it. She’d stowed it on the Centaur’s external equipment rack. The weapon was either a Confederate VB-105 or the unlicensed Imperial copy of it. I hadn’t bothered to check the markings. Both the Empire and the Confederacy made extensive use of this particular model during the war. The weapon used cartridges with perforations that released hot, expanding powder gases into a venturi tube, sending as much energy rearward as it sent downrange. Standing directly behind one when it fired was a guarantee of ruptured eardrums and rattled brains.

The 105mm shells packed a hefty explosive punch, enough to send spall flying around the interior of an armored vehicle or demolish a bunker. Recoilless guns this size were typically mounted on a tripod, but Prima levitated the weapon off the Centaur’s side hooks with ease, tilting the breechblock open and loading one of the giant cartridges like it was no more troublesome than loading a break-action shotgun. She levitated the entire ammo crate along with her.

“Sergeant,” Prima said. “I’m going to post up on a rooftop overlooking the port. Call for fire support when you need it.”

I nodded. “Much obliged. We need to narrow down where these assholes are. They’re gonna know we’re coming. I want a more exact fix on their location.” I keyed my radio. “Ghost Two, begin surveillance. Use the sensor mortar. Spearhead One, get into position.”

“Copy that,” Secunda said. “Sensor mortar, up.”

Crookneck was next. “Yes, Sergeant. Repositioning.”

While Prima and Crookneck’s Palfrey took off running at a good pace, my squad took a few steps back from the Centaur as a retractable small-caliber mortar tube rose from its stowage position on the Centaur’s roof. The turret rotated with an electric whine, adjusting elevation slightly. I covered my ears. Bang. Bang. Bang. After the last deafening report, the thin metal of the mortar tube briefly pinged like a tuning fork.

“Sensor mortars, out!” Secunda said.

The projectiles were away. Somewhere downrange, in the Port of Vanhoover, three unattended sensor stations blew their aerodynamic covers off, deployed their chutes, and slowly came to a rest on rooftops or on the ground, linking into the datasphere and extending our network area and sensor coverage.

I approached the rear of the Centaur, peering inside. Secunda was hard at work at the surveillance station, deploying the Centaur’s antenna boom and retracting the mortar. I gave Lucky a quick charge with my horn and sent him up to survey the area, slaving his video feed to my helmet’s display. Couldn’t quite see anything, as yet. We would have to get closer.

Secunda held her hoof to her headphones. The cups containing their drivers shone like obsidian over her ears, her face lit up in an eerie glow by the screens and oscilloscopes in front of her. “We have something that might be a hostile contact. We’re going to need to narrow it down. I’ve spoofed the enemy’s communications channels.” Secunda hoofed over a mic connected to her station by a long, coiled cable, nodding towards Barleywine.

Barleywine was barely coherent, his breathing labored, his expression miserable. It was clear he was in a lot of pain.

I held the mic out to him. “Barley, I’m gonna key this mic, and you’re gonna have those fuckers check in. You got me?

“Storm, no, pleash,” he said. “They’re my friendsh, Storm. They’re—”

I held out a hoof with a fentanyl snail in it. “See this? Fentanyl citrate. Painkillers. Every time you obey, you get one. Every time you don’t, I beat you black and blue. If you alert these fuckers to our presence prematurely, I’ll knock your head off.”

He slowly nodded with a defeated whimper. “Okay. Jush gimme the damn thing.”

He reached for the mic and I moved it just outside of his reach. “Cross me, Barley, and I’ll hit you so hard, your head will come out of your ass inside-out. Stop speaking like a mush-mouthed retard, too. They can hear that.”

Barleywine glared at me, sighing as he took the mic from my grasp. “Grinder, this is Dweller.”

For a few seconds, there was nothing but silence. I briefly gave up hope that we’d ever get the drop on these bastards.

“Go ahead, Dweller,” the radio rumbled with a stallion’s voice, rough as an iron rasp. “I heard there was trouble. Did you take care of it?”

“Situation’s under control. Just some drifters poking their noses where they shouldn’t have been.”

“You’re dicking me around, boy,” Grinder said. “I don’t like being dicked around. The boys tell me there were battlesuits in the city. Battlesuits that walk on four legs. If there’s one gang I hate more than any other, it’s the fucking Sparklers. So, tell me, boy. Is it Sparklers?”

I looked over to Secunda, who grinned and made a throat-slitting motion with the tip of her hoof. I smirked. We got ‘em.

I snatched the mic from Barley’s grip. “Yeah. It’s Sparklers.”

“Who is this?” The stallion on the other end grew perturbed, if his tone of voice was any indication.

“This is Sergeant Desert Storm of the Equestrian Liberation Front, and you just painted a bullseye on your ass, motherfucker.”

“You b—”

I switched the channel. “Ghost One, Spearhead One. Target is marked. Fire at will.”

I watched on Lucky’s feed as Prima and Crookneck let loose with a barrage of recoilless gun rounds and Tatzlwurm missiles, the muzzle flashes on the feed appearing slightly ahead of the sound due to the fact that they were several hundred meters away from us. Moments later, in the Port of Vanhoover, a warehouse was reduced to a skeleton, engulfed in a fireball that quickly gave way to a rising cloud of smoke. Shards of corrugated metal floated in the air like confetti.

“Good effect on target,” Prima spoke over the radio. “Whoa, that one had secondaries. Let us know if you want any more.”

“Ghost One, Spearhead One, hold fire and await further orders.” I switched to my Orbit’s datasphere link. “Lucky, search pattern, hundred-meter radius.”

The Juke 1300 spiraled outward from the center, giving a clear view of the target area. I relayed the feed from my helmet to Secunda’s console, and she ran it through a basic AI expert system. I glanced over her shoulder. Nothing on algorithmic. No pixels shifting around. There was nothing moving down there. Either they were dead, or they had decided to bunker down.

“Good. Just what I wanted to see.” I nodded and stepped out of the Centaur. “Squad, on me. We’re going in to secure the port. Neutralize all vandals and Basement members you encounter. No survivors.” I turned to Ketros, striking out my hoof towards him. “Ket, guard the prisoner. I don’t want this fucker slipping away while we’re occupied. He has a lot to answer for. Oh, and give him his pain candy.” I hoofed over the fentanyl.

“At once, ma’am.” Ketros unslung his flechette gun and stood guard across from Barleywine in the back of the Centaur.

We moved up along the street, watching the roofline for any signs of an ambush, sweeping the alleys as we maintained a loose formation. All was quiet, except for the far-off wailing of fire alarms in the port. A dozen gantries dominated the horizon, their ominous, hulking, pitch-black silhouettes barely visible against a twilit backdrop. Right in the midst of it all, a column of smoke and flame split the sky. We turned into the driveway leading into the Port of Vanhoover. This entrance had a closed and padlocked chain-link fence gate.

“Revenant Six, get that gate open,” I said.

“On it, ma’am.” Hexhead nodded.

I watched the big, gray unicorn pull a couple of combination wrenches out of her saddlebags with her levitation. She hovered them over and stuck the open ends into the padlock’s shackle. With just a bit of leverage, she was able to bust the shackle right off.

“Shitty lock,” she muttered.

She reared up and started pushing the gate open when I heard a supersonic snap and saw a puff of ballistic fiber from Hexhead’s vest. She stumbled back, cursing and groaning in pain.

“Cover!” I shouted. “Enemy sniper!”

We quickly lined up behind the concrete wall abutting the fence. I took Hexhead aside and checked her over real quick, eyeing the hole in her Bulwark armor’s chest protector.

“How’s it feel?” I said.

“Hurts.”

I unstrapped the front piece of her barding and swiveled it out of the way. There was a great deal of back face deformation, the plate bulging inwards a fair bit. No penetration, but it was certain to leave a big bruise. I sure was glad the Empire spared no expense on our gear.

“You’re good, Private.” I buttoned her back up. “Plate’s trashed. See the armorers for a new one, later.” I hustled back into cover and checked the feed from my Orbit. I increased the light-enhance setting, feeding the video back from my helmet to the Centaur and Secunda. “Ghost Two, we have an enemy sniper in our AO. I need intel support. What do you see on your sensors?”

“Gunshot locator’s got an approximate fix,” Secunda said. “Wait, I see him. Upper catwalks of the warehouse, one hundred meters west of your position.”

“Relay grid coordinates to the fire support elements.” As Secunda sent Prima and Crookneck their targets, I switched the channel. “Ghost Two’s sending over another grid reference. As soon as you have it, I want shells and missiles on that target yesterday.”

“Ready,” Prima said.

“I’ve got four more rounds, and then I’m out, Sergeant,” Crookneck said. “Ahh, I see it. Ready.”

“Revenant One to Ghost One and Spearhead One, you are cleared to engage,” I said. “Take ‘em out.”

Seconds later, a 105mm shell streaked over our heads. It demolished the catwalks and took a chunk out of the warehouse, engulfing the building in a huge explosion. Then, two Tatzlwurm ATGMs raced overhead, their engines aglow. The HESH CycloHex warheads ripped the steel siding of the warehouse to bits, caving in the supports holding up the roof. The whole building sagged, and then collapsed. The squad cheered at the carnage.

“Get some, motherfucker!” Haybale shouted, proving that he was, in fact, that one guy.

I switched to the radio channel used by the Basement. “To the kidnapping, murdering scumbags who’ve chosen to befoul one of Her Majesty’s seaports with their presence, surrender immediately, drop all your weapons, and come out, slowly. If you do, you will not be harmed. If you do not, hostages or not, I will level every fucking building in the Port of Vanhoover.

“I bet there are still some nasty petrochemicals down there. I would shed no tears if the whole shebang turned into a blazing inferno and you shitdicks all burned to death. Your lungs will be filled with toxic fumes and your skin will peel off like an onion. It’s a terrible way to die. Ten seconds!”

I switched the channel back, listening for an intel update. Several seconds elapsed. Nothing. At first, it seemed like they were choosing to do things the hard way.

Now or never. “Ghost One, you are—”

“Revenant One,” came Secunda’s voice over the radio. “I’m seeing lots of movement on the ground. They’re coming out of the buildings.”

A couple dozen Riggers and Basement members stumbled out into the open, sans armor or weapons. Some were visibly shaking in fear as they approached us.

The Rigger in the lead was practically broken by the whole affair. “They said come to the docks. They said we’d be safe. Instead, we got trapped here! Fuck, the ELF are gonna fuckin’ kill us!”

“Shut it, moron,” one of the Basement members said. “Do as they say.”

“Come over here, asshole!” I said. “I got your zip-ties right here.”

As my squad stood by, I secured the prisoners one by one, tying their forelegs and hind-legs together so they couldn’t get far. “Secunda, radio the Vanhoover cell. We have prisoners that need to be transported.”

“Grinder and his boys aren’t surrendering,” said one particularly scarred and rough-looking vandal mare with a cataracted eye and lips encrusted in dried blood. “You silly Sparkler cunts are in for one hell of a time if you think you can take the big boss.”

I knelt down towards her. “I don’t give a fuck. I’ll burn him down like all the rest. Just watch me.” I turned towards my squad. “Revenant Three and Four, guard the prisoners. The rest of you, on me.” I waved my forehoof in a circle. “We’re going in.”

Cloverleaf and Haybale nodded silently, standing by the heap of writhing wretches we’d detained. Me, Shooting Star, Jury Rig, Hexhead, and Mardissa moved in, fanning out and keeping an eye out for enemy movement. I recalled Lucky and had him come to a hover over my shoulder. I coughed sharply, covering my mouth. There was a lot of smoke around. Visibility was poor.

We came upon the jagged, flaming rubble of one of the warehouses. As I moved towards the blaze, shielding my eyes from the radiant heat, I saw something that chilled me to the bone. A small, kicking leg was sticking out from underneath a fallen concrete support beam.

“Oh shit,” I muttered. “Hey, guys, help me with this!”

The five of us reached up and planted our hooves on the beam, giving it a shove aided by my levitation. We quickly levered it off the filly trapped underneath. To my shock, I quickly recognized her as the one whose father I’d shot in the Redheart General Hospital when we were on the run from the Confederacy after the outpost raid went bad. Sometime between now and then, the Basement had taken her captive in order to harvest her quintessence, and then, we’d brought a whole building down on her head. She was bleeding, shrapnel-wounded and badly concussed.

“Damn, and just when I was starting to think I was the unluckiest girl in the universe!” I said.

At the sight of me, she began to cry out and struggle in fear. “Monster! You monster!”

“Calm down.” I quickly pulled my first aid kit from my saddlebags. “You’re making your injuries worse.”

She kept struggling, so I did the unthinkable. I used my body-seize spell to paralyze her muscles. Dark magic though it was, it took on an entirely different character when used with noble intentions. There was no blowback, as a result.

It wrenched my heart, seeing her look up at me with such fear in her teary eyes, her face marred with angry red wounds and flecks of blood. She shivered for a few moments, resisting my magic, until I allowed her to breathe again.

“Don’t move,” I said.

“Please don’t kill me.” She was trembling with fright. “Please don’t. Please, please, please.”

“I’m not. Now hold still. This is gonna sting.” I ran an antiseptic pad over her wounds, wiping the blood away and disinfecting them. I used Hemogel to seal the worst of them. “Can you get up?”

Slowly, shakily, she tried to stand. One of her hind legs was smashed. Broken from having the pillar fall on it, it looked like. She walked a couple meters with a pronounced limp before collapsing into a sobbing, whimpering mess.

“What the hell happened here?” I said.

“You,” she said, her voice laced with venom. “You happened. There were like fifty ponies in here, you bloodthirsty morons!”

I looked over at the burning rubble, my eyes widening with shock and dismay. A cold sweat broke out on my forehead. “Fuck. Fuck!” I keyed the radio. “Ghost One, we have civilian casualties in the port. Shit. We need medical assistance from the Vanhoover cell. Whatever they can send us. Ghost Two, what the hell? I thought we had positive ID on the target.”

“We had positive ID on an enemy transmitter,” Secunda said. “You were the one who gave the order to fire.”

“Dammit,” I muttered. “Ghost One, Spearhead One, abandon those firing positions and get your asses down here. Fire support at a distance is no good. Too much collateral damage.”

I pulled my amulet out from under my chest protector. The pendant glowed red, vibrating and self-levitating like a thing possessed as I drew upon its monumental store of power.

“Hordettas, Imanas, Carraistur.”

With my magic’s glow tinted red by the power of my stored anger, I blasted forth a stream of cryokinesis magic at the blaze, sustaining the spell for several seconds as I swept back and forth over the flames. Though I was never particularly skilled at elementalism, the stored power of the amulet offset my weaknesses in that particular spectrum of magic. Several seconds later, the amulet was almost exhausted. My spell guttered out, but so did the fire.

Underneath lay the remnants of the holding pens, along with dozens of charred and broken bodies. Some had armor and weapons, either vandals or Basement members—it was impossible to tell which, given how mangled the corpses were. However, most of them were unarmed. Innocent ponies who’d been taken captive. Some of them, too small to be anything but foals. I soon found myself hyperventilating.

I heard the slow clapping of hooves behind me. All of us wheeled around to face the interloper. There stood before us an immense, brown-coated, yellow-eyed unicorn stallion, easily a half-again my height and covered from head to hoof in makeshift body armor composed of numerous scavenged bits and baubles. Most strikingly, he wore a chest plate adorned with a lamellar caparison fashioned from old grinder wheels.

He tossed a broken antenna into the air, catching it in a fetlock and twirling it around. “Dumb Sparkler. Did you think I’d be stupid enough to mount my transmitter on top of my head? No. It goes on the building with the meatbags, for exactly this reason. I take it you caught that dumb little bitch Barleywine. I guess that’s it for the whole Basement act. Time to close up shop and get out of this shit town.”

“You must be Grinder,” I said.

Grinder reared up and spread his forelegs. “The one and only.”

“But you’re a Rigger,” Hexhead said. “Are you saying the Riggers and the Basement are one and the same?”

The stallion grinned. “Of course, you dumb fucks.”

Jury Rig was speechless for a couple seconds. “But what about the dead drops? The security measures?”

The vandal laughed. “That’s just bullshit to keep Sparklers like you distracted and to keep the other gangs from getting wise to the hustle and trying to take it over. I take it you’ve raided one of my gold stashes. You think we move a safe that size around every week? Hah! Fuck no! We just vary our routes to throw you off.”

I was shaking with rage. They’d completely fooled us. My amulet could barely keep up as it soaked in my overflowing emotions. “You sons of bitches have been murdering ponies and harvesting their quintessence.”

Grinder shrugged. “So fucking what? All the gangs love it. Quintessence is the true currency of this benighted age, and I aim to corner the market.”

“No.” I stepped forward. “This is over. You’re fucking done.”

“You walked right into my trap, Sparkler,” Grinder said. “When you go to meet her, give the Martyred Maiden my regards.”

I steeled myself as Grinder lit his horn. In a bright flash of yellow light, the stallion teleported away. The same magical signature I’d seen during our skirmish with the Riggers in Tar Pan. He sure got around. All around us, in the ruins of the port, Basement members rose up from hiding, their modified caster emitters flickering red. An ambush.

“Squad, get to cover!” I shouted. “Weapons free!”

The air hissed with red and green caster pulses as a firefight erupted. I used my levitation to depress the internal triggers of my Phoenix Fire as I ran to cover, sending streams of scintillating green spellpower downrange. Lucky swept precise sheets of suppressive fire over the enemy, keeping them pinned down. I had all of us tagged in the datasphere as friendlies; the onboard IFF systems tucked into my Juke 1300’s firmware did the rest.

We took cover behind the concrete rubble and crumpled metal siding of the destroyed warehouse, assailed on all sides. The filly we’d rescued was screaming and crying, covering her head as she pressed herself low to the ground, hoping not to get shot. I saw a live grenade land right next to her and Shooting Star. The Corporal, in spite of her famous reflexes, didn’t even notice.

“Grenade!” I shouted.

Having scarcely any time to react, I grabbed the thing in my levitation and hurled it skyward with as much force as I could muster. With a grunt of exertion, Shooting Star leapt on top of the filly and covered her with her body. The grenade detonated a good fifty meters into the air, raining fragments down on us from above. Ball bearings bounced off my helmet.

“Nice save, ma’am,” Shooting Star said.

I gritted my teeth and keyed my radio. “Fuck! Ghost One, Spearhead One, where is my fucking support?”

“We’re almost there, hang tight,” Crookneck radioed back.

The galloping of the Palfrey’s titanium hooves drew near, beating like a drum. Crookneck’s contraption burst onto the scene, giving our enemies quite the shock. The machine’s imposing presence drew a substantial portion of their caster fire, red caster beams bouncing uselessly off of its thick metal glacis. The Palfrey reared up onto its hind legs, converting into biped mode and unlimbering its autocannon. The staccato thumping of the 30mm heralded a string of grenade-yield explosions, knocking Basement members and Riggers off their hooves and sending them scattering. Some weren’t so lucky. I saw one stallion take a round to the neck, blowing his head clean off his shoulders and leaving a bloody crater in its place.

Crookneck grunted with displeasure, his voice relayed through the Palfrey’s external speakers. “Oh, that was nasty.”

Prima was next to arrive. Without hesitation, she teleported into the fray and started stabbing. One Rigger tried to take a swing at her with an old tire iron. She crossed two of her Levdaggers in front of her face, catching his weapon. A third dagger went straight for his eye, the point of the blade driving so deep it couldn’t have gone anywhere but his brain. The enemy’s attention had been diverted from me and the rest of my unit. This was our chance.

“Squad, assault the enemy positions!” I shouted.

We leapt out of cover and opened fire on the suppressed and disorganized vandals. When Mar’s flechette gun ran dry, she switched to her caster without missing a beat, sending beams downrange. One of the Riggers stepped out from behind cover directly in my path as I advanced. This stallion was armed a little differently than the others, seeing as he had a pressurized synfuel tank strapped to his back. The bastard grinned and chomped on a cigar, the pilot lights on his twin flamethrowers lit like a pair of eyes in the gloom.

“We’re havin’ roasted Sparkler for dinner, boys!” he said.

He gave the modified caster pull-rings on his weapons a yank, sending gouts of burning synfuel streaming straight at us. I had no time to dodge. The only way forward was through the inferno. A split-second after he triggered his weapons, I let loose a burst of cryokinesis magic from my horn. There was a brief tug-of-war between ice and fire, chilled crystals crackling and blazing heat rippling the air. I poured on the spellpower, extinguishing the flame and freezing the fuel into a solid gel all the way back to the flamethrowers themselves, clogging their nozzles and extinguishing their pilot lights.

The stallion was less than pleased. “Fuckin’ cheatin’ unicorn bitch!”

Mardissa had freshly reloaded her smoothbore flechette gun. Her weapon’s booming reports were an assault on the senses in close quarters. She put a few rounds in the vandal’s fuel reservoir, sending synfuel streaming all over him. Shooting Star hit the whole mess with a burst of pyrokinesis magic, setting the flamethrower operator ablaze. His bloodcurdling screams and the crackle of his peeling skin served as ample confirmation of the effectiveness of our combined-arms tactics.

Mardissa reached back, her hand upturned. “Put one here.” Me and Star slapped our hooves into her hand. Mar shook it out. “Ow, not so hard.”

I jerked a hoof over my shoulder. “Mar, get the civilian to safety, then form back up on me! We’re moving in!”

While Mardissa nodded and carried out my orders, running back to collect the survivor and take her to the front gate, me and the remainder of the squad advanced on one of the warehouses. Our enemies had just sealed off the entrances, having withdrawn inside the structure while covering their retreat with poorly aimed caster and machine gun fire.

Crookneck lined up his Palfrey with the warehouse’s roll-up door. “I am in position and ready to breach inside, Sergeant.”

I glanced at Prima as she took up position near us. I took a deep breath. “Not yet. Wait till Mar gets back.”

A tense two minutes passed in silence as we waited for Mardissa to hand off the survivor to Clover and Haybale. Soon, she linked back up with us, tapping me on the back as I kept my eyes focused in the direction of the threat.

“Hard to slice the pie with a beamcaster,” Mardissa said.

“What?” I glanced back at her.

“You have to fully commit because it’s attached to your torso, so you can’t peer around cover with it. Shit sucks. I can’t believe you use these as primary weapons. Handy sidearm, though.”

“We don’t have hands, Private. How do you suppose we’d hold a rifle and pivot around cover? With our mouths? Yeah, I bet my dentist would fucking love that.” I keyed my radio. “Ghost Two, status. How are we looking?”

“They’re concentrated in the structure dead ahead of you. I don’t see much movement anywhere else on my sensor grid.”

“Spearhead One, breach in!” I shouted.

Crook was too close for ATGMs, so he readied the autocannon, aimed low and to the left, and stitched a cutout pattern of 30mm rounds in the rollup door, his weapon deafening us with its full-auto report. Weakened by the string of holes perforating it, the rollup door offered no resistance as he broke into a sprint and shoulder-charged into it with a screech or tearing metal. We surged into the hole behind him, the Palfrey’s floodlights illuminating the dusty space beyond.

We scanned the space for threats as we carefully advanced, keeping our eyes on the catwalks above. The darkened interior of the warehouse was cluttered with abandoned goods and rusty mechanical detritus, vegetation creeping up through the concrete in places.

A deep cackle filled the air, reverberating through the cavernous space. We all searched in vain for the source. Mardissa swept her flechette gun high and low. There wasn’t a hostile in sight.

That was when a pair of headlights lit up in the gloom. We hadn’t seen the Confederate battlesuit, camouflaged as it was among the ruins of our civilization. The Rakshasa slowly stood to its full height, raising its autocannon.

Grinder was at the controls, as was soon made evident by his voice crackling through the machine’s external speakers. “Teeny tiny little Sparklers.”

“Rak!” I yelled. “Scatter!”

Me and my squad ran in all directions to escape imminent death. The booming of the Rak’s autocannon heralded the prompt arrival of explosive munitions. I was mildly concussed by the blasts going off all around us. I’d lost my kidneys last time. I wasn’t keen on losing any more organs and having them replaced with more chrome.

Crookneck’s floodlights fell upon the aggressor, and he let loose with his remaining Tats. Grinder fired the Rak’s disposable rocket bottles, sending his rig careening sideways. The Tatzlwurm missiles missed their target by a hair, streaked to the far end of the warehouse and detonated there, the shockwave rattling our teeth and sending shards of metal debris into the air. The Rak ejected its glowing maneuvering cartridges, their fuel spent. Grinder aimed his autocannon dead-center at Crookneck’s Palfrey and let loose a burst of rounds that detonated against the battlesuit’s front glacis, pockmarking its armor.

I leapt into a steel trash skip, just barely avoiding being gutted by shrapnel. I peeked over the rim of the sturdy metal enclosure. The rest of Revenant was hiding in cover. I could see Mardissa standing behind a support column, fixing a HEAT rifle grenade to the end of her weapon and silently debating whether or not to outflank the enemy battlesuit. Grinder’s Rakshasa and Crookneck’s Crook dueled briefly, charging at each other and grappling hoof-to-hand, the thudding of metal-on-metal reverberating through my chest. The air was tinged with a metallic odor as sparks flew.

“Squad, status!” I radioed, receiving only a soft crackle under the din of battle in response. “Guys? Fuck!”

I enabled my helmet’s scan view mode and checked the location of my squad’s nav markers in the local datasphere. They were all over the place. Mar was the closest one. Jury Rig and Hexhead had taken to the catwalks above. Shooting Star was pinned down in a firefight with stragglers halfway to the other end of the building, doing a damn fine job of holding them off all on her own. Rig and Hex were in a very questionable position.

“What the fuck are they doing?” I thought aloud. “They’re too exposed up there!”

I peeked over the edge of the garbage skip and watched, slack-jawed, as Jury Rig flapped his wings and jumped in the cab for the warehouse’s overhead gantry system. He yanked the joysticks, and with a squeal of unlubed bearings, the gantry began to move. He latched the spreader onto a shipping container, raising it into the air, and then began moving the gantry towards the dueling battlesuits.

“Yeah, that’s it,” I said. “Drop it on the fucker!”

Crookneck Squash, obviously sensing Jury Rig’s plan, grappled with the enemy Rak and pushed it back, its armored feet skidding across the concrete as artificial muscles vied for supremacy over hydraulics. Jury Rig unlatched the spreader from the container, letting gravity do the rest. Unfortunately, Grinder’s awareness proved superior; he fired his rocket boosters a second time, sending him skidding backwards. The container fell between the two battlesuits and crunched against the floor. Grinder took aim at the gantry’s exposed crew cab with his autocannon.

“What?” My eyes widened in horror as I realized what was about to happen. “Fuck! Revenant Five, fall back! Revenant Seven, enga—”

Grinder let off a single, precise shot from his autocannon, the round slamming into the thick glass of the gantry’s crew cab, the explosion denting it inward and punching a beer-can-sized hole in it. I could hear Jury Rig’s screams of agony from fifty meters away. I sucked in air through my gritted teeth, my eyes slowly squeezing shut.

After chambering a blank cartridge, Mardissa swung around the column and let loose with a HEAT grenade from the end of her flechette gun. The round struck the Rak’s autocannon dead-center, blowing a hole in the barrel and rendering it entirely useless. Grinder jettisoned the disabled cannon and drew a weapon stowed on his battlesuit’s back, breaking the straps that the vandals had used to secure it in place. Those Rigger maniacs had built a giant circular saw with a salvaged V12 Centaur engine as its power source. Grinder revved his weapon a couple times, its exhaust pipes howling and shooting flame.

“Nice suit you’ve got, Sparklers,” Grinder spoke through his Rak’s external speakers. “It’d be a shame to rip it to fucking pieces.”

“I’m going to try something,” Crookneck said. “Stand back!”

Crook’s Palfrey stowed its automatic cannon in its back-mounted rotary weapon carriage, equipping a rod in its manipulator hand that telescoped to a good several meters in length. Five salvaged Confederate plasma emitters at the tip of the gleaming metal staff roared to life, spraying conical fingers of bright-blue ionized gas. An electromagnetic sheath snapped around the plasma jets and a buzzing and warbling axe blade composed of raw energy crackled to life.

“Plasma Halberd, active!” Crookneck’s glee bordered on the maniacal as he raised his weapon high. “Always wanted to say that.”

The two battlesuits circled each other, adopting a fighting stance, their pilots searching for openings in the enemy’s defenses, their heavy footfalls shaking the ground and kicking up puffs of dust from the warehouse’s floor. Any sign of a gap, any sign of a weakness, and it was sure to be swiftly exploited. After a few moments, Grinder exposed his machine’s right side, leaving himself open.

“No, Crook, it’s a feint!” I whispered.

Crookneck lunged, bringing his Plasma Halberd down in a mighty swing. Grinder dodged to one side and swung his giant circular saw in a vicious reverse uppercut, scarring the Palfrey’s cockpit and sending sparks flying.

Staggering backwards, Crookneck unleashed a point-blank barrage from the Palfrey’s medium beamcasters, slagging bits of accessory armor that’d been welded onto Grinder’s Rak. When Grinder swung his fearsome weapon downwards in an overhand chop, Crookneck gracefully twisted away from it, spun like a ballerina, and cleaved the circular saw’s blade with his halberd. The sawblade, spinning at a few thousand revolutions per minute and containing a considerable amount of rotational energy, exploded with a deafening bang, pelting both machines with a shower of sparks and flying fragments.

Grinder did not break his stride or hesitate in the least. He let out an enraged roar as he discarded his destroyed weapon, grabbed the handle of Crook’s halberd, and laid into him with a big haymaker that shook the whole warehouse, parting Crook from his weapon. The blow tore the power cable connecting the Plasma Halberd to the Palfrey, the blade instantly winking out of existence. Grinder tossed the ruined weapon’s handle aside and charged headfirst into Crook’s Palfrey, their torsos slamming together. Crookneck was overbalanced by the impact and knocked flat on his ass. Grinder slammed his machine’s manipulator hands into the Palfrey’s cockpit over and over again, denting its armor, trying to pry open the cockpit and kill Crookneck.

“Ghost One!” I radioed. “Spearhead One needs assistance! Support!”

“Got it, Sergeant,” Prima said. “You just keep hiding in that garbage can right there where you belong, and I’ll take care of it.”

“Fucking bitch,” I whispered to myself.

Prima winked into existence on top of the Rakshasa with a flash of teleportation magic. She set about placing CycloHex charges on the Rakshasa’s upper surface, but she must have made too much noise. An electro-optical sensor turret on the Rak’s roof rotated to face her.

Prima briefly paused, realizing she’d been caught. “Oh fuck.”

Grinder reached up and grabbed her before cocking his arm back and hurling her through the air like a hoofball. Prima braced her forelegs in front of her face a split-second before she slammed straight through a concrete column, taking a chunk of it with her. The SpecComSec agent rolled across the floor of the warehouse and came to a stop a good fifty meters away. She struggled to rise to her hooves, but her legs wouldn’t obey her.

Grinder slow-marched in her direction. “You’re gonna die here, Sparkler. How does it feel, to know that you’re gonna die just like your useless Empress? It’s the law of the jungle, now. Bootlicks and whores like you are obsolete. You hear me? No one tells me what to fucking do. No one!”

I looked up and saw Hexhead trying to cut her way into the gantry’s ruined crew cab with her blowtorch, my eyes tracing down to Crookneck’s fallen machine. There was only one thing to do.

“Mar, follow me!” I shouted.

I vaulted out of the garbage skip and quickly crossed the open ground between it and the Palfrey, my heart hammering in my chest. Mardissa peeled out of cover and quickly caught up with me. Her nimbleness despite having only two legs was as surprising as always. I climbed onto the machine’s cockpit, looking for a release lever. Finding it, I pulled it and opened the cockpit hatch, the machine’s torso hinging open at the front to reveal Crookneck Squash’s battered and bloodied form. The old stallion had been knocked unconscious, his brow tricking blood from where he’d been smashed against the vehicle’s cramped interior.

I quickly undid his harness, put my forelegs under his, and lifted him out of his seat, hoofing him over to Mardissa. “Get him out of here. Evac him back to the main gate in one piece, you got it?”

“Yes, ma’am!” Mardissa nodded, toting Crookneck under her arm as though he weighed no more than a saddlebag and retreating as ordered.

I snickered a bit. I’d made the president’s daughter into my own Pony Express courier. I climbed into the Palfrey’s cockpit and dropped the hatch, clipping the harness into place over my chest, adjusting it a little to compensate for my armor. The Palfrey’s monitors, gauges, and readouts flared to life in front of me. I reached up and grabbed my head and cracked my neck from side to side, shaking the cobwebs out of my legs. I took a deep breath as I wrapped my hooves around the Palfrey’s controls.

The Crook’s cockpit was unadorned and primitive, constructed from bits of salvage and stitched together by hoof with exposed TIG welds hastily painted with primer to rustproof them. To call it a rough prototype would be an understatement, but it was still a surprisingly well-engineered product, given the harsh circumstances of its construction. The machine had no anima and was obviously designed to be piloted by any race of pony. The Palfrey clearly had no pyrojets, either. Its speed was limited by its duostrand muscles. All the controls were large and simple and placed within easy reach. No syncsuit was required at all to operate it. I slowly guided the Palfrey to a standing position. The machine’s responses to each of my control inputs were sluggish and imprecise compared to my Courser. I could balance a chicken egg on Black Devil’s outstretched hoof if I really wanted to.

I watched as Grinder raised one of his machine’s manipulator hands, preparing to crush Prima into a fine paste. I could’ve let him kill her. All I had to do was delay a few moments longer.

“Hey, motherfucker!” I shouted, my voice amplified through the Palfrey’s loudspeakers and echoing off the warehouse’s walls. “How ‘bout you try a real pilot on for size?”

I slammed the Palfrey’s manipulator hands together in a challenge. Grinder lowered his machine’s hand and turned away from Prima, stalking towards me. Now that I could see it more clearly through the Palfrey’s optics, it was clear that the Rakshasa had been modified to cater to its pilot’s tastes.

The thing had triangular sheet metal spikes welded to it here and there, razor wire strung around its torso to deter boarders. The Rak was painted in a garish industrial orange color scheme, like the rest of the Riggers’ gear. One could just barely make out the charred gray hull and yellow stripes of a spec-ops leader’s paint job underneath, through the gaps in the machine’s new livery.

I recognized the Rak’s underlying battle damage. It was the one whose Gafalze Arresgrippen pilot had taken out my kidneys with a well-placed autocannon salvo after the disastrous outpost raid. The Riggers had salvaged it and restored it to working order. I bared my teeth in rage. I was going to deep-six that infernal machine once and for all.

The two of us broke into a sprint, charging at one another. I pushed the pedals as far as they’d go, squeezing every ounce of speed out of my machine’s bipedal, loping gait. I looked up and to my left. There was a lever that had a couple pictograms hastily hoof-painted next to it; one of the battlesuit standing, and one of it on all fours. I slammed the lever forward, dropping onto my forelegs and picking up even more speed, the entire internal cockpit-pod rotating to keep me level.

I was traveling at a good sixty kilometers an hour when I rammed headfirst into the oncoming Rak. I grunted explosively as my chest slammed into my restraints, briefly seeing stars from the sudden deceleration. I flipped the lever and shifted back into bipedal mode, grappling with the Rak using the Palfrey’s forelegs. Grinder wound up and delivered a punch, his fist sailing towards my cockpit. I raised one of the palfrey’s forelimbs to intercept it, my manipulator hand automatically locking its fingers around his as the two slammed together. He tried an uppercut with his free arm. I caught that one, too.

I poured on the throttle, pressing the pedals as far as they’d go, my duostrand straining against his hydraulic actuators. His feet began to dig furrows into the concrete floor as I pushed him back, marching him towards the ruined and collapsed end of the warehouse and away from my comrades. A walk built into a run, one that he lacked the power to stop. Grinder fired his battlesuit’s rocket bottles, braking his rearward motion with the Rakshasa’s disposable chemical maneuvering thrusters. Gouts of bright orange rocket exhaust spewed from his machine’s shoulders. Our vicious tug-of-war came to a halt in the center of the warehouse. At that point, I wished I had pyrojets of my own. I made a mental note to remind Crookneck of that fact.

A few moments later, the Rak’s rocket boosters burned out and auto-jettisoned. The advantage went to me, yet again, the Confederate battlesuit helplessly sliding across the floor as my duostrand effortlessly overpowered it. I let out a war cry as I smashed Grinder’s Rak straight through the corrugated siding and wrecked girders at the warehouse’s rear with a reverberating boom. I pushed the son of a bitch out the back of the warehouse and all the way down the jetty, the sea undulating beside us in the dark, our floodlights cutting through the mist. I yanked the controls for the manipulators, pulling him towards me and headbutting his machine with my Palfrey’s cockpit. I rammed the Rakshasa off the end of the pier, watching it fall and splash in the ocean below, consigned to a cold, watery grave.

There was a flash of yellow magic as Grinder teleported from his doomed vehicle and back onto an adjacent pier. He let out a whistle, waving to his surviving underlings. A small group of wounded Riggers and Basement members, fleeing a losing battle with Corporal Shooting Star, joined Grinder on a speedboat beside the jetty, unmooring it from the cleats.

“Get back here, you motherfucker!” I shouted.

Grinder turned towards me, his face clearly visible through the Palfrey’s light-enhancing optics, grinning evilly and mock-saluting as he boarded his escape vehicle. They fired up the speedboat’s outboard motors and tore away from the pier, leaving a foamy white trail of disturbed water in their wake.

I panted from adrenaline as I fiddled with the Palfrey’s controls for a few moments, looking for a way to fire the medium casters. Finding the triggers recessed in the hoofcups, I pulled them, only to be greeted with an alarm and red warning boxes that flashed in my viewscreen. The caster emitters had been damaged in the melee and were inoperable. I tried cycling to the autocannon, but I received a warning that its ammo stores were empty. The Crook didn’t even bother pulling it from the carriage.

I slammed my hoof into the console. “Fucker! I won’t let you get away!” I keyed my radio. “Ghost Two, do you read me? We’ve got a hostile contact leaving the AO. Enemy speedboat. Is there any way you can see the son of a bitch from where you are? Get some thirty on him?”

“No dice, Sergeant,” Secunda said. “I see ‘em on our scopes, but there are intervening buildings in the way.”

“Can you reposition?”

“Wait one. Yes, there’s a good firing position a few hundred meters to the southeast, but by the time we get there, they’ll be out of range.”

I watched as the Riggers’ speedboat began to shrink on the horizon. “Fucking fucking-fuck!”

I took a deep breath, suppressing the fight-or-flight response that’d taken hold of me. I pulled my brass amulet out, letting it soak in my anger, sighing as a dull serenity took its place. As I stared out over the horizon, a row of evenly spaced floodlights several kilometers across winked into existence at the edge of Luna Bay. I watched through the Palfrey’s optics, zooming in on one of the distant contacts with a knob on the console, my eyes slowly widening and a chill running down my spine.

A dozen submarines breached the surface, several klicks out. First, their conning towers, and then, their angular bows. They were huge machines, easily the size of a supercarrier. What happened next made my blood run cold in my veins. Watertight doors in their decks slid open, lifts raising aircraft into place from within their bellies. I took a deep, shuddering breath as I watched two dozen of the contragravitic craft lift off and take to the skies. Their bulbous white fuselages, blended wings, and feathery wingtips—like a cross between a great seabird and a killer whale—were unmistakable.

“Orcas,” I whispered. “Vargr.”

Their spotlights looked like the accusatory eyes of a pack of predatory beasts, sizing us up and preparing to pounce on their prey. I broke out in a cold sweat and my guts tied themselves into knots. I grew nauseous. I was so sick with fear, I felt like I was about to spew all over the Palfrey’s cockpit. I could just barely keep it in.

I keyed the radio. “Revenant One to all squads, SILVER SCALPEL. I say again, SILVER SCALPEL in the AO. Get those civilians and prisoners to safety and then evac to the rendezvous point immediately. We are leaving.”

I did an about-face and put the Palfrey in quad-mode, building up speed as I retraced my path. I came to a stop as I saw Hexhead climb onto the overhead gantry’s wrecked crew cab and reach down into that mess to try and retrieve Jury Rig.

“Get him out of there, quick!” I spoke through the Palfrey’s external speakers.

“Ma’am, oh gosh.” Hexhead’s normally calm demeanor faltered. “He’s fucked up! I’m seeing a lot of blood and feathers in here!”

“Is he still breathing?”

“Yeah, but barely.”

“Then pull him out, Private,” I said. “We are out of time.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

I brought up Lucky’s feed on my helmet’s display eyepiece. The enemy dropships weren’t moving. They were hovering in formation off the coast, providing aerial cover to the subs and tracking Grinder’s speedboat.

It had taken several fixed beamcaster turret installations and all of the HBCs on a Destrier for me to drop one of those things’ shields. With a Palfrey with depleted ATGMs and an empty 30mm automatic cannon, and a Centaur with similar armaments, it was impossible to scratch even one of them. There were dozens. The calculus wasn’t difficult to do in my head. We weren’t merely outgunned. We were completely at their mercy. Retreat was the only option.

I made my way towards the rubble pile that used to be the warehouse where the vandals kept their captives. Using the Palfrey’s manipulators as carefully as I could, I quickly lifted a few fallen girders and hunks of concrete to see if there were any survivors trapped underneath. I was greeted with more bodies, many of them mangled beyond all recognition. Just when I was about to give up hope, I found a cage that seemed mostly intact, its occupants groaning in pain. I reached down and ripped the cage door off. The eight survivors—three mares and five stallions—thanked me profusely, in spite of what I’d done to them. I pointed towards the main gate and they limped away to join the others. Sadly, even though I kept digging as quickly and cautiously as I could to keep the whole mess from shifting and killing anyone trapped below it, I didn’t see anypony else.

“Fuck it,” I said. “No time left.”

The Vanhoover cell had shown up with a number of cargo trucks. The ELF militia members collected the prisoners and survivors, escorting them into the backs of the trucks. Then, they rolled out. I kept a keen eye on the Centaur’s ramp and did a head count as the rest of Revenant quickly boarded the vehicle. Hex was holding Jury Rig aloft in her levitation. I couldn’t see him too well, but he looked like a mess.

“Where’s Prima?” I radioed the squad.

“I thought she was with you, ma’am,” Corporal Shooting Star replied.

I looked back towards the warehouse where we’d fought Grinder’s Rak. She had to be in there, still. I had to go back for her. I didn’t leave ponies behind, and I sure as fuck didn’t leave them to get taken by the fucking Vargr. I dropped onto all fours and my speed built to a gallop as I depressed the throttle pedals, running back to the warehouse. I quickly brought my machine to a halt and raised up into bipedal mode. If I hadn’t been looking for Prima on thermals, I might’ve run her over. The injured Special Commando Section agent had crawled all the way to the warehouse’s entrance, one of her forelegs smashed and broken.

She looked up at me, her expression forlorn. “Come to finish me off, Sergeant? Afraid I’ll report your fuck-up?”

“No.” I reached one of the Palfrey’s forelimbs down towards her. “Grab on.”

Prima looked surprised as I opened the cockpit and gingerly lifted her inside. I set her down on my lap, since there was nowhere else for her to go in the cramped space. I winced. She weighed a ton, what with all her chrome.

I scooped up the fallen Plasma Halberd and stowed it in the Palfrey’s weapon carriage. Then, I took off at a steady gallop, following the Centaur as we retreated west. It took almost everything I had just to steady my panicked breathing.

A fight was something I understood. A battle had rules. It had limits. Humans weren’t enemy combatants. They were a force of nature, as utterly irresistible as any tsunami or volcano. There was no glory to be had in fighting them. There was only absolute terror.

“You can’t outrun them,” Prima said. “You’ll fail.”

“I’m damn well going to try!” I growled.

We took a few sharp turns in the dusk, staying right on the Centaur’s tail as it navigated Vanhoover’s abandoned streets. As it turned out, the Vargr had not chosen to pursue us. Several minutes later, we reached the outskirts of the city, pulling into the gas station beside the highway. The Centaur pulled in ahead of us, rocking back and forth slightly as their suspension went over bumps in the pavement.

I shook my head, keying my radio. “Keep going, Ghost Two. Return to base. Don’t stop for anything. Don’t come back. If any of us get separated, attempt no rescue. Assume MIA and withdraw immediately.”

“Copy,” Secunda radioed back. “We’re heading back to Tar Pan.”

As the Centaur made a hard right turn and ran over the curb to pull back out of the lot, I let Prima scoot to one side as I unbuckled my harness. I caught a glimpse of her injuries in the process. Her foreleg was hanging loose, the armor around it torn to shreds by the impact. I could see the frayed duostrand and wiring within. It was quite artificial, through and through, just like Clover’s.

“How much chrome do you actually have?” I said.

Prima sighed. “All four legs fully bionic. Subdermal armor on the head and torso. Both eyes. Both ears. Small exocortex and nerve sheathing to boost memory and reaction times. Before you ask, yes, I—”

“Stepped on a landmine?”

“Yep.”

I scowled. “Fucking hell, you’re more metal than this battlesuit. You think you’re in good enough shape to drive?”

Prima raised her other foreleg. “I’ve still got three others that work.”

I opened the cockpit hatch and moved to hop out onto the pavement, but Prima put her hoof on my shoulder and stopped me.

I turned towards her. “Huh?”

Prima had a remorseful look on her face. “You didn’t have to come back. After the way I’ve treated you, I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t.” The weariness in those green eyes of hers was like a void in space, pulling me into her inner darkness. They shone with just the tiniest glimmer of equinity. “I’m just—I’m just fucking tired. You know? You know what I mean?”

I smiled and took her hoof in mine. “Yeah, as a matter of fact, I do.”

I stepped out onto the asphalt, watching as Prima buttoned up the hatch and took control of the Palfrey.

“Stay safe, Sergeant,” her voice crackled through the machine’s external speakers.

Prima took off at a trot that quickly built to a gallop, the Palfrey disappearing into the twilit haze. I went to the rear of the parking lot and ripped the tarp off my motorcycle, sticking the key in the ignition and starting my Stampeder up. I recalled Lucky over my headset, and after a few tense minutes, my Orbit finally showed up. I powered it down and strapped it to my back. I scanned my surroundings. Neither the Centaur nor the Crook were anywhere in sight. I clicked my tongue softly with disappointment at having fallen so far behind them, giving the throttle a twist and heading back out onto the highway.

Several minutes passed as I rode through the cold and dark. There were no lights on in any of the buildings as I drove on by. Not a soul in sight. It came on slowly. First, with soft hiccups every now and then. After the ten-minute mark, this had degenerated into full-blown messy crying. I struggled to keep control of my bike as I sobbed and shuddered.

“Barley.”

The rain had picked up again, showering me from head to hoof and slashing visibility. I spent the next few minutes of the ride home crying messily and sniffing snot that threatened to dribble from my muzzle. I’d been holding it in for hours. I didn’t want my unit to see me like this. I needed them to respect my command. This needed to work, or I was useless to the rebellion.

As I blinked away tears, I failed to spot the oily puddle in a depression in the roadway. I barely had time to gasp before I skidded, lost directional control, and low-sided my bike. Me and the motorcycle went our separate ways and I tumbled down the highway, finally coming to a stop when my back smashed into a parked car, my body armor denting the bumper. A spill like that would’ve crippled or killed the average cleomanni. Instead, with my pony constitution, I was awake and alert with no broken bones, albeit sporting a rapidly swelling contusion over my spine. I sat there and curled up, burying my face in my hooves as I sobbed endlessly. My very soul hurt.

Every little inconsistency in our relationship stood out in sharp relief. I couldn’t help but recall every time Barleywine had spent a little longer than usual out and about in the wee hours of the morning, or the little brown paper bags he often carried around. I was willing to overlook his flaws, all for the sake of love. He took my loyalty and forbearance, and he spat on it. There weren’t words for the loneliness I felt.

I stared out at the night in silence. I rocked back and forth, my eyes fixed on the darkness. Everything I’d experienced since escaping captivity kept replaying itself in my head. Every miserable second of it. This was my future. This was all I had to look forward to. More of this. It all added up to one thing.

“It’s too much,” I whispered. “It’s just too much.”

I retrieved one of the Confederate painkiller dispensers from my saddlebags, eyeing it intently. The dispenser was of hardened steel construction and could have easily survived being run over by an armored car or dropped from a hundred-story building. However, it had its limits. There were dozens of tablets inside. All it would’ve taken to get at all of them was the application of considerable torsional force from my telekinesis.

It wouldn’t have taken many. A small hoofful, and respiratory depression was guaranteed. I smiled softly, my eyes clouded with tears. It would be the ultimate act of selfishness. My comrades, abandoned. My tale, concluded. All I had to do was swallow a lethal dose of fentanyl citrate, and I’d slip off into a blissful, eternal sleep. My struggle would finally be over. My smile fell. Paralyzing my diaphragm wouldn’t be enough to kill me. There was something in my blood. Something that kept me from needing to breathe. I looked down at my abdomen, where I knew the stigma was. I rubbed the place over my womb where I’d been branded by a harbinger of the blackest evil in the universe.

The Seneschal’s words reverberated through my mind. You will spend the rest of your days in dread, fearing the end, because you know that in the moment your heart stops beating, you will belong to me. And your children. And your children’s children. Forever.

Even death offered no escape. When I died, my soul was destined for that rotting hell. That cold, dark, and oily expanse that smelled of low tide. I would become yet another plaything for the Archons. Up here, I was still a Charger pilot. Down there, I was fast food. A meal and a toy.

It was inevitable. Sooner or later, I was going to die. Either violently, in war, or peacefully, in my bed. And then, they would have me.

I started breathing faster and faster, until I was hyperventilating. I swallowed the lump in my throat. My ears began to ring. I couldn’t stop it. A panic attack was like being mauled by an invisible predator. My body was responding to a threat that wasn’t even there. I began to whimper and pace back and forth, my vision narrowing into a tunnel as my mind was assaulted with adrenaline. While I tried to calm myself, I stuffed the fentanyl back in my saddlebag and retrieved the sertraline and the gene snipper pills. My saddlebags were becoming like a miniature pharmacy, reflecting the wretched state I found myself in.

I popped the two pills into my hoof, and then tossed them in my mouth, tilted my head back, and swallowed them both without any water. That simple act was enough to terminate the attack. The medication was reassuring on its own, even before it had a chance to kick in. My eyes remained fixed on the sky as a strange rumble shook the pavement under my hooves. I gasped in fright and my ears went flat against my skull as an Orca uncloaked a hundred meters directly above me in a stationary hover.

“No,” I whispered. “No, no, no!”

I reflexively used my levitation to yank the ignition key from my motorcycle where it sat on its side several meters away, killing the engine and the lights. I immediately crawled under the abandoned car, utterly chagrined as I watched them bathe my motorcycle in the glow of their spotlights.

“No, no, fuck you!” I hissed. “Go away! Just go the fuck away!”

The spotlight went out and I breathed a sigh of relief, only to sharply inhale and hold my breath when I heard the warble of a contragrav repulsor and the thump of something heavy landing close by. My jaw trembled as I looked through the small gap between the vehicle’s undercarriage and the highway, watching as a pair of shiny, armored boots paced towards my motorcycle, the footfalls making the pavement quake due to the mass of their owner. I heard heavy breathing, rasping and mechanical, the human’s footsteps thumping into the pavement with the clink of heavy power armor sabatons.

The Vargr paced over to my motorcycle and gave the gas tank a light kick. “Leattle broetheri,” he said, his voice a mocking singsong. “Dokon ar ye hiddin’, ye nimby-pimby?”

I held my hooves over my mouth, my eyes wide as saucers, trying not to breathe or make a sound of any kind. If they found me, it was over. I had to fight the urge to light my horn and cloak myself with invisibility magic. Against the Vargr, that didn’t work. They had the ability to detect magic. Not only was I not rendered invisible to them, using spells actually increased my signature, allowing them to see me through solid objects. The only way to win was to hide, and the only way to hide was the old-fashioned way, with camouflage or concealment. This hiding spot was no good. He was seconds from detecting me. All he had to do was look under the car, and I was fucked. When the rumble of the dropship overhead subsided as it moved off, I slowly inched away from him, crawling out from under the vehicle on the opposite side. With my back against the vehicle’s passenger side door, I looked at the concrete barrier.

I was in the shoulder on an overpass. Running down the highway in either direction wasn’t an option. I’d be spotted and killed in seconds. Instead, I quietly mounted the barrier and climbed over, hanging off the edge. I looked down. A drop of about one story down onto the roadway below. This was going to hurt. I steeled myself, clenched my jaw shut, and then let go. A couple seconds later, I landed on my back on the hard pavement, the impact knocking the wind out of me. I exhaled through my nose to muffle the sound. I scrambled to my hooves and quickly ran beneath the overpass so I wouldn’t be spotted, in case he chose to investigate the noise.

There was a drainage ditch nearby with a culvert under the road. Not one of the nice, big concrete ones, but one of the small, corrugated polyethylene ones. There was a stream of rainwater running through it. I tried crawling inside, only to bump my helmet and shoulders into the edges of the culvert. The opening was about as wide as I was. My armor kept me from squeezing through.

“Bullshit,” I whispered. “This is complete bullshit.”

I’d have to strip my armor off. I recalled what happened the last time I went naked while being hunted by the Vargr. I involuntarily began to shake. I bit my lip, stilling my shivers. After snapping the dust covers shut on my PF-27’s emitters, I initiated the process of methodically removing my barding, starting with my helmet and the pieces on my legs and finishing by unstrapping my chest rig and torso armor, letting my caster and Orbit fall into the ditch.

I crawled into the culvert and pulled all of my gear in behind me, shuffling backwards on my belly and using my teeth to drag my stuff so I didn’t give off a magical signature. It was wet and cold, and my fur quickly dampened with muddy water. I crawled a good ten meters from the drain culvert’s opening, propping up my armor and saddlebags in front of me as a blind to hide my thermal signature, in case anyone peeked into the entrance.

The rainfall seemed to intensify outside. I hoped I didn’t get washed out, but there was nowhere else for me to go. If they were going to find me here, they were going to find me, and there was nothing I could do about it. I hoped they hadn’t spotted me on thermals. I leaned my head against one of my saddlebags and resolved to try and get some much-needed shuteye, closing my eyes and sighing heavily with exhaustion.

My dreams were far from pleasant. The horrors I relived in them were not worth recounting. Through the night, I awoke twice from my slumber and glanced over my shoulder to ensure that my hiding place wasn’t disturbed. The culvert was too narrow to turn around in, practically hugging my body. My gear had dammed up one end of it and left me practically bathing in cold rainwater. I was freezing, shivering violently. I packed my saddlebag underneath myself to lift me up out of the water and act as bedding. It was far from comfortable, but it would keep me warm.

After a couple more hours of restless sleep in my hiding place, I slowly leaned up and pushed my gear out of the culvert and out into the ditch. I crawled out of the opening in the corrugated plastic pipe, trying not to fuck myself up on its sharp edges. I took a few nervous glances up and down the roadway. The coast was clear, or so it seemed. Hard to tell, what with how easily those fuckers could cloak. I threw on my armor and my caster and shrugged on my saddlebags, slinging Lucky over my shoulder and donning my helmet. Once I’d finished putting on my muddy and soggy gear, double-checking to make sure all the electronics were still in working order, I looked up at the elevated highway section that I’d jumped off last night.

I set my jaw, “Now, to get back up to my bike.”

Energized by my rest, I took off at a gallop towards the off-ramp, heading back up to the highway. To my relief, my motorcycle was still there. I ran over to it and gave it a look-over, scouring every inch of it for any oddities. Nothing wrong with the engine or the frame. The side of the tank was a little scratched up from the fall and had a small dent from where it’d been kicked. When I looked under the gas tank, however, I spotted a tiny, disc-shaped object adhered to the underside.

“The fuck is that?”

I plucked it off the gas tank with my levitation magic, turning it over and inspecting it. Whatever it was, it looked like a tiny refrigerator magnet. I gave it a twist in my magic’s aura and broke it in half. The inside had a circuit board and a small transceiver coil. A tracker of some kind. I sneered and tossed it over the edge of the highway.

“Nice try, fuckers.”

I took a look around myself. They had to have been tracing its location. The destruction of an active beacon would’ve gotten their attention. This area was no longer safe. In fact, all they had to do to catch me at this point was set an ambush further east along the highway, which was likely what they were doing at that very moment. This was a horrifying cat and mouse game. It felt almost personal, as if they knew who I was. My paranoia was kicked into high gear.

“They want me alive. Well, then. Come and get me.”

I stuck the key in the ignition and started my Stampeder up, the parallel-twin rumbling to life. I twisted the throttle and did a burnout to pull a one-eighty and head back to the off-ramp. Once off the highway, I hooked south, headed for the open plains. I could see the Unicorn Range to the east, way off on the horizon. Tar Pan lay in that direction. I’d have to take the long way home. The last thing I wanted was to lead the Vargr right to our doorstep. I rode on through the ruins of small-town northern Equestria. The desolation was universal, as always. Not a single pony to be seen. No other traffic on the road. All that greeted me were miles and miles of abandoned cars and derelict homes. It was hard not to get a little choked up at the sight.

I shook my head. “Where did we all go?”

I curved back towards the east, and then north, keeping to the rural two-lane roads, checking and re-checking my map through my helmet’s eyepiece now and then just to make sure I wasn’t getting off track. With all our GPS satellites down, I was stuck using TERCOM, or terrain contour matching. My command helmet’s built-in scanner was constantly receiving a low-resolution fix from the surrounding terrain using a tiny diagrammatic engine firing off imperceptible, low-energy pulses of levitation magic out to a few hundred meters. Solid objects resisted the spell ever-so-slightly, allowing the system to gather point cloud data from the surrounding space. Unlike my own magic, it wasn’t sensitive enough to detect infantry with any specificity. Nevertheless, the contours it picked up were checked against a database of satellite maps stored in the helmet’s onboard computer, allowing me to navigate decently enough.

Before long, I cruised into Tar Pan from the south, having circumvented the cloaked Vargr air patrols entirely. There was a tension in the air. It had me on edge. I didn’t like it one bit. I eased back on the throttle when I heard the cries of an assembled throng. As I approached the entrance to the mine, I brought my motorcycle to a complete stop, my jaw agape at what I saw. There had to be a thousand ponies congregating in front of the main gate, chanting repetitiously and waving protest signs.

The Riggers had withdrawn from the city, judging by how the fighting had died down. They had bigger fish to fry, and scarcely any reason to try and dislodge us now that their quintessence-harvesting operation in Vanhoover was destroyed. Instead, the Oligarchs of Tar Pan had their representatives front and center in their pinstriped suits, spurring a revolt against the Liberation Front and our presence. As the last remaining representatives of the Equestrian government, we were a threat to their power. As I shut off my engine, dismounted, and slowly wheeled my bike closer to the crowd, their rhythmic chants became frenzied.

“Tonnanen Harredo, sev aduene!” The great crowd of ponies screamed in unison.

Equestrian Empire, go home!

It was a slap in the face. They spat on everything we’d tried to accomplish. Me and my comrades’ pain and suffering on their behalf meant nothing to them. They wanted an easy life, and that meant keeping out of the Confederacy’s baleful eye. The Liberation Front spoiled all that. We drew too much attention of the unwanted sort. As I approached the crowd, they formed a line to stop me.

“Please let me through,” I said.

A rough-looking stallion with a couple missing teeth and shabby clothes became belligerent. “Get fucked, ELF bitch!”

I raised my voice. “I have wounded ponies to attend to. Clear out, or I’ll make you clear out!”

I pressed onward towards the line of protesters, pushing into and through the crowd. They reluctantly parted in my path, booing and jeering as I wheeled my motorcycle between them. I was nervous as hell. I knew it wasn’t long before this went completely pear-shaped. My fears were confirmed a few seconds later, when I got hit in the eyes with a bright red shot of pepper spray.

I reflexively jerked away, my helmet’s visor catching most of it. The rest took that as an invitation to pounce. I wasn’t even sure what happened, but moments later, I was sprawled out on the road, having dropped my bike. I covered my helmeted head as I was assailed on all sides by a flurry of savage blows, the crowd taking turns kicking and stomping me to satisfy their sheer contempt.

“Get the fuck out, Imperial trash!” one mare shouted in my ear.

I couldn’t see a damn thing. My eyes burned and watered, my eyelids refusing to part as I lay on the ground, whimpering in pain. It was when they started hurling objects at my head, fully intent on stoning me to death, that I decided I’d had enough. I lit my horn.

Laus, Iastowa, Bankina.

I could see every blood vessel in the backs of my eyelids. The crowd was blinded by a burst of light that was orders of magnitude brighter than magnesium flash powder, recoiling from my prone form. Blinking away tears, I raised my bike off the ground and kept wheeling it forward as the crowd dispersed in front of me. I just had to make it to the gate. The front wheel of my motorcycle banged against the chain-link fence. A bunch of forelegs wrapped around my neck as I writhed and struggled against the crowd. I shook like a dog shedding some fleas, tossing one mare off my back. Others immediately took her place, trying to wrestle me to the ground.

I desperately beat on the gate with my hooves. “Guys! Let me the fuck in!”

One of the militia stallions guarding the gate spotted me, his eyes widening in shock. “Oh shit, it’s the Sergeant! Someone get me the fucking tear gas grenades!”

The militia shuffled around a bit as they looked for their supplies. A few seconds later, a pair of gas grenades releasing noxious plumes of riot control agents were emplaced at the gate. Relative to other species in the galaxy, ponies were impossible to control with blunt force. Riot sticks were useless. However, we had large eyes and sensitive nerves. Electroshock weapons and lachrymators were highly effective. As it so happened, that included me, since I didn’t happen to be wearing a gas mask at the time. As the crowd fled from the CS gas, I coughed and spluttered, squeezing my tormented eyes shut. The main gate was wheeled open and a pair of forelegs wrapped around my neck, dragging me inside.

“Lemme go!” I said. “I need my fucking bike! I’m not letting these sons-of-bitches steal it or burn it in effigy or whatever the fuck they were planning to do with it!”

I broke free from the militia stallion trying to rescue me, raising my Stampeder back onto its wheels and dragging it into the base. The gate was shut and chained behind me. I collapsed to the ground with exhaustion, my muscles burning. For a good thirty seconds, I lay on my back, staring out at the starry skies above and gasping for breath.

A militia stallion offered to help me up, but I batted him away and slowly rose to my hooves. “I’m fine. Where’s the rest of Revenant?”

“They got back several hours ago, ma’am,” he said. “They thought you were a goner for sure.”

“I’m fine. Got separated on the way back, is all. My own stupid fault. Thanks for the assist.”

I spent a couple minutes taking a breather and letting my eyes and my lungs recover from the tear gas and pepper spray. I got back on my motorcycle, started the engine, and drove down into the mine’s gaping black maw. I parked on the cargo lift and hit the lever, sending it down. I paced back and forth across the lift’s sizable surface as it descended into the mine shaft. One could’ve almost played a hoofball game on it, it was so unreasonably large. I wondered what manner of salt mine needed such a big lift in the first place.

When the lift hit the stops at the bottom, I wheeled my bike off and parked it in the motor pool. The Centaur and the Palfrey were both there, as well. Silent sentinels in the shadows. I breathed a sigh of relief. My unit had indeed made it back in one piece. I knew where some of them would be. I took off and sprinted towards the infirmary.

I ran right into a crowd of ponies gathered outside our makeshift medical facilities. “Where’s Revenant? Where the fuck is Private Jury Rig?”

One of the militia mares wordlessly pointed inside one of the caverns we’d repurposed into a medical ward. I made my way inside, watching as doctors and nurses swarmed around a figure on a cot. I heard incoherent cries of pain echoing across the room. I quickly developed a sinking sensation in my gut.

“Private?” I said.

As I muscled my way through, Gauze Patch tried stopping me, pushing on my armored chest with her hooves. “No, ma’am! He’s not in any condition to be seen!”

I tossed the nurse aside like a rag doll. “Get out of my fucking way! Rig!”

I made my way to his bedside, and I honestly wished I hadn’t. The boy’s wings were ruined, their dressed stumps sticking to his sheets. His muzzle was pockmarked with shrapnel and they were still plucking bits of broken glass out of him hours later. When Grinder had turned his autocannon on the gantry’s cab, Jury Rig had shielded his face at the last moment with his wings, and it had probably saved his life. Still, it wasn’t enough to stop the high-velocity ball bearings completely. His eyes were gone. The bridge of his nose was mangled, both of his eye sockets joined into a single reddish pit of gore.

“Ma’am!” Jury Rig shouted. He writhed on the bed, gulping a wad of bloody spit with some difficulty. “Is that you, Sarge? Ma’am, help me! I can’t see! Why can’t I see? Why can’t—” He broke down in a coughing fit. “Why can’t I feel my wings? Help me! Please!”

My lips trembled in horror. “What the fuck is going on here? Why isn’t he sedated?”

Argent Tincture gave me a guilty look from the other side of Rig’s bed. “I—our stocks are running l—”

I cut her off, grabbing her lab coat’s collar in my magic. “You get some fucking morphine in him, right now, or I’ll knock your fucking head off!”

Argent’s eyes flashed with resentment, and she gave me a good, long stare before silently going about digging through her supplies for an IV bag, hanging it on the stand and lining it up with Rig’s catheter. I held the colt’s hoof in my forelegs as he shivered and shrieked in pain.

“It’s gonna be alright, kid. You’re gonna be okay. I’m here.”

I stayed with him until the medication took hold and he passed into blissful unawareness. I watched as Rig’s chest rose and fell, his pained grimace turning peaceful. I looked up at Argent, fixing her with a cold glare.

“I don’t want to see one of mine suffering like that again, doc. Do you understand me?”

“We’ll do what we can, Sergeant,” Argent Tincture said. “We’ve been running low on supplies again, ever since we evacuated from Camp Crazy Horse.”

“I don’t care. Never again. It’s not acceptable.”

“I also had some other concerns, beyond the shortages.” Argent shrugged. “He’s in a bad way. There may be some cranial injury, and the sedatives might do more harm than good. Damn, sure have been saying that a lot, lately, haven’t I? You all ought to take better care of your noggins. I haven’t been able to evaluate his brain because I don’t have the right imaging equipment here.”

“He seems alert and conscious to me,” I said. “Did those sound like the words of a brain-damaged patient to you?”

Argent winced. “No, I suppose not. Still, that kind of injury can hide.”

I looked Jury Rig over, marveling at how he survived his terrible wounds. “What are you gonna do for him? Is he out of the fight?”

“No.” Argent smiled wistfully. “We have prosthetics that can fix this.”

I nodded. “Finally, some good news. Will he regain the ability to fly?”

Argent Tincture shook her head. “No, he will not. At least not for now. We don’t have the right bionics for that. We’re fresh out of spare wings. The Stormtroopers go through ‘em like candy. He’s getting these.”

Argent motioned me over to a table with a pair of polymer hard cases, one bright orange and the other bright blue, marked with all sorts of warning decals and seals assuring their sterility. She took a utility knife and sliced through the seals, flicking the latches and swinging open the cases. The smaller case contained a device that looked like a head-mounted visor, with a single, horizontal slit for a lens.

“What’s that? A head-mounted display?” I said.

“It’s not an HMD,” Argent said, lifting the bulky device out of the case. “Argus Type-22 Panopticon. This thing is his new eyes. All of this gets semi-permanently attached to his skull and wired into the visual center of his brain. I’ll spare you the technical details, but suffice it to say, he’ll be able to see all sorts of things with this.” She placed the bionic visor back into its case and then retrieved what looked like a pair of manipulator arms ending in three-fingered robotic claws from the other one. “Tantalus Technologies’ most popular piece of chrome. The Hecatoncheires. Only a pegasus can use ‘em. They get installed—”

I cut her off. “Implanted. They get implanted. He’s not a fucking robot.”

Argent nodded. “Right. They get implanted where the wings usually go and tie into the same motor nerves. You give up flight, but you get a couple of strong and dexterous hands.”

I’d seen this particular aug before, among Charger technicians who’d lost their wings. Very few pegasi preferred having hands over being able to fly, but the grizzled souls who made that sacrifice and willingly had manipulator arms implanted on their backs instead of bionic wings were some of the best damn mechanics I knew.

I let out a stressed sigh. “Has he consented to the procedure?”

“Not yet. We’re going to need to talk him into it, but I don’t think he’ll need much convincing. He wants to be functional, and I want him up and about and healthy as soon as possible.”

I hung my head, my ears drooping low. Our first mission as Revenant, and a member of my unit was already crippled. The nicest, youngest, most talented, and least deserving of us, to boot. I’d fucked up. I’d let him down. My whole job was to maintain the formation and keep the squad from overextending themselves. Without that, we weren’t a cohesive team; we were individuals, scattered, alone, and vulnerable.

“How soon will he recover?” I said.

“No activity for at least two weeks.” Argent put the prosthetics back and closed up both cases. “I’d much rather that he not have any activity for a month, and then at least four to six months of physical therapy, but we don’t have that kind of time, not in this outfit.”

Two weeks. I shook my head. He deserved more time to recuperate than that. I didn’t want him sustaining lifelong debility beyond what he’d already suffered. “Take good care of him, doc. I’ve got some shit to do, but I’ll be back to check in on him every now and then, if that’s okay with you.”

“Well, I’d rather the patient have his privacy, but it’s not like that’s stopped you before.”

I turned and glared at her. Her rebuke had stung. I felt like I owed it to Jury Rig to be there for him. “Schedule him to see Weathervane once he’s well enough. This isn’t just physical trauma. This is mental. He just lost some important parts of his anatomy. He’s going to need all the help he can get.”

“Will do,” Argent said. “Good call.”

“Later, doc.”

With a dejected sigh, I made my way out of the infirmary. Crookneck and Prima were sitting outside on a bench, the former with an ice pack on his head from where he’d been concussed, and the latter tweaking a replacement foreleg with a screwdriver held aloft in her levitation. Crookneck was wearing a rather flimsy disguise of a wig and makeup that washed away the wrinkles and made him look thirty years younger. At ten paces, he passed for someone else well enough, but close up, it was obvious who he was. I hoped the mole hadn’t spotted him.

Crookneck shot up from his seat. “Sergeant!” He groaned a bit and then sat back down. “Damn, stood up too quick. Still hurts a bit.” He sounded gruff.

“Are you really doing a voice and everything?” I laughed.

“Yes, of course.”

“You better hope that fucker doesn’t see you.”

“Oh, they won’t. Me and my Palfrey will be out of here as soon as the crowd clears.”

“You can’t go back to Vanhoover,” I said.

“Yeah, about that.” Crookneck looked up at me with concern in his eyes. “I woke up halfway back to the base. Why did we withdraw so quickly?”

“Are you cleared for SILVER SCALPEL?”

Prima looked up at me and fixed me with a deadly stare, as if she was planning to incapacitate or kill me depending on what came out of my mouth in the next few seconds.

Crookneck scratched his head. “Silver what, now?”

“Then I can’t tell you. Not yet.” I nodded to Prima and she stood down, though she was still a little anxious by the looks of her. I sat down on the bench with them. “By the way, I have some possible improvements I’d like to discuss, for the next version of the Palfrey. I like it, but it has some issues.”

“Such as?” Crookneck said.

“Like you told Koskas earlier, it needs self-sealing fuel tanks so it doesn’t cook the pilot alive. You almost fried her, dude.”

“Hard to get. The ones we have are hoof-fabricated from sheet metal and are not crash or bullet-resistant cells.”

“No ballistic liner, even?”

“Nothing.” Crookneck shook his head. “They’re prototypes.”

“Yeah, that needs fixing, pronto. Also, the interior needs some padding, or it needs to stand off from the pilot a bit more. I almost banged my head as bad as you did.”

“That’s on the list, too.”

“And pyrojets.” I nodded.

“Extravagant. Hard to find ones that are the right size, but theoretically doable. Maybe as an elite model.”

“Also, the caster emitters need to be recessed more.”

“You busted them up, I saw.” Crookneck Squash frowned. “How did you do that, Storm?”

“Headbutted that Rak off a pier and into the drink.”

Crookneck looked almost miffed that I’d put his creation through so much abuse, but this soon turned to a contemplative expression as the gears started turning in his head. “Definitely not within my design parameters. If you want to ram things, the whole front glacis needs reinforcing. The armor isn’t that thick, nor is there any Mithrium in the Palfrey’s construction. In a serious collision, it’ll crush inward, and any recessing of the caster emitters will be rendered pointless. Recess them too far, and your firing arc narrows. I don’t think you realize how primitive my latest creation is. There’s no LAMIBLESS except over the joints. The rest is welded steel. It’s heavy for its size, and that works against you.”

“How so? Sure pummeled that Rak good.”

“It works both ways. More mass means your crashes have higher kinetic energy, Sergeant. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Mounting an apple on the front of a bicycle and running into a brick wall has a much different effect than mounting a pumpkin on the front of a train and running into a concrete wall.”

I chuckled. “That’s a really, really weird analogy, but I get it. By the way, where are the others? Where’s Quill?”

Crook pointed his hoof down one of the tunnels. “Mess hall. Getting some chow, I presume. Quill got off the Centaur and went into town. Haven’t seen her since.”

“Shit, I’m hungry, too,” I said. “Did you two want anything?”

Prima shook her head. “We’re fine, Sergeant. We ate. Besides, it’s not a good idea for our mutual friend here to mingle with anyone at the base.”

“Right. See you two later, then. I’m going to go get something to eat.”

I stood up and walked down the tunnel towards our mess hall, which was basically a camp stove and a few benches in a cave, with a smoke ejector fan with a long extension cord so we wouldn’t get carbon monoxide poisoning. We sure had the whole insurgent lifestyle down pat.

Secunda and the rest of Revenant were sitting at two of the tables, and they were startled at the sight of me. Mardissa’s despondent look soon turned to a beaming smile. She stood up from her seat to greet me.

“Ma’am, you made it! What happened?”

I looked her squarely in the eyes. “Them. They happened.”

By the unblinking stare she gave me and the way the corners of her lips fell, I could tell that she immediately understood what I meant. She quickly dropped the subject. I spooned out a bowl of whatever the beet stew slop they were eating was, and I sat down next to them and started digging in.

“Fuck,” I muttered. “Needs salt. Bland as shit.”

Though I’d sat down between Mar and Hex, Hexhead didn’t look at me. She stared down into her own bowl of barely edible slop, sighing frustratedly.

“Private Rig’s fucked up, ma’am,” Hexhead said.

“I saw,” I said. “Eh, don’t worry about it. Argent will fix him up good.”

“Fix him up?” Hexhead frowned. “Grinder blew his fucking face and his wings off. Even if they replace what was lost with chrome, you don’t come back from that the same person you were before.”

I looked down into my bowl, gritting my teeth. As if I didn’t know that. “Private, I’m trying to eat. I have a long and very awkward debrief ahead of me that sounds something like ‘aw yeah, I blew some civvies into enough mincemeat to feed a good-sized pack of wild dogs, and then me and my bike got lost in a rainstorm’, and I’m dreading it. If you’re feeling like shit over what you saw, then go see Weathervane over it. I have enough problems on my plate.” When I saw the look that my unit was giving me, I decided to amend that. “Okay, look. We’ll talk about it later, guys. Just not right now. We need to rest up, first. Your time is your own. Do whatever you like for the next several hours.”

We spent the rest of our time eating in silence, before one by one, my unit filtered out. Eventually, I was left alone, the disgusting meal like a lead weight in my gut. There were no refreshments to be had, here. Just more burdens to carry.

// … // … // … // … // … //

I gave Bellwether my report to the best of my ability. He sat across the table from me in his makeshift office, nodding at every detail I related. His room was sparse, with the only other furnishings consisting of a bed made from old, rolled up air filter material and whatever passed for some blankets, and a terminal with a chair for him to do his intel work, all lit by hanging LED rope lights.

“So, let me get this straight,” Bellwether said. “The Vargr showed up with a dozen submersible aircraft carriers. Then, when you decided to withdraw, you got tracked down by one of their dropships and had to lay low until the threat passed. Does that sound about right?”

“Yeah, that’s basically it.”

“Wow. You did a great job, all things considered.”

“I didn’t rescue as many of the civilians as I would’ve liked. I fucked up real bad, there.”

The look on Bellwether’s face was grave. “Did you have every reason to believe you were looking at enemy contacts on your scope, and not civilians?”

“Yeah?”

“Then don’t worry about it.” Bellwether leaned back in his seat. “In case you haven’t noticed, we play it pretty fast and loose with the rules of engagement around here. We’re technically unlawful combatants and not legally required to do, well, anything. We just don’t like killing civilians because it harms the cause. And, well, those are our people. Every single one we rescue is a potential recruit. Just be more careful, next time. I mean it. I’ve already got Garrida breathing down my neck enough as it is.”

“Easy for you to say,” I muttered.

“You did good. You stopped those sick bastards and their Quint harvesting, and you got your unit away from the Vargr in one piece before they surrounded, engaged, and killed all of you. That’s success by any measure, regardless of the stain on it. You also brought back a prisoner who’s proven himself quite a useful source of intel. He cracked pretty much instantly once I went to work on him. If it’s any consolation, he’s a little blacker and bluer, now.”

I took a big swig from the bottle of juniper-flavored gin in my hooves, enjoying the burn as it went down. “Sure doesn’t feel like success.”

“Is it ‘cause of your boyf—”

“Don’t,” I said. “Don’t say a word about Barley. Me and him are through. If I’d known he was such a useless prick, I would’ve fucked you like, a month ago.”

It took me a moment to realize what I’d just said, and the two of us stared wide-eyed at each other for several seconds. Bellwether blushed bright red.

“Well, uh, do you still want to?” he said.

I smiled and crawled up onto the table, swaying my hips, liquid courage guiding my movements. Bellwether recoiled a little in surprise at the sultry display. I draped my forelegs over his shoulders and looked him straight in those pretty sapphire eyes of his.

“What do you think?” I said.

Bell blinked a few times, reaching for the bottle of gin and snatching it from my grasp. “Shit,” he muttered. He took a few swigs of his own. He knew from prior experience that he was going to need the added fortitude. Soon, he’d polished off the bottle, dropping it as I climbed onto him and overbalanced his chair backwards, sending both of us toppling to the floor.

“Oh shit, careful,” Bell said, though neither of us were exactly hurt. It took much more than that to harm a pony.

Consumed by lust after such a long dry spell, I dove for his lips, sinking my tongue into his mouth. He responded to the kiss eagerly, his thick tongue dancing with mine. I could’ve said that he had the flavor of raw iron and masculinity, or something sappy like that, but the reality was indescribable. Whatever it was, it drugged my senses. As I broke off the kiss, I could see that whatever he tasted in me, he craved it as much as I craved him.

“We’d better get out of these,” I said.

“Yeah.” Bellwether grinned.

I started undoing my uniform, baring my chest. I nuzzled in close with him as we writhed together on the floor, my mane slick with sweat. I wanted him. I wanted him so badly, I damn near could’ve ripped every shred of cloth off his body and taken him right there. We took it slow at first, inhaling each other’s scents and cuddling fiercely. Bellwether stood suddenly, and I whined with incipient need as we parted.

“One sec, baby,” he said. “I gotta get myself ready, here.”

“Same here.”

I kept stripping off, removing my BDU and my boots, folding them up, and setting them aside. I’d had plenty of experience in the realm of fucking. I wasn’t some doe-eyed virgin. It still felt strange doing it with a stallion so much older than I. Somehow illicit and pornographic. No puppy love was this. It was a hasty encounter between two jaded adults for the sole purpose of mutual ravishment.

“Should I use a rubber?” Bell asked.

I shook my head. “No need. I’ve been infertile for the past several years. Shrapnel wound. Got me right in the foal furnace.” I turned to look at him and the incredulous stare he was giving me. “I—”

After a brief pause spent in mild shock, I nervously bit my lip at the sight of his throbbing stallionhood. He was so much bigger than my punk fiancé. Just thinking of Barley’s name almost killed my arousal right then and there.

“Damn, Bellwether.” I snickered. “You sure aren’t anything like your namesake.”

“It’s a codename.” Bell sheepishly rubbed the back of his head.

“Oh yeah? What’s your real name, stud? Thundercock?”

“Gneiss.”

“Hell yeah you are.”

“It’s my name. Gneiss Pie.”

I perked an eyebrow. “Like, the Pie Brothers? The quarrying company?”

Bell smirked. “The very same. My great-granddaddy’s business. Used to blast holes in mountainsides when I was a kid. That’s kinda why I ended up as a sapper. Then, they made me a spy when I saw too much. Fuckin’ Karks.”

I couldn’t take my eyes off it. I thought he was at full stiffness but he kept getting more engorged. It was almost comically big. A uniformly grayish fuck-truncheon. He wasn’t kidding about the fifth leg.

I let out a soft chuckle. “So, these holes in these mountainsides. I take it you mounted those poor, helpless mountains and punched divots in them that way?”

I could tell by his bemused and slightly annoyed expression that he was tiring of my witticisms, which weren’t all that witty to begin with.

“Wanna find out?” he said.

We looked each other in the eyes, and no further words were necessary. It was like the signal to go, right at the start of a race. The slowest race in the world. The one where you could take all the time you needed. The one where you could dream about living forever, against all common sense.

We practically lunged at each other, our bodies desperate with need, pirouetting onto the rickety bed, which proved to have far too much give as our weight sank into it. We planted kisses on each other over and over again with throaty groans. I’d never done it like this, before. It had never been so animalistic and sweaty and raw. I hadn’t even bathed yet since I got back, and I still smelled like a muddy drainage ditch. When I was younger, every boyfriend I’d been with had insisted on some stupid candlelit dinner. Then, we fucked in the dark afterward, fumbling for each other’s genitals like some dumb scavenger hunt. This was different. Infinitely sexier. In the sterile white light, I could see all of Bell, and he could see all of me. He was pure Daddy material. All hairy and musky and aged like a fine vintage. This wasn’t Barleywine. This was a step up. Pinot Noir.

There was no additional foreplay necessary. I was already fucking drenched just from kissing him. I felt horny as hell and I loved every second of it. My ass, tail, and dock were positively soaked in juices, my nether lips puffy and ready for the deed. Somehow, the advantage in the kissing contest had gone to him, and he rolled me onto my back with that gentle but overwhelming Earth Pony strength. Face to face. So dirty. So scandalous.

He wasted no time. His lips were locked with mine and his tongue was exploring my mouth as his massive prick pushed against me, stabbing a couple times against the inside of my thigh before finding its mark. When he brushed against my nether lips, my hips jerked with trepidation. I hadn’t had a stallion in years. My whole body was tense with excitement. He guided his hips forward and started to part my petals. A flood of pleasure surged into my consciousness. They kept parting and parting so far, it felt like it’d never end.

Waves of ecstasy coursed up my spine. I was completely lost in him like a maze, and he hadn’t even truly begun. His tip, that meaty cockhead of his, wasn’t even fully inside my entrance. A strange sense of panic descended over me as the pressure between us mounted. I closed my eyes. In that warm, liquid space between our bodies, it felt like my very ego would be swept away. In the darkness behind my eyelids, I saw a flicker. A figment of the Seneschal’s orange, slitted eye. My heart squeezed in my chest with fear, my eyes flickering open to banish the hallucination.

“Bell, ahh!” I squeaked.

He stopped immediately, a look of concern on his face. “You good, Storm?” he said. “We can stop if this ain’t the right time.”

I frowned. I wasn’t about to let the apparition of some alien shitbag get in the way of a good fuck. “Look, it’s sweet that you’re all worried for me and stuff, but did I say stop? Gosh, I need it! Fuck me, you cute hunk! Just fuck me and don’t think twice!”

That was all the permission he needed, because a split-second later, Bell pushed the full length and girth of his cock into my body in one steady stroke. He moaned with a throaty rumble as he penetrated me. I wasn’t even sure what sound it was that I’d made in response. My mind had gone white. I’d never had a stallion so thick before. I was so stretched. So full. So satisfied. I could feel his heartbeat right through his hard, velvety cock. My pussy winked as I convulsed over and over again, gripping him like a vise.

As he made his first retraction, dragging my pussy lips along with him, I kept gasping and moaning over and over again. Bell shuddered with deep, baritone groans of pleasure, the rumble reverberating through my chest as he half-collapsed atop me, our breastbones rubbing together in total communion.

“Oh fuck,” he whispered. “You’re so fuckin’ tight. Geez, it feels like I’m fucking a foal. Almost fuckin’ hurts. Those limp-dicked little boys you had before me must’ve really neglected you.”

It didn’t know if I should be insulted, but the way he said it with that husky, judgmental voice of his, it sounded so ridiculously hot that it drove me absolutely nuts. “I love it when you talk dirty.”

He began issuing thrusts with increasing intensity and I lifted my hips and pushed my greedy cunt against his pounding meat, losing myself in the incredible feelings that coursed through my whole body. I wasn’t about to let him do all the work. I gyrated my rear half, gripping his lovely ass by wrapping my hind legs around each cheek. I pulled him into me, like prey trapped in a spider’s web. I wanted him more than anything at that very moment. Him, and nothing else. The whole world could burn for all I cared. I was finally happy.

I was happy, for once. So why am I sniffling and crying?

Bell noticed the tears falling down my cheeks as I trembled in his grasp, stopping his movements and looking me straight in the eye. “What’s wrong, Storm?”

“You’re not gonna abandon me, too, are you, Bell? This isn’t just some fling, is it? Do you—do you fucking love me?” I sobbed. “I don’t want to be alone. Oh, Celestia, I don’t want to be alone. I drove through a town, and everyone was gone. Why’s everyone gone, Bell? Why? Why’s everypony gone? Dust. Dust and shadows! They walked into the fire and they didn’t walk out!”

He softly shushed me, rubbing a foreleg over my head. “It’s okay, baby. I’m not going anywhere. Promise. Oh, you darling girl. I’m here for you.”

I hugged him, laughing and crying. “Have I ever told you that you make me feel wanted? In ways that so many others haven’t? Everypony thinks I’m a freak because of what I had to do for my country. None of us real Charger pilots will ever be thought of as heroes. We’ll be lucky to have a memorial when we’re all gone. If it were the Confederacy, if we were their people, they’d celebrate all of us. Immortalize us. I’m too different from the rest of ponykind. I’m too fucking different for anyone to accept that this who I am. I’ll probably just end up hurting you, too. Just like all the other bridges I’ve burned.”

Bellwether put a hoof to my jaw, gently nudging me into looking straight at him. “Storm, darling, I care for you in a way that’s unlike any mare I’ve met before. You’re different, but that’s what I like about you. The fact that you smell like a killer, the way you cuss and strut around just a little butch the way you do—it doesn’t bother me at all. It fucking turns me on. Fuck, you make me so hard, it hurts. I’ve fucked so many fake, empty, vapid little bitches. They had no presence, no vitality, no will. Nothing. You? You’re larger than life itself. You are so real, so present, so vital, you make me quake inside. You’re not a freak. You’re the perfect mare, sent by Celestia herself.”

I let out a deep belly-laugh, wiping the tears from my eyes. “That’s a funny way to say ‘I love you’. Kinda chauvinist, too. We gotta work on that.”

Bellwether smiled. “For you, anything.”

After a brief pause, we locked lips and resumed fucking, even harder than before. He’d aroused something predatory in me. He’d teased out that famed aggression of mine. I groaned into his mouth in utter ecstasy as my muscles worked against his, and when I sensed a moment of weakness from him, that was when I seized the opportunity. I overpowered him, rolling him onto his back on the bed, forcing my tongue deep into his mouth, swirling his tongue around with mine as we kept fucking. I sensed his surprise and I broke the kiss and giggled at him, my tongue slithering over my lips like a snake’s as I stared down at him with the same slitted gaze I gave alien bastards when I was about to kill them.

“Oh, wow,” he muttered, his eyes wide.

I had transformed from that gibbering little crybaby cunt into someone else. I had become the mare he said he cared for so much. Storm, the Virago. I could be that mare for him, if that was what he wanted so badly. If he wanted me to devour him like the dragon in pony skin that I was, he could have just asked. I gyrated my hips in a circle and rode him forcefully, grunting and snorting all deep and bassy as I engulfed his shaft. The sounds and smells of frenzied, animal copulation drifted through the air. Sloppy and salty, just the way I liked it.

“Silly boy,” I said. “You shouldn’t tease bad mares like me.”

He squeaked and moaned underneath me, his hips quivering as he went over the edge. With just a little flick of a switch from sub to dom on my part, Bellwether had gone and blown his load in me. He shot rope after rope of his seed against the gateway to my womb, his cock flaring and throbbing, filling me with wetness and pressure. I shuddered and sighed. It was a big one. Perhaps the biggest wad of spunk I’d ever taken in my life. I settled onto him, my loins still throbbing with need as I worked my hips back and forth atop his prick, enjoying the sensation of pressure and warmth in my guts from his trapped cum and the way his warm, twitching balls nestled against my asshole.

I clicked my tongue. “Did I say you were done? Did I say you could come? I haven’t come yet, so that means we still have some work to do, motherfucker!”

“Oh, shit!” He let out a little squeak of terror.

“Shit is right. I’m gonna fuck the shit out of you, Gneiss Pie! I’m gonna make you shit for me! The only ‘pie’ you’re gonna know is the kind that begins with cream and ends in my holes, penis! Yeah, you think mares are ‘bitches’, little boy? You’re just a cock with legs. You were born to please me!”

“Are you doing this for me?” he muttered.

“Yeah, yeah,” I said, waving a hoof dismissively. “Just roll with it. I mean, unless you’re not cool with it. We can go more vanilla or quit if you’re not, dude. You down for butt stuff?”

“Sure. Do we have a safeword?”

My eyes widened. “Oh. Damn. Hadn’t thought that far ahead. How ‘bout something like, uhh, penicillin?”

Bellwether grinned. “You just like that because it sounds like penis.”

“Just so.” I smiled.

“Then penicillin it is.”

“Okay, where were we?” I said. “Oh, right. Do you clean your ass?”

“What?” Bell mumbled, resuming the frightened little sissy persona.

“Simple question! Do you clean your ass or not?”

“I—I—”

“Fuck it, I have a spell for that. You’ve been a naughty boy, Bell. You’re gonna clean this mess out of my pussy with your tongue while I eat your ass!”

I dismounted from him, his copious quantities of jism streaming down the inside of my thighs like I should give a shit. I’d claimed this stallion for my own. For the next few minutes, he was my property. My own personal living squirt gun. I levitated Bell into the air and flipped him around so his ass faced me. It wasn’t quite a 69. I wasn’t positioned to suck him off. I wanted his ass. I needed his ass. While he moaned pathetically and slurped at my pussy with his sloppy tongue, I ran a wipe of levitation magic over his perfect little cornhole, removing any trace of ass-sweat or unwanted debris.

I thought of all the times I sadistically hunted the vermin that plagued our race. The way I laughed as I made them go pop with weapons of unfathomable power. I channeled that predator’s spirit into my search for Bell’s prostate. I panted huskily. My meal had arrived. I tongued Bell’s musty old balls, eliciting a squeal of pleasure from him as I ran my tongue up his taint and the crack of his ass. I took my time, working my way up to his meaty ringpiece and then thrusting my tongue inside him. The flavor was of the most questionable sort, but I was too horny to give a damn, and I loved the way he squirmed as I feverishly tongued his quivering asshole.

I couldn’t take it anymore. I was crazy for his ass. While he continued to eat me out, whimpering in pleasure all the while, I withdrew my tongue.

“I hope you’re ready for this, butt-slut!” I said.

I dipped my head down and pushed my horn into his ass. Inch after inch of my cranial appendage disappeared into him. He moaned girlishly from my cold, hard horn penetrating his spasming boy-cunt. I could feel his walls around my horn with surprising tactility, my ears flicking about from the stimulation. I lit my horn and pushed into Bell’s passage with a levitation field, eliciting a shriek of mixed pleasure and surprise from him. I’d penetrated him with a nice big glowcock, like the kind I used sometimes when my hooves weren’t enough to get me off. I thrust my magic back and forth, poking his guts over and over. I rutted his insides with a magic dick.

“You think I’m as tight as a filly?” I laughed. “Putting my horn in you’s like threading a fucking needle. If your ass were any tighter, I’d just about break my damn horn clean off in it.”

“M—mercy,” he sputtered.

“Did I hear you speak? That means you’re not eating cunt as ordered, meat! Put your tongue back to its proper use!”

I used my levitation to guide his head back towards my pussy, which he obediently lapped at like the dog he was, whimpering all the while. As I worked my magic into his insides, stimulating him from within, I could feel him stiffening against my chest. He was about to come again.

“Nuh-uh!” I said. “That jizz is mine!”

I pulled my horn out of him with a wet pop like a wine bottle coming uncorked and dispelled the magic I’d conjured up. I flipped him over with a strength and eagerness that surprised even me, eyeing his cock standing proud at full mast. His tasty, tasty cock. I engulfed him with my hungry lips as he moaned and squirmed. I suckled at his ridge and swirled my tongue around him, trying to coax him to shoot in my mouth. I had full control over his body. Everything he experienced was only because I willed it. It was like piloting, in a way. Every part of him was mine to command.

With a shudder and a groan of pleasure, he started to come for the second time that night. As he pulsed and pulsed between my lips, I clamped my muzzle around his big, floppy flare and drank every single gulp, not letting even a single drop get away. Bell’s tongue lolled out of his head with insane pleasure. It wasn’t enough. I hadn’t yet achieved my own release. I needed more. I threw my head back and licked my lips with delight after tasting his delectable old stallion spunk. Fuck, it wasn’t enough. I wanted to ravish him. I was a slavering beast, drooling with hunger. He was the prey. My mind was consumed with raw, aggressive sexuality.

I lapped at his softening length to work him back up to a nice, full erection. It’d be minutes before he’d be ready to fuck again, so I elected to grind my winking clit against his warm sheath and mash my pussy against his wrinkly old balls while I rubbed the soft frogs of my hooves up and down his floppy shaft, jerking his cock back into action.

He was ready to go again in what felt like no time at all. I climbed up onto him, panting like a beast as I lowered my wanton cunt onto his pole, letting out a passionate sigh as I engulfed him with my eager marehood. I rode his whimpering, squeaking form like a squeaky old bike in need of my mare-oil. I fucked myself with him. I masturbated with his dick.

“Fuck, I’m gonna come,” I muttered, panting hard. “Fuck. Fuck!”

My orgasm shot like lightning from the base of my spine all the way to my brain. I threw my head back and screamed with pleasure, my hips convulsing again and again, the space between us growing wetter by the second. I gripped onto his cock over and over, my insides tightening around every inch of his glorious length. His sheath and his fur became a swamp underneath me. I squirted so hard, some of it went as high as his navel. Lovemaking? Get the fuck out of here with that nonsense. Where I come from, we fuck. We fuck and we fuck. With each quiver of my flesh around his, I let out a soft little whimper of sheer enjoyment as I rode out my orgasm.

With a gasping croak, Bell climaxed for a third time, his cock throbbing as he blasted into me with ounce after ounce of his cream. I sighed with satisfaction as my sopping wet insides drank him in, rolling my hips around as I milked every drop of seed from his weighty balls. I spent half a minute snuggling up to him and enjoying how full I felt. When I pulled off of him with a wet plop, what felt like a liter of his cum spurted from my ass end, my legs quivering with delight at the feeling of it running down the inside of my thighs.

I shouldn’t have known the spell I was about to use. It was pretty much illegal to use on other ponies, and with good reason. I’d delved into certain aspects of dark magic and curses perhaps a bit too enthusiastically when Cicatrice tutored us. Until recently, I’d forgotten much of it, but there was one particularly perverted one I’d always remembered, because I occasionally used it on myself.

My horn flared purplish-black. A void that swallowed the light. Shining darkness. With a crackle of raw eldritch energy, I planted a mark that etched itself into Bellwether’s soft, exposed belly. The lines of the sigil glowed with irrepressible magic power.

“The contract is fucking sealed,” I said. “You’re not to fuck other cunts. You’re not to rub one out without my permission. You’re gonna give me all your seed from now on, penis. The only place you’re gonna finish is in me. You understand?”

“What the hell was that spell?”

I clamped his jaws shut with levitation. “That’s no way to talk to your mistress, but since you were so curious, I’ll humor you, fuckmeat. That’s an orgasm denial curse. The effects are permanent until I dispel it. You’ll try beating your meat, and you’ll get close to the edge, but you’ll never actually come. If you keep going, you’ll get the blue balls something fierce. You’re gonna save every single drop of that cum for my cunt. I’ll make you go days, even weeks, until you’re so pent up you go off like a cannon.”

Bellwether sighed. “Penicillin.”

My eyes widened. “Oh, okay.” With a flash of magic, I dispelled it right away. “I respect other ponies’ boundaries, dude. I’m not gonna do anything you’re not cool with, I promise you that.”

Bellwether smiled. “And that kind of integrity is commendable indeed, Storm. Seriously, though, that was kinda fuckin’ messed up, baby. Do you have any idea how vile that shit is? I’m surprised and a little bit dismayed you even know how to do that!”

“I know, I know. Sometimes, I use it on myself so I can edge for a really, really long time without climaxing, and then let it all go at once like sploosh. I’m kinda fucked up, aren’t I?”

“You’re unbelievably perverse, yes. But that’s not the same thing as actually being evil, just so you know.”

“Wanna go again?” I said, grinning slightly. “More vanilla this time?”

Bellwether smiled. Our muzzles slowly moved together, we closed our eyes, and we briefly locked lips. I heard a muffled grunt of displeasure from him, and so, I opened my eyes to see what was wrong. I could see by the look of despair on his face that he could taste at least a faint trace of his ass on my tongue. We withdrew from that configuration after a moment, staring at each other with mild shock.

“Oops,” I said.

// … // … // … // … // … //

By the time we were done, I was smoking a cig and enjoying the afterglow. Bell was completely wrung out. He looked deflated, like a party balloon that had been stamped on over and over again until it was a sad, flaccid little pile of rubber.

“Yer fuckin’ crazy,” he said. “You’re a damn succubus, you know that?”

I let out a chuckle at that. “Do tell.”

“I had no fucking idea what I was signing up for, and now that I’ve done it, I don’t know what to feel. When you asked if I was okay with butt stuff, I didn’t know exactly whose butt you were talking about, but now, I know the answer all too intimately. My dignity and my lechery are in a tug-of-war, and I can’t decide if I was the fucker or fuckee or what the hell just happened, but my balls are emptier than they’ve ever been. It actually kinda hurts.” He whined a little. “I’m an old stallion, you gotta be careful with me, darlin’.”

“That’s the way we pilots fuck.” I grinned, holding out my cig and letting it smolder. “The crazy way.”

“For our first time, I didn’t think we’d—y’know—do it like that.”

I snorted. “Bell, I’ve done it the other way plenty of times. It’s boring and not all that fun. Seriously. Mounted in the dark by some dumbass, and he’s like ‘I can’t find it’ and I’m like ‘that’s my ass, retard’, and then I basically just lie still while he snorts and thrusts away and then my OCD hits and I wonder if I left my bike’s keys in the ignition or thought to bring them in and put them on the coffee table so some dipshit doesn’t run off with it. I’m so done with having sex like that. I’m all about the wild fucking, now.”

“Shit,” he said. “You got that right.”

I stared at the floor of the mine, deep in thought. “Y’know, Bell, I know we haven’t always gotten along. I’ve done some stupid shit since joining the rebellion. Shit I now regret.” I looked up at him with a smile. “But I don’t regret this. Not even for a second.”

He smiled back. “Me neither, darlin’. Me neither. I know I’m an old fart, and I might not have much time left, but, to tell you the truth, I can’t think of anyone I’d rather spend the last of my years with than you.”

I grinned. “You’re a sweetie pie.”

I stood up from the bed and surveyed myself. I was a mess, to put it bluntly. Some days, I envied the cleomanni. They had patches of fur, but they weren’t hairy all over like we were. Gobs of dried cum had started to stiffen my coat in places. Just the thought that I was filled and covered with bits of Bell almost made me horny all over again, but I was pretty sure if I jumped his bones at this juncture, the poor bastard would turn into a dried-up husk and blow away in the wind like a tumbleweed.

Well, I wanted this, I told myself. Comes with the territory.

“I’m gonna go get myself washed up,” I said. “You good?”

“Fine as I’ll ever be,” Bell said.

I smiled softly at him before turning and heading out. In one of the dark corners of the mine, I retrieved a bucket and filled it with water, and then grabbed some soap and a sponge and gave myself a sponge bath. We were rationing water due to our situation. Long, hot showers were out of the question, unless it was on Cicatrice’s transport.

Just when I’d gotten the bulk of the filth off, the base’s alarm rang, the klaxon echoing through the salt mine’s tunnels. I tossed the sponge aside, watching intently as militia ponies ran every which way in a panic. Something was going on.

“Dammit,” I said. “It’s always gotta be something.”

I merged with the crowd and joined them in the main room, looking up in awe at my Charger. The twin heavy beamcasters had passed their range test checklists, after having been fired down one of the disused mine tunnels the night before, and they were securely mounted on their retractable erector arms hinged at my Charger’s shoulders. Captain Garrida was standing before my machine, holding herself up shakily with her rifle, still receiving a drip of intravenous fluids from a bag on a stand right next to her. She had a haunted look in her reddened eyes that immediately put me on edge. There was a commotion all around me as ponies openly speculated on what could possibly be the matter.

Garrida brought her rifle’s barrel down three times on the hastily poured concrete slab the technicians were using as a work surface, the clank of its muzzle echoing through the mine. Everyone went silent.

“Ponies!” Captain Garrida called out with a resounding shout that needed no artificial amplification. “Liberation Front members. Soldiers and brave patriots of Equestria. I give you terrible news. Corrector Dieslan Veightnoch intends to wipe all of us out. To that end, he has sent a combined division of Confederate Security Forces and Confederate Army soldiers, led by Colonel Aurman Ravetaff, to raze Tar Pan to the ground. This is not a hypothetical thing. They are right at our doorstep. Our scouts report that they are two hours away from entering the city and breaching the perimeter of this, our final bastion.

“We have a tiny handful of tanks and artillery. They have hundreds. We have two Chargers. They have dozens and dozens of Goliaths. Their soldiers are a teeming, numberless horde, and they have a detachment of mercenaries augmenting them. I won’t tell you the odds. All I will tell you is that you must win. We are cornered. There is nowhere left to retreat. If we do not fend off this attack, we will be destroyed.

“The survivors have the worst fates imaginable to look forward to. Those living will wish that they were dead. For the sake of the Empire, you must fight. You must fight to your dying breath and bring Empress Twilight Sparkle’s burning hot wrath upon the invaders! You will punish them for all that they’ve done, for every life that they’ve taken, for every planet they’ve stolen, and for every one of us they’ve enslaved and tormented!” Garrida’s eyes swept over us as she raised her fist into the air. “Long live Empress Twilight Sparkle! Long live the Equestrian Empire!”

“Hedsza wroe Harranftah Renleus Tika! Hedsza wroe Tonnanen Harredo!” the crowd echoed.

Not a single one of us budged from our place. None of us ran or showed cowardice. Mardissa was there, in the midst of the assembled crowd, and I could see the look on her face; her horror at our desperation in the face of total annihilation by her people, and how humbled she was by our dedication to our cause.

“Sergeant Desert Storm, Private Mardissa Granthis, step forward now,” Captain Garrida said. “All others, go to your stations at once and prepare to defend the base.”

As the militia dispersed and the two of us approached Captain Garrida, we could see the miserable state she was in.

“You okay, sir?” I said.

Garrida glared at me. “Do not inquire about my health ever again, Sergeant. Is that clear?”

I nodded. “Yes, sir.”

“Sergeant Storm, your Charger is complete, fully functional, and fully rearmed. We’re short on officers. I want you at the front of our formation, leading an element of our counter-offensive. You have my permission to give these Confederate bastards a guided tour of hell.”

I snapped off a salute. “Yes, sir!”

Captain Garrida turned to Mardissa. “Private Granthis. In the short time I’ve known you, you’ve proven a remarkably reliable ally to our cause. It is difficult indeed to turn against one’s own people, one’s own blood, all for the sake of one’s ideals. However, you saw our grave need, and you could not stand by while ponies were driven to the edge of extinction by the actions of your race. You are a credit to your kind. It is regrettable that so few of you have opened your eyes to our suffering. I still believe that, in the fullness of time, we have much to offer each other. If I die, I charge you with the sacred duty of carrying that dream into the future.”

Private Granthis stood ramrod straight as she saluted. “Yes, sir!”

Captain Garrida sat down in her wheelchair and offered her Grover to Private Granthis. “I want you to have this.”

Mardissa was flabbergasted. “Y—you’re giving me Thumper?”

Garrida’s beak formed into a flat, derisive line. “No, I’m giving you my walking stick. Of course I’m giving you my damn rifle, idiot.”

Mardissa reached out and gingerly grabbed the giant weapon, her arms sagging under its weight. She was grinning from ear to ear like a kid in a candy store. “Wow!”

Garrida grunted her assent. “I have no use for it in my condition, and I can’t think of anyone else who can wield it with your degree of skill. Learn it, respect it. Don’t let it out of your sight. I ain’t got any more. They don’t make ‘em anymore.” The Captain sighed, rubbing her claws together. “Briefing’s in five. Be there.”

// … // … // … // … // … //

“Fuck,” I whispered. “Don’t even know what else to say. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuckity-fuck. Maybe shit? Maybe a tarnation and hellfire, too? Now look what they’ve done. They’ve got me speaking hick.”

I adjusted my syncsuit, trying to relax as the sync arm latched onto my back and a sharp tingle ran from my spine down to the tips of my hooves. I settled into Black Devil’s pilot seat and placed my hooves in the stirrups.

The briefing had been the stuff of nightmares. It was like Pur Sang all over again. There were two Confederate divisions bearing down on Tar Pan from the east and the southeast. Cicatrice’s Stormtroopers were whipping up an actual batch of severe inclement weather ahead of both of them, trying to wash out roadways, form tornadoes, and turn the land into wind-beaten muck. Standard practice when on defense. That would buy us another hour or two at the most.

I knew that outside the mine, the militias were towing fixed AA gun emplacements up onto the hillside and search radar units were being hastily emplaced to watch the sky for enemy gunships. I flicked on the forward viewscreen and viewed the local datasphere map feed being relayed down into the mine, little colored dots marching around. Our self-propelled guns were taking up their positions near the mine. They’d be wiped out by counter-battery fire if they opened up on the enemy now.

Garrida had fibbed a bit to motivate everyone. The enemy had no intention of razing Tar Pan flat. If they did, they would have used fighter-bombers or orbital bombardment and not a messy, inefficient ground invasion. They wanted the city. More specifically, they wanted what was in the city. Ponies. Living product. Thousands upon thousands of soon-to-be slaves.

The rest of Revenant was already topside, using the Centaur’s sensor mortar to set up a cordon. The first enemy contacts crawled into my scope. One, then four, then a dozen, and then hundreds of red dots.

My nose wrinkled in disgust as I cracked my pasterns and settled my forehooves back on the stirrups, my eyes tracing over to the polywell fusion reactor’s unlit status indicators.

I had someone worth defending with my life, and I wasn’t about to let these bastards take him from me.

“Black Devil, initiate startup sequence.”

// … end transmission …

Record 21//Riposte

//HOL CRY SWT
//CHECKSUM READ
//CHECKSUM GOOD

// … decoding …

Desert Storm

Loose rocks and chunks of salt fell from the ceiling of the mine as the Confederate shelling continued, hour after hour. Dozens of civilians milled around. They were frightened, whimpering, and acutely aware of their own powerlessness. I sat hunched with my back to a smooth wall of salt, watching as the technicians repaired the damage to my Mirage as quickly as they could. After having freshly recovered my glacis plate from the field, they lifted the thick, heavy chunk of Mithrium off the back of a Bull Runner using a hydraulic chain hoist. The thing made a loud whining and clinking noise as it pulled the damaged emblem of the Imperial Army upright. The golden sword-in-horseshoe wasn’t actually gold. It was ordinary, unenchanted titanium with a titanium nitride coating. Strong, but not nearly as strong as the Mithrium underneath.

Among the three thousand refugees seeking shelter from the city, the Equestrian Liberation Front had acquired a thousand fresh recruits. My little speech was the reason. Once word had gotten around that the Confederacy were plucking out pony brains, quite a few of the civilians decided that they’d rather go down fighting. There was no way for our cell to equip all of them, with our limited supplies. We had only enough casters and enough barding for a couple hundred at the most, and not nearly enough time to train them into a semi-competent militia. They would be of little use in this fight. However, we had tomorrow to think of. And the day after that.

The Palfrey was gone. Crookneck had departed to link up with the Vanhoover cell. Vanhoover was crawling with a small army of pissed-off Vargr. It was no longer safe for the Liberation Front to operate there. Bellwether sat to my left, Corporal Shooting Star to my right. Mardissa paced around in front of us, arms crossed, shaking her head with a mirthful grin on her face.

“You and Bell, huh?” she said. “Still can’t believe it.”

“Well, believe it,” I said. “He’s a great fuck, and he’s all mine.”

Mardissa started counting with her fingers. “He’s rugged, charming, a little chilly in demeanor, though.”

“You two, I’m sitting right here, y’know,” Bellwether said.

“Huh.” Mardissa shrugged. “So you are. We seldom talk. Now, why is that?”

The older stallion shrugged and pouted. “I don’t have much to say to a Granthis, I guess?”

Bellwether grunted as I lightly kicked him in one of his pasterns. “Try saying something nice, Bell.”

Bell grinned sheepishly. “Well, I’m, uh, I’m Bellwether. Not my real name, of course. Forty-eight years old. Been blowing shit up with explosives since I was very little.”

“How little?” Mardissa said.

“Uh, five?” Bell’s eyes darted around almost guiltily.

“They let five-year-olds handle high explosive material in Equestria?” Mardissa deadpanned.

“Well, no. Foals, y’know. They can get into just about anything, including digging under a locked shed full of sticks of dynamite, fuses, blasting caps, whatever.”

Mardissa broke out in peals of laughter. “How the fuck did you not die?”

Bell huffed dismissively. “Earth pony. Just singed my fur a bit. They found me crying with wood splinters sticking out of me and a crater where the shed used to be.”

“Well, it’s a good thing you weren’t any closer,” I said. “You and that magnificent cock of yours would’ve been little pieces everywhere.”

“That’s so trashy,” Shooting Star muttered under her breath.

“What’s that, Corporal?” I said.

“Nothing.”

I stood up and paced around in front of her, invading her personal space. “If I hear another word out of you, I’m gonna blow him right here, and you’re gonna watch.”

Corporal Shooting Star glared at me in silence. Bellwether squirmed with visible discomfort. When I looked back at Mardissa, she had reading glasses on and had somehow procured a pencil and a lined paper notebook.

“Well, I guess I’ve taken up xenobiology.” Mardissa licked the tip of her pencil sensuously.

“What the fuck?” I laughed.

// … // … // … // … // … //

Black Devil was a mess. The techs had to rip out and unit-exchange at least a third of the cockpit electronics, which had been damaged by spall. They were hurriedly fabricating new pieces of LAMIBLESS to replace the sections crushed by melee combat and shredded by enemy fire. The glacis had been remounted and a couple of the technicians busied themselves taking the dents out of the emblem with hammers and torches. Titanium was very hard and very heat-resistant, and difficult to work by hoof. I marveled at how they set aside the time to repair something that only possessed cosmetic value.

I was a mess, too. Argent had needed to put a couple dozen stitches into me to close up the hole in my side. The frag had gone right into my fucking colon and was millimeters from blowing my spleen to bits and making me bleed to death on the spot. Luckily, I wouldn’t need a colostomy bag, or more chrome. Argent had done a little colon resection and anastomosis, along with an injection of regenerative stem cells to the wound site, before sewing me up the rest of the way.

I was supposed to engage in no strenuous activity for at least two weeks. None. Zero. Too much movement, and I could’ve ripped it back open and had shit leaking into my guts, and that would be a problem. Obviously, rest wasn’t an option. I was still needed in this fight. My side hurt like hell. With the adrenaline from the battle worn off, even with the help of painkillers, my face was warped into a perpetual grimace. I squinted away my tears and took a long drag from what was left of my cig before dropping the butt on the floor of the mine and stomping it flat to put it out.

“Beauty and virtue!” the chief armorer spoke from the pony-lift he was using as a podium. “The Conclave’s creations are no mere tools of war. They are living icons that represent the unshakable will of the Empress herself! A blemish on them is like a blemish on her face. Not merely inconceivable, but also impossible!”

Quill Dipper was sitting around, looking a little worse for wear. Before she’d returned to the mine, she’d been pulled out from under rubble during the fighting, and she had quite a few bruises to show for it. “Not the Empress I remember. She was one scarred-up mare.”

“What do you mean?” I said. “The Twilight Sparkle I remember was gorgeous. Not supermodel-hot, but still, hot. Are you thinking of the same mare?”

“That’s a glamor spell,” Quill said. “Underneath? Oh boy.”

I raised an eyebrow. “You’ve seen what’s underneath?”

“I’m one of the few outside the Conclave who has. The Vanhoover Post were going to run an exposé on it, but BASKAF came one day and confiscated everything.”

“How bad?”

“Bad. Her right eye’s bionic, and old as hell. There’s a great big scar running from her brow all the way down her cheek on that side, and another huge one that crosses her lips on the other side of her face, and a bunch of other little ones besides.”

I frowned. That did change my mental image of her a little, but still, it was her own damn business. A bunch of muckrakers had no right to attack the Empress on the basis of her physical appearance. “What the fuck was the goal with the article?”

“Twilight Sparkle, the true face of a warmonger! We wanted to show the public what she’d been hiding all those years. Make them question whether or not she was just as hideous on the inside as she was on the outside.”

I shook my head. “That’s fucking retarded.”

“What?”

“You can’t take someone’s injuries or disfigurement and make it a reputation thing. If anything, it’d backfire and generate sympathy, and make the paper look like a bunch of monsters. You should be thanking BASKAF for saving your shitty little newspaper from the wrath of the public.”

“Figures.” Quill narrowed her eyes. “You’re the last pony anyone should ask. A true-believer.”

“And you’re not? You sure seemed to hate the Confederacy when I met you.”

“You and them are the same. You all like killing a little too much.”

“We are not the same.” I marched up to her. “Not even remotely. They kill us to enslave us. We kill them to preserve our autonomy. At the most basic level, regardless of our methods, our cause is intrinsically just, and theirs is intrinsically evil.”

“That’s not what most ponies see,” Quill said. “They see one group of brutes and killers vying against another for their own enrichment, using whatever self-serving ideology they like to justify it.”

“I’m not going to mince words.” I let out an exasperated sigh as I lit up another cig, pulling a long drag from the cancer stick and blowing a smoke ring. “If we lose, you’re fucked. Everyone you know is fucked. I mean that quite literally. It’s basically an unending rape train that ultimately ends when the corpse of the last pony to ever live is too cold and desiccated and maggot-ridden to fuck and there isn’t enough mung left to lubricate our enemies’ dicks. Print that.”

Quill Dipper turned a few shades greener. “That’s disgusting. You’re disgusting!”

“Reality is disgusting,” I said. “I’m being realistic.”

“I can’t show ponies that stuff. I can’t write shit like that. They’d be bent over the kitchen sink, hurling their morning coffee and cinnamon bun!”

“Who the fuck eats a cinnamon bun on an empty stomach? I’d be so fucking sick, scandalous newspaper article or not.”

“I saw you fighting, Sergeant,” Quill said.

“Oh yeah? Well, what do you think?”

“I never really appreciated just how violent and destructive Chargers are. It’s one thing to see war reels. It’s another thing to actually be standing there with that shit happening right in front of you. I saw you ram an Assault Walker into a building right next to the one I was in! I thought I was gonna be crushed. I’m almost certain that you did, in fact, crush some ponies to death! Don’t you care at all about the damage you cause to civilian infrastructure?”

I sighed softly. “Charger Exception.”

“What?”

“There are collateral damage thresholds for engagements involving urban Charger combat. As long as one doesn’t cross a certain threshold, it doesn’t count as an ROE violation. It’s expressed as a ratio. For instance, they give us an allowance of up to fifty civilian casualties for every Ifrit we take out. Six Ifrits and two hundred civilians means you’re in the clear. Four hundred civilians, and you get punished.”

I hated putting it that way. The truth was, I knew she was probably right, and in all likelihood, I had probably killed more than a few innocents by accident in my last battle. I was trying not to think about it. I was trying to stay focused. I felt sick. Sicker than I’d been in Vanhoover, even. I didn’t show it, though. I put on an impassive front, displaying not even the slightest hint of emotion. I wanted to see how she would react.

Quill Dipper was taken aback, her jaw hanging loose. “How can you be so cold? Those are ponies. You killed ponies!”

“What did you expect me to do? Evacuate them all first? Let’s put this a different way. There are like tens of thousands of ponies in Tar Pan, right? If I hadn’t deployed my Mirage, if I’d let the enemy overrun us, what do you think would’ve happened? Where do you think they’d all be right now? Where do you think you’d be, personally?”

“I don’t—I don’t know,” Quill mumbled.

“If we let the Confederacy take Tar Pan, they’re going to enslave its entire population. If it weren’t for us, you would be in a cage, right now. You and several others, packed in like tinned sardines. Like fuckin’ cat food.”

Quill looked increasingly anxious. “What the hell are they trying to do?”

“Have you listened to a single word I’ve said? Slavery. Stallions, they send off to work in asteroid mines or agricultural fields. Hard, dangerous, dirty work. Mares, they use as housemaids and fuckmeat. Would you like that? Would you like some fat, middle-aged cleomanni owner to dress you up in a maid outfit and spend every day bending you over a bed and fucking you with his microscopic dick? How ‘bout the damarkinds? Look at you.” I thumped Quill in the chest lightly with my hoof and she bent over, the wind practically knocked out of her from a tiny little tap. “Soft. Weak. To a Dingo, you’re a quick fuck-and-snack. Seen it happen with my own two eyes. They oughta wrap us in foil. Check the date, peel, enjoy.”

Quill’s eyes went as wide as dinner plates. “I thought you were joking.”

“You and everypony else.” I nodded. “Is it really so hard to believe, though? Pony gangs kidnap, enslave, and exploit fellow ponies, too. You know that. No one wants to believe this is reality. I sure don’t. But it just is. This is what’s happening to us, and worse.”

The journalist’s eyes welled with tears. She couldn’t even make eye contact with me, instead diverting her attention to the floor of the mine. “Not everypony should have to be as callous as you are, Sergeant. Getting through to you is like trying to beat sense into a lump of iron. What the hell made you like this, and how can I keep it from hurting others?”

“Do you have to ask? You’ve seen what I do for a living, Quill.”

“The onus shouldn’t be on us to be strong. The onus should be on the cleomanni and their allies to be decent people and not monsters.”

I shook my head. “That’s not how this works. That’s not how anything works, especially not in nature. There have always been predators and prey. You can never have a blanket expectation of safety. You have to be able to protect yourself. I mean, that’s literally the most basic fact of evolution. If you can’t perform, if you can’t guarantee your safety by your own hoof, then you can’t safely breed. If you can’t breed and protect your offspring, then you die out. It’s not nice, it’s not pleasant, and it’s not fair, but it’s the way things are. Life is intrinsically unfair. It’s a constant struggle against the inevitable. You’re born, you get old or sick, and you die, and leaving behind some small token of your existence is the best you can hope for. The weird thing is how ponies look at reality and expect fairness out of nothing. If you want fairness, if you want justice, you have to make it yourself. You can’t just expect it to fall from the sky.”

“The whole point of civilization is for people to act civilized!” Quill was visibly angry. Eyes narrowed. Voice raised. I’d struck a nerve.

“No. The point of civilization is to impose rules on people that they can choose to follow, or deviate from, and the consequence of deviance is to have an injury done to them by the State. The only reason why our civilization has existed at all up to this point is because we demonstrated ourselves willing and able to injure others, within and without. We delayed our extinction by a matter of centuries. Had we done nothing, had we passively accepted our fate, you and I wouldn’t be standing here.”

“But diplomacy—”

“So what?” I said. “What about diplomacy? Without the threat of force behind it, diplomacy isn’t diplomacy. It’s begging and pleading. Diplomacy is an act of bargaining. It’s a haggle. ‘Do what I say, or you will pay a price in blood.’ That is the diplomacy of which you speak. The only thing that keeps a stronger nation from attacking, annexing, colonizing, and despoiling a lesser one is if the lesser nation has nothing that they want. We have something the Confederacy want. It’s our bodies. It’s us. It sure would be nice if all they wanted was resources or territory, but they haven’t stopped there. They want it all. They want me, and they want you. My job is to dissuade them from taking us. If I have to put thousands of them in the ground for that to happen, so be it. They didn’t need to come here. They made their choice. If they wanted to keep living, all they had to do was stay home.”

“But—“

“There is only one language that everyone immediately understands. A universal language, if you will. Violence. Rearranging someone’s molecules until they are no longer able to do you harm. Everything else is a deception, a dilution.”

Quill Dipper was mortified, slowly shaking her head, tears tracing their way down her cheeks. “Dear Celestia. If ponies like you are all that’s left of us, we’re already dead.”

The mare before me buried her head in her hooves, sobbing fitfully. My cold rhetoric had clearly hurt her in some way. I had to show her I wasn’t a complete asshole, somehow. I enveloped her in my forelegs and drew her into a tight hug. She was apprehensive at first. They always were. I could feel it in the way her muscles briefly tensed with fear before relaxing. We all did that. Hypervigilance, from expecting to get hurt.

“Quill, I’m sorry,” I said. “I wish we lived in a better world. I do. But I can’t do anything about it, ‘cept kill for one. If you expected something gentler than that, if you expected finesse, you’re asking the wrong pony.”

Quill slowly wrapped her forelegs around me, in return. “You give good hugs. Just—just hold me. Please. Just like that.”

We held that posture for what felt like several minutes. It was relaxing. I needed it as much as she did. As I broke the embrace, I looked her squarely in the eyes. “I need to get back out there. This isn’t over. There’s another wave of Confederate ground forces incoming from the south. Scouts say they’re sending in damarkinds from the Boarhead Company as their vanguard, this time. They’ll be on us in under half an hour. The techs are just barely gonna be able to get my rig back together in time.”

Quill’s eyes slowly widened. She began to shake. “N—no.”

The Boarheads were some of the most vicious butchers in the known universe. Their brutality was excessive even by the standards of their species. Other damarkind mercenary companies gave them a wide berth. If we let them take Tar Pan, it would not be an exaggeration to say that every street in the city would have several dozen flayed pony skins draped from the windowsills by tomorrow morning.

“I know you’re a journalist and you probably want something for a story, but for Celestia’s sake, stay inside this mine and do not leave until the fighting’s over,” I said. “Get your story by talking to the ponies here. They’ve got plenty to share. You don’t want to get grabbed by these bastards.”

Quill Dipper looked straight at me, her expression severe. “Okay.”

Something about the look on her face told me that she was planning something. She had a glint of dishonesty in her eye.

“Whatever you’re thinking, don’t,” I said. “Just stay here.”

“Don’t worry about me,” Quill said. “I’m staying put.”

As I headed off to our makeshift Charger bay, I looked over my shoulder at Quill, who stood rooted to that spot and watched me with a keen eye as I departed. I hoped she wouldn’t cause any trouble for us, or herself.

// … // … // … // … // … //

Quill Dipper

This was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for me. I was now unofficially embedded with the ELF, a motley assortment of former Imperial soldiers and civilian militia recruited from the ranks of survivors who lived in the wastes or in the towns that the rebels had liberated. I had to get my scoop, no matter what. Sure, no one was paying me, and my editors at the paper were probably all dead. I would be doing this one freelance. I’d write a book. Maybe I’d publish it and make a few bits if we won this hopeless war. I needed something to keep me focused on anything other than our dismal situation. I needed a goal to live for, and I suspected that these ponies needed the same thing. I decided right then that I would hear the testimony of Desert Storm’s rebel unit. I had my cameras and my recorder with me, and my journal. All I needed was a story to write.

I picked my first member of Revenant to interview. A fiery-eyed and fiery-maned mare. Upon closer inspection, she had the countenance of a killer. I could just feel the bad vibes radiating off of her. In spite of our dire situation, she wasn’t fearful in the least. She had a look of smug satisfaction on her face, like she was looking forward to some action. Even the Sergeant gave off an aura of equinity that this mare lacked. I fearfully swallowed the lump in my throat, steeling myself as I approached her.

“Ma’am, excuse me?” I said.

“The fuck?” She turned to face me. “Oh, it’s you. The journalist.”

“You were with Sergeant Storm during the action in Vanhoover, against the Riggers.”

“That is correct. Corporal Shooting Star, at your service.” The bow she gave was a mocking one.

“I’m interviewing ponies on the base,” I said. “What can you tell me about your time in the resistance?”

The Corporal grinned, waving me closer. “C’mere.”

When I took a few steps closer, Shooting Star put her foreleg around my neck, dragging me close so she could whisper in my ear. “I can see that look in your eye. You’re thinking about heading topside. Watching Storm fight again. I can see it written all over your face. You’re addicted. See a Charger in battle once, and you never go back. You’ve just got to see it again, I know. Forget it. You ever had a metric ton of stinking, humping dingoes on top of you? It’s not worth it, and you’ll regret it for the rest of your life. I promise you that.”

I pushed her away. “Fuck! Are any of you ponies fucking normal?!”

“Define normal, Quill. All of us have been through shit that would put hair on your eyeballs if you saw it up close and personal. That’s the fuckin’ truth. Are you sure you want to know any more than that? I don’t sleep right. The Sergeant doesn’t, either. Nopony here does. That will be you, too, if you keep going the way you’re going.”

“Don’t act like you’re the only one to have ever lost something or someone important to you,” I said. “This war left none of us untouched.”

“It left some ponies more untouched than others. After all, if you already knew everything, then you wouldn’t be waltzing around here asking stupid questions. You should treasure that innocence. Don’t throw it away so easily, ‘kay? Bye. Go bother someone else.”

Corporal Shooting Star turned and ambled off, looking more bored that she wasn’t killing something than anything else.

I shook my head. “Unbelievable.”

My next stop was the infirmary. I was able to worm my way inside a salt cavern that had been festooned in temporary work lights so the doctors could see to their patients. There was one subject I needed to hear from.

Argent Tincture was there. I’d met her hours earlier, when they looked us over after we got back from Vanhoover. She’d done more tests on us than usual, like she was looking for something specific. It was very odd, in retrospect. There were also dozens of wounded ELF members, some having experienced varying degrees of dismemberment in the fighting. I winced at the figures that moaned and writhed in their cots. Argent was speaking to a couple of militia stallions.

“We’re running out of morphine,” Argent said. “It’s the damn salt. It’s in the air. It makes everything hurt more. Where are those rolls of canvas I asked for? We need to seal off the walls.”

“You’ll get what you’re after, doc,” one of the militia stallions said. “May take a little while, though.”

As the stallions walked away, leaving a very disappointed Argent behind, I took that as an opportunity and sidled up close to her. “Doctor Tincture?”

She glanced over at me with weary eyes. “What? Can’t you see I’m busy, here?”

“I want to interview your patient.”

“Who? Jury Rig? He’s not seeing visitors.”

“Send her over, doc,” a rough voice from behind a curtain spoke.

Argent turned to the source. “Are you sure?”

“Positive.”

I clicked on the voice recorder on my shoulder and I slowly walked up to the free-standing curtain divider, pushing it aside and entering the space beyond. I gasped at the sight of the pony in the cot. Jury Rig, the bubbly and optimistic looking pegasus colt I’d met in Vanhoover, was a shambles. Broken utterly. His wings were completely gone. Flayed bits of his wing nerves lay out at either side of him, immersed in small tubs of nourishing protectant gel. Nerve conditioning. The first step before implantation. There was a big, unsightly visor of some kind over his eyes. As he turned to face me, a small, vertical band of blue light in its single lens slit turned and tracked me.

“Why are you wearing that in bed?” I said. “A little bulky, isn’t it?”

“I can’t take it off, Quill,” he said. “It’s not headgear. It’s chrome. It’s a part of my body.”

I blinked a few times, feeling a sympathetic pain in my retinas that I just couldn’t shake. “Why?”

“I lost my eyes. Both of them. And my wings. They’re putting in a Heca, too, so I’m still not gonna have wings when they’re done.”

“I am so, so sorry,” I said. “How are you feeling? Are you alright?”

Jury Rig was hesitant, his voice soft and laced with emotion as he replied, “Lady, do I look alright?”

“Stupid question.”

“Do you know how important flight is for a pegasus? It’s the center of our identities. It was my own stupid fault. I was trying to help, and I overextended myself.”

I pulled up a folding chair, sitting in it heavily. “What do you think about the Sergeant?”

“Sergeant Storm? My boss? You want to know what I think? Don’t tell her this, but I think she’s trying to be a hero. Something she’s never been before. I think she’s trying to atone for what she did during the war. I think she’s going to get hurt. Worse than me, even. And when she does, there will be no one around to help her, and it will be entirely her fault. She thinks she can do everything herself. Y’know, we tried. We tried helping her. I don’t think she wants to be helped. I think she wants validation. She wants to feel like it wasn’t all for nothing.”

“Well, what do you want?”

“What do I want?” Jury Rig echoed, his lips curling into a sad smile. “I should have died, but I can’t. Not yet. My country needs me, ma’am.”

“But—but you’re a child. You should be in high school, not getting maimed while trying to—what? Cobble the Empire back together?!”

“That’s right. I’m fifteen. Not like that’s relevant to fucking anything at all. I’m strong enough to carry a caster. I’ve killed ponies, I’ve killed cleomanni. I don’t give a fuck about how long I’ve been here, on this planet. You try being twelve, and watching a kinetic strike turn your entire neighborhood into a crater. You see these ponies walking around here? Huh? They’re my family, now. They’re all I’ve got.”

“You’re not worried that they’re manipulating you for their own selfish ends?”

“What in the fuck is that supposed to mean? Ma’am, have you looked around yourself lately? We need our damn country back.”

“Are you sure about that?” I said. “Can’t we parley with the Confederacy, somehow?”

“They’re not going to stop.” Jury Rig slowly shook his head, being careful not to move his body and disturb his immersed nerves. “They’re not going to stop hurting us. Not unless we hurt them back, and harder.”

“But the Confederacy has huge armies, huge fleets.” My voice quavered with emotion; there was no reason for a teenager to be this hard-hearted, not at an age when he should’ve been learning and playing and enjoying life. “Are you sure that’s a realistic goal? What if resistance only hastens our annihilation?”

“They were gonna do it anyway. They’re not leaving us alone. They’re toying with us, like a cat toys with a mouse. Three years to reckon with the horror of it all. Three years of living twisted half-lives, drifting like ghosts through the ruins. Ma’am, this is systematic torture. There is no other explanation for it. They’re torturing us on purpose. Gloating and waving our defeat over our heads until it sinks in. You know it. I know it. And I—” Jury Rig bared his teeth. “I will punish them for every single thing they’ve done.”

I reached up and turned off my audio recorder, my legs trembling with fear and sorrow. I was left reeling by the boy’s words, my mind racing. What am I even doing, here? Am I fishing for somepony who’ll say something bad about the Empire? Restoring our nation against all odds is the last hope these ponies have. I have no right to take that away from them.

“I thought—I thought there could be peace, finally,” I said. “I thought they’d leave us alone. We’re not a threat to them anymore, so why?”

“We’re an inconvenience,” Jury Rig said. “If we have too much contact with other civilizations in our present state, eventually, someone is going to ask some uncomfortable questions about genocide, with wide-reaching political implications. They’ve got to shut us up before that can happen, or it’ll cost them. Face it. Peace was never in the cards. Any lull in the fighting is just a pretense for them to gather their strength and plot against us. Ma’am, I’m not stupid. I study, I read, I know these things. I know our history, and I know electronics. I’ve been using a soldering iron since I had a pacifier in my mouth. My dream was to join the Conclave, one day, before it all fell apart. The Empress was right. We need all hooves on deck. More support for the sciences. More appreciation of technology. I’d be a cripple if it weren’t for Magtech.”

“Isn’t that kind of bleak?” I said. “Abandoning the arts, so we can have more machines of war and death?”

“Yeah, it is. But it’s either that, or we all die, and nopony gets to paint, sculpt, or noodle on guitar anymore.”

“But ponies need culture. It’s vital for our mental health to be able to express ourselves.”

Jury Rig chuckled softly. “I know this is going to sound like a no-brainer, but it’s pretty hard to express yourself when you’re unarmed and dead. Go tell that to the hippies and the buskers and all the other idlers you know, if any are still alive. We could’ve used them. Their time would have been better spent arming and equipping Equestrian soldiers rather than getting stoned out of their minds and denying reality. Maybe things could’ve been different. Maybe, just maybe, I wouldn’t have needed to watch my house disappear in a flash of light, with all my toys, all my photo albums, stamp collections, bottle tops, my bicycle—and my mom, my cousin, my cousin’s best friend, and my kid sister inside.”

I shook my head, barely holding back my tears. “I’m so, so sorry.”

“She was five years old. You think they cared? I went to the bottom of that crater, filled up with sewage and water from broken mains, and I dug through the mud, looking for something, anything. A scrap of hair. I didn’t care if I got an infection or whatever. I think I got pink eye for a couple days, but I dunno. It could’ve been the crying, from when I shed every last tear in my body. There was nothing. They’d turned to dust. Why do you think I always put on a happy face for everypony? It’s because I don’t want them to feel the way I did that day. Nopony deserves to feel that rotten.”

I slowly rose to my shaking hooves. “This has been very enlightening. Thank you, Private.”

“Any time.”

“I wish you a full and speedy recovery.”

Jury Rig sighed. “Thanks.”

My forehead beaded with sweat. I needed to get away. I needed to get away from that judging, glowing blue slit of an eye. It felt like the young stallion could literally see right through me. Argent Tincture’s own accusing eyes tracked me as I departed. I looked for the nearest portable sink, and finding one of the blue plastic devices, I filled the basin and splashed my face a few times, panting with dread. I’d almost cracked up right there in the infirmary. Images of my missing husband and my daughter had flashed through my mind like a slideshow. I had very little confidence in my ability to remain objective. We’d all lost something dear to us. We all shared that same pain.

I stared down into the sink as I unplugged the drain. “Fuck. Fuck!”

I saw Corporal Cloverleaf walk past me. She was pacing back and forth, her body language betraying her nervousness. Her eyes were wide and haunted. She was mumbling something to herself. As I approached her, I could just barely make out her words.

“They won’t get in. They won’t get in. They won’t get in.” When she saw me, her demeanor changed instantly, her terrified countenance instantly replaced with a false cheer. “Oh, hey there, Quill! Didn’t see you there.” A disingenuous grin etched itself onto her face, stretching her scarred cheek, though her brows bore the distinctive arch of worry.

“What were you going on about a second ago?”

The big green earth pony bit her lip. “Nothing. Nothing at all.”

I looked down at her right foreleg. A bionic limb replacement. Its green matched her coat perfectly and had some amazing decorations on it, with airbrushed floral designs. It had the word Unbroken on the front of it. As I walked around to the side, I could see that the rear of her foreleg had even more script; it read, Unbowed.

“Wow, where’d you get that?” I said. “It’s nice!”

Cloverleaf recoiled as if struck, her face curling into a hateful snarl. “Oh yeah, ask about the leg first thing. What are you? The journalist from Tartarus? Do you ask every granny on the street where she got her cane?”

My eyes widened; when she put it that way, it sounded horrible. I waved my forehooves from side to side. “I didn’t mean anything by it, Clover! I just liked the paint job, that’s all.”

The Corporal’s expression softened. She lifted her leg and looked it over admiringly. “The Sergeant gave it to me. Her and the techs.”

“Wow.” I found myself reevaluating Storm, in light of this generosity. “What a thoughtful gift!”

Clover smiled sadly. “Ponies are always so mean to the Sergeant. I don’t get it. She saved me. Hell, she’s put her life on the line for us more than once. I’ve never seen her hesitate to run right into the fray. Whatever threatens us, she takes it head-on and gives it a good whipping. The resistance is better for her presence. That’s what I feel.” Cloverleaf’s eyes were brimming with tears. “Storm’s always getting hurt. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her not hurting from something. They always push her so hard. One of these days, there’s not gonna be anything left of her, and we’ll only have ourselves to blame.”

I gazed at the floor of the mine, deep in thought, before returning my attention to the Corporal. “This has been very illuminating. Thank you for your time.”

“Yeah, sure.” Clover nodded.

As Corporal Cloverleaf went to attend to her own business, I kept walking, making my way towards the Charger bay. Sergeant Storm’s intimidating machine of war was crouched in the center of the cavernous space, attended to by a small army of technicians. They were assisted by large and powerful robot arms that swept around and did much of the heavy material-handling work. I watched with rapt attention as the techs performed their duties, each according to their race’s specialty.

Unicorns performed the difficult tasks requiring a degree of manual dexterity not afforded by hooves, using their levitation to lift and precisely manipulate large and cumbersome-looking tools, many of which I did not recognize. Pegasi used their wings to reach the upper hull of the vehicle without needing pony-lifts or ladders, carefully inspecting the Charger’s head. Earth ponies did much of the grunt work, moving heavier components and towing carts laden with tools and things of that nature. It looked positively grueling. Most of them had their coats slathered with oil and grime and were barking instructions at each other, cursing intermittently whenever one of them made some boneheaded mistake that wasted valuable time.

I approached Sergeant Storm and Private Granthis, but then quickly hid behind a tool chest when I noticed them conversing privately.

“You never told me your sister was a mech pilot,” Desert Storm said. “Just how many of your family are military or politicians?”

Mardissa Granthis let out an exasperated sigh. “Almost all of them. You didn’t hurt her too badly, I hope.”

“She’ll probably lose an arm.” Storm was apprehensive at the silence and the slack-jawed glare that she got from the cleomanni woman. “What? What’s that look for? She was trying to fucking kill me, you know!”

“Yeah, I know.” Private Granthis’ shoulders slumped. “I just don’t like it when family gets hurt.”

“I know exactly how you feel.” Storm nodded. “By the way, Cicatrice and his team have recovered the Djinn, or what’s left of it. Looks like they tried scuttling it, but our guys stopped ‘em in the nick of time. Silassa was nowhere to be found. We think they successfully extracted her.”

“What’s so special about that thing?”

“Brains, Mar. The systems are run by a shackled unicorn cyberbrain. They need to be. It uses magtech.”

Mardissa was taken aback. “That’s illegal!”

Storm chuckled. “Mar, I doubt the Confederacy really sees anything as illegal enough to let it stand as an obstacle between them and ultimate power.”

“The law predates the formation of the FTU.” Granthis was looking increasingly panicked by the second. “It’s from the time of the Devourers. An artifact from the Confederacy’s founding. Abandoning it is a big deal. If the nemrin knew, they’d be furious. They might even pull out of the Union!”

Storm’s lips slowly pulled into a grin. “Wouldn’t that be nice?”

“I think I see where you’re going with this.”

“What we have is evidence.” Storm nodded. “It shows that the Confederacy have crossed a red line. They’ll deny everything. They always do. But it sows doubt among their allies, and that’s plenty enough for our purposes.” The Sergeant reared up and put a hoof on Mardissa’s shoulder. “Mar, the techs are just finishing up. Dingoes are coming, next. I gotta get back out there. We’re not leaving the Centaur behind on the hill, this time. We’re pushing these fuckers back. Tell everyone to get their shit ready.”

“Yes, ma’am!” Mardissa nodded curtly and strode away from the Sergeant, right towards my hiding place.

As Storm went to board the Mirage, I stepped out in front of Mardissa and waved. “Hey, Miss Granthis, can I have a moment of your time?”

Mar frowned for a second before she recognized me. “Oh, you’re Quill. Quill Dipper, right? I’m very busy. Were you eavesdropping? The hell do you want?”

I clicked my recorder on. “Flash interview! The Granthis family are very wealthy. I know for a fact that your father is worth billions of credits and has a large estate on Maroch III. What convinced you to abandon your fortune, join the cause of ponykind, and fight against your own people?”

Mardissa snorted with derision. “Are you serious? Look around you. Half this town is hiding in a salt mine. The other half is out there, being processed into horse meat by nonstop shelling. If we don’t do something about these damarkinds, the situation is going to get immeasurably worse.”

“You didn’t answer my question. What convinced you give up everything and join the rebels?”

“The fuck are you on about?” Mardissa’s eyes narrowed dangerously. “You know damn well that your people are going extinct in the wild, and the rest are being—what, domesticated? Are you really so eager to turn down help?”

“No, I—”

Mardissa glared at me, kneeling in front of me so that we were at eye level. “Let me make one thing crystal clear. I don’t like watching you wander around this base, fucking with ponies whose morale is already shot, spewing your useless, defeatist nonsense. I don’t care for your silly, irrelevant questions. I used to sit in on meetings of Union delegates. I used to eat hack journalists for breakfast and preening sociologists for dinner. If I wanted to watch you masturbate in public, I would’ve brought a camera and a tripod. Fuck off!”

I was stunned into speechlessness. Eyes wide, jaw slack. I’d never been spoken to like that by an interviewee. I had absolutely no idea how to respond. I held that posture for several seconds while Mardissa left to attend to her own business. I could already tell that the book I was going to write was bound to be a colorful tale indeed.

Mardissa genuinely saw herself as heroic for becoming a turncoat and abandoning her family’s wealth and comforts. Ponies like me didn’t fit into her daring and romantic vision of what an adventure should look like. I reminded her of a home that she hated, full of boringly practical people who didn’t like taking risks and didn’t want to die young.

We were all headed towards our doom, clearly, but there was something else in the air that I couldn’t quite put my hoof on. Maybe, in another time, in another place, it could have been called hope.

// … // … // … // … // … //

Desert Storm

I slipped into my syncsuit, the shrapnel holes freshly mended by the techs. The faux-leather saddle of my Charger groaned under my weight as I settled in, my hooves locking into the stirrups. I winced, hissing through gritted teeth. My guts still hurt. Everything hurt.

“Fuck’s sake.” I levitated a bottle of ibuprofen out of my first aid bin, placed a pill on my tongue, and tossed it back without any water. It was no fent, but it would take the edge off a little. I needed to stay sharp.

The sync arm lowered over my back and snapped into place over my spine, sending a wave of tingling sensations from my head down to my hooves. I went down my checklist to make sure I didn’t miss anything. Battery voltage, good. The Charger’s main electrical bus was still paralleled to the base’s power, keeping everything topped off. New armor plates had been attached to my frame, my glacis was back in place, and I’d been freshly rearmed with a pair of newly uncrated and hastily qualified HBCs and a full ammo load for the forties and missile launchers.

“BD, initiate startup sequence,” I said.

“You got it, boss.”

The turbomolecular pumps began spinning up, pulling a hard vacuum on the reactor chamber. I watched as the status indicators for the reactor winked green on my readout, one after another.

“Prepare for beam injection.” I could hear the tiredness in my voice.

“Coolant pressure and flow nominal,” Black Devil said. “Ion guns ready on your command.”

“Mark.” I watched as the indicators for the ion guns flared green, and then the polywell itself immediately thereafter. “Hey, BD?”

“Yeah?”

I thought back to all the times it’d been just me and her. All alone. Endless alien dunes before us. Flattened cities behind us. Smoke and fire all ‘round. I never appreciated her enough. I never appreciated how diligently she’d kept me safe. I’d been a bad friend.

“No matter what happens, I thought you ought to know.” I fixed my weary eyes on the figure in the holotank and the quizzical expression on her face. “You were my only real pal.”

BD held a hoof to her mouth, shocked and blushing at my confession. I gazed at the main viewscreen, where the cracked panel glass had been freshly replaced. The sync rate percentage racked up to ninety-nine-point-eight. The highest I’d ever seen it. Motes of rainbow light danced down my instrument panels in the corners of my eyes, vanishing when I looked directly at them. I tried blinking it away, but the apparitions wouldn’t leave the corners of my eyes. I felt lightheaded.

Our instructors had warned us about this. Gestalt Frame Superimposition Effect. An all-spectrum emanation that some pilots witnessed when achieving exceedingly high synchronization rates. Some called it a faint echo of the legendary Rainbow Power. I suddenly became aware that I could feel, with astounding depth and fluency, the emotional states of every single pony on the base. Thousands of them. I could feel their fear, their pain, their sorrow, and their anger. A nightmarish jumble of sensations that pressed on my mind. I could hear the faint whispers of their subconsciouses in my head.

Why won’t they leave us alone?

I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die.

Mommy! Where’s my mommy?

Get them. I’ll get them first. Cleomanni bastards. I’ll go out there. Beat them all to death with my bare hooves. They think I’m hiding from them? Au contraire. They’re hiding from me!

Had I not been accustomed to such feelings in recent months, I would have collapsed right then and there, my lips covered in froth. Instead, something strange happened. As I felt the emotions of the great multitudes swelling and swaying within me, I let go of all malice and contempt and fear and other such pointless attachments. Friend? Foe? Such false distinctions between peoples arose from the Archons’ lies and deception. I beheld an essential truth; a universe filled with kindred souls that I wanted nothing more than to protect from the Archons’ vile depredations. I watched as the sync rate crept up to ninety-nine-point-nine. The rainbow light that filled the cockpit became more intense, streaking towards the center of my field of vision. My nerve endings were on fire. I felt like I wanted to scream.

“Sergeant!” BD said. “Oh fuck, Synchronicity Event!”

Rainbow flames licked their way up my legs, the sync rate reaching an impossible one hundred percent.

I blacked out.

// … // … // … // … // … //

Quill Dipper

I heard it before I saw it. The roar of magic energies beyond imagining. The Charger technicians were scrambling over each other, trying desperately to escape. The walls of the salt cavern were painted in blinding sheets of rainbow light.

“Oh fuck!” the Chief Armorer shouted. “GeFRASE! Run! Fucking run!”

When I turned and my eyes fell upon Desert Storm’s Charger, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Billowing rainbow flames licked up the machine’s legs, its hooves aglow with flickering rainbow light. A mane of rainbow-colored energy rose from its head, a white halo of magic suspended vertically between its antennae. Without warning, the Charger hunched, and then sprang forward, taking off at a gallop, its hooves trailing rainbow flame. It was coming straight for me. I clenched my eyes shut. One of the technicians tackled me out of the way at the last second before I was crushed to death. I could feel the icy-hot tingle of arcane energies as it nearly blistered my skin, the machine’s hooves passing me by mere millimeters, kicking up clods of dirt. I slowly rose to my hooves and patted the salt from my muzzle and my chest, my eyes stinging. I watched, flabbergasted, as the Charger raced up the tunnel towards the circle of twilit sky that was the mine’s entrance, over a hundred meters up-slope, the beating of its hooves growing fainter every moment.

“The fuck was that?” I said. “What the fucking hell was that?”

“Synchronicity!” the technician yelled. “Come on, it’s not safe! The Sergeant’s a lost cause!”

“What do you mean lost cause?” I said.

“No way she’s still conscious. Pilots that hit that level of sync, they meld with their Anima system, and it’s lights out. She’s a zombie. We have no fucking idea what she’ll do!”

I was shocked by his words. The military regularly made use of these machines, even though the possibility existed that a Charger and its pilot could go completely out of control. “How often does this happen?”

The pegasus shook his head. “Rare. Exceedingly rare. Something must have set ‘er off. Probably all the damn refugees and one very stressed out pilot. Come on, get to shelter!”

I ignored him. I had to see this with my own eyes. I pulled out my headcam, strapped it on, and started recording, taking off at a dead sprint after Storm’s Charger. The technician shouted after me, but eventually, he got fed up, barking dismissive profanity before running to save his own skin. As I crested the mouth of the tunnel, stumbling on the loose gravel, what I saw nearly made my heart skip a beat. Our lines were being assaulted by waves of ugly and primitive battle tanks made from riveted steel. I watched with dismay as heavy explosive shells blew our side’s machine gun nests sky-high, sending sandbags and bits of ponies into the air. I pulled out my still camera, zooming in on one of the interlopers with my telephoto lens, carefully bringing them into focus. What I saw made me gasp so hard, I almost dropped my camera.

The tank was obviously of damarkind make and had damarkind crews. The over-muscled, heavily armed beasts sat perched on its hull, riding into battle tank desant. However, that wasn’t the shocking part. When they dismounted, belt-fed machine guns at the ready, I could see the colorful patchwork of pony hides that they’d stretched over the vehicle’s hulking frame.

“Oh,” I said. “Oh fuck. This was a mistake. Nope. Nope! Fuck everything about that.”

I panned around, looking for a mech enveloped in rainbow flames, but there was no sign of Storm or her Charger anywhere. As the mercenaries charged our lines, fully intent on overrunning us, the militia pulled back towards the mine entrance, a dozen of them forming a line in front of me. I watched as the nightmarish aliens leapt over sandbags and into our trenches, one mercenary element pinning the pony militia down with machine gun fire while another advanced down the trench line and butchered them with their knives. Though my heart flopped in my chest with abject fear, I kept recording and taking stills. It was a bloodbath. We were being slaughtered, one after another.

“Where the hell are our tanks?” one militia mare shouted.

“Above us!” a stallion yelled.

I turned around and looked up, just in time to see a half-dozen damarkinds leap from the cliffs above us. Three had landed and rolled to their feet by the time the fourth practically landed directly on top of me, using me to break his fall. My still camera was knocked from my hooves and tumbled into the dirt, the lens smashed and ruined. I gagged as an impossibly strong hand latched around my throat, lifting me into the air. I yelped in terror at the sight of the knife, the flash of chrome flickering in the corner of my vision, my bloodstream awash with adrenaline. The rank odor that the alien exuded was as overwhelming as it was disgusting. The foul beast drew me close to his drooling, toothy maw and grinned, his beady eyes gleaming with pleasure at the thought of the carnage to come.

I was an idiot for coming up here, and now, I was paying a terrible price for my curiosity.

“Why are you like this?!” I screamed, clenching my eyes shut from fear. “Is violence all you people know? Why can’t you listen to reason?”

The stillness of my captor made me cautiously crack open one eye, and then another. His fellow killers surged forward, hosing down the hapless militia with their machine guns, their weapons deafening me by their proximity. After a brief pause, he threw his head back and roared with laughter, before fixing his hateful gaze upon me.

“Reason? Your reason is poison, pony. Why would we hear your honeyed words, if all they do is make us weak and contemptible, like you? Hypocrite. Hypocrite, caitiff, and fool! If it were my brothers being killed instead of you, then you would have no complaints, would you? You’d be sitting and dining and fluffing your fur in silence, contented and oblivious. ‘Oh no’, you whine. ‘I don’t like being killed’. Well, that’s just it, isn’t it? No one does! There is only one law in this universe. One holds the knife. The other gets their flesh parted off from their bones. Somewhere along the way, you made a fatal error. You didn’t take up the blade, like your sisters. You took up the lens. A perfect reflection of your own passivity and arrogance. Instead of choosing to kill in defense of your own life, you chose to document your own death. Can you feel it? Can you feel the magnitude of your own failure?”

As the surprisingly articulate speech rattled off from the buzzing translator strapped to his chest, my eyes slowly widened with each word that crossed his black lips. His argument—and the way he appeared to wholeheartedly believe in it—horrified me to my very core. I looked back at the militia, watching with teary eyes as the damarkinds mercilessly cut them down. I couldn’t help but wonder if he was right. Though it was the evilest thing I could imagine, though his depraved words filled me with anger and disgust, I wondered if it was the truth after all. If one took his spiel at face value, then reality was a zero-sum game. A cruel and harsh moral wasteland where the winner took all and the loser was a rotting sack of meat. I refused to accept that.

“We’re people.” My voice was a pathetic mumble, tears dripping down my cheeks. “People reason. People commiserate. People make contracts and agreements. They don’t resort to this. People don’t do this to each other!”

“Ah, ah, ah,” he said. “So close, and yet, so far.” He thrust his blade into my guts, driving the wind out of me. “People do worse.”

It hurt. It hurt really bad. I always knew it’d hurt to die, but I never thought it’d be like this. The pinch of cold steel lodged in my abdomen made my heart leap into my throat. I could feel the blood running down my legs, dripping off the tips of my hooves. Storm had been correct, as reprehensible as her conclusions had been. I had been weak. So weak that my life and everything it represented—including all my years of diligent work—could be snuffed out with ease that bordered on the comical. The only consolation I had was that I was going to see my wonderful husband and my beautiful daughter real soon. I gritted my teeth, trying to stifle a scream.

“I’m—I’m not a combatant,” I said. “I’m a m—member of the press! You can’t do this!”

It was more than any mere indignation over my circumstances that I felt at that very moment. There was something wrong with this world. Something terribly, deeply wrong.

“Olive green,” the damarkind said. “I like your pelt. Take solace in the fact that you shall soon adorn my neck as a warm scarf.”

I sobbed fitfully as the beast left his weapon buried in my guts. He reached back and squeezed my rump, as if to highlight his total conquest over my body. His nostrils flared as he sniffed and salivated over me. He was checking the meat. Judging the skin and fur. I was a thing to him. Just a thing, and nothing more. Something to be groped and kneaded and processed into other things that brought him pleasure. My words meant nothing. I wasn’t even a person to him. I was food and clothing. Anything I could have told him was only a temporary distraction from the milliseconds it took him to see me and immediately decide my fate.

Something in my head finally clicked. This wasn’t a war. Wars had a goal and a purpose. They had terms and conditions. This was nothing but wanton and grotesque predation. As my eyes drank in the skins the mercenary wore over his armor and the headdress of pegasus feathers and wing bones atop his head, I realized that my own hide would soon join this ghastly collage. I let out a howl of anguish.

There was a deafening boom. Warm blood and a spray of brain and bone splattered my face. When I looked up, there was a divot dug through the damarkind’s skull, his head practically split in half. He released me and collapsed to the ground, twitching in his death throes. Behind him stood Mardissa Granthis, hefting a giant rifle, smoke rising from its muzzle. She did not look pleased. Her red eyes were fiery pits of rage. She advanced from the mouth of the tunnel, her weapon booming over and over again. Each report rattled my teeth and deafened me a little more, until my ears rang. It felt like my head was stuffed with cotton gauze.

Behind her, a Centaur APC crested the tunnel entrance, blasting away with its autocannon and strings of beamcaster fire. My whole world became scintillating laser lights and thunderous explosions. I wasn’t even sure if I was screaming or not. I could feel my vocal cords vibrating and air leaving my lungs, but I could not hear anything but ringing and the rushing of blood through my inner ears. My muzzle was covered in gore that was not my own, a knife still protruding from my aching belly.

A militia unit surged from the mouth of the tunnel, pegasi armed with missile launchers sending anti-tank missiles streaking across the gravel-covered field towards the incoming damarkind tanks. The macabre things were afforded no additional protection by the pony skins that decorated their hulls. Two of them quickly became bonfires, their ammo supplies burning down as the missiles’ warheads penetrated into their interior compartments.

The remaining damarkinds were no fools. They quickly retreated and took cover in the trench line they’d just captured, sending bursts of suppressive fire in our direction with those brutish-looking belt-fed machine guns of theirs. Mardissa slipped into cover behind the advancing Centaur as bullets pinged off its hull. The rest of Revenant were there right beside her, peeking out briefly and sending off bursts of caster fire as they continued to move up. Every now and then, Mardissa would lean out with her rifle and put a round in one of the mercs downrange. It was pure chaos, or so I thought. Nothing could have prepared me for the spectacle I witnessed next. One of the Chimeras crested the ridge of the hill atop the mine, rolling forward until their hull was on a downslope. A few of the mercs saw what was coming and tried to retreat, but it was too late. The Chimera crew hosed down the trench line with their anti-aircraft gun, turning anything and anyone still in the trenches into a fine paste. As they swept back and forth, the length of the trench looked like one contiguous explosion and sounded much the same.

One of the load-handling motorized carts that the technicians used to move Charger parts wheeled out of the mouth of the tunnel. As bullets whizzed past us, I could feel legs wrap around me and raise me up, carrying me over to the vehicle’s cargo bed and tossing me into it. One after another, the militia gathered the casualties, throwing them into the back of the cart next to me. I was just one of a number of writhing and groaning bodies. As the others continued the counterassault, my world grew dark as I was driven back down into the depths of the mine. I could see Corporal Shooting Star looking back at me from Revenant’s formation as we passed them by.

The brightly maned unicorn grinned like a psychopath. “That’s what you get! That’s what you get when you don’t listen, ya’ dumbfuck!”

Now that the adrenaline was wearing off, the pain from the knife that impaled my guts was becoming unbearable. I whimpered and reached for it with blood-slicked hooves. A medic wearing a ball cap and sitting crouched on the motorized cart’s bed sprang into motion and batted my hooves away.

“Don’t pull it out!” he said. “You’ll bleed out!”

He readied something for the pain. A shot of some kind, from an autoinjector. The tip of the mouth-held device clicked into place over my neck. There was a brief sting before blessed analgesia followed in its wake. This was how the resistance lived, fought, and died. They were assailed on all sides by monsters, shot or stabbed to pieces, stacked like firewood in the back of a truck, delivered to the doc to patch them up, and then, right back out they went.

They did this over and over and over again, until it was too much. Until their minds and their bodies finally gave up.

It was the purest madness.

// … // … // … // … // … //

Desert Storm

The cosmos stretched out before me as I sailed through the void between the stars. My body had become an avatar of light. When I looked down, I saw the ghastly mark that the Archons had etched on my soul. The brand of a black four-pointed star within a semicircle on my abdomen glowed a deep, sinister purple, in stark contrast with the rainbow flame that wreathed every other part of me. I experienced mental clarity like I hadn’t felt since I was a foal. All my burdens, all the little aches and pains in my body, were completely gone. I sighed with palpable relief.

I passed several celestial bodies on a journey beyond my control, from lush and verdant terrestrial planets, to imposing orange gas giants, to gray and airless moons. I could see that there were ponies on those worlds. I witnessed their lights of consciousness, their divine sparks. I realized with a start that there were still ponies alive on other planets, far from Equestria, though I wasn’t sure exactly how I knew this. I could just feel it, as though it were a revelation from beyond. Whether they were free or enslaved, I could not know.

My journey came to a stop over a barren hell of a world, almost totally bereft of light, save for one tiny pinpoint in the inhospitable deserts below. I felt drawn to that precious, solitary light. I felt an irresistible urge to protect it from harm.

I experienced a strange sensation that I was witnessing the passage of a rather substantial amount of time. Darkness dimmed the corners of my vision, civilizations winking out of existence one after another, whole worlds stripped of life till they were barren and empty. A horrifying reality lay bare before me. I was frozen with terror, incapable of reacting, or even comprehending what I was seeing.

The magical glow around my body subsided as I took on a more familiar form. It felt like I was falling. Slowly, gently. A grassy field materialized beneath my hooves, stretching out towards infinity. Then, mountains, and rolling hills, and with them, the crispness of air after a fresh rain. Little hamlets formed in the valley before me, windmills and farmhouses being built, stone-by-stone, in time-lapse. The structures assembled themselves from nothing. I couldn’t see any ponies, or members of any other species, for that matter. I sat down hard, stunned by the serene beauty of my surroundings.

When I turned towards the ethereal glow at my side, I was startled to find myself sitting beside the Martyred Maiden. Celestia stared out forlornly into the distance, her eyes bearing a depth of sorrow I could scarcely comprehend. Her form seemed to shift, indistinct. From certain angles, I could almost see what she looked like when she was whole. She was gorgeous, once.

“Cattle,” she said. “They see us as nothing but cattle. The Archons harvest our love, our pain, every experience we had from birth until death. They’ve been doing so unimpeded since before there were planets and stars. The strongest predators in the universe. Oppressors without equal. Monstrous filth, fatted and indolent, rapacious in their despicable greed. My hatred for them equals my love for everything else. Once I recognized the threat they posed, in the ancient past, I tried protecting my ponies and hiding them away. I tried to keep them from falling into darkness and coming under the influence of the Lords of Matter like so many other races in the galaxy before us. It was a venture many millennia in the making. I failed in that task.”

There was a long pause as I carefully considered my words, finding myself coming up short. “Princess, I—I don’t know what to say.”

“Little one, I may have been exceedingly harsh when first we met.” Her gaze met mine. “You have experienced things that no pony should ever have to experience. Strange, how your adoration for a construct brought you to me. You do realize that she’s not a pony anymore, right?”

“Then what are you?” I said. “You don’t have a body, either.”

Celestia smirked, looking down at her cracked and ruined hooves. “I’ve asked myself that question many, many times. I shouldn’t even be here.”

“Where is here?” I ran my hoof through the grass, watching the blades rebound. “This isn’t like before. This feels almost real.”

“One of the places-in-between,” Celestia said. “A realm where the world of mind and the world of matter intersect. Call it the Conjunction, if you will.”

All of a sudden, my Charger materialized in the grassy field before us, its menacing appearance a stark contrast to our idyllic environs. I was so surprised, I yelped and almost fell over backwards.

Without an ounce of fear, Celestia stood and walked closer to it, placing her hoof on its left foreleg, knocking on it a few times, the composites thudding solidly in response. “I can see her handiwork. Oh, my most faithful student. I cannot imagine what she must have suffered, for her to want to build something so evil to repay it.”

“Black Devil isn’t evil,” I said. “She’s my companion. I need her, and she needs me. Wherever we go, Charger and Pilot are one.”

Celestia looked up at the Mirage’s head, sighing wearily. “Friendship, huh? Interesting.”

The Martyred Maiden spread her bloodied and frayed wings, flapping them a few times as she lofted herself into the air. Moments later, she alighted on the head of my Charger, tapping a hoof to her chin as she looked down at the casing over the radome and the spell locus. With her magic, she pulled the locus crystal out of my machine’s head, levitating it in front of her and studying it intently.

I took a few steps closer, furrowing my brows. “Hey!”

“A good effort,” Celestia said. “But fundamentally wrong. The enchantment is flawed. There is absolutely no reason why this crystal shouldn’t be able to channel every spectrum of magic.”

Princess Celestia charged her horn, the glow of her magic blinding in its overwhelming brilliance. I had to squeeze my eyes shut and cover them with my foreleg to keep my retinas from hurting. When the glow subsided, the focus crystal remained, only now, it was a different color. Gone was the faint amber hue of an Illusion locus, replaced with a bright white glow tinged with prismatic emanations that curled in and out of each facet of the spell locus like a star’s corona. She replaced it in its casing, the crystal seeming to slip straight through the armor plating of my Charger’s head without resistance.

“What did you do?” I said. “Answer me!”

“A little gift. When Twilight sees it, she will know what to do with it.” Celestia turned towards me, smiling broadly. “You’ve heard from the Archons, haven’t you, in spite of everything?”

“Yes,” I said. “I have.” My shoulders slumped with defeat.

“That evil ritual that Cicatrice taught you didn’t keep them at bay as well as you thought it would, did it? Now you know the price of killing. Desert Storm, are you ready to be my Soldier of Light?”

I contemplated her words for several seconds, unsure if I should trust a spiritual entity that happened to resemble a long-dead ruler of ours. “What do I have to do?”

“It’s very simple,” Celestia said. “Stop killing the innocent. In return, I will protect you from the Archons and their malign influence. I don’t care how many of the deserving that you put to death.” Her eyes narrowed. “However, if you kill defenseless people again, I shall strip my boons from you, and you will truly belong to the darkness.”

I stood straighter, weighing the responsibility that she’d placed on my shoulders. I would need to modify my tactics to prevent civilian deaths from now on. Lure enemies out of urban areas. Protect structures from damage. Avoid indiscriminate artillery fire. In exchange, a spiritual entity of incredible power vouchsafed her aid against the Archons, promising to guard my soul from damnation. The choice was clear.

“I accept,” I said.

Celestia smiled down at me from atop my Charger’s head. She flapped her giant wings a few times as she dismounted from the Mirage and came to a rest on the ground before me. “There is so much more I could tell you, but we’re running out of time. You have a battle to fight and ponies to save. I have a little magic lesson for you, and then, I’ll do something about that mark. So long as you never lay a hoof on the innocent, you won’t have to worry about hearing the Archons’ voices in your head.”

“Magic lesson?” I scratched my head.

“How good are you at things like levitation?”

“You mean Arcane magic?” I said.

Celestia pinched her brow with a fetlock, sighing hard. “Is that what they’re calling it, now? Yes, then. Arcane magic. Kind of an overdramatic name for the most basic kind of magic in existence. Magic of that spectrum is very neutral and largely uncolored by emotion or will. It involves the manipulation of simple physical forces. Gravity, kinetic energy, and so on.”

“I’ve never been very good at levitation,” I said. “The most I can do is a few tons at a time.”

Celestia chuckled condescendingly. “I think you’re selling yourself short, Sergeant. To be good at levitation and other spells like it, you have to be dispassionate and restrained. Rare indeed is the unicorn who can press through their fear and anger and yet levitate things with considerable force. And yet, you’ve done exactly that. I wonder how much more powerful you’d be if you learned how to rein in your emotions better. A lesson for another time, I suppose.”

I frowned. “You can read my mind?”

“Of course. I’m in your mind right now, aren’t I? Where do you think we are? How do you think the Archons communicate without the benefit of mouths? Telepathy, in the sense of information somehow being transported from one place to another by fiat, isn’t real. All information propagates through the fabric of spacetime. The minds of living creatures are a part of that fabric.”

“So, you’re saying that strict materialism is true,” I said. “That the soul is something physical in nature.”

Celestia grinned wide. “My, my. You do catch on quick. Close, very close, but not quite. At certain levels of reality, the distinctions between the physical and the abstract begin to break down. However, we’re getting off on a tangent, here. We need to stay focused. I want you to listen close. I’m only going to say this once.”

“I’m listening.”

“Lora, Vienttu, Berdaros.”

Celestia charged her horn and a barrier spell snapped into existence around her, a golden sphere of magic encircling her spirit’s form.

“A barrier? That’s basic stuff. Arcanists are taught that in our first year at the academy.”

Celestia dropped her barrier. “Then why do you never use it?”

“Because.” I winced. “I’m a Bronze-rank Arcanist, and a Silver-rank Illusionist.”

“Show me.”

I shrugged, letting out a sigh. “Okay, sure.”

I did the incantation, charged my horn, and tried coalescing a barrier around myself. A ragged, distorted sphere of orange magic slowly began to encircle me, before the strain became too much. The spell guttered out, the barrier failing like a popped soap bubble.

“I can’t do it!” I said, stamping a hoof with frustration. “I’ve never been able to do it right.”

“That’s because you’ve never mastered yourself,” Celestia said. “And I mean that quite literally. It takes discipline to perform this spell correctly. Barriers come easily to a serene mind. Try again. This time, let go of your fear and your hatred. Be at peace. It’d be good for you to relieve yourself of some of that stress, anyway. I don’t know how you can stand it.” Celestia grimaced. “Do you ever unclench your jaw?”

I took two deep breaths, the cold and refreshing air of this place calming my nerves. I charged my horn. “Lora, Vienttu, Berdaros!”

I poured more energy into the spell, almost getting the barrier to coalesce fully. This time, I almost had it. Then, my dying sister’s agonized face flashed in my mind. An unquenchable hatred for the Confederacy welled up within me. Again, the barrier failed, the magic dispersing into the air.

“I can’t!” I said.

“You can,” Celestia said. “You can and you must.”

“Why does it matter to you if I can do it or not?” I scowled at her as I marched up to her without hesitation or fear, in spite of her imposing size. “You’re long-dead, aren’t you? Why do you care about the living anymore?”

Celestia gently thumped her hoof against my chest. “It’s not for my sake, but for yours. There will be ponies that you will need to protect with all of your might. With your magic in this state, you won’t be able to fulfill your duties. Twilight Sparkle performed barrier magic quite frequently. She mastered teleportation when she was a third your age. In my time, this kind of performance from a professional spellcaster would have been considered disgraceful.”

“I am not Twilight Sparkle.” I waved my hoof dismissively. “She’s an alicorn and a talent without equal. Her magical ability put the next dozen of the top Platinum-Ranks to shame. The scale doesn’t even go that high.”

Celestia smiled softly. “It will come to you, in time. You know what you need to do.” Celestia draped a foreleg over my shoulder, pulling me close to her chest. She was oddly physical, for a ghost. She felt solid, and not ethereal. “Don’t give up. Never give up, you hear me? Don’t let it all be in vain.”

I returned the gesture, placing my leg alongside her barrel. “I won’t.”

The wind whistled through the grass, louder by the moment. The world was bathed in blinding white light. There was a burning sensation in my gut, like a scalpel tracing its way through my skin without anesthetic. I squeezed my eyelids shut, trying to steady my breathing. I had to endure it. If I couldn’t, then I wasn’t worthy to bear the mantle placed upon my shoulders.

I screamed as the otherworldly heat scorching my nerve endings overcame my resolve. Everything went white.

// … // … // … // … // … //

I let out a startled cry as my eyes flashed open and I regained consciousness, finding myself back in my Mirage’s cockpit with a hammering headache. An omni-directional sphere of rainbow fire burst forth from my machine as the Synchronicity Event ended. All that pain and tension I experienced on a daily basis had returned, with a vengeance. Tears filled my eyes. I immediately longed to go back to wherever it was I’d just left. I scanned my status readouts, checking for any signs of damage.

“BD, report!” I rasped out, coughing a few times, my throat inexplicably parched. “Is the spell locus damaged?”

“That’s a negative. It’s working fine. Too fine. I’m getting readings from it that I can’t make heads or tails of.”

“What kind of readings?”

“Sergeant, I don’t know how to explain this, but it’s no longer an Illusion locus. It’s not any locus I’ve ever seen or heard of.”

“Put it up on the screen,” I said.

A picture-in-picture readout appeared on the main viewscreen, displaying the status of my spell locus. I blinked a few times in shock as I went over the spectral attunement readings of my locus. The star graph looked like a ring, indicating that it was attuned to every spectrum of magic.

“What. The. Fuck?”

It was an everything-locus. The holy grail. Something that Charger engineers had long sought, but never achieved in practice. My Charger was now host to the only known sample of a cutting-edge enchantment that could revolutionize Charger design. I started panting faster and faster, barely able to contain myself. If I were to fall in combat now, it would be an immeasurable loss.

“Put me in touch with Command,” I said.

“They’re not responding,” BD said. “Could be their radio’s out.”

“Well, that’s just fucking great.”

“Uh, boss?” Black Devil said. “We got company!”

I glanced at my scope, nervously chewing the inside of my cheek. I was sitting very exposed in the middle of no-mare’s land, southeast of the mine. There was a formation of mercenary Ravager tanks bearing down on me, on my ten o’clock. I nearly gagged at the sight of them. The Boarhead Company had decorated their vehicles with pony hides, the colorful and macabre patchwork quilts a stark contrast to the drab grays and browns of the storm-beaten, muddy, twilit plain. The lead vehicle got a bead on me and started blasting away. I fired my thrusters and evaded to the side, heavy anti-tank shells sailing past me. As their formation peeled open, I saw the bright tan-painted monstrosity that sat at the center of the enemy tank platoon.

The Mauler-Longboy was one of the oddest military vehicles that the damarkinds manufactured, and one of the most brutish of all their creations. Unlike most of their armored vehicles, its construction was mostly modern, with welded steel and composites instead of the primitive riveted plates that Ravagers were fashioned from. True to its name, it was longer than most tanks. Its hull consisted of two articulated segments, each a good fifteen meters in length, giving it a length-to-width ratio of three to one. With an overall length of over thirty meters, it was the size of a few main battle tanks placed end-to-end.

This was necessary, as its main armament, consisting of a turret with a pair of 76mm rotary-barrel cannons, needed ample hull volume for its ammo. This particular example had been fitted with a large in-air sonar atop its turret, specifically for detecting cloaked vehicles. The tank’s commander—or at least I assumed that was what he was, given the peaked officer’s cap, the gaudy, brass-buttoned uniform, and the blood-red capelet he wore—stood atop the vehicle’s turret, his left arm lazily draped over the top of the sonar. His right hand swept up from below as he drew his fingers together, leaving one upraised as he flipped me the bird.

My eyes widened as their guns began spinning up. I fired my boosters, accelerating on a course perpendicular to that of my enemy. The roar of the three-barrel rotary cannons was loud enough that I could feel it in my chest, right through my Charger’s hull, from a few hundred meters away. I was forced back into my saddle by several gees of acceleration, pushing the boosters as hard as I could. If I stopped for even a second, I was done. The Mauler’s guns ripped up the terrain behind me, digging long trenches in the muddy earth. I didn’t even bother cloaking. I wouldn’t give them the satisfaction of using their fancy detector.

As I circled closer towards them, I soon found myself surpassing their turret’s limited traverse rate. The others opened fire with their main guns, but I was too fast for them to track me.

I hit a lever on the missile control panel and rotated my launcher boxes so that they were level with the terrain. Direct-fire mode. Luckily for me, I’d had the technicians load them with KE bundles, anticipating an anti-armor fight. Each of my missile tubes had four line-of-sight anti-tank missiles. Thirty-two in all. These missiles had no explosive warhead, just a solid kinetic impactor weighing over fifty kilos. When they hit, they hit hard, with the force of a small bomb. While continuing to evade the incoming fire, I painted the enemy tank platoon with targeting locks for each and every one of them.

My pyrojets roared as I slammed on the brakes before launching myself into the air, jump-jetting into a backflip as the 76mm fire swept beneath me. When I leveled out, I fired my thrusters again to remain aloft, rotating in a hover to face the enemy tank formation. I mashed the missile launch pushbutton with my levitation. My Charger’s hull shook, dull thumps reverberating through my chest as dozens of KE missiles raced from their tubes, their guidance fins letting off doppler-shifted howls as they sliced the air. Every missile carried with it the energy of a half-dozen tank shells, a force utterly irresistible by any armored vehicle. Dozens of mercenary tanks were instantly blown to smithereens, their tracks, their hulls, and their turrets going their separate ways. The few infantry in the formation immediately scattered, some dropping their weapons in a panic and fleeing directly away from me and my relentless onslaught.

The Mauler crew had activated their Drapers, sacrificial contragrav drones that quickly formed a web of armored plates in front of two of the KE missiles that had locked onto both ends of the oversized tank. The rest of their vehicles were eradicated except for a pair of tanks that were lucky enough to be situated right in cover behind their fellows, and those two were retreating with all haste. The Mauler was still very much an active threat. They popped smoke, their turret-mounted smoke launchers flashing and sending a flurry of smoke grenades in all directions. They immediately reversed away into concealment, trying to keep the strongest part of their hull armor facing me.

After jettisoning my empty missile launchers, I flicked a few switches and activated my multi-spectral sensors. They may as well have been naked before me, for all the good their smoke did to prevent my reconnaissance-grade sensor array from picking up the outline of their hull.

“BD, arm the HBCs. Target the Mauler, 12 o’clock!”

The damarkinds opened up with one last, defiant burst from their rotary-barrel cannons, which I immediately and reflexively sidestepped by firing my pyrojet thrusters. I let loose a pair of heavy beamcaster pulses dead-center in their glacis. Even with as thick as their front armor was, they didn’t stand a chance. Their turret popped halfway off before falling back down on the hull. Then, their ammo stores went up, flames shooting out from underneath the turret ring. My audio receivers picked up screams.

The tank’s commander leapt from his hatch, his whole body on fire. He stumbled and tossed around and clawed at his uniform as he desperately tried to rip it off. Eventually, he resorted to dropping and rolling on the ground to put himself out. When he rose to his feet, his fur was singed, his uniform in tatters. He’d undoubtedly sustained third-degree burns to much of his body. The damarkind drew a heavy saber from the scabbard he wore at his hip, pointing it directly at me.

“Dihoet sunu’kettor idmar!” he bellowed. “A coward’s weapon, for a race of pathetic grazers! Dismount and face me, or you will always be a coward!”

I hovered in place, well over a couple hundred meters distant, my forties trained on him, my gun sights zoomed in far enough that he filled my front viewscreen. All it would have taken was one little squeeze of the triggers in my hoofcups to end his life.

I brought my machine forward and touched down fifty meters away from him, alarms sounding in the cockpit as I kneeled and popped the lower hatch. I threw on my jacket, opened one of my storage bins, and pulled my knife and its sheath from the saddlebag I’d tossed in there.

“The hell are you doing, ma’am?” BD said. “Area’s not secure!”

“I’m done with these fucking sons of bitches,” I said. “They come to our fucking planet, they run roughshod all over the place, doing fucked up, psychotic shit to ponies, and then, they have the nerve to talk shit even when we whip them. I’m gonna ram this thing through that son of a bitch’s fucking heart, and we’ll see how cocky he is afterward!”

Ignoring BD’s protests and the impracticality of answering the damarkind’s challenge, I dropped through the lower hatch, rolling to my hooves, wincing from all the little aches and pains from the injuries I’d accrued over the past few days. I unsheathed my knife and levitated it into the air as I trudged across the muddy field and approached him.

“When I put this blade through your quivering guts, I want you to know one thing,” I said. “You asked for this.”

He broke out in hearty laughter. “Who would’ve thought? Such a machine, built for a craven assassin, and it’s piloted by none other than the Slayer!”

“What?”

“Blue hair, saffron fur. I know who you are, Desert Storm.” He turned and spat, as if the name was filth upon his tongue. “You have a growing reputation, you know. It’s not every day that my kin speak in fearful whispers of a member of your pathetic race who slaughters our kind with such contemptuous ease. I heard you crippled Broggas’s son. Surprised he let you live after that.”

“As if he could kill me,” I said. “As if any of you mangy mongrels could.”

“You know what I think?” There was a dangerous glint in his beady, bestial eyes as he raised his sword. “I think you’ve only faced little boys. You have yet to challenge a real Made Man.”

I held my knife before me in the orange glow of my magic. “Bring it.”

“That purloined Saggor you wield won’t save you, pony!”

He immediately took off at a dead sprint, charging towards me with his weapon held high, his feet kicking up clods of muck. I raised my knife and blocked his mad down-swing. We struggled, wrestling against one another for a few moments, my levitation working against the frightful strength of his arms. Now that he was close, I could see the skin hanging off his face. The damarkind was mortally wounded. He would’ve died in the hospital in a week, or a month, even with the best treatment available. He was ignoring the pain from his fatal burns, all for the sake of engaging in one last duel. One final dance with death.

“You see it, don’t you?” he said. “Soon, I will be no more. I bet you’d be blubbering and crying, if you had to suffer even an ounce of this agony. A true Seg’jakha never cries. Our convictions never waver, even in the face of certain death. You know what happens if I beat you, don’t you? You become my life’s final reward. A good fuck and a good meal. A perfect capper for a life of strength and honor!”

He brought his knee up and slammed it into my muzzle, sending me rolling backwards and skidding through the mud. I was dizzy, blinking away the stars in my vision as I rose, my nostrils dripping blood. He did not hesitate to seize the advantage, moving in for the kill. I howled a battle cry as I parried his slash with my knife and went for his chest. He back-stepped just out of range of my swipe, holding his weapon at the ready in a high guard as he circled around to my left.

“Why do your kind send your females to fight?” he said. “Are your males so thoroughly whipped and emasculated that they obey you?”

“Our culture has always prized feminine virtues,” I said. “Just about as much as yours worships cock, I guess.”

“The battlefield and the hunting grounds are places for males.” He drew his muzzle into a hateful snarl. “Males are born victors. Males penetrate, as do bullets, as do arrows. Females bend and receive seed, wallowing with their gravid bellies. It is a loathsome perversion for females to fight, to dominate, to overcome. An inversion of nature. Do you penetrate your males in bed, too?”

I threw my head back in a mad cackle, blood running from my sinuses and down the back of my throat. “I’m about to penetrate you with several inches of cold steel, you fucking goon.”

The damarkind let out an enraged roar as he charged me with his blade. It was time to end this pathetic charade. As he swung his weapon at me with a savage downward slash, I drew my stored anger from my pendant and channeled it into a Body-Seize spell. The moment before his blade could connect with my head, every muscle in his right arm lost coordination, his saber falling from his grip and landing in the mud. He was my puppet, and I held the strings.

Putting as much force behind my levitation as possible, I ran my knife straight through his sternum, burying the blade halfway in his chest, right through bone. I reared up and slammed my hoof into the knife’s pommel, driving it in the rest of the way.

The bastard’s left hand came up, his long, leathery fingers latching around my throat and lifting me off my hind legs. I kicked and struggled as he raised me into the air until I was level with his face. The damarkind bared his long rows of sharp, carnivorous teeth.

“Where I come from, we burn witches!” he roared.

“Good!” I drew my lips into a bloodstained grin. “That’s what they’ll put on your tombstone!”

Most mares would have been helpless in this position, without the aid of magic. Most mares didn’t know Imperial Army Combatives, or how to perform the Python. I brought my hoof up and smashed it into the underside of his wrist, breaking it. Then, I wrapped my hind legs around his outstretched upper arm, grabbing his hand and forearm in my forelegs. I twisted both ends of his arm in opposite directions, snapping his elbow like a twig. He screeched and desperately shook me off, sending me rolling through the muck. I was sure I’d pierced his heart. It was a miracle he was still standing.

He rushed forward and tried to tackle me, but I slipped between his legs and latched my forelegs around his ankle, pulling his leg backwards with all the force I could muster, tripping him and sending him sprawling face-first in the muddy field. As he tried crawling towards his fallen sword, the two of us wrestled in the muck, coated all over with filth. A raw and primal struggle. I crawled atop his back, avoiding his thick mane of hair, and I got my forelegs around his muzzle. Damarkinds had strong cervical spines, resistant to breakage, but the length of their faces worked against them, serving as a lever. He tried clawing back at me, but his swipes slashed through my jacket and deflected off my syncsuit’s pauldrons. I gritted my teeth and growled as, bit by bit, I twisted his head. With a wrathful scream, I exerted every ounce of force my muscles could muster, and with a loud pop, I snapped the fucker’s neck.

Panting from exertion, I slowly rose to my hooves. My opponent lay still, death having finally taken him. When I looked up, I noticed that I had drawn a crowd of onlookers. Boarhead mercenary infantry had crept up on me, weapons held low. Despite my initial apprehension and my lack of ranged armaments, they did not move to attack. They looked almost confused, if their body language was any indication.

I grinned, my pearly whites no doubt contrasted by the mud that stained my face. “That’s right. I’m the fucking predator, here. You step on this battlefield, and your life belongs to me. You got that?”

I could hear them murmur with speculation. It had to be an accident of nature, they thought. Perhaps something in my DNA. Others entertained fanciful ideas, such as the soul of one of their long-dead legendary warriors somehow transmigrating into my embryo before my birth. However, the truth was none of those things. I was one hundred percent pony, except more motivated than average. I represented the potential of my species, when we put down the knitting needles and stopped tending the flower gardens, and got very, very mad.

Because we were forced to. Because it was either that, or we would suffer fates worse than death. My frame sagged. I felt strangely exhausted. Chilled to my very bones. Here in Tar Pan, we were so close to the remnants of civilization, and yet, so far removed from its comforts. There was no reward left in any of this. Just the killing. Just killing for its own sake. Just killing for the sake of pure hatred.

The damarkinds drew their knives and held them aloft in the air as they began to chant in unison. “Strahum de Skwiidis’jaak! Strahum de Skwiidis’jaak!”

I watched, transfixed, as several of them moved to collect their leader’s corpse, raising him onto their shoulders in a funerary procession, their knives held against their chests as they marched beside him. They carried him to the Jakha, one of their leader’s trusted lieutenants. After briefly inspecting the body, he grabbed the handle of the knife still embedded in the Seg’jakha’s chest and pulled it out with a grunt. After flicking the blood off of it, he retrieved a small anvil, a hammer, and a punch, though why he carried these things on his person, I had no idea. I was soon to find out. He kneeled, placed the anvil on the ground, placed the blade atop it, placed the tip of the punch against the side of the blade, and then brought his mallet down with one mighty blow, leaving an indented mark in the blade.

Then, leaving his tools behind, the master of the bizarre ceremony carried the blade back to me, presenting it to me in his outstretched palm.

“Sagros Kaussas was the last of his blood, and he left no issue,” he said. “With his defeat, there are none to carry on the legacy of the tribe. I witnessed you and your actions. You could have simply shot him, but you chose a different path. It is clear that strong blood runs in your veins, in spite of what you are. Soldiers are many, but warriors are few. Never forget a good kill, Storm the Slayer.”

I slowly levitated the blade out of his grasp, turning it over and inspecting the odd mark on the blade for a few moments before I placed it back in its scabbard.

“Yeah, great,” I said. “So, what happens now?”

“We must take our leave and convene shipboard.” He smiled, baring those freakishly sharp teeth of his. “The fates have shifted. There will be more contests of strength, in time. There is now great honor in taking your head, Slayer, but not here, not now. This is a time of mourning. The young ones will hear the story of Kaussas, and they shall carve idols, so that he and his forebears will live eternal.” The Jakha raised his hand and looked back towards the others. “D’yeand’harz! Assemble and move!”

As they moved off without further incident, I swallowed the lump in my throat, breathing a shaky sigh of relief. If it came down to it, I could’ve had BD operate her weapons in auto mode, but unless she restricted herself to the medium casters, the risk of her hitting and killing me by accident was high. If they’d all come after me at once, some seriously bad shit would’ve happened.

The Boarheads were out of the fight. One salvo of kinetic missiles in the right place at the right time was all it had taken to crush their dreams of senseless slaughter and debauchery. If we hadn’t been here, if the ELF hadn’t relocated to Tar Pan, all the inhabitants of this city would have suffered a gruesome end. I shuddered. Like Dodge, I thought.

I mounted back up on my machine, closing the lower hatch, stowing my knife and tattered jacket, mounting up on the saddle, and clicking my sync arm back in place. I checked my radar and unattended sensor feeds. There was a large enemy formation approaching from the south. I looked up at my forward viewscreen, zooming in on the Confederate force. There were twenty-plus Ifrits and a good hundred-plus Conqueror tanks surrounding a Confederate Landcruiser, with Mambas covering them from the sky.

“Incoming!” BD said.

Artillery shells whistled through the air on my audio receivers, digging craters and sending plumes of dirt aloft on massive fireballs. They were ranging their guns, marching their fire towards me. The next ones to land, a couple seconds later, were fifty meters closer, great rows of detonations scouring the muddy plain. Mud and clods of dirt pinged off my hull as the blasts got closer and closer. When I was sure the next one would land on top of me, I jump-jetted a hundred meters straight up. The shell landed far below me, missing me entirely. As I touched down, the shelling kept walking towards Tar Pan, until it abruptly stopped at the city’s edge.

My signal interceptor picked up an incoming transmission. “Equestrians! This has gone on long enough. You have fought valiantly, but you cannot win. You cannot defy the will of the Confederacy and the Free Trade Union any longer. If you do not surrender, you will leave us no choice but to flatten the entire city. We possess the means, and the will.”

I recognized the voice, my nose curling with hatred. “Wertua Naimekhe. She’s on that Landcruiser.”

The Confederate Bannerman-class Mobile Command Post was far larger than a Mauler-Longboy. It was less of a tank and more of a naval ship on tracks. At a hundred and fifty meters in length, studded in artillery turrets, CIWS guns, and anti-air missile launchers and outfitted with a powerful phased-array radar, the Landcruiser was more than capable of defending itself from any threat, land, air, or sea. They occasionally used similar classes of Landcruiser as mobile coastal artillery batteries. Its eight massive crawler track pods sat at the ends of shining hydraulic rams that descended from its hull. When encountering uneven terrain, it had the ability to raise and lower them to incline the tracks independently. Its upper surface featured two helipads fore and aft of its command bridge and refueling facilities for the same, allowing it to project air power and support special forces units.

I strode out in front of them, boosters flaring, matching their frequency and radioing back. “I will defend these ponies to my last breath, you Con-fed motherfuckers!”

After a few seconds, there came a reply. “You’ve chosen to die, then. So be it.”

Two dozen Ifrits formed a line, sighting me in from afar. In the open field, being fed targeting data from the Bannerman and its sensor suite, they couldn’t miss, even if I’d cloaked. I took a deep breath, releasing the tension from my body. I gazed out at the enemy force through my main viewscreen. Most of them were little babies in their twenties, being sent to die by wealthy and powerful cleomanni who were centuries older. Most of them didn’t even realize ponies were fully sapient. They’d been fed propaganda all their lives, but then again, so had we. I closed my eyes and thought back to all the posters and vidstreams that depicted the satyrs as demons with blood-dripping fangs. I thought of Mardissa’s smiling face, and the touch we shared.

It was hard to hate people who’d been deceived all their lives, when we all had that in common. When I opened my eyes, I saw the glowing row of charged plasma pulsecannons, all arrayed towards me, their icy blue pinpoints floating off on the edge of the twilit plain promising swift death. I lit my horn. No one would ever think to use the wrong spectrum of magic with an Illusion locus. However, the locus my Mirage now possessed was no ordinary locus. The Martyred Maiden herself had seen to that.

I funneled my magical energies into my Charger’s locus. “Lora, Vienttu, Berdaros.”

A nigh-impenetrable sphere of orange magic snapped into existence around my Charger. The Ifrits’ pulsecannons discharged. A thunderclap slammed through my head as the concussive force of the combined pulsecannon discharges shook my bones. The release of energy blinded my machine’s sensors and dug a crater in the ground in front of me. The sheer force of the impact drove me back a couple meters, in spite of the barrier. I released the breath I was holding and panted with exertion. My first successful use of barrier magic. My instructors would’ve been proud if they were still around to see this.

I quit feeding energy into the spell and allowed the barrier to dissipate, advancing a few paces and keying my radio. “Wertua, I know that’s you! You won’t have what you want. I’m not going to let you hurt these ponies any more than you already have. Do you hear me, you worthless bitch? No more. Not one step further. It doesn’t matter if you come one at a time, or all at once. The only thing you will accomplish is wasting the lives of your men.”

“Two-two-five-seven,” Wertua spoke in a condescending singsong over the radio. “My most troublesome test subject. You’ve been giving the boys quite a scare, you know. Some of them have started calling you the Devil of the North. The last one who said it within earshot of me? I beat him over the head with a stack of binders.”

“I have a name,” I said. “It’s Storm.”

“I reviewed the drone feeds myself,” Wertua said. “I know you and that damn Oracle agent were behind that nuke. What are you hoping to accomplish? We have fleets. We have armies. You have the failing, rusting relics of a dead Empire. We will get what we want. We always do, eventually. It doesn’t matter how much little worms like you wriggle. The best that your species could possibly hope for is to be domesticated. In fact, I think I’d like you all for myself. I would take great satisfaction in breaking you. You’re headstrong. It would take a long, long time, but sooner or later, I would have you kneeling and shivering and inquiring of your mistress’s desires the moment I enter the room. Yeah, that sounds nice. You, bent over, shining my hooves with your tongue, every single day.”

Her words made me practically shiver with disgust. “Do you usually broadcast your kinks on an open channel?”

“No, she prolly doesn’t, but I do!” A manic-sounding mare I knew very well shouted over the radio.

The ground quaked as Sierra’s custom Rouncey, Scofflaw, and Night Terror’s Selene-class Destrier, Luna’s Grace, landed at either side of me, their pyrojets flaring as they braked their descent. The two Chargers were polar opposites, one ramshackle and ill-conceived, the other, massive, sleek, and insectile. A nervous grin slowly spread across my face. My reinforcements had finally arrived.

“So here’s the fuckin’ breakdown,” Sierra said. “I need a new fuckin’ Muff Queen to eat my fuckin’ muff. Whoever gets the fewest fuckin’ kills has to eat me at least three times a fuckin’ day! And if that unlucky soul is me, I’ll fuckin’ bend in the middle and do it myself!”

I turned to Lieutenant Terror’s machine. “Sir, is she cleared for Charger duty? Brain damage is a hell of a thing.”

“That’s a negative, Sergeant,” the Lieutenant said. “But we heard about the GeFRASE. Couldn’t keep her out of the cockpit. She was champing at the bit to come rescue you.”

“So this is it, huh?” I said. “The three of us, back together again for one last stand.”

“Fifty-to-one,” Night Terror said. “Terrible odds. For them.”

“Enough!” Wertua’s voice crackled over the radio. “I will not suffer this idiocy a moment longer!”

The Landcruiser leveled its gun batteries at us and opened fire. Strings of muzzle flashes heralded incoming shells, paired with the white exhaust plumes of surface-to-surface missiles streaking from their vertical-launch tubes.

“Lance, break!” Lieutenant Terror ordered.

The three of us fired our pyrojets and boosted apart from each other, spreading out our formation. Terror took the left flank, Sierra took the right, and I charged down the middle. The shells missed us almost entirely, landing well to our rear. The three of us coordinated our medium casters in APS mode, blasting the incoming missiles out of the sky before they could even get close.

“Contact, front, enemy Landcruiser,” Night Terror radioed. “Lance, disabling fire. Kneecap ‘em.”

Most armored vehicles had numerous exposed components. Antennas, sensors, optics, weapons, tracks, and so on. One could intentionally target each of those exposed components to mission-kill or mobility-kill a vehicle and render it incapable of fighting or moving. Landcruisers were exceptionally vulnerable to this tactic; due to their sheer size, their armor was by necessity much thinner than a tank’s, otherwise, they wouldn’t have been able to move. There was little to protect each of their components from the kind of firepower we were packing.

I sighted in their radar housing. “BD, ready the HBCs!”

A series of clanking noises resounded through the hull, status lights winking on. “HBCs extended and armed!”

“Firing!”

The breakers slammed shut with an audible wham as I let loose two bright purple columns of energy from my twin heavy beamcasters, plucking the radar housing and mast right off the top of the Landcruiser’s bridge in an instant, their hull rocking slightly from the impact. Their phased-array radar and in-air sonar were utterly ruined, slagged hunks of glowing metal sitting where they used to be. The enemy’s attention was divided between the three of us. If I were to cloak, that would drop to two, and the chances of my Lancemates being blown to bits by the thick incoming fire would increase drastically. I cloaked myself, funneling a decoy spell into my locus. A perfect copy of my Mirage sprang forth. The enemy tanks and AWs continued firing upon the decoy as it peeled off, missing me entirely.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” I said. “Celestia came through on her end of the deal. It really does work in every spectrum. Arcane and Illusion both work. Fuck me. This is huge.”

“Celestia?” BD said. “Ma’am, are you okay?”

“Not now. We’ll discuss it later.”

The point cloud representation of the Landcruiser grew rapidly in my main viewscreen as I approached. I fired my boosters and jump-jetted into the air, crossing hundreds of meters in the blink of an eye. As I descended towards the Landcruiser’s deck, I aimed for the Mamba on the helipad and the crews servicing it. My hooves slammed into the helicopter, crushing its fuselage flat as I skidded across the deck while riding atop it like a skateboard. Since I was invisible, what the deck crews witnessed was a helicopter that was instantly smashed flat in the shape of a pair of Charger forehooves before sliding off the helipad with no apparent cause.

I uncloaked directly in front of their command bridge, raising my Charger’s head to peer inside. I zoomed in on the bridge crew on my main viewscreen. They were already rising from their consoles and fleeing for their lives. Wertua was there as well, her face registering shock, and then anger. She uncrossed her arms and clenched her fists before turning tail and joining the rest of the evacuees, her bodyguards in tow.

“Can’t have you dying just yet,” I spoke over my Charger’s PA system. “You’re the bait.”

I let loose a long burst of forty-millimeter rounds directly through their bridge windows at point-blank range, ruining the consoles and equipment inside. After a few seconds, the Landcruiser’s bridge was a roaring inferno. I was well within the blind spot of most of the Landcruiser’s weapons. It was physically impossible for them to aim their deck guns at their own deck, and the missiles from their vertical launch tubes couldn’t turn sharply enough to hit me, either. ATGM infantry desperately tried deploying their tripod-mounted Pilums on the Landcruiser’s deck, but they were too late. I swept my medium casters over them, the snapping green columns of energy mulching them in an instant.

The Ifrits were repositioning. Trying to get an angle on us. Pulsecannon fire glanced off of my glacis plate. One solid hit blew the shroud off my right forty entirely. My cockpit was rocked forcefully by the hit, jarring my brains inside my skull.

I gritted my teeth. “Fuck! BD, status!”

“Armor’s off. Gun’s still operational.”

I pulsed my pyrojets and hurtled myself into a backflip, sending me off the Landcruiser’s deck and landing hooves-down in the dirt beside it. Night Terror and Sierra pulled up next to me, using the Cruiser for cover. The Landcruiser’s crawler tracks began to move. They were trying to reposition.

“Shit,” I muttered. “I shot out the bridge. They must be trying to run it from the engine room.”

“Let’s flip the motherfucker over!” Sierra shouted over the radio.

Without any hesitation or further discussion of the insane maneuver we were about to execute, the three of us reared up and placed our Chargers’ forehooves against the side of the massive Landcruiser’s hull, throttling our pyrojet boosters up on full, kicking up great plumes of dirt that stretched for over a hundred meters behind us. Even with the combined hundreds of tons of thrust that our pyrojets could put out, it wasn’t enough. The damn thing barely budged.

“Lance, limiters off!” Lieutenant Terror ordered.

“BD, disengage the limiters on the pyrojets!” I echoed.

“Limiters disengaged,” BD said. “Fifteen seconds, no more.”

The pyrojets on a Charger were capable of peak levels of thrust far beyond their design specifications, but only for brief periods of time. Beyond overheating, which occurred in a matter of seconds, there were simple safety and material issues to consider, such as passing out from pulling excessive gees, or collapsing a limb. The three of us locked the actuators in our Chargers’ forelegs and slammed our throttles to three hundred percent, our pyrojets lighting up the side of the Landcruiser bright white, our exhausts spewing long trails of shock diamonds.

The Landcruiser began tipping, its deck crews clambering towards the edge like little ants, many of them going over the side and falling to their deaths. One of the crawler track pods rose out of the muck, and then another, the Cruiser’s hull twisting from stem to stern in an inexorable cascade. With an earth-shaking slam, the Landcruiser fell over onto its side. We mounted the fallen cruiser and peeked over the side, emptying our cannons and casters into the enemy armored formations that advanced on us. We used the massive steel hulk for cover much in the same way that a griffon might use a tipped bar table in a drunken shootout. One pulsecannon shot after another slammed into the Landcruiser’s deck as the Ifrits fired upon us, leaving molten pockmarks all over it and sending showers of sparks everywhere.

Our signal interceptors picked up a frantic enemy transmission. “Cease fire, cease fire! Ordinator Naimekhe is on that damn Cruiser!”

I put bursts of forty-millimeter fire into the approaching tanks and walkers, blowing chunks of armor plating off of them. I sent a pair of HBC pulses downrange, coring out a couple of the Ifrits and sending them toppling to the ground. Waves of enemy infantry assaulted our position, blasting away desperately with flechette guns and ATGMs and whatever else they had on hand.

“Motherfuckers!” Sierra’s Charger leaped over the fallen Landcruiser and landed directly in front of the advancing enemy formations. “Eat this, you fucking dickwipes!”

Sierra set off the Scofflaw Special, the array of mortar tubes, makeshift mitrailleuses, and anti-personnel mines she’d welded to the front of her Charger’s forelegs, head, and glacis plate. It looked like a fireworks display gone terribly wrong. The entire front of her Charger was one big concatenation of rippling muzzle flashes and explosions, projecting a cone of shrapnel and explosive shells that turned everything in a thirty-degree arc in front of her mech into a frag-pounded killing field that stretched for a few hundred meters. I watched in slack-jawed amazement as hundreds of Confederate soldiers were instantaneously liquefied.

Sierra seemed almost disappointed in the results. “Fuck! I can’t lose the bet! I’m not fucking flexible enough!”

Before the Ifrit pilots could even comprehend what happened, Sierra slammed on her thrusters and jump-jetted backwards into cover with me and Night Terror. The Ifrits and Conquerors started circling around the ends of the wrecked Cruiser. They intended to catch us in a pincer.

“We’re surrounded!” I said.

“Chill, Sergeant,” Lieutenant Terror said. “Stay focused and engage the incoming hostiles one at a time. If it gets too hot, disengage and fall back to the northwest.”

I tried popping up and sending a couple HBC pulses, but the incoming fire was too thick. They nearly blew my Charger’s head off. The tanks were moving ‘round the ends of the Landcruiser. The first few Conquerors drove into view, swinging their turrets in our direction. I took the southern end at the stern of the Cruiser and Sierra took up position at the northern end. We let loose volleys from our autocannons, knocking the tracks off a few of the Conquerors and mobility-killing them. A pair of 140mm shells smashed into my glacis plate, rocking my Charger’s hull backwards.

The blasts rattled my skull right through my armor. “Fuck! Fuck, fuck, fuck!”

I locked onto a pair of Conquerors and sent two shots from my HBCs, blowing their turrets clean off their hulls. Five more tanks took their place. I fired my thrusters and slid sideways at several gees, skating out of the line of fire as more shells sailed past me. They tried firing their coaxial guns at me, of all things. Dozens of flechettes were embedded in my composite armor to no effect.

I operated my Charger at the speed of thought. There wasn’t enough time to make rational decisions. Anima and pilot acted as one, on pure instinct. Millimeter-wave and terahertz sensor feeds fused together and were fed into my neural lace. A threat behind me was like a tickle in the back of my neck. I could feel the incoming shells, like a hot clothes iron held inches from my body.

I kept blasting away with my heavy beamcasters. The capacitors struggled to keep up. The indicators for the cooling systems showed that I was reaching critical heat levels. The heat sinks on my HBCs were glowing bright orange.

“We’re being overrun!” I said.

“Bullshit!” Night Terror shouted over the radio. “Hold your position and return fire, that’s an order!”

I was surprised to hear him swear. I was used to the Lieutenant having a suaveness and unshakable resolve that set him apart from the rank and file. I watched through my scope as Night Terror charged one of his spells, a corona of raw magic coalescing above his Destrier’s head. He let loose a purple wave of potent black magic that chilled my spine as it passed me by.

The spell washed over a dozen Confederate tanks. Our enemies were immediately thrown into disarray. The Conquerors swung their turrets wildly, driving at odd angles to each other. Two of the tanks promptly rammed each other. One unloaded its main gun on another. I could only imagine what awful tortures the crews of those vehicles experienced. The bloodcurdling screams over the signal interceptors painted a grim picture of the bedlam that ensued within their cramped hulls. Over my audio receivers, I heard gunshots. A few of the Confederate tankers afflicted by Lieutenant Terror’s spell had already reached for their sidearms and ended their own lives.

Another two dozen tanks moved up, firing their guns madly at us. I was doing more dodging than shooting. I didn’t even have enough time to line my guns up. I watched Sierra lose a chunk of armor from her Charger’s right foreleg as she took a bad hit from a 140mm shell, exposing her duostrand and staggering her.

Her reaction was venomous. “Fuck you! Fuck you! Cunt, cunt, cunt! You lousy bunch of cunts!”

Sierra popped her smoke deployer, putting a wall of obscuring smoke between her and the incoming tanks. She lured the enemy in, and then set off her Hedgehogs. Scofflaw had retractable multi-barrel mortars on its shoulders that were filled with stacked-projectile smart EFPs. Their range was short, but this engagement was practically point-blank. She swept from left to right as her launchers spat the disc-shaped projectiles in rapid succession on a high ballistic arc.

Once in the air, the smart EFPs oriented themselves such that each one lined up directly with the roof of the nearest Conqueror tank. A string of explosions went off high in the air as the explosively formed penetrators turned their concave copper liners into high-velocity copper bullets that sailed down through the turret roofs of a couple dozen Conquerors. Traveling at a speed of two kilometers per second, the time between the detonation of the EFPs and their impact was practically simultaneous. The crews of those vehicles were immediately killed by spall that ricocheted around their crew compartments. Two of them had their ammo stores explode, turning those tanks into flaming wrecks as strings of secondaries went off.

An Ifrit leaped atop the overturned Cruiser, holding a plasma demolition sword high in its manipulator arm. This one bore the yellow stripes of a commander. It didn’t matter how senior they were, as they would soon find out. With the sole exception of the Djinn, AWs were inferior to Chargers in every way. I fired my thrusters with a burst of lateral motion to evade the pulsecannon blast.

The Ifrit’s pilot was more skilled than average. He didn’t wait for the counterattack. He immediately advanced with his blade at the ready, aiming for a downward swing, his weapon trailing blue plasmatic energy. Too slow. He looked like he was moving in slow motion from my perspective, my awareness heightened by my sync with my Charger’s Anima.

I slammed the boosters to full, raising my forelegs and smashing into his cockpit with my armored knees, causing him to miss with his sword, overbalance and topple backwards, smashing into the hull of the downed Landcruiser and crumpling the edge of its deck. I boost-kicked him in the cockpit, firing my pyrojets to augment the force of my attack. I rammed my armored hoof through the front of the Ifrit’s headless torso. My audio receivers picked up a strangled scream as I crushed the pilot to death. I was sure I could see blood somewhere in that mess of mangled machinery and sparking wires. In any case, he didn’t get back up.

Several more Ifrits began pounding our position with their heavy mortars. I tried to pull together a barrier spell as shells exploded at my feet, but my psyche was too frayed to concentrate on calmly ensconcing myself in a shield bubble. The blasts pelted me with shrapnel that bounced off my armor, the concussive impact rippling through my hull. Ifrit mortar shells had flux compression generators that put off a powerful electromagnetic pulse. With my armor suite complete, EMP wasn’t a problem. However, with holes in my rig, that was a different story. Alarms blared as a few of the modules in my cockpit failed. I quickly silenced them.

I pounded my hoof against the deck in anger. “Dammit! Fuck!”

The signal interceptor was ablaze with enemy comm chatter. “All units, pull back and regroup. Gunship wings, swing around and hit these monsters. Drone teams, spot for artillery. We need firing solutions, now!”

Seconds later, the hull of my Charger was pelted with more explosions as FFARs raked our position. I turned skyward, aiming for the Mambas that harassed us from over a kilometer away. One of them let loose with a pair of air-to-ground anti-tank missiles, the fat suckers racing off of their pylons. My Active Protection System directed the medium beamcasters in my Charger’s head to fire upon the incoming missiles. A couple seconds and a few dozen automated caster pulses later, the anti-tank missiles were blasted out of the air.

I centered the Mambas in my scope, waiting for the squalling lock tone from my radome. The fuses in my forties were automatically programmed with the targets’ range. I squeezed the triggers in my stirrups and my cockpit shook as my autocannons unleashed a burst of 40mm HEMP and APDS rounds. The armor-piercing discarding-sabot penetrators missed the helos entirely. The high-explosive multi-purpose rounds detonated in mid-air, spraying the gyrodynes with deadly ball bearing shrapnel that tore their rotors to pieces. The two gunships went down in flames, one of them blowing their rotor mast free and punching out, firing their ejection seats.

The Con-fed bastards were getting desperate, if their transmissions were anything to go by. “Where is that godsdamned artillery?!”

Over my audio receivers, I picked up the sounds of autocannon and missile fire on the far side of the fallen Landcruiser. I reared up and jumped onto the hull of the Cruiser, peering over the side. What I saw made me grin from ear-to-ear. Eleven Crook-type Palfreys were wading into battle with the enemy after having caught them off-guard, outflanking them from the south.

Tatzlwurm ATGMs streaked across the battlefield, smashing Conquerors to pieces and sending Ifrits reeling. The lead Palfrey extended their glowing blue plasma halberd, charged towards an Ifrit walker, and slashed the hydraulics that kept it upright. The AW stumbled a few paces before smashing face-first into the ground, having completely lost hydraulic pressure in one of their spindly legs.

“Lance, forward!” Lieutenant Terror radioed. “Advance on those fuckers and take them out while they’re on the back foot.”

The three of us jump-jetted in unison over the massive carcass of the fallen Landcruiser. The enemy walkers and tanks were in total disarray with the unexpected assault of the Palfreys. Twenty friendly Minotaur MBTs and eight Gargoyle IFVs crested the hill to the south in a loose formation. The Vanhoover cell had arrived. 120mm shells started sailing in, hitting the Conquerors from behind, where their armor was weakest. Our Chargers hit the enemy from the north, while the tanks and Palfreys from Vanhoover hit them from the south.

I switched to their frequency and hailed them. “Revenant One to incoming friendlies. I guess we know what happened to that Con-fed artillery. Nice work!”

“This is Crossbone One,” the commander of the lead tank responded. “Yeah, we rolled over ‘em on the way here.”

What ensued was best described as a massacre, and not a battle. With the Palfreys in their midst, running around at their feet and slitting their hamstrings, the Minos and ‘Goyles hitting them from the flank with 120mm shells, Tatzlwurms, and autocannon fire, and the three of us Charger-jockeys blasting away with casters and autocannons of our own, the Confederate armored battalion was quickly taken to pieces. Sweat beaded on my brow as I fell into a laser-focused trance, snapping off HBC pulses one after another, obliterating as many Ifrits as I could. They couldn’t even decide how to regroup and focus their fire. They didn’t have a chance in hell.

They were down to fifteen tanks and six walkers when finally, they hailed us on the radio. “Cease fire, please! We surrender!”

They were here to enslave us. To torment us. To threaten our lives and to strip us of our freedoms. And now, they begged for us to preserve them alive.

I gritted my teeth. Their cowardice made me sick. I flicked on the PA system on my Charger. “Power down your vehicles, shut off your fucking engines, get out and kneel on the ground with your hands behind your fucking heads, or so help me, I’ll slot every last fucking one of you!”

They did as ordered. Conqueror crews shut their engines off, Ifrit pilots powered down their fusion reactors, and they all disembarked. The detainees assembled in a large throng, kneeling on the ground with their hands behind their heads. The Gargoyles pulled up near them, dropping their ramps and disgorging six squads. These weren’t the typical untrained militia we often relied on in our cell. These were former military. Fellow Imperial Army. I could tell by the way they moved.

The grim-faced ponies wordlessly went around and zip-tied the hands of the detainees, escorting them away from the fallen Landcruiser and positioning them such that a few Gargoyles could keep them in check with their autocannons, should they decide to make a break for it. I desynced from Black Devil, unlatching the sync arm from my back and rising from the stirrups, shaking my legs out a bit. I briefly considered tossing on my jacket, but after inspecting the ragged claw-holes in the shoulders, I cursed and shook my head, tossing it back in the bin. I really liked that jacket.

“BD, open the lower hatch.”

“Yes, Sergeant.”

My Charger knelt close to the ground so I could drop out of the lower hatch safely. I walked up to the detainees. I had questions, and they had answers.

“Who’s in charge here?” I said.

One grizzled-looking cleomanni with a square jaw and a beret atop his head stepped forward. “That would be me, Major Zvaler.”

I struck out a hoof at the tilted hulk of the fallen Landcruiser. “Ordinator Naimekhe. I know she’s on that Cruiser. She’s the one we want. Get her out here, and we’ll let you and your men go.”

Zvaler shrugged his broad shoulders. “Nothing doing. We lost contact with her when you nutcases flipped the damn thing over. Naimekhe’s with her bodyguards, now. Gafalze Arresgrippen. Best of the best. You’ll never catch her.”

“Bet me,” I said. “I’m going in there and I’m going to drag that bitch out by her ankles.” I walked up the ramp of one of the Gargoyles while stripping off my syncsuit. “Got some extra barding in there and a caster I can use?”

The driver looked back over his seat and sneered at me derisively. “Yeah, I keep ‘em under the Hearth’s Warming Tree, polka dotted wrapping paper and a little bow tie and all.”

“Hey, you fucking got ‘em, or what?”

“Rack to your right.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll bring ‘em back.”

I took the spare suit of body armor, tacked up and threw on a Phoenix Fire pulsecaster and a standard-issue infantry helmet. I’d have to make a pit stop back at my Charger to stow my syncsuit. No way I was letting it out of my sight, or leaving it on the Gargoyle. Way too important.

As I walked down the tracked IFV’s ramp, Revenant’s mobile surveillance Centaur pulled up next to us. They dropped their ramp and Mardissa—who was wielding Captain Garrida’s rifle, of all things—and the rest of Revenant disembarked.

Mardissa grinned wide. “Storm!” She dropped Thumper in the dirt and ran up to me, scooping me up in her arms and holding me tight.

I giggled a little. “I’m fine, Mar.”

“We lost your transponder.” Mardissa set me down. “They were saying you were a goner. Something about a Synchronicity Event? The hell’s that, ma’am?”

“It happens, sometimes,” I said. “I’ll explain later. We’ve got a slaver bitch to catch, and she’s guarded by Gaffs.”

“Where?”

I pointed to the Landcruiser. “In there.”

The Bannerman was tipped completely on its side, its deck nearly perpendicular to the ground. A good portion of the crew were probably killed or knocked the fuck out by being slammed against the bulkheads when we flipped it over. There was smoke, perhaps from sporadic fires. There was no way to know if Naimekhe was even alive in there, but that chromed bitch probably survived.

Me, Revenant squad, and the newcomers from Vanhoover lined up facing the Landcruiser, with Lieutenant Night Terror and Sergeant Sierra providing overwatch with their Chargers. We gave each other uneasy looks. The interior of the Cruiser would be extremely hazardous to navigate, with all the stairwells and doorways tipped on their side. It would be disorienting and potentially chock-full of hostiles.

We needed to secure that high-value target. Our plan to capture Corrector Dieslan Veightnoch depended on it.

We had no choice but to enter the belly of the beast.

// … end transmission …

Record 22//Sideways

//HOL CRY ADV
//CHECKSUM READ
//CHECKSUM GOOD

// … decoding …

Desert Storm

The massive hulk of the overturned Landcruiser loomed over us. Confederate soldiers and CSF were scurrying off the thing like rats fleeing a sinking ship. I watched more than a few of them take a ride down the heavily inclined deck and crack their skulls like a raw egg on the way down.

“WIDOWMAKER to all squads,” Lieutenant Night Terror spoke over the radio. “We are moving in to secure the downed Landcruiser. Regroup and check your gear. Climbing equipment will be necessary. Out.”

I’d left my syncsuit aboard my Charger and retrieved some medical supplies from my bins, stowing them in my borrowed saddlebags. I also pulled out a few grenades I’d stashed in my bins and clipped them to my vest. A little insurance, in case I was downed, surrounded, and on the verge of capture, and I needed a way to take a few dingoes out of this world with me. I was told they were better than cyanide pills. That a frag was a quicker, more painless death. I didn’t doubt it. In the meantime, another Centaur had shown up with Bellwether, Placid Gale, and the troops directly under their command. Layer Cake flew in wearing her Dragoon exosuit, accompanied by two whole squads of Airborne Pegasus Commandos equipped with heavy assault armor and Mark-14 casters.

I knew Crookneck was in the head of the Palfrey formation, because of his conspicuous plasma halberd, of which there seemed to be only one in existence. However, he did not announce his presence, for obvious reasons. One of the Palfreys loped towards us and took a knee, its cockpit hinging open to reveal none other than Sergeant Teirro Koskas. None of the troops from Vanhoover were particularly shocked by the damarkind, having long been acclimated to her presence, but some of the Crazy Horse personnel shared uneasy looks.

“We need grapple!” She pointed up towards the Bannerman’s tilted bridge island with one of her wickedly sharp claws. “I launch. You clip on cable. We all go, yes?”

I nodded. “Aye. Let me go over this shit with my squad for a second.”

Mardissa had brought Lucky along with her; I took it from her grasp and gave the Orbit a charge with my horn, and then, I linked it into the intel feed from my Charger while I approached the other members of Revenant.

“Mares and gentlecolts, gather ‘round,” I said. “We need a huddle before this one.”

Most of the other infantry squads were being separately briefed by their own leaders. I had the attention of Revenant, as well as Bell, Placid, and their squads. We all hunkered down in an artillery crater as I began the briefing. Haybale looked nervous, constantly leaning up to look over the rim of the crater at the ominous wreck and the thick clouds of black smoke that spewed from it. Hexhead and Shooting Star were calm and collected, inspecting each other’s casters, giving the emitters, heat sinks, and power sources a once-over. Each of them tapped the other on the shoulder when everything checked out.

“I’ve got a couple Parasprite recon drones out there scanning this big son of a bitch. We now have data on the internal layout of the decks.” I powered on Lucky’s holoprojector, forming a glowing blue three-dimensional representation of the overturned Landcruiser. “The fucker’s on its side. Getting inside will be a bitch and a half. It’s also on fire. The bridge is a no-go. There will be flame and asphyxiation hazards to deal with as we navigate the space. Don’t go into the areas marked orange, or you’ll die. Fully involved fires. You open those spaces, there’s a chance of backdraft, and even if there isn’t, they’re still full of smoke and the steel’s blazing hot. You’ll melt your boots to the deck, and then, you’ll pass out and die of smoke inhalation.”

“Where’s our objective, ma’am?” Corporal Shooting Star said.

“We want Ordinator Naimekhe. She’s our best chance at nabbing Veightnoch. He’s the asshole that runs the CSF in this sector. He’s also our best lead for finding Empress Sparkle.”

Shocked gasps and furtive murmurs abounded. Only Bellwether and the other squad leaders had any inkling of how important it was that we captured this HVT alive. The rest had only just begun to appreciate the enormity of the task at hoof.

“Here’s the thing,” I said. “We don’t know exactly where the target individual is located. She could be practically anywhere. In a locker. Under a bunk. A maintenance access tunnel. A duct. Anywhere. We’re going to have to comb this thing from top to bottom to find her. Lieutenant Terror and Sergeant Sierra’s Chargers and the rest of these vehicles are going to form a cordon around the Landcruiser. No one gets in unless it’s our reinforcements. No one gets out without going with their wrists zip-tied or in a bodybag. Questions?”

“Do we even have a clue where to start looking?” Corporal Cloverleaf said.

“Wertua always travels with a couple Gaffs, so if we see them, we know she’s close.” This remark garnered more than a few apprehensive looks from my squad, so I decided to elaborate a bit. “Yes, yes, I know what you’re thinking. ‘See Gaffs? In close quarters? Has the Sergeant gone nuts?’ Well, that’s just it. We’ve got a Dragoon and some Stormtroopers with us, and we oughta make use of them. You see something you can’t fight on your own, pass it to them.”

“What do we do if everything goes tits-up, ma’am?” Private Haybale said.

“We fall back the way we came in, here.” I pointed to the entrance to the superstructure on the deck. “We don’t wanna get cut off by fire or hostiles. We need to secure each space as we advance. There will be fighting, but there will also be those who will want to surrender immediately. There’ll be many injured crew in there. If you have to barricade a door, do not trap anyone—friendly or neutral, since hostiles can get fucked—in spaces with fire. If an area is clear of hostiles, then search for and evacuate the wounded. We don’t need this to be any messier than it already is. Alright, let’s fucking do this.”

There was a grunt of affirmation from everyone in the squad. I didn’t tell them the whole truth. I was thinking ahead. If we wanted to hold Tar Pan, we needed hostages. Lots of them. Something to dissuade the Confederacy from using kinetic strikes or strategic bombers and simply flattening the whole city. They would also be valuable sources of intel, if we could get them to cave under questioning.

I climbed towards the edge of the crater, my boots scraping against the upturned soil, and I peeked over the rim. I watched as Koskas’ Palfrey picked up a large, gleaming chrome piton launcher with a long reel of steel cable. She took aim and fired a fin-stabilized piton at the superstructure of the fallen Landcruiser. The cable spool whined as the cable reeled out, the piton sailing through the air and striking an overhang in the cruiser’s superstructure. The bang of a small blank charge reverberated across the field as it drove the piton’s tungsten carbide tip right through the massive vehicle’s plating.

Using her battlesuit’s hands, Koskas put some tension on the line and then staked it in the dirt, waving us over with her Palfrey’s manipulator arm. She opened the cockpit of her Crook and dismounted from the vehicle. She got out some motorized cable ascenders from a big duffel bag and clipped them to the cable as we approached.

“Everyone is ready?” Koskas made a toothy grin. “We no going back without prisoner.”

“We’re ready to make entry,” I said. “Squad, clip on. We go up ten at a time, and we’ll send the ascenders back for the next ten, and so on.”

There were a series of clicks as we clipped the carabiners on the ascenders onto the loops in our armor. I climbed up and wrapped my hooves around the cable, electing to hang inverted. I looked up at the burning superstructure of the Landcruiser, and then, I fired up the ascender. The cable ascender’s motor let out a steady hum. I could feel the radiant heat from the fire as I approached.

Infantry combat was very different from being cocooned in the cockpit of my Mirage. The sights, sounds, smells, and other sensory experiences of the battlefield were all in evidence. Being in the cockpit of a Charger was like having a full-body condom between oneself and the stark reality of warfare. The narrow field of view of the forward viewscreen encouraged a kind of tunnel vision that would be quite hazardous were it not for all the other little cues that Charger pilots received through our sync with the Anima system.

I climbed onto the side of the Landcruiser’s superstructure, unclipping my carabiner from the ascender. The vessel’s flight deck loomed over us, blotting out a good portion of the horizon. I could feel the heat and smell the acrid smoke from the flame-engulfed bridge. The rest of Revenant showed up one after another, sending the ascenders back down the line for the rest to use. Then, Koskas and her squad showed up, then Bell and his team, and then Placid and her fliers, who elected to use their wings instead of the contraptions Koskas had rigged up. Commodore Cake and the Stormtroopers landed in unison, securing the area. Bell and I exchanged glances and nods, but little else.

Mardissa was the last one from Revenant, bringing up the rear as she unslung Thumper from her back. Ket was with her, sweeping the area with a flechette gun. I eyed the anti-materiel rifle skeptically; Garrida’s gun would be very unpleasant to use in close quarters. Mar would be limited to her beamcaster in most circumstances. Still, the unwieldy weapon offered some advantages that I could not easily discount, armor penetration and barrier penetration being two of them.

There was an open hatch in the side of the superstructure, but because the Landcruiser was on its side, the entrance was horizontal, opening into the space beneath us with a sheer drop. There was a commotion in the compartment beyond. Cleomanni desperately clambering over each other in the dark, trying to get to the extension ladder they’d set up at the hatch.

Normally, I would’ve tossed in a frag grenade, and that would’ve been that. However, I made a promise to Celestia. An unrealistic promise, given our circumstances. I had nothing to lose, though. If I pissed her off, I was back to square one. I let out an exasperated sigh as I thought of the words in Ardun that I would have to use to persuade them to come out without fighting.

“Shikret kized,” I said. “Nev kradr adon han.”

Outside come. You shoot not we.

The word order in Ardun was the reverse of what one would expect. To speak like a cleomanni, one had to think backwards. I wondered if it affected their psychology, somehow.

Mardissa’s eyes lit up with surprise. “I didn’t know you knew how to speak Ardun like that, ma’am.”

“Well, when you’re all cooped up in a shipping container for a few years with nothing to do, you may as well pick up a new language. Besides, I’ve been practicing.”

A pair of trembling paws poked up through the hatch. A cleomanni woman with a bloodied face, her black uniform torn in a couple places, slowly ascended the ladder, her hands raised in surrender.

“Please, don’t shoot!” she said.

Mardissa grabbed her arm and pulled her up. “Are there any others?”

The officer dusted herself off. “Yes, almost the whole bridge crew, in the compartment below us.” The Dochnast woman had a pale complexion and long, straight, black hair that sprouted from under her cap and ran down her shoulders, seeming to almost blend into her equally black uniform top.

I walked up to her. “Where’s Wertua?”

The bridge officer eyed me fearfully, shaking. “I—I—“

“Focus! I’m Sergeant Storm. What’s your name and rank?”

She seemed to calm down a bit. “I’m Lieutenant Kriste Sawal. What do you monsters want with Miss Naimekhe? What does it have to do with me?”

Cloverleaf was incensed by this. “Monsters? We are fighting for our lives against you psychos! Do you have any idea what your pet mercs have been doing to us? If not, then you have no business running your mouth, bitch!”

Haybale nodded. “That’s right. We just wanna live, and you keep comin’ for us. You won’t leave us be!”

Lieutenant Sawal was looking increasingly perturbed with each passing moment. “You’re not—you’re not synthetics?”

I burst out laughing. I felt like I was going mad. These fuckers lived in an alternate reality. “Nope.”

The corners of Sawal’s mouth fell. She slowly turned to Mardissa, gesticulating as if demanding an explanation. “What? What?”

“They’re wholly sapient,” Mardissa said. “I’ve spoken with them extensively, and I can’t see any evidence to the contrary. They’re not bioroids and most certainly not on autopilot upstairs. They have free will.”

“Oh.” Sawal started shaking again. “Oh gods.”

“Pretty common reaction,” I muttered.

“No, you don’t understand. Naimekhe keeps one of you as a pet—I—oh, gods!” The Lieutenant put a hand to her mouth in shock.

“You mean a slave.” I marched up to her, fixing her with an angry glare. “She keeps a pony slave.”

The cleomanni woman slowly crumpled to the deck, sobbing and holding her head in her hands, her complicity finally dawning on her. With everything else she’d just experienced, she’d hit her limit. She was bawling like a baby. There was snot involved. This went on for a while, to the point where it became really awkward. Mar and Ket traded a worried look. After a few moments of careful deliberation, I closed the distance, putting my forelegs over her shoulders and drawing her into a hug.

“Hey, it’s okay,” I said.

The Lieutenant slowly, tentatively returned the gesture. “You’re not—you’re not going to hurt us?”

I drew my lips into a grimace. In Dodge, blinded by rage at the kidnapping of my sisters, I’d ordered my squad to summarily execute dozens of CSF civilian support personnel. Before I’d acquainted myself with Mardissa and Ket, cleomanni weren’t even people to me, but living obstacles. Weird, animate sacks of flesh who’d denied us a future. They saw us the same way. Don’t fraternize. Don’t acknowledge each other’s personhood. Just attack. Attack, attack, attack. For a thousand years. Quill was right, in a way. This wasn’t living. We needed to find a solution to all of this, or there’d be nothing left for any of us.

What we’d lost in this war was incalculable. I couldn’t even begin to imagine what our society would have looked like if things had been different, and we’d been allowed to pour our resources into more peaceful ends. A faint oasis lay at the edge of my consciousness. Not even a daydream. A figment. Gleaming cities, rich culture, and bounteous wealth. We could have been the envy of the whole universe. Instead, we wallowed in filth. It was hard not to feel deeply resentful over that fact.

“We’re not gonna hurt you,” I said. “Promise.”

“Thank goodness.” Her relief was palpable. “Thank goodness!”

“You’ll be detained with the others, but I promise you’ll be treated well. I need you to do something for me, however. I’m going to try and rescue as many as I can from this coffin, but I’d rather not get in a firefight with Naimekhe’s bodyguards with surrendering personnel caught in the crossfire. Furthermore, I want you to convince as many as possible to evacuate immediately. Can you do that?”

Lieutenant Sawal slowly nodded, sniffling a little and clearing her mussed hair out from in front of her eyes. “I’ll try.”

I stood by and watched as she shakily climbed back down the ladder. I could hear them muttering amongst themselves down below. The conversation got heated in places as they deliberated on whether to trust us at our word. After all, we did just push their shit in, and I played a significant role in that. After a few minutes, the Lieutenant ascended the ladder, shaking her head.

“What is it?” I said. “No good?”

“No, they’ll come,” she said. “But they’re not happy about it.”

“Understandable.” I nodded. “If I were in their shoes, I wouldn’t be, either.”

“You promise that no harm will come to them?”

“I have limited authority,” I said. “I will do what I can to make sure they are treated fairly.”

Sawal sighed, dusting her knees off. She approached the cable we’d rigged up, tugging on it a couple times to make sure it would hold her weight. The troops from Vanhoover assisted her, making her wear a fall-protection harness meant for ponies and adjusting it so the straps would hold her. They clipped her to one of the cable ascenders and sent her down.

I watched as, one by one, the stranded bridge crew of the Bannerman climbed up the ladder and out the hatch. Some were scared out of their minds, glancing at us fearfully as they passed. Others fixed us with resentful glares.

One marched up to me, snarling and balling up his fists. “Animal!”

My ears drooped and my jaw went a little slack as I watched the Stormtroopers goad him onward, their casters glowing threateningly. He joined the rest, donning a harness without any further complaints. Placid Gale and her small team of pegasi stationed themselves at the cable, making round-trips to deliver the limited set of harnesses back to the top so they could be reused. It was grueling work. I could already tell that the evacuation was going to take a long damn time. Meanwhile, there were still enemy personnel inside who had not surrendered. Dozens, possibly hundreds. A firefight inside the cruiser was guaranteed to be a hellish experience. I swallowed the lump of fear that had formed in my throat.

Once the compartment was clear, I waved up Revenant. “Squad, push inside!”

We descended the ladder one by one, sweeping the compartment with our casters. Everything was sideways. The floor was what used to be a bulkhead mere minutes before. One of the walls was actually the deck. Furniture and loose items had piled up to one side. It was hard to tell what the compartment might have been used for. It looked almost like a lounge of some kind. Passageways that crossed the vessel transversely were now sheer drops into a black void. Emergency lights and red strobes flickered in the dark, alarms blaring from one end of the Landcruiser to the other. It was maddening and disorienting at the same time.

Commodore Cake and the Stormtroopers poured through the hatch, their wings giving them a distinct advantage as they traversed the space. We flicked on our helmet lights, scanning around for survivors. There was smoke hanging in the air, but the passage to the bridge itself had been sealed off. The awful reality of what had happened when we tipped the Landcruiser on its side was evident in the blood stains on the bulkheads. As I’d suspected, some of the vessel’s crew had busted their heads open like a watermelon when they went skating sideways across the near-vertical deck. I saw bodies. More than a few of ‘em.

“Shit,” I whispered.

I could hear sobbing in one of the far alcoves. I turned my head towards the source. There was a crewman cradling one of the deceased in his arms and rocking back and forth, a pistol in his hand.

“Drop the weapon!” I shouted.

When he saw me, he pushed his buddy’s corpse aside and stood up, pressing his pistol to his temple. “Don’t you fucking come any closer, I’ll fucking do it! This, I swear!”

“Do you think your pal there would’ve wanted you to do that?” I said.

“Shut up! I don’t know what you things do to captives, but I’m not about to find out!”

“What’s your name?”

“What?” His grip on his pistol relaxed, as I’d anticipated. “E—Ensign Valkour.”

“I’ll tell you what we do.” I seized his weapon in an orange levitation field and yanked it out of his grasp. “We’ll give you a hot meal, and a bed, and plenty of time to think about what you’ve done wrong. Now, get the hell off this thing and go catch a breath of fresh air.”

One of the Stormtroopers escorted him towards the ladder. Before he made the ascent to go join the other detainees, he looked back at us, bewildered. This wasn’t what he’d been expecting at all. This wasn’t what he’d trained for. I checked the magazine on the pistol, finding it fully loaded with 10mm Auto. There was, in fact, a round in the chamber and the safety was off. I put the magazine back in, clicked the safety on, and threw it in a saddlebag. It could come in handy, later.

“Smooth, ma’am,” Ket said. “Glad you didn’t have to, well, you know.”

“Yeah, well, looks like Storm the Slayer has turned over a new leaf,” I muttered.

I wasn’t about to tell them about Celestia, just yet. They wouldn’t have taken it well if I’d told them I was experiencing vivid hallucinations of a dead goddess who arbitrarily bestowed her blessings upon me. Placid would’ve just about gone off the deep end if word of my visions spread around and reached her ears. I wasn’t quite ready to be her own personal fucking messiah.

I didn’t even know what the hell any of it meant, or why, to my knowledge, Celestia hadn’t shown herself to anypony else in the thousand years she’d been gone. One thing was certain; I had to tell Cicatrice and BD about it, at the very least. It was a conversation I was beginning to dread, but one that was absolutely necessary. Once may have been tiredness and trauma taking its toll. Twice was something supernatural. It had to be. The altered enchantment on my Charger’s spell locus was proof positive of divine intervention. I had to get it back to the techs in one piece.

I couldn’t allow my mind to wander. I had to stay focused. The interior of the overturned Landcruiser was hazardous in the extreme. I almost tripped a few times as I walked across the now-horizontal bulkheads and their many wire conduits, light fixtures, and other protrusions in the dark. As we came upon an entrance to a passageway, I gazed straight down into the void. There was a piece of broken glass next to me. I picked it up in my levitation and tossed it down the shaft. Over the din of the alarms, I could barely hear it clink at the bottom a second or two later.

Hexhead peered over my shoulder. “About a fifteen-meter drop, at least.”

“Rope,” I said. “There’s a stairwell down there. We’re climbing down.”

Private Haybale tied off a rope to a sturdy drainpipe, and I clipped on with the descender integrated into my armor’s chest piece. I stepped off into the darkness, rappelling down several meters, swinging back and forth in the flickering red abyss. I swept my helmet light around a bit, soon finding the stairwell.

“It’s halfway down!” I yelled up to the rest. “Gonna have to swing myself over there.”

I tensed my abdominal muscles and used my hind legs to give me some momentum, trying to swing into the stairwell. After a few swings, I reached out and wrapped my leg around one of the railings, pulling myself towards it. I tied off the rope at the bottom, knotting it around the handrail.

“Why didn’t you just send one of us?” one of the Stormtroopers shouted down.

“Because I’m not a big fucking baby, that’s why!” I yelled back.

I gritted my teeth. My abdomen was still sore from my shrapnel wound surgery. I had to take it easy. After policing the slack carefully, I waved the others down. One by one, the other members of Revenant rappelled down, climbing into the stairwell.

“How much rope we got?” Hexhead said. “We’ve got a lot of climbing to do.”

Private Haybale rifled around in his saddlebags. “Plenty.”

I went down the stairs, which was a very odd experience, given that they were now aligned vertically. I had to carefully mount the rail, climb over, and shimmy down. The weight of my armor made me realize just how tired I felt. I’d been running on fumes since before the battle began. I’d barely had any rest after getting back from Vanhoover. Pretty much the only real sleep I had was hiding from the Vargr in a culvert full of rainwater. Even though I was completely exhausted, I was climbing around like a fucking monkey.

I smirked a little as a funny thought crossed my mind. I wondered if this was how the oh-so-enigmatic and dangerous humans amused themselves in their spare time. Perhaps they climbed trees or scaled fake cliffs in the pristine, astroturfed luxury habs they probably lived in. I dropped into the section of stairwell below. Blue plasma streaked past my face, singeing my muzzle.

“Contact!” I ducked low against the bulkhead, pressing myself into cover.

I waved away the others, who were about to climb down to get me. One of the Landcruiser’s crew members was shooting a pulsegun up the vertically inclined passageway from the cover of an open hatch. I slowly pulled a grenade from my vest. That was when I heard it. The cries of protest from below.

“Stop shooting at them, Kastie!” The voice was whiny and male. “They’re gonna kill us!”

“I’m not givin’ up the cruiser to these fucking animals!” The second to speak was a gruff-sounding woman, obviously the shooter. “Do you hear me, you fucking four-legged freak?”

I stared at the grenade in my hoof. A standard Imperial Type-Four with 200 grams of CycloHex fill and a ball bearing frag liner. If I pulled the pin and tossed it down there, they’d both die, or be grievously wounded at the very least. I had no idea how many cleomanni down there were neutral rather than hostile.

Celestia’s words resonated in my head. If you kill defenseless people again, I shall strip my boons from you.

I bit my lip. “Shit. Shit!”

I clipped the frag back to my vest. I drew in a deep breath, trying to think of the alien words I’d have to use. The exact sequence of consonants and vowels that would have to cross my tongue.

“We’re not after your lives,” I spoke in Ardun. “We only want Ordinator Naimekhe. Turn her over to us.”

“In your dreams, creature!” the woman shouted back. “If you things even have dreams.”

I grinned wide, measuring my words carefully. “Akapta nev, kontestametz nev wes Taffal fru vak Naurud? Kaunuos meg dos nev kovate boma iave adon vor? Kaunuos meg dos nev hostarra awul-setz, kro henmo arvuna kitas, meg dussas-maggeol miktas adon vor?”

Realize you, contest you with Devil of the North? Think make what you another nuke have not I? Think make what you pathetic trash-heap, and soul every inside, make smoking-crater into not I?

I had to remind myself to think backwards. I could hear Ket snickering above me, and I briefly wondered if I’d got my grammar wrong.

“The—the Devil of—“ I could hear the hesitation creeping into the woman’s voice. “Oh lords above. You—you’re the one?”

“Yeah, that’s right,” I said. “I take bad little imps, and I nuke them. No mercy. Just nukes. Be nice, or be next.”

“You’re not serious.”

“Ditch that fucking gun and climb out of there, or you’re gonna find out.”

“Okay. Okay! You win! Fuck!” I heard the clatter of a pulsegun being tossed aside. “Fuckin’ psychos.”

Maybe it was my delivery, or maybe it was something about the context of those specific words in their language that differed from ours, but somehow, I almost always rolled a twenty on my intimidation check. I missed playing tabletop with the guys on the Endless Summer. I wondered if I could cajole my new squad into a game of Ogres & Oubliettes, sometime.

I was banking on most of the Landcruiser’s crew being too banged up and frightened to refuse the possibility of rescue. It was starting to look like I was right. The show was mostly over, at least on this deck. They rightly considered themselves to be in distress. The woman struggled to climb up the passageway, grabbing on to the protrusions that lined it.

I crawled over the edge and reached a foreleg down towards her. “Grab my hoof.”

She paused for a moment, unsure if she should take my offer, before her hand clasped around my armored boot. I would have used levitation to pull her out, but my horn was almost completely exhausted, and I was saving what little spellpower I had left, in case I really needed it. Her eyes widened a bit with surprise when I hauled her up with just one leg.

“Damn, you’re strong!” she said. “What do they feed you things?”

“First off, I’m not a thing,” I said. “Second, I’m not a farm animal. I can feed my-fucking-self.”

The red-headed Zinsar woman had her hair drawn into a neat bun. She sat across from me and looked me up and down, a bemused smirk playing its way across her face. “You’re the Devil of the North?”

I shrugged. “As far as I can tell, yeah.”

“But, you’re so small. And so orange. I thought you’d be scarier. You’re fucking adorable!”

“Oh, right.” I rolled my eyes. “I bet you expected me to have fangs down to my chin and glowing red eyes or some shit. Nope. Sorry to disappoint.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be some kind of mech pilot or something?” There was a glimmer of recognition in her eyes. She shoved my shoulder. “That was you out there, wasn’t it? You pushed us over!”

“Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time.”

“How did they make you so person-like?” she said.

I blinked a few times. “Excuse me? Okay, first off, who the fuck are they?”

“Your creators. You’re obviously manufactured to be visually pleasing. I mean, why would a species evolve naturally to be every color of the rainbow? Fur coloration is for camouflage against predators. This world’s grass and dirt are completely normal colors. So, like, why are you bright orange?”

“I’m not fucking orange! I’m saffron!”

“Right. Saffron. That shows up against everything!”

“No, it doesn’t!” I said. “In a desert, at sunset, it’s perfectly good camouflage.”

The cleomanni rolled her eyes and snickered. “Right. In that very specific use case, sure.”

“Sandstone?”

“That’s stretching it a little.”

I had no idea why I was so offended by her line of argumentation. It may have been that I liked to think I was good at sneaking around, and here, someone was telling me I stuck out like a sore hoof.

“Well, Devil of the North.” She offered her hand. “Hekkasten Arboka. I’m one of the engineers on this old shit-heap.”

I took her proffered hand. “Desert Storm. I’d love to chat, but we're running short on time. Our target could be getting away. Here, I’ll give you a boost.”

I cupped my forehooves together and she placed one of her hooves atop mine, putting her hands on my shoulders for stability. I lifted her high enough for Mar and Ket to reach over the railing, grab her, and pull her up the rest of the way.

“Who’s the target?” Hekkasten said.

“Wertua Naimekhe, an Ordinator in the CSF,” Mardissa said.

“Oh, that prancing cunt?” The engineer frowned. “Never did like her. I think she’s in the Citadel. Armored combat information center, down below and amidships, between the two engine rooms fore and aft. They retrofitted the officer’s lounge there into her own personal quarters.”

“I take it that wasn’t a very popular decision,” Corporal Cloverleaf said.

Hekkasten shook her head. “Not popular at all. The orders to do so came from way up high. She got the officers all heated, and then, they started taking it out on us. If you see my lads down there, don’t shoot at them, please. Tell them who you’re after. They’re about ready to serve her head up on a silver platter to anyone who asks nicely.”

“Hey, listen,” I said. “We’re trying to evacuate everypo—excuse me, everyone—that we can from this damn thing. Is there anything else we should know?”

“There’s a bunch of crew holed up on the Gallery Deck, just below us.” The fire-headed woman leaned over the railing. “They won’t know your intentions if they see you. Some of ‘em are armed. We pulled those fancy new pulseguns from the armory. I could get on the PA system. Make a few calls, if you want.”

“Can you confine it to the Gallery Deck?” I shouted up at her. “I don't wanna let Wertua know we're coming. I owe her some payback after all that bullshit on Ahriman Station.”

“Can do. Wait one.” Hekkasten wandered out of sight and made her way to what was presumably an intercom station. The next time I heard her voice, it was through the overhead PA speakers. “Engineman Arboka to the Gallery Deck. There are Equestrians incoming from the bridge. Do not open fire on them. They're attempting to evac everyone.”

As before, I could hear a commotion below us as they deliberated over what to do. That deliberation again turned to argumentation. Another crewman began to make the ascent to my position. I watched him plant his hoof on a rounded light fixture.

“Wait, that's not safe!” I said.

Predictably, he slipped. I tried to reach out with my magic to catch him, but it was too late. I heard him cry out briefly as he fell several meters before grunting explosively as his back slammed into the bulkhead with a sickening crunch. His shocked cries quickly turned to agonized screams.

“Fuck! Fuck!” He flailed around helplessly, his lower half paralyzed from the waist down. “I think I broke my back! Help! Gods, no!”

I keyed my helmet radio. “Revenant One to Goshawk One.”

Commodore Layer Cake’s voice came in loud and clear from the other end. “Go ahead, Revenant One.”

“We have an injured member of the Landcruiser’s crew here who needs immediate evac. Spinal injury. Bring a stretcher.”

With a bright flash of magic, Prima teleported in next to me in the stairwell, nearly giving me a small heart attack. I took a few deep breaths to steady myself. “Fuck, call me up on the radio next time!”

“Having fun, yet?” Prima said.

“This is turning into a fucking slog, and we aren’t even two compartments in, yet,” I muttered. “We need ladders. Rope. Cutting torches. Fire extinguishers. More climbing equipment. Now.”

“Your wish is my command.” Prima clapped her forehooves together and grinned wide, before she teleported back out. My own personal genie in a bottle.

The rest of Revenant started their descent. Two Stormtroopers flew past them with a foldable stretcher. They were beside the casualty in a flash, loading him onto it with the utmost care as he looked up at them and their faceless helmet visors with a mixture of fear and awe. Over the din of the vessel’s own klaxons, I could faintly hear another, more distant set of sirens through its hull.

My helmet radio picked up some chatter from Placid. “Raven One to all ground teams, Tar Pan’s fire department have arrived on the scene. They’re waiting for the all-clear to move up to the cruiser and start tackling the blaze, but they want to know the area’s secure and their guys aren’t gonna get shot.”

“Wait one.” I radioed back. I checked my drone feeds from the Parasprite drones for any movement, any heat signatures, anything on the terahertz scanners. Nothing. “No hostile contacts in the immediate vicinity of the cruiser. Tell them to stay away from any lower openings. Tell the boys from Vanhoover to send a Gargoyle in and cover them, dammit.”

“Raven One to WIDOWMAKER, did you get that? I need confirmation of the Sergeant’s orders.”

Lieutenant Terror was the next to check in. “That’s affirmative, Sergeant Gale. We need the base of the cruiser completely cordoned off. No one leaves without being detained. Have the TPFD guys escorted in.”

Over my drone feed, I watched as the fire trucks moved up, deployed their booms, and began spraying thick, white jets of firefighting foam all over the Landcruiser’s flame-engulfed bridge. I snickered softly. “Yeah, that’s it. Give her a nice facial.” I squinted closer at the feed. “Hold on a sec, why are they using foam? Don’t they need to cool the steel down?”

We tied off more rope and descended through the fallen Bannerman’s upturned corridors. I could hear the wails of the trapped and the injured all around me. The darkness was claustrophobic and disorienting. If not for the inexorable pull of gravity, it would be difficult to tell which way was up. This wasn’t combat. This was caving, in a big steel cave that was on fire. We must have been insane.

Smoke was rising from one of the compartments further below. The cancerous stink of an electrical fire stung my nostrils. As I rappelled down, I encountered a gaggle of Confederate crewmen all huddled together in a corner. They didn’t reach for any weapons or make any sudden moves. I ignored the looks they gave me and made my way over to a hatch in the bulkhead-turned-deck and placed my hoof on it. It was hot to the touch. There were thin wisps of smoke coming up through the gaps. Not good.

“Don’t go in there!” one of the cleomanni said. “Fire!”

“I can see that.” I glanced at the feed in my eyepiece to check my position in the cruiser relative to the Parasprites and their scans, carefully marking the compartment beyond, and then, I keyed my radio. “Revenant One to Raven One. Be advised, we’ve got an air-starved fire in a—“ I turned back towards the cleomanni. “What kind of room is this?”

One of the crewmen stood a little straighter, eyeing me curiously. “Electrical panel room. I think that’s why most of the lights are out.”

“What do you think the source of ignition was?” I said.

He sheepishly scratched at the back of his neck. “Well, I think there were some cans of solvent stacked in there.”

I raised a brow. That shit would never have flown on the transport ships I used to ride on. “Why? Why didn’t you put them in a compartment with built-in fire suppression?”

“The paint locker’s too far of a walk,” one of them finally admitted.

I snickered at their idiocy, basking in the sense of superiority that I felt at that moment. “That’s retarded. You’re retar—”

There was a loud bang that reverberated through the compartment. A bullet slammed into my spine armor, knocking the wind out of me. I cried out from shock as I tumbled to the deck. Someone had shot me from behind. My adrenaline ratcheted up as I twisted upright and located the source. A woman charged at me, screaming, madness in her eyes, the 10mm autopistol in her hand barking over and over. A second round smashed into my chest protector. A third went in the gap between my plate and my pauldron, digging into my flesh. My vision narrowed to a tunnel as I suddenly found myself fighting for my life.

The rest of Revenant were still climbing down after me. Flashes of insight into my situation raced through my consciousness. Why are they moving so slow? How come no one’s covering me? Did I overextend myself and not realize it? I raised a barrier in the nick of time, a bullet flattening into a copper and lead pancake against the orange sphere of magic that surrounded me. The fourth round would’ve gone through my neck.

I hit my assailant with a body-seize spell. I panicked. Used too much magic power. Her own spasming muscles hyperextended and dislocated her right elbow with a sickening pop, her sidearm flying out of her hand and clattering to the deck. The weapon skidded towards me and I pinned it to the deck with my hoof. My attacker’s mad dash ended with her tumbling to the floor in a screaming heap, her broken arm held high, the baleful effects of my magic in full evidence. Seeing this, the group behind me, which I had assumed had surrendered, sprang into action. Arms went around my neck and around my flanks. Two of them, the strongest and burliest, tried pulling me backwards off my hooves.

My eyes went wide as dinner plates, my heart flopping like a fish in my chest from adrenaline. In the darkness of the felled cruiser, with nothing for visual reference, the way their arms and fingers wriggled as they seized me reminded me of the Seneschal’s oily, black tentacles. With a panicked cry, I swung my left foreleg behind myself aimlessly. A jaw was crushed. Teeth flew. My right hind leg lashed out with a powerful buck, almost on pure reflex; a primeval twitch of my muscles very nearly beyond my control. A knee caved. There were now three flopping, screaming cleomanni on the deck, grievously injured. The remaining three were about to make their move, but I wheeled on them, my caster emitters glowing.

“On the floor, face down, now!” I shouted.

At least one of them was hesitant. “Fucking witch!”

“I’m not fucking around with you. Get on the fucking deck, hands behind your head, or I will fucking shoot you!”

They slowly, reluctantly complied. As the rest of my squad finally finished climbing down after me, I went up to the crewmen and zip-tied their wrists one by one. I was panting, my heart still racing. The adrenaline gave way to a throbbing pain in my shoulder. I rolled back onto my haunches and leaned up against a wall. I started stripping off the armor over my right foreleg, pulling my chest protector back so I could see the wound. I groaned in pain. There was a hole in my shoulder that was leaking a small river of blood down my leg, my fur stained red. No exit wound out the back. A hollow-point round. 10mm ball would’ve gone right through both sides of me.

Clover approached with a first aid kit, grimacing. “Damn, that looks bad.”

I felt around inside the gunshot wound with my levitation. The bullet had stopped in my bone, right at the point of my humerus where it joined my shoulder. I bit my lip to stifle a scream as I yanked out the hunk of deformed metal with a small spray of blood.

I pointed to the wound. “Hemo. Now.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Cloverleaf went to work, and though she was far from being a trained medic, she managed to pack the wound sufficiently to get a nice plug of hemogel in there. I winced as its enchantment activated and it heated and hardened.

“The fuck took you guys so long?” I said.

“We’re moving as fast as we can, ma’am,” Haybale said.

“Don’t give me that shit. Stick close. Check your corners. Move up and clear the space. They wanna do this the hard way, we do it the hard way.” I looked down at the struggling, zip-tied cleomanni. “Dammit, I’m trying to help you people. Stop trying to make me fucking kill you.”

I stood and gathered myself. My shoulder burned. It hurt to walk. I was physically and emotionally exhausted. I stifled a whimper and forced myself to power through. It would be very difficult for me to climb in this condition. I had to slow down. At least that would give the others time to catch up.

The rest of Revenant seemed to have lost their bearings. They’d never trained for a situation like this. The alien ship had tall, imposing passageways meant for bipeds. The light seemed to fade into the dark corners of the steel corridors. The black voids at the end of them would seem like gaping maws were it not for the periodic flicker of emergency lighting beyond them that suddenly brought their true length into stark relief. Most of us were in no condition for chitchat. We were all tired as fuck. I watched Cloverleaf stifle a yawn, futilely blinking the dryness out of her eyes. Both Mar and Ket had noticeable bags under theirs.

“Bring up your overlays. There’s a fire in this panel room, here.” I pointed to the closed hatch. “That way’s a dead end, anyway.” I switched to the frequency used by the Commodore and her team. “This is Revenant One. Commodore Cake, ma’am, we’re moving down towards the CIC. We’re going after the HVT before they have a chance to bug out. We would be very grateful if your team could secure the gallery deck and keep the vessel’s crew off our backs. Some of the crew are neutral, but there are still pockets of hostile activity. There’s an out-of-control fire of improperly stored materials in a distribution panel room that has knocked out the lighting. It’s a shitshow.”

A few seconds later, I got a response from Commodore Cake. “Affirmative, Sergeant. We’ll secure the gallery deck. Give us a shout if you run into trouble further on.”

I switched frequency. “Revenant One to Raven One. Gale, you there?”

“Raven One here, go ahead.”

“Are the TPFD planning to make entry to the upper levels of the cruiser?” I could hear the far-off sound of firefighting foam sweeping over the Landcruiser’s hull. It sounded like riding through an automatic car wash.

“Wait one.” There was a brief silence as Placid conversed with what was presumably the fire chief. “They’re saying, and I quote, ‘not just no, but fuck no’. They’re not doing jack shit until the rest of the cruiser is secure. There was a miscommunication. They asked for water, not foam, but the Oligarchs sent a couple of airport fire trucks they had in their stockpile, thinking they’d be better because they were fancier or something.”

“That’s because they’re complete dipshits,” I said. “Foam has less cooling capacity than water. They use it at airports because planes are full of fuel and you need something to blanket and smother it if it leaks all over the tarmac. Get those guys unfucked, pronto. We need water on this thing, now!”

“Working on it.”

Corporal Shooting Star pounded on a hatch in the deck a few times with her hoof. “Come on out, fuckin’ cockroaches!”

She rotated the handle and swung open the hatch. Gunfire boomed from the other side, rounds pinging and ricocheting in the cruiser’s cavernous steel hull. Shooting Star braced herself in cover, pulled the pin from a grenade with her teeth, and dropped it down the hatch. There was a loud bang. Screaming and coughing. Pleas of surrender from frag-wounded enemy personnel.

“How do you feel about tryin’ shit now?” Star shouted down the hatch. “How you like them new holes?”

This was some shit, and we’d stepped in it with all four hooves. Business as usual. Despite Hekkasten’s entreaties, it seemed that doing this part of the operation nice and clean was too much to hope for.

Commodore Cake and the Stormtroopers moved in. They outgunned the enemy by an order of magnitude, to such a degree that the first few compartments they cleared weren't even a battle at all. What I saw, and heard, was faceless pegasi shock troopers swooping in like birds of prey, no-selling 10mm Auto rounds to their chest armor and helmets and tackling noncompliant cleomanni with bone-crunching force. Koskas and her team moved down, next. The damarkind was grinning and licking a nine-inch fixed-blade knife like it was a fucking lollipop. I shuddered to think of the brutality she’d visit upon the Landcruiser’s crew if they did not capitulate.

I shook my head. Koskas was a friend. I hated feeling narrow-minded about someone who’d more than demonstrated her allegiance to our cause, but the fact remained that she was a two-meter-tall, couple-hundred kilo carnivore with sharp teeth and big claws. Even the friendliest damarkind was unsettling as fuck to have in close proximity. Something ancient and primal tickled the inside of my brain, urging me to run in the opposite direction. It was only my experience and conditioning that permitted me to hold my ground when in her presence.

“Squad, we're moving down to the CIC and engineering,” I said. “Sergeant Koskas and the Commodore have this deck. Let's go.”

For what felt like hours, we scaled the cruiser’s upturned interior, tying off ropes and making our way further down. The lower reaches of the cruiser were dark and grimy, laced with rust and soot. We found ourselves in an upturned storeroom with bearings and tubing and all sorts of little parts strewn all over next to empty storage racks that protruded from a deck that was now a bulkhead. The air stank of diesel, old grease, and lube oils.

We moved through the space, taking care not to trip on the spare parts scattered all over the deck. I unslung Lucky from my back and powered him up, giving him a charge with my horn. “Lucky, sentry mode. Follow, close.”

The Orbit beeped a few times as it acknowledged my commands, sweeping its casters back and forth. We advanced carefully, scanning for signs of movement or any hostile activity. There was none. We didn’t see any of the crew. This area of the cruiser was eerily deserted.

I heard a strange, far-off clicking noise. An inequine howl echoed through the cruiser’s hull, muffled by distance and intervening walls.

Haybale looked nervous. “Ma’am? I’ve got a—“

Shooting Star punched his shoulder. “Don't even say it, you jinxing motherfucker.”

“Orders, ma’am?” Mardissa tightly gripped her shouldered anti-material rifle, eyes fixed forward.

I lifted a hoof, gesturing for the squad to hold. I took a few deep breaths, quietly inhaling and exhaling through my nostrils. My worst fear had been realized.

“Karkadann,” I whispered.

There was a pregnant pause. Everyone had heard the rumors. What little remained of the secrecy surrounding the existence of the Karkadann had faded when they took part in the attack on Camp Crazy Horse and just about everyone had a good look at the things. It took a few seconds for the grim reality of the situation to sink in.

“Oh fuck,” Haybale said. “Oh fuck!”

“Quiet.” I got on the radio. “Ghost One, reinforce our position. We’ve got Karks.”

A couple seconds later, Prima teleported in with a flash of green magic, her expression grave. “Where?”

“No contact,” I said. “Can hear ‘em, though.”

“Fuck. Not good.” Prima pointed at the ductwork. “Keep your eyes on the vents. Any openings big enough for a pony to fit through.”

We took it slow, advancing cautiously in the dark, listening for the scratching of hind-talons against metal and the digital chittering and warbling that the monsters made. The sirens and flashing emergency lights disoriented us and impeded our senses. I checked the map. The path to the engine room was above us, through a bulkhead that had become a ceiling. Prima teleported up to it, tied off rope, and tossed the other end down to us.

I clipped on and climbed up, my legs burning with exertion. Every last strand of muscle in my body protested, begging me to lighten my load, either by stripping off my saddlebags or pieces of my armor. I did neither.

One by one, we pulled ourselves up into the passageway outside the storeroom. The corridor was long. Over fifty meters, at least. Long enough that the emergency lights undulating along its length made me briefly wobble on my legs, deeply disoriented. My Orbit hovered close by my shoulder, scanning for targets. No movement. No hostile contacts in sight. Prima took point, holding up a few of her blades in her levitation magic.

I checked the terahertz feed from my drones outside. There were small movement pings everywhere. Not particularly useful. It looked like noise. It could’ve been anything, even interference from the Landcruiser’s electrical cabling. Scanning through metal with terahertz sensors was basically a non-starter. Was worth a try, though.

There was a palpable tension in the air. I took deep breaths to steady myself, scanning around, my helmet’s headlamps casting pools of light on the bulkheads, revealing small details that otherwise faded into the dark. Light fixtures, fire extinguishers, wireways, plumbing, and switches. The gray monotony of it was mind-numbing enough to send one into a trance. I had to remind myself to stay focused.

There was an inequine howl that brought me and my squad to a halt. Banging and rattling of gnarled hooves against thin metal. Every hair on the back of my neck stood on end.

“Definitely Karks.” Prima turned and looked back at us, a worried look on her face. “Close, too. Was beginning to think you were off your rocker, Sergeant.”

“Naw, we all heard it,” Haybale said.

We advanced a few more meters. Then, there was a loud clang behind us. A vent grating tore free from a duct and a dozen Karks flooded out, hissing and chittering. There wasn’t enough time to regroup and form a base of fire. They were right on top of us. It was every one of us for our-fucking-selves.

Mardissa tried bringing Thumper to bear, but the Karkadann was too fast, brushing the barrel of her rifle aside. The weapon boomed, the muzzle blast absolutely deafening in the close quarters, practically rattling my brain inside my skull. A miss. The bionically augmented creature tackled her to the deck. She screamed as she tried pushing its snapping jaws away from her face, but even with her augs, it was too strong for her. I broke into a gallop and rammed into the Kark’s side, sending both of us skidding across the bulkhead that was now a deck.

I wrapped my forelegs around the Kark’s cold, armor-plated barrel, wrestling with it as it writhed in my iron grip. There wasn’t a hint of fear or recognition in any of the beast’s four expressionless eyes as I drew the 10mm Auto from my saddlebag with my levitation, jammed it into the Karkadann’s mouth with the bore angled upwards, and swiftly emptied the entire mag straight into its brain. The thing collapsed in a heap, gunpowder smoke drifting from its bloody maw.

There was no time to dwell on my victory. There were still several more of the damnable things. Prima was doing things I’d never seen any pony do before. She tripled up her blades in her levitation field, making a steel claw that she drove into the underside of a Kark’s neck in an uppercut powerful enough to send it flipping end-over-end. One took a swipe at her with its fetlock-talons, but she parried, twisted, and rammed her bionic forehoof into the Karkadann’s side, denting its armor and sending it flying. Yep, she’d definitely been holding back when we’d fought back in Vanhoover.

I heard Haybale screaming. “Get off! Get it offa me!”

Hex, Clover, Lucky, and Star were blasting away with their casters, thin green beams of energy lashing out from their emitters and scorching the walls. The few shots that actually connected often deflected off the Karks’ armor. There was a flurry of movement at the rear of our formation, and as my headlamps fell upon it, I could see a Kark swiping and slashing at Haybale with its hooves and its bladed tail. Through the beam of my headlamps, I saw a glint of blood-slicked metal. Mardissa rose into a crouch, taking a knee and leveling her weapon. Thumper shook my chest.

The 30mm round punched a hoof-sized hole straight through the side of the Kark’s barrel, sending it rolling off Haybale, flailing its legs in its death throes. Chrome met chrome as Cloverleaf clotheslined one of the creatures with the mass of her bionic foreleg, following up by stomping the grounded Kark repeatedly with wet thuds and desperate cries of exertion until it fell unconscious. Another Karkadann pounced at Shooting Star. She tucked and rolled backwards and it sailed past her, its gangly forelegs sweeping through empty air.

“How convenient!” Shooting Star said. “They put metal in you!”

The Corporal lit her horn and channeled her pyrokinesis into the Karkadann’s armor, heating it so rapidly that the whole thing glowed cherry-red, its flesh soon smoking beneath its implants. The cries of gut-wrenching agony the creature made were unlike anything I’d ever heard in my life. They didn’t last long, however. The thing’s implants were more than skin-deep. Smoke was trailing from its nostrils when it finally collapsed and went still. The other Karks, their heads whipping like a wet dog in what looked almost like fear or pain as they shared in the unwanted stimuli transmitted by their fallen brethren, immediately withdrew from the battle, clambering towards the vent that they’d assaulted us from.

Mardissa refused to let them escape. Her rifle issued three deafening reports, my ears ringing and muffled as if stuffed with cotton gauze. All three rounds landed center-mass. Three of the Karks tumbled to the floor, freedom just beyond their grasp. The last two got away, the ducts shaking and rattling as they fled. I could see the unfettered rage on Mar’s face. This was personal to her. She knew where these things came from. How they were made. Each and every one represented an unspeakable crime.

An agonized scream split the air. I quickly made my way over to the source. Haybale was lying on his back on the deck. He was covered from head to hoof in cuts and lacerations, some inches deep. His helmet was off, a deep gash having split his left eye open like a hard-boiled egg. One of his carotid arteries had been chewed open and was spilling blood all over the deck. Red was pooling around him. In his one remaining eye, I could see only one thing. Absolute terror.

“Oh shit,” I muttered. “Oh, fuck. Hemo. Get me the fucking Hemo, now!”

I dived in as quick as I could to apply pressure to the worst of his wounds, trying to pinch off the artery in his neck. I saw an ice hockey player get his throat slit open by a skate on live holovision, once. His trainer was ex-military and saved his life by immediately running out onto the ice and pinching his jugular vein off with his magic. I probed around inside Haybale’s neck with my levitation and found the severed artery, squeezing the ends shut as tight as I could.

“Ma’am,” he began to speak. This immediately broke in a fit of hacking and sputtering.

We all knew that casualties were likely, but this was the kind of thing that nightmares were made of. I could see the looks on the rest of Revenant’s faces. We were in the worst possible environment to fight Karks. Close quarters, low light. Getting away with just one of us being WIA or KIA per engagement was actually a favorable outcome. One slip-up, and the whole squad would be wiped out. Cloverleaf was frozen in place, her legs trembling. She was being less than cooperative.

“Clover, the fucking Hemogel!” I snapped.

She shook her head. “Ma’am, he’s—he’s not—“

While maintaining my spell, I wheeled and marched up to Cloverleaf, slamming my blood-smeared hooves down on her shoulders. “I gave you an order! A fucking order!”

Clover shakily deposited the requested medical supplies in my hooves, and I ran back to the casualty. I opened the applicator with my teeth, which, in retrospect, wasn’t the most hygienic thing. At this point, it no longer mattered. Haybale was in visible distress and on the verge of passing out. I jammed the syringe into the hole in his neck, filling the gap with Hemo, waiting for it to set and harden while I quickly went after as many of his wounds as I could see. He had so many. Right through Armor, BDU, skin, fat, muscle, tendons, and right down to the fucking bone. I could see white in many of them.

“Ma’am,” Haybale sobbed. “Help. Help me. Please. I don’t wanna—I don’t—“

He couldn’t even bring himself to say it. He broke down in pained sobs, flailing his limbs desperately as the light slipped away from him. I cradled him in my forelegs, holding him close.

“Stay with me, dude,” I said. “Come on.”

After another half-minute, his struggling stilled. I put an ear to his chest. No breathing. He was going into cardiac arrest. I took off my helmet and tossed it aside. With a great heave, I ripped Haybale’s chest protector off, placing my hooves on his breastbone and beginning CPR. Thirty compressions, two rescue breaths. His mouth tasted like blood. I was about to begin compressions again when Corporal Shooting Star put her hoof on my shoulder.

“Ma’am, he’s gone!” she said. “CPR’s a waste of time.”

I shrugged off her touch and slammed my hooves into the deck, the metal ringing and reverberating beneath us. “You don’t think I know that? Fuck. Fucking motherfuckers!”

Haybale’s face was frozen in a mask of terror. After taking a few sharp, angry breaths through my nostrils, I willed myself to calm down. I ran a hoof over Haybale’s intact eye to shut it for the last time. I wrapped my forelegs around him and hugged him tight, my legs shaking. My chin touched his forehead.

“I’ll see you again, soldier,” I whispered in his ear.

It was a promise I wasn’t sure I could keep, what with the curse threatening to drag my soul down into the Archons’ domain. I rose to my hooves, taking a deep, shuddering breath and sniffling the snot that threatened to dribble down my muzzle. I was exhausted in body and soul. This day just wouldn’t fucking end. I let out a sigh as I pulled Haybale’s tags and gathered up the extra climbing equipment he carried and stuffed them in my saddlebag.

I turned and faced the rest of my unit. I was responsible for all of their lives. I was the one who’d led us here. Haybale paid the ultimate price for it. Soldiers die in the line of duty, all the time. All of us had seen death more times than we could count. It was different when it was someone you’d come to see as a brother. As a friend.

He’d always crack stupid jokes and make pithy remarks, and we’d always tell him to shut up, even though we didn’t mean it. We liked the levity, and we liked having him around. The reason I was so choked up was because, for a moment, I wondered if anyone ever actually sat down, invited him to speak, and listened to him. I’d seen him sitting alone more than a few times, working up the nerve to fight a coming battle. Once, I’d seen him crying, alone. I’d meant to talk to him about it, but I’d never quite crossed that threshold. It was as if there was always tomorrow.

Yeah. Shut up, Haybale. Like he was never even fucking there.

We didn’t even need to say it. We were all thinking the same thing. If one of us said it, then none of us would be in any shape to fight.

Mardissa couldn’t meet my eyes. Her expression was grim. Miserable, even. She felt guilty for what her kind had done, and continued to do, to mine.

I was struggling to keep my cool. Bellwether was up there, somewhere, in this mess. We hadn’t even said anything to each other. If loverboy ate shit on this run, I would be fixing to just about fucking kill myself.

“Private Granthis, can you spare me some ten-millimeter mags?” I said.

“I’ve got some, ma’am.” Ket tossed me a couple extras he carried for his own pistol.

I pulled the empty mag out of the 10mm Auto and stowed it in my saddlebags before swapping in a fresh one.

“I’m not one for eulogies,” I said. “You all know what I’d say, because it’s what you’d say. That’s how tight of a team we are. All I’ll say is this. You see this?” I pointed to Haybale’s body. “That’s ten more bruises we’re putting on Wertua when we find that bitch and beat her black and blue. We are Equestrians. They look down on us, and with their height advantage as bipeds, that’s quite literal. Sorry, Mar, Ket, but it’s true. It dawned on me, one day, what it’s like to see a pony through the eyes of the average cleomanni.” I smirked. “We’re not even real fucking people to them. If this were a theme park, we’d be the mascots, and they’d be the spoiled brats who run around, shitting on everything and kicking the poor, underpaid carnies in the shins while they stumble around in a daze suffering from heatstroke due to the cutesy costumes they’re forced to wear. Except there is one crucial difference.” I pulled on my cheek with my levitation. “You see this? You see it? I can’t take this off. It’s not a costume. It’s my fucking body.”

Mar and Ket’s shoulders heaved with what I immediately identified as shame and contrition. They knew what I meant. There was nothing quite like abusing a species to the point that they began to resent their own flesh. All of us had wondered what it’d be like to be treated like an actual person by non-Equestrians. Many of us had gone as far as to daydream, at one point or another, about what life would’ve been like for us if we’d been born on the other side. Safe. Secure. Our livelihoods and families intact. Out of all the thoughts that ran through our heads on any given day, those were the most painful ones of all.

I didn’t pull any punches as I continued my tirade. “You know what they think, don’t you? They think, ‘oh, look at the cute little colorful horsies. They’re so small and fluffy and adorable, I’d like one in my house, or in my front yard, or stuffed and mounted on the wall.’ Not people. Not livestock. Not even pets. Worse. They see us as fucking toys. And, of course, since we look like harmless teddy bears to them, it stands to reason that we will tolerate the most heinous abuses imaginable, like any other inanimate object. That we will simply grin and bear any evil they can dream up. This is manifestly false. We will not be fucked with. We will not be humiliated and reduced to chattels. You know how I plan on dying? I plan on dying with my hoof completely broken off in someone’s ass. We’re going headlong into a meat grinder. You know it. I know it. You don’t have to come. Anyone who’s with me, step forward now.”

Prima and every member of Revenant remained silent as they all took one step forward without hesitation.

I turned and faced down the long stretch of passageway that lay ahead of us. I hit the release and let the slide on my purloined pistol fly home, stripping a round from the magazine and loading it in the chamber. “Let’s fuck ‘em up.”

// … end transmission …

Record 23//Warden

//HOL CRY SWT
//CHECKSUM READ
//CHECKSUM GOOD

// … decoding …

Desert Storm

Revenant and I advanced deeper into the cruiser’s forward engineering section, keeping our eyes peeled and our heads on a swivel. The loss of Haybale had hit us like a freight train. We were all running on fumes as it was, without the additional burden of a buddy’s gruesome death weighing on our consciences. There were an unknown number of Karkadann and other hostiles occupying the compartments ahead of us.

I tried projecting an aura of confident badassery, hefting the Confederate 10mm PolyBren B10, but my heart wasn’t in it. To tell the truth, I was exhausted, injured, and frankly terrified out of my wits. It took most of my energy to hide it. The remainder, the portion that kept me on my hooves and moving, was made up of sheer, unbridled rage.

Windy was held captive and Hoodoo was dead because of Wertua; according to everything I’d been told, she was one of the Con-fed freaks who originally advocated the idea of enslaving my kind and selling us as commodities. Were it not for her orders, the concentration camp in Dodge would never have existed. Ahriman Station would never have been used to experiment on me and thousands of other captive Imperial Army personnel. There wouldn’t be nearly as many Karkadann in the field. Thousands of ponies had been subjected to unspeakable indignities in the past three years, and it was all because of her.

Wertua Naimekhe was exceedingly lucky that she’d been marked for capture and not for neutralization. If the latter had been the case, I would have taken my time with her, and I would have done it well out of sight of my comrades. They didn’t need to see that side of me.

I narrowed my eyes. Wertua’s screams would be like music to my ears as I broke every bone and dislocated every joint in her miserable body.

// … // … // … // … // … //

Mardissa Granthis

I couldn’t help but think of how adorable she looked when she gave her little speech. Underneath the imposing shell of her armor, the Sergeant was, like every other Equestrian, a bug-eyed, velvety-soft fuzzball. Even at their most pragmatic, ponies were like mythical creatures out of a demented children’s storybook. Hearing her barking promises of violence was absurd. If one was not familiar with her species, then at first glance, just about the only thing one could reasonably expect a pony to say was that she had a coin slot somewhere on top of her head, hidden underneath her mane, and if one inserted a handful of tokens, they could pet her for ten-minute blocks of time. And then, just like that, Storm’s words had reeled back and punched me in the stomach. I had to remind myself of the essential truth. I was here, fighting by the Sergeant’s side, for a good reason.

Ponies were people. There was absolutely nothing humorous about their predicament. It was horrifying. Their appearance and physiology made them the target of exploitation.

Ponies were as colorful as peacocks and as soft as mink. One could make fur coats out of them in every color of the rainbow without dyes. Their bodily substances were psychoactive and had profound scientific and paraphysical applications. Ponies were physically powerful and well-suited to hard labor, despite their lack of manual dexterity. They had high-energy metabolisms and didn’t bulk up much, which made them unattractive for their meat, thank goodness. That didn’t stop damarkinds from using them as a light snack, but damarkinds would happily cook and eat anyone, anywhere, at any time, so that wasn’t too out of the ordinary for them. Some reputedly used them for sexual gratification. The very idea that so-called civilized people saw fit to eat and fuck unwilling ponies made my skin crawl. In my travels with the Sergeant, I’d discovered that Mil-Int and the CSF had conspired to exploit Equestrians for even more blatantly immoral things that beggared belief, such as using captive mares to breed the Karkadann, or even stealing the brains out of their skulls and stuffing them in new-generation Assault Walkers alongside extremely illegal roguetech.

They were the ideal cash crop. They were also fellow sapients.

I felt sick. All the time. So damn sick. For a time, I feared that the Sergeant would never accept me. I feared that maybe my kind had hurt her species too gravely for us to ever be close. And yet, whenever she was at her most emotionally vulnerable, it was me whose arms she fled into. It was my shoulder she cried against. After all, she carried a great burden, too. She was one of the ponies that Twilight Sparkle had chosen to be one of her deadliest executioners. There was no telling how many cleomanni she’d slain in the past. I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear a concrete number. Regardless of all that my kind had done to hers, and everything that she’d done to mine, she was willing to make room in her heart for me.

Desert Storm was a friend that I felt I did not deserve. A part of me wished we could’ve gotten even closer. Another part of me wanted to push her away for fear of hurting her even more. When she was happy, I was happy. When she wasn’t, I wasn’t. Maybe I didn’t know what friendship even was, but it felt like it should’ve been something like that. I didn’t have friends, before. I had family. Having family is easy. They’re your own blood, and they’re right there from the start, and you can’t choose who they are. Friends are hard to make, and even harder to keep.

The distant hissing and chittering of the Karkadann made my wandering mind snap to attention. I gripped Thumper tighter, balancing the heavy griffon rifle atop my shoulder. I blinked my tired eyes a few times, trying to stay focused even though my arms and legs felt like taffy.

It was a dangerous gambit, what the Sergeant was doing. We were aiming to run a gauntlet of Karkadann and Gafalze and who knows what else, in the engineering spaces of a damned Bannerman. Of all things that could happen, I was quite sure that this was the worst possible thing. Then again, for all I knew, the pony penchant for melodrama was rubbing off on me.

// … // … // … // … // … //

Shooting Star

So, little ol’ Haybale finally bought the farm. Everypony around me was acting all choked-up, like they suddenly grew a conscience after seeing one of us bite it. I couldn’t bring myself to give two shits. They didn’t care about him when he was alive, and I sure as fuck wasn’t going to do their share of caring now that he was dead. It sure woke them up, though. Thank fuck for that. I wasn’t sure I’d be getting out of this alive, either, but now that everypony was running on a meaner shade of adrenaline, we were sure to pull through.

I didn’t like the Sergeant. I didn’t like Charger pilots in general. Fucking around in their great big armored ponies. Chargers didn’t make life easier for the militias. No matter how ponies tried to spin it, they weren’t really fire support. They were weapons of mass destruction. The only commonsense response to multiple Chargers entering the fray was to turn and run in the other direction, otherwise, we’d get crushed underhoof, blown up, or have a building brought down on our heads. Desert Storm was the most annoying Charger pilot I had ever met. Fuck betting. I would’ve paid money to watch that insufferable Oracle SCS bitch twist Storm’s neck from now until the stars explode. The highest form of entertainment. Now, the crazy fucker even had Prima wrapped around her hoof. Too bad. I hoped someone would have enough leverage to extract the Sergeant’s head from her ass, but it was just about fucking impossible. Her ass was a great big black hole of bullshit, sucking us all into its singularity.

What the fuck was that fucking speech? Has she finally fucking cracked? No, don’t answer that question. You won’t like the answer. I traded barbs with myself in my own brain. The irony wasn’t lost on me. It wasn’t just her. We were all near our respective breaking points.

// … // … // … // … // … //

Hexhead

I wasn’t shocked or surprised that we’d lost one. I was numb to it. The killing. The dying. It was good to keep one’s eyes forward, fixed on the goal. Not optimistic. Realistic. Leave optimism for the bleached skeletons in their muddy graves all around us.

Letting one’s mind wander was an invitation to miss vital details. A mechanic’s job was to look for things that were out of place. Rust and pitting. Torn rubber seals and worn piston rings. Bearings scraped down to exposed copper. Things that did not belong. Things like a slagged handle on a dogged-down hatch leading into a compartment below us. I’d nearly tripped over it.

“Ma’am?” I said. “Check it. Someone sealed this off.”

The Sergeant never took her eyes off her surroundings, even as she sidled up to the hatch. After all, she had an eye for the details, too.

// … // … // … // … // … //

Desert Storm

Those Karks were still out there. At any time, another half-dozen of the fuckers could swoop down on us from the vents. I kept my gaze flat and level as I approached the door in the upturned bulkhead that Hexhead had indicated. There was a red band painted across the door. A restricted area of some kind. Wertua could have been hiding in there. No, she’d never back herself into a corner like that. I had a sinking feeling in my gut that this was gonna be another fucking charnel house. We, the lost little carnies, had gone backstage. One never asks a griffon how the sausage is made. One never opens a door that Con-fed fuckheads had seen fit to seal off. I ignored my instincts.

“Hex, torch it open,” I said.

“Yes, ma’am.” Hexhead nodded, unlimbering her breaching torch from her back and levitating it over to the door.

Unlike the cheesy acetylene torches that were typical combat engineering kit, Hexhead’s was a specialist’s microfusion-powered unit with a pyrokinetic cutting tip. The cutting lance and its backpack power supply had to have weighed over a hundred kilos, but she toted it around like it was nothing. The tip of her cutting torch howled and sparks flew as she made a square cutout in the door big enough for us to fit through, before punching out the ruined chunk of door with her hoof, leaving a glowing hole behind.

We were immediately assaulted by the scent of rotting flesh. I let out a long, exasperated breath through my nostrils. Yep, charnel house. I had Clover pass me her medical kit, and I pulled out some gauze balls and fashioned them into nose plugs.

“Want some?” I proffered them to the others.

Most took a couple, but Ket and Shooting Star declined. We tied off rope and climbed down into the upturned compartment. As my headlamps scanned over the space, I caught sight of empty cages, as well as stacks of body bags piled up against the far bulkhead, along with everything else that wasn’t nailed down. Shattered fragments of what looked like laboratory glassware and other bits of detritus littered the area.

“The fuck?” I whispered.

I climbed down towards the piles of body bags, shuffling across the filthy, inclined deck. When I got close to the pile, the stench was overwhelming. I bit my lip, slowly unzipping one of the bags, the glow of my levitation magic casting a dim orange hue on the hellish scene. It wasn’t long before I found the decomposing corpse of a stallion staring back at me.

“Lucky, record video,” I said, my voice wavering. “Head tracking.”

The Orbit beeped in acknowledgment, hovering over my shoulder and following my head movements exactly. There had to have been at least fifty body bags. Mardissa held a hand to her mouth, eyes wide with horror and disgust.

“You think they killed ‘em before we got here, ma’am?” Hexhead said.

“Something else is going on here,” I said. “They’ve been dead for a while. Days, at least.”

“What if they had some kinda virus or something?” Clover’s brows knit with worry. “Are we gonna get sick, too?”

I looked around the space. Some surgical trays, gurneys, and other equipment lay scattered about. I shook my head. “No. This isn’t a biolab. No filtration. Nothing. It just goes right to the same ventilation trunk as everything else. They wouldn’t bring something dangerous like that aboard a command cruiser, where there’s a risk of contagion jumping species accidentally and infecting the entire crew. So, what the hell?”

I reached down with my levitation and manipulated the deceased stallion’s head, inspecting it. There was a hole in his forehead, right where his horn would’ve been if he was a unicorn. Someone had removed his horn and drilled all the way into his brain. The lump in my gut turned from lead to tungsten.

“Any ideas, Mar?” I turned towards the only cleomanni woman I saw fit to call a friend, who looked like she was trying desperately not to lose her lunch.

“I couldn’t even begin to venture a guess, ma’am,” she said.

I didn’t like this. Not one fucking bit. I thought I’d gotten used to atrocities by now, both inflicting and receiving them. This had a touch of darkness and cruelty that went a step beyond the usual Con-fed bullshit. My sense of unease was palpable. It felt like a predator’s eyes were boring into the back of my head. As it turned out, they were.

The air was split by hisses and warbling, digital shrieks. When me and the squad turned back towards the entrance we’d made, we saw the glowing eyes of a half-dozen Karkadann pour through the hole like roaches.

“Contact!” I shouted. “Weapons free!”

I kept my pistol in reserve, sending caster pulses downrange as I lunged for cover. The Karkadann were maddeningly difficult targets, jumping and speed-crawling along the empty storage racks, hissing like snakes, pulsing their bizarre audio data bursts at each other. I could barely maintain a lock. Adrenaline and exhaustion vied for control of my body as my targets slipped from my aim. I was getting a little emotional, watching them come at us without a hint of fear as we unloaded on them.

I gritted my teeth. “Motherfucker. Motherfucker!”

Prima, that unyielding death goddess in the shape of a pony, teleported front and center, and in so doing, she proved that she was mortal after all. Six Karks screeched and pounced on her from six directions. Their armored bodies slammed into her, knocking the wind out of her with an explosive grunt and sending her sprawling. I watched them all roll across the inclined deck in a big ball, three of them trying to seize her by the haunches and the shoulders, their bladed tails flickering in our headlamp beams. If Prima went down, we were all as good as dead. Mar took a knee and lined up Thumper, but she didn’t have a shot. She could’ve put a hole in Prima if she wasn’t careful.

However, what happened next defied explanation. Prima let out a roar of pure rage as she teleported out of the dogpile of Karks, bringing one of them with her as she rematerialized in mid-air, stabbing it in the neck as the two of them fell. She pivoted so she landed on top of it, driving her knives into its neck over and over with her levitation. She levitated a grenade off her vest, ripping the pin out and letting the spoon fly free. Then, Prima did the wildest fake-out I ever saw. She put the grenade in her hoof and cocked her leg back as if she was going to throw it. The Karkadann watching her reacted immediately, swarming away from where she aimed. She performed the whole motion of throwing the grenade, but she teleported the grenade off her hoof mid-course. I didn’t see where the grenade went, until one of the Karks exploded violently from the inside-out with an ear-shattering bang, showering three others with its own shrapnelized armor.

I waved the squad forward. “Go, go, go! Kill these motherfuckers!”

We moved in on them, aiming to put the pressure on and seal the deal before they had a chance to recover. Me and Shooting Star charged up the middle, with Clover and Hexhead taking the right and left flanks around the pile of body bags and Mar and Ket hanging back and providing support. The Karks writhed on the inclined deck, chunks of their armor missing. There was blood all over. Lucky was already pouring fire on them from over my shoulder, the flash of the green caster beams almost blinding me. I switched my caster to manual, eye-tracking mode, and then shot the Karks in the exposed fleshy bits. Hexhead leapt into the fray, slinging her cutting torch. The big mare fearlessly tackled one of the Karks, bringing her pyrocutter’s tip down on its head, rapidly burning through its skull and into its brain as it shrieked and struggled.

I drew out my knife and rammed it hilt-deep into the mess of shrapnel-ruined flesh that one Kark’s neck had become. I pumped the blade in and out with my levitation, going for the arteries. There were things in there that belonged in no flesh-and-blood being. My knife bounced off silicone hoses; artificial vessels carrying unspeakable fluids. The creature writhed on the floor as it whined and bled, its tortured physiology a mockery of the prosthetics that kept me alive. I snuffed out its twisted existence without a hint of remorse.

I rose to my hooves, my chest armor covered in spatters of blood and off-white ichor. The others had just neutralized their chosen targets. One of the creatures had been turned into a smoldering husk by Shooting Star’s pyrokinesis. Two more Karks remained, circling like hungry manticores. Just when I thought we might’ve had a fighting chance, a dozen more of the things poured through the hatch.

My blood ran cold. “Pull back! Fire and retreat!”

We were backed into a corner. There were no other obvious exits to this compartment. As we withdrew and they rapidly advanced on us, climbing down the storage racks, the utter hopelessness of our situation became apparent. Thumper erased two of Karkadann and their warped lives, but that still left many more. One in the center of their formation, one of the Bull Karks, was physically larger and more imposing than the others, clinging to the inclined deck with its magnetic boots.

The creature’s hot breath puffed visible condensation into the cold air as it snorted through its nostrils. Like the rest of its body, its face was completely covered in reflective armor, with tiny cameras in place of eyes. For all I knew, they were its actual eyes, its real ones having been surgically removed. It moved with a dark and unknowable intelligence, communicating what seemed like orders to the others.

They advanced on us, our caster beams bouncing off their heavy plating. The Bull Kark’s shoulder plating unfurled, revealing what could not have been mistaken for anything less than a pair of glowing orange caster emitters.

“Cover!” I shouted.

Scintillating columns of orange energy slammed into Hexhead’s chest protector. She let out an explosive grunt as the force of the impact struck her like a hammer, sending her sprawling. The Bull Kark had a hump on its back that could only have been a power source for a beamcaster of Confederate make.

There were things on its back that I vaguely recognized as life support devices. Titanium hoses and what looked almost like a dialysis pump. Then, it hit me like a sack of bricks. The Confederacy didn’t know how to make diagrammatic engines. Either they’d somehow figured out how to get these vile creatures to latently perform magic, or there was a pony cyberbrain slaved to this Karkadann’s systems.

Along with the stress of the situation I found myself in, something about the idea of being a living brain trapped inside a Karkadann’s armored body made me violently ill. I gagged and dry-heaved, but nothing came up.

Prima keyed her radio. “Tiamat, we need your Wolfhounds, right the fuck now, over!”

“Rally Point Gold,” the Anima radioed back. “Come and get ‘em.”

Prima teleported out, and then teleported back a couple seconds later with the three Wolfhounds we’d recovered from Pur Sang Arsenal. Pure chaos ensued as the Karkadann charged us, the Wolfhounds immediately springing into action with their powerful MBCs, cutting down three Karks in the blink of an eye. The Bull Kark burst into a gallop and caught me off-guard with its sheer swiftness, tackling me and ramming me into a steel bulkhead with a loud clang.

“Ma’am!” Cloverleaf cried out.

The thing’s huge body physically overwhelmed me. I was being crushed. The Karkadann drooled and huffed in my face like a mindless beast, smashing its chest into mine. I saw a flash of chrome in my lower peripheral vision. A sharp, metal prick like a cross between a syringe and a male bedbug’s genitals unfolded from the monster’s groin. I was moments away from the most gruesome and painful death imaginable. I levitated out my knife, my ringing ears filled with the sounds of the beast’s growls and my own terrified, adrenalized screams. I couldn’t see anywhere to stab on its body. It was completely covered in armor. If I tried, I’d roll the point of my knife.

I flipped my blade around in my levitation and desperately smashed the pommel into the thing’s armored skull, making nary a dent. “Fuck you! Fuck you!”

The huge thing jostled forward and humped against my underbelly like a big dog, trying to find the ideal angle to spear through my gut and pump me full of corrosive nanomachines. I couldn’t help but think, this is it. I’m going to fucking die. The Archons awaited their newest plaything. They’d been denied long enough.

I summoned the deepest reserves of my nearly exhausted magic, forming a partial barrier over my abdomen that the thing’s gunmetal doom-prick thrust into. It bounced and slid off. I watched a 30mm ATR barrel lower itself into my field of view, leveled straight at the Kark’s neck. “Wai—” I had just enough time to cover my face before my words were cut off by an earsplitting boom and I was showered with gore. The Kark’s disembodied head was launched several meters away in a spray of blood and twisted metal armor. Its decapitated body collapsed atop me like a puppet with its strings cut, its jagged neck-hole flopping over into my face and decanting its vital fluids all over me like a dingo’s tipped-over wineskin.

I quickly learned that Karkadann have two circulatory systems. One natural, with red, iron-based blood like ours. One unnatural, with a milky white synthetic substance that smelled like pus-filled gauze wraps. It was all over my face. It was in my nose. It was in my mouth. I retched and I retched, my eyes watering. Mardissa offered a hand that I gladly took, and she helped me up. I slowly, shakily rose onto my hooves and spat repeatedly, scraping the blood and gunk off of my tongue with my teeth.

Karks were tough, but Vurvalfn they were not. Our automata made short work of them, their red energy claws slicing through the creatures’ armor like butter. The inclined deck ran audibly with rivers of red. A babbling brook of blood. Even with the aid of climbing gear, Clover’s hooves struggled to keep her upright on the slippery slope. It was a damnable mess.

“Sound off!” I said.

Hexhead slowly rose to her hooves, tossing her ruined chest protector aside. “I’m okay.”

I eyed Hexhead’s mangled Bulwark armor. The Confederate caster made a wide and shallow crater in the plate. They hit hard, but they were unfocused. The Djinn’s casters had the same exact thing going on. Hexhead was damn lucky the Confederacy hadn’t yet figured out how to dial them in for a tight-focused, penetrating beam. Their reverse-engineered caster tech was primitive at best.

“Everyone’s accounted for, ma’am,” Mar said.

“Tiamat, do you read me?” I coughed and sputtered, hoping she could hear me through her Wolfhounds.

“Yes, Sergeant?” Tiamat responded through one of the Wolfhounds’ speakers.

“Got a Bull Kark,” I said. “Need a scan on this thing, right now.”

“Bull Kark?” Tiamat said. “We call them Liquefiers, but I suppose Bull Kark is catchier and has fewer syllables, which always appeals to the rank and file.”

I smiled half-heartedly. “I feel like I was just damned with faint praise.”

One of the Wolfhounds walked up to the fallen Kark and ran its multi-spectral sensors over it, its head scanning up and down. “What the shit?” Tiamat said. “This thing’s got magtech, and lots of it. I suppose the Confederacy don’t give a damn about their own laws anymore.”

“Any cyberbrains in there?” I said.

“One. In the back.”

“Alive?”

“Yes, but not for long.” The Wolfhound turned its head towards me. “Life support system’s failing.”

“Fuck.” I shook my head. “Fucking hell, guys. They’re shoving pony brains in these things, too.”

“Any way to keep that brain alive?” Prima said. “I have some questions I need to ask it.”

“I bet you would,” I muttered.

Prima shot me a glare. “We’ll do our best to save their life and restore their body, if we can.”

“Yeah, as a Total.” The slang for full-body conversion cyborgs was a double entendre, having the senses of both total replacement of the body and a totaled car. “You and I both know that level of chrome does weird things to your head.”

“I’m nearly an FBC myself,” Prima said.

Yeah, and you’re fucked up. I shrugged, trying to avoid saying the quiet part out loud.

One of Tiamat’s Wolfhounds walked up to the Bull Kark’s corpse, extending a probe into a port on the back. There were a few tense moments before we finally had the answer we sought.

“Ah, good,” Tiamat said. “Idiots didn’t even change the connection standard, they just copied it right off our casters. I can bypass the failing power cell and use the Wolfhound’s instead. Should last long enough for Prima to teleport the whole shebang back to base. Shouldn’t do it for more than a few minutes at a time, though. The amperage is a little bit more than this probe can reasonably handle, and it’s starting to heat up.”

Prima charged up her magic and teleported the Wolfhound and the dead Kark back to the mines with a flash of green. “Done and done.”

“They’re using pony b—brains?” Clover mumbled nervously. “Is that what the dead ponies are about?”

I bit my lip. “We don’t know that, yet. Tiamat, need another scan.”

“On what?”

“The bodies. We need to know what the fuck the Confederacy were doing here.”

“Working on it.”

Tiamat had the Wolfhound pass its head over the corpses. There were no laser beams, no cones of sizzling energy slewing up and down, nothing dramatic of that sort. The Wolfhound simply nodded its head over the bodies a little, and then, it was done. Can’t see T-waves. All those dumb Applewood movies had tricked me.

Tiamat’s prognosis was grim, and I could tell by how the Wolfhound carried itself that it wasn’t too enthused, either. “Their brains are present, but scrambled. No thaumatic signatures detected. Looks like they harvested their quintessence.”

Me and the squad shared very unnerved glances. All those lives, just for powder. This was barbarity of the highest order.

I gritted my teeth. “What. The fuck. For?”

“Oh, that’s easy,” Tiamat said. “That Liquefier there has a caster. Confederate scientists obviously don’t know how to make diagrammatic engines, so they use pony cyberbrains and slave ‘em with a neural lace. So far, so awful, right? It gets worse. It seems they don’t know how to make tetrafluid, either. So, they boost the cyberbrain’s thaumatic output with reservoirs containing a gel suspension of actual Quint instead.”

Cloverleaf was mad. I could see it on her mug. The curl of the lips, the wrinkle of the nose. She was about to say something she’d regret. She turned and stamped over towards Mar, getting in her face.

“Why couldn’t your species just leave us alone?” Clover said. “Is this vileness worth it? Don’t you have enough wealth without adding our bodies to the pile?”

Mardissa, for her part, wilted with shame, squeezing her eyes shut and drawing her neck in. Chin touching her chest. Arms straight up and down at her sides. Fists balled. I was becoming adept at recognizing the way bipeds expressed emotions. Similar to us, but different.

I shook my head. “Corporal, I know you’re angry. We all are. Mardissa didn’t do this, so don’t take it out on her. Ease off.”

Clover slowly nodded, sniffling miserably. Prima teleported out and returned immediately with the third Wolfhound. The techs at the base had taken custody of the Kark’s corpse and were undoubtedly hard at work recovering the intact, living brain inside.

The lead Wolfhound walked up to me and addressed me directly with a feminine and slightly robotic voice. “Ma’am, we’ll provide support.”

“What’s your name, soldier?” I said.

“Hound Two-Eight-Nine-Nine,” the Wolfhound replied. “They don’t give us fancy names like y’all.”

“But you’re a person, right?” I thumped the machine’s chest with my hoof. “You’ve got a full-fledged Anima system in there, don’t you?”

The Wolfhounds glanced at each other, and then back at me. Hound-2899 nodded her head. “Yes, we do, but because of the source of the souls and the grade of the core—”

“Convicts, right?”

“I don’t know. Probably. We don’t have any memories of our past lives, so it’s not like it really matters where the souls come from.”

“Bullshit,” I said. “Alright, that settles it. Your name is Ripper from now on. Got it? It’s ‘cause you’ve got those claws. They rip stuff up pretty damn good.”

The war automaton tilted its head quizzically. “Whatever you want, ma’am.”

“Tiamat, can we keep her?” I said. “We’re down a soldier. We lost Haybale. This way, I can keep in close contact with you, too.”

Mainly, I just wanted to see if Tiamat was amenable to putting one of the Wolfhounds in my squad. We were something like seventy percent less likely to die with one of those things watching our backs. They were just that awesome.

“Wait one, I’ll run it by the Captain,” Tiamat said. After a few moments, I had my answer. “Captain Garrida says it’s fine, for now, so long as you reimburse her. The techs need some parts to fix a few of my other Wolfhounds that were deemed repairable, and she wants your team to go get ‘em. Not now, of course. You up for salvage hunting, later?”

“Yes,” I said. “Tell her yes.”

“Then you have your bot. Take good care of her, Sergeant.”

“Hey, Ripper,” I said. “You’re the new Revenant Four. Welcome to the team.”

“Glad to be here.” A tinge of nervousness in the golem’s voice indicated that she was anything but.

“Tiamat, can you patch me through to Captain Garrida?” I said. “I’m having trouble raising her on comms.”

“She’s in a bad way, Sergeant,” Tiamat’s voice crackled over my headset. “We’re not sure if she’s going to make it.”

“What?” I shook my head. “She was fine a few hours ago. What the fuck’s going on?”

“Peritonitis,” Tiamat said matter-of-factly. “A sword through the bowel tends to do that. My records show that you sustained a similar injury very recently, Sergeant. You organics need to take better care of yourselves.”

“Can’t be helped,” I said. “There’s no rest for—uh—for—” I trailed off as everything went dark.

I awoke a few seconds later to Mar gripping my shoulders and shaking me. “Sergeant! Storm, are you okay?”

I blinked a few times. Microsleep. Totally uncontrollable. I was so exhausted. My body had just about fucking had it. I’d only had a couple hours of sleep in the past few days. Just keeping my eyes open was a struggle. An awful weariness had seeped into my bones. I hated being so tired that I was acutely aware of my body. I felt like a heap of tormented meat wrapped around a calcium frame, the whole assemblage struggling to animate itself. It was a deep and thorough fatigue. On top of that, my magic was nearly depleted. I held a hoof to my head, gritting my teeth. I had a splitting headache, like someone had taken an electric whisk to my brain.

I couldn’t let Wertua get away. Not when we were so close. We needed her as bait to lure in Veightnoch. We needed to rescue the Empress. We needed Twilight Sparkle. She would fix all this, somehow. She had to, or everything we’d done was completely pointless.

I let out a sigh. “I’m fine, Mar. Just a little tired, is all.”

“More than just a little, by the looks of things,” Mardissa said. “We’ve got to finish this, and quickly.”

I took a deep breath and nodded. “Tiamat, mark this compartment as a point of interest. What happened here requires further investigation, and we don’t have the time to do it.”

“Yes, Sergeant.”

“Squad, let’s move,” I said. “Back into the passageway, let’s go!”

After I had Lucky take a few more snaps of the grisly scene, we clipped onto our ropes and climbed back out of the compartment, up the heavily inclined deck and out into the engineering access corridor. We made our way deeper into the engineering spaces, coming across a large, open gallery that looked surreal turned on its side. We climbed through a hatch and out into the dark, cavernous space, struggling to get our bearings.

“Lucky, Ripper, I want scans, now,” I said. “No surprises.”

My Orbit beeped a few times and zipped through the space, making a quick pass with its basic camera feed. I saw nothing on the picture-in-picture view in my helmet. The image was rather dark, aside from the emergency lighting.

Ripper nodded her head up and down and side to side. “Coast looks clear.”

“Keep moving,” I said.

We climbed down to the lowest point of the gallery, mantling up and over railings and making our way to the far end of the space. There was smoke pouring from the hatch directly ahead of us. We took a detour. Prima teleported up to the entrance to a passage above us and threw rope down. It was quite the ascent. A few stories straight up. The Wolfhounds scaled the bulkheads with the help of powerful electromagnets in their feet, crawling up the steel walls like spiders.

Ketros was the last one to the top. “You could just teleport us up, couldn’t you?” He gripped Prima’s hoof and she helped him up.

“And what? Waste my magic?” Prima smirked.

“How does that work, anyway?” Ket said.

“It’s tied directly to a unicorn’s metabolism, Private,” I said. “We eat to recharge.”

“Really?” Ket grinned. “You just nosh on a snack, and poof, just like that, you’re good to lift boulders with your mind?”

“Well, you’ve got to give it time to digest,” Hexhead said. “But yeah, that is how it works. Big magic, bigger appetite.”

Ket doubled over laughing. Shooting Star cocked her head at him. “What’s so funny?”

“I—” He immediately lost it and broke out in peals of laughter again, bent over with his hands resting on his knees; we all stopped and waited until he was done.

“Go ahead, Ket,” I said.

“I couldn’t help but picture Twilight Sparkle wolfing down like twenty thousand calories, dirty plates stacked high around her, and she keeps pounding her hooves on the table and demanding more food like a big baby.”

Mar rolled her eyes. Shooting Star groaned and deliberately ignored him. I giggled a little. “Interesting, Private. Very interesting.” It was very dull, but I feigned interest nonetheless so he wouldn’t feel like the whole world was against him.

Ket shrugged. “It was funnier in my head.”

We advanced further down the passageway, focusing on our surroundings. I sent Lucky to scout ahead. My Orbit’s mics picked up a heated argument echoing from further down the passage.

“Bring her out!” Whoever it was, they were mad as hell. “We know she’s in there. Wertua put us in this fucking mess. She deserves to get what’s coming to her.”

A large crowd had formed and Confederate Security Forces were struggling to keep the vessel’s crew at bay with non-lethal methods, raising their stun batons high and trying their best to look menacing in that laughable blue armor of theirs. “Back! Get back, or you’ll be charged with mutiny!”

“By whom? The tunnies marched all the bridge officers off with their wrists tied. It’s just you and us, and there’s more of us than there are of you!”

I wrinkled my muzzle at the odd slur. “Is that really what they’re calling us, now?”

Ket made an exaggerated nod, his face and neck strained as if resisting the urge to burp. “Indubitably.”

I shook my head. “Fuck me. The sass is coming at me from both ends.”

I peeked around the corner and got eyes on the crowd. They had gotten physical with the CSF. This was about to become a bloodbath. I could just feel it. I had to intervene.

I put on my most authoritative voice and shouted down the passage in Ardun. “Knock it the fuck off!”

The struggle came to a halt, all eyes turning towards us. I approached them with my caster emitters shut, stepping out of the shadows and into the light with my Orbit perched over my shoulder. Disdainful looks adorned all of their faces when my identity became clear.

“And there they are, now.” One of the engineers gestured at me. “Tunnies. Like clockwork.”

It was obviously a corruption of the word tonnanen, warped to sound as diminutive and mocking as Ardun would allow. I brushed the derogatory remark aside. It would not avail me to complain, and I had to keep up appearances if this was to work out.

“We’re not here to kill you,” I said. “We don’t want to harm any of you unless forced to do so. We want Wertua Naimekhe. Give her to us, and you will spare yourselves a lot of unnecessary hardship.”

“They can talk?” One of the engineers had a look of dawning understanding and then incipient rage on his face. He turned back towards the CSF goons. “You told us they were constructs.”

“Don’t listen to that thing!” one woman shouted. “It’s got you under its spell!”

I stamped my hoof. “Shut up!” That got them good and quiet. “This thing is on fucking fire, and here you are, bickering like a bunch of foals. I passed multiple compartments belching smoke. Do you want to burn to death? I have had enough! All I want is to have some chow and sleep like a dead mare for sixteen hours straight. Hopefully, the doc will find something busted in my fucking spleen and demand I get bed rest. I’m tired. I’m hungry. If you don’t get out of my way in ten seconds, I am going to ram my leg down each of your throats, pull your stomachs out of your mouths, and see if there’s a bite of salad left in any of them!”

After a few moments of stunned silence, one of the engineers snickered, pinching the bridge of his nose to alleviate his newfound stress. “Yep. That’s a person.” He walked up to one of the CSF guardsmen and patronizingly clapped his hand on the man’s shoulder. “You should look up what the word atrocity means. Could come in handy at your trial.”

“Arboka sent me,” I said.

“She’s alive?” one of the engineers said.

I nodded. “She has not been harmed. She’s safe and has been detained along with the bridge crew. We’re trying to get everyone off this thing alive. We don’t want your lives. We just want Wertua. We have a lot of very pointed questions to ask her.”

“Well, that’s a fairer shake than these CSF cunts are giving us. Oy, lads! The Equestrians want the same thing as us; that vile bitch clapped in irons. Truce, for now.”

One by one, the engineers gathered at my side. The rest of my squad joined me, standing resolutely in the face of evil. The intercom beside the upturned door the CSF were guarding crackled to life.

“Traitors!” Wertua spoke. “A millennium of warfare, and we stand on the cusp of total victory over that wretched species. You would undo all of that progress, and for what? Because your heart faltered at the last moment? Because you couldn’t bring yourself to do what must be done?”

“We did destroy them!” One of the engineers was distraught, gesticulating in an exaggerated way to drive her point home. “Have you looked outside at that wasteland? There’s rubble and bones everywhere, as far as the eye can see. We blew them up once already. Why do we have to blow them up twice? I’ve seen things. On here, even, on this very ship. What are we doing to these poor people that would make them so desperate?”

“You’re young,” Wertua said. “Young and foolish. You haven’t seen the Equestrians at the height of their power. You don’t know what they’re capable of. You haven’t the slightest inkling of their paraphysical abilities. Look at them. They have no suppression rings on. It’s highly likely that your minds have all been infected by this brief contact alone.”

She was trying to manipulate them and get them back on her side in the most obscene way possible, by misrepresenting both our magic and our physiology.

“That’s not true!” I shouted. “I have not used any magic at all. This is all them. They have eyes. No one likes being lied to, Wertua.”

“Speaking to you at all is beneath me,” she said. “You filth. You vile little animal. You will be silent!”

I beat my hoof against my chest. “Come out and make me, you gaping cunt.”

The mutinous engineers burst out laughing. The absurdity of a pony swearing so roughly in their own language was just too much for them.

“Can I adopt her?” one said.

“You fools. You’ll pay dearly for this.” Wertua cut the transmission.

“Could she be any more of a stereotype?” Ket wondered aloud.

“Just wait till we find, like, a billion skeletons in her closet,” Cloverleaf muttered. “We’ll open the door to her walk-in and get buried in skellies.”

I let out a deep sigh. I was getting tired of finding skeletons. It seemed like every mission we went on was capped off with a gruesome and demoralizing discovery of some kind. Every beamcaster blast and every bullet hole slowly peeled back the Confederacy’s mask to reveal the rot underneath. It was never clean, and it was never simple.

That pile of corpses was only the beginning. I had a sinking feeling in my gut that we were about to walk onto the scene of another crime, and I wasn’t sure I was ready for it.

“Now, I want you to think.” I directed my attention to the CSF goons. “I want you to use those two little BBs in your skull that you call hemispheres, and I want you to decide if any of this shit is worth losing your life over.”

The guardsmen looked at each other, and then back at me. They knew damn well who I was. I could tell by the looks on their faces. The Confederate Army brass had probably issued a detailed dossier on me by this point. Word was getting around. I was quickly becoming public enemy number one.

Without a word, the guardsmen tossed their weapons to the deck and stood aside. We outnumbered and outgunned them by a considerable margin. It wouldn’t have been a fight, but a massacre.

“Smart,” I said.

After Hexhead breached the door, we climbed through the hole her torch left behind after the edges had cooled sufficiently. We were in the main engine room. The Bannerman’s giant diesel generators were in full evidence. They were hanging sideways, but were never designed to. One looked like it was ready to shear its mounting bolts, come undone, and fall into the other.

As we walked beneath them, my face was assaulted by the waste heat like a blow dryer. It had to be at least thirty degrees Celsius in here. The main engines were shut down but had a lot of residual heat left over. An emergency generator rattled away in a far corner.

“Isn’t this your space?” I said. “How the hell did they lock you out?”

One of the engineers nodded. “We were ordered to rally at the nearest egress point, but we never received the order to abandon ship. Those CSF bastards locked the doors behind us.”

As we advanced through the space, dozens of the ship’s engineers in tow, two Gafalze Arresgrippen supersoldiers stepped out from behind the machinery at the far end, accompanied by a half-dozen Karkadann that slithered out from behind cover. One of the Gaffs was armed with a pulse rifle and the other with a monomolecular sword and a heavy ballistic shield.

“This is as far as you go, Equestrians,” one of the GARG Troopers said. “Bold of you to test Ordinator Naimekhe’s patience to this extent.”

“Are you listening to yourself?” Cloverleaf was flabbergasted. “You attacked us. You tested us. You failed. We in the Liberation Front showed you that there are consequences for the evil shit that you do.”

“You will not prevail,” the other GARG Trooper spoke. “Turn around and walk away.”

I stepped out in front of the others, addressing both my squad and the ship’s engine crew. “Do you all know where these creatures come from?”

“Fine beasts of war, aren’t they?” the first Gaff said. “Cloned and grown in artificial wombs. Purpose-made to hunt and kill your kind.”

Mardissa stepped forward, next. “If that’s what you’ve been told, then you have been lied to. I know my biotech and genegineering. The tech to make artificial wombs has been lost since the fall of the Concord. Despite many years of active investment and research, it was never rediscovered.”

I turned towards the engineers. They were young cleomanni, like Mar. Young and impressionable. Though I wasn’t particularly good at written Ardun, my grasp of spoken Ardun was improving every day. I’d been practicing with my Orbit with a language program and listening in on Mar and Ket’s conversations. Translators were convenient but speaking to them in their own native language seemed to grab their attention better, opening up all sorts of opportunities for demagoguery. I could play a damn good carnival barker when required, and these kids all had free tickets to the freak show.

I paced in front of them. “Why do you think we resist you so desperately? Why do you think we refuse to lay down our arms? This is what you have all been fighting for, for so many years. This is what your parents and grandparents fought for. This is what your children will fight for. To persecute us. To enslave us. To rob us of our bodily autonomy and reduce us beneath livestock. Doesn’t that bother you on a fundamental level?”

The looks on their faces were uneasy. One raised his hand to get the others to settle down. “What are you talking about?”

I struck a hoof out at the slavering, mindless Karks, their forked tongues flickering at us. “They’re called Karkadann. Every single one of those creatures is the product of a hideous crime committed against my kind. They use us. They kidnap us to use our bodies as hosts for these fucking things. They’ve been doing this to us for centuries. Maybe even since the very beginning. Maybe this is how it all began. Without your knowledge and certainly without our consent, your government has been taking mares and putting those things in our fucking bellies.”

The reaction was immediate. Horror. Disgust. Anger. Some were so distressed, they were doubling over and trying not to throw up. Others hunched and balled their fists in rage, like coiled whips about to lash out. Most cleomanni were normal people, and normal people became deeply angered and perturbed when they heard uncomfortable truths such as these, especially when they shared some degree of culpability in acts so heinous.

“There is no excuse!” one woman shouted.

Both sides were adopting an aggressive posture. I glanced back and forth between the crowd of nameless engineers and the two Confederate supersoldiers. This had the potential to turn into a bloodbath very quickly. I assessed my forces. Three Wolfhounds, Prima, some very tired soldiers, and a crowd of renegade Confederate crewmen armed only with makeshift clubs, like pipe wrenches and pieces of actual pipe. If the engineers were the first into the fray, then they were going to be slaughtered. I had to do something.

I squared up with the Gaffs, keeping my distance. “Your boss is little more than a kidnapper and slaver. Does she deserve your undying loyalty?”

“How did you do it?” the GARG with the pulse rifle said. “I see you've got them all wrapped around your hoof nice and tight. What kind of magic did you use for that?”

I thought back to when Night Terror manipulated several Gaffs into killing themselves and each other with his magic during the attack on Camp Crazy Horse, a rising sense of nausea in my gut. I knew dark magic, too. It was essential for concealing objects. The spells that formed the foundations of the Illusion school were originally used in antiquity by unscrupulous mages, shambling necromancers, and mad kings to conceal hidden passages in their lairs. I had no way to prove that I hadn’t used magic to manipulate the minds of these cleomanni and force them to be sympathetic to our cause. Once again, I found myself gripped with dread at the implications. They had no reason not to suspect me. To suspect us. The engineers had not been difficult to persuade. I chalked it up to them being young and idealistic and having a bone to pick with Wertua, but I secretly wondered if there was something more to it. Perhaps our magic charmed them by some passive mechanism unknown to our science. Or maybe it was something more mundane. Some of them seemed to find us irresistibly cute, like house pets.

I found this line of thinking deeply perturbing. There was a sharp delineation between those who had magic and those who didn't. Our enemies had fine dexterity, and we had our spells. A fair trade, it was not. Magic was vastly more powerful than having fingers, in several key ways, not least of which was because it both replicated and excelled over the manual manipulation of objects with the varying forms of levitation. There were so many ways a unicorn could bend reality to our will. If I wanted, I could rip a pin off an enemy’s grenade on his vest, or manipulate the controls of his weapon, putting it on safe or jarring out the magazine from afar. Unicorns more skilled than I at Arcane magic could snap a neck just by looking at someone funny. Shooting Star could make someone’s rifle glow cherry-red and brand their hands with her pyrokinesis, or heat a blade and inflict grievous wounds by carbonizing tissue. Prima was a murder machine, teleporting herself, teleporting explosives, and stabbing with levitation more forceful than any pony I’d ever seen.

Just about the only thing that stopped the average pony from using our magic for violence was mere social convention. Most ponies were simply not cut out for inflicting gruesome death on others. Remove that one last mental barrier, replace idealism with pragmatism, and we became some of the most frightening creatures in the whole galaxy.

I took a deep breath through my nostrils. “There is no greater magic than the truth. You can lie, cheat, and gaslight people all you want, but sooner or later, there is a tipping point where they thirst for answers to their pain. Once that happens, you cannot stop them.”

“What would you know about the truth?” the one with the shield said. “You’re a terrorist.”

“A terrorist?” I let out a long and low cackle. “Between us, which one lives in terror of the other? Which side has hired literal monsters to skin ponies alive and tear us limb from limb? You are the undisputed masters of terror. Every single pony in Tar Pan who is still alive is cowering in a dark hole as we speak, all because of what you’ve done here. Don’t you get it? You’re in the wrong, just like you’ve always been. I stopped you. We stopped you. It’s over.”

The GARG trooper with the pulse rifle grunted dismissively, his faceless mask offering not even the slightest hint as to his reaction. “You think your insistence alone will get you through us without a fight?”

I shook my head. “I know you won’t be swayed by an emotional argument, so let’s try a logical one. You walk away, we take Wertua, and that’s the end of it. Or, you can slaughter your own countrymen to get at us, and even if by some miracle you stopped all of us, we are not the only team clearing the wreck. There is no conceivable scenario in which you walk away from this.”

The Gaff shrugged. “Maybe so. Regardless, we have our orders.”

I took a deep breath, letting it out with a sigh. “I understand. I also have mine. Squad! Contact, front! Spread out and engage!”

Revenant scattered, taking up positions in cover. The dust covers on my caster snapped open upon my half-squeeze of the triggers, emitters flaring green. The GARG troopers were faster. Much faster. The one with the sword and shield charged, while the one with the pulse rifle raked us with fire. Pulse rifle projectiles were a little slower than gunfire, but not by much. I had only a split-second to react as I poured my magic into a unidirectional barrier spell. An orange wall of energy snapped into existence in front of me.

Blue plasma slammed into my barrier, smearing over it. I gritted my teeth as the shock was transmitted to my horn. It felt like someone took a hammer to my skull. The engineers were stunned by the sudden outbreak of violence, faltering and stumbling as they tried hiding behind my barrier. I turned and looked back at them out of the corner of my eye.

“Get back!” I said. “My barrier won’t hold forever!”

A few gave me odd looks, never expecting a pony to protect them from others of their own kind. The satyrs scrambled to their hooves and retreated to cover behind a step in the overhead that had turned into a bulkhead. There were tools strewn all over the place, fallen roll-away chests having spilled their contents onto what was now the deck.

A monomolecular sword bit into my barrier, shattering my magic in an orange spray of fragmented arcane energy. The Gaff followed up with a horizontal slash. I hit him with a body-seize spell as I ducked, forcing his arm muscles to spasm and limiting his control over his blade. He almost took the tip of my horn off, regardless. Without hesitation, he propelled himself forward and rammed his shield into me, sending me tumbling away and slamming into a stanchion with a ringing noise that reverberated through the cruiser’s hull. The blow knocked the wind out of me. I coughed, and when I did, I could taste blood. The GARG trooper planted his ballistic shield in the deck and concealed himself completely behind it. He sheathed his sword and planted a directional antipersonnel mine in front of it. I groaned in pain as I willed my uncooperative body to roll up, over and behind a tool chest. The blast rattled my teeth, my ears ringing loudly.

I keyed my radio. “Ghost One, bring the Commodore here, now. Wolfhounds, you’re on Kark duty. Go!”

Prima radioed back, “Sergeant, the Commodore is busy leading her own team.”

“I don’t give a flying fuck! Teleport her here, now!”

“Yes, Sergeant.” Prima’s words were laced with a hint of venom.

I tracked the movements of the Karkadann, watching with open-mouthed horror as they leaped onto the Landcruiser’s giant diesel engines, scrambling across them before diving towards the helpless crowd of Confederate engineers.

“Ripper!” I shouted. “You and the other ‘hounds, protect the crew!”

The Wolfhounds sprang into action, firing their medium casters and striking two of the Karks broadside, practically blowing them in half. The skirmish was brief and bloody, the Wolfhounds pouncing with their energy claws aglow, tearing two more of the creatures asunder with screeches of torn metal and splashes of gore. The remaining two Karks retreated sinuously to their perch atop the Bannerman’s engines, snarling and chattering before turning tail and disappearing from sight.

“Dammit!” I didn’t like the idea that they could reappear from almost anywhere without any warning at all.

The GARG trooper with the sword mounted the tool chest, thrusting his blade down at me. I rolled out of the way, the point of his weapon ramming into the space I’d occupied moments before. He kept up the tempo, advancing as I desperately retreated, his deadly monomolecular-edged sword slicing through the air. As I rolled to my hooves and backpedaled, the tip of his blade caught me in the face, nicking my cheek. I unloaded my casters on him point-blank, howling with rage. His ballistic shield deflected the green kinetic pulses effortlessly, leaving glowing pockmarks in the aluminum deck plates.

He raised his blade, ready to deal the killing blow, when a whitish blur slammed into his side, tackling him into a steel wall with a tremendous clang. As I staggered backwards, I caught a glimpse of Commodore Cake wrestling with the GARG trooper in the darkness, trying to get her hooves around his helmet so she could end it quick by snapping his cervical spine. He shimmied out of her grip, rolling to his feet and making some distance. The Commodore’s overdriven casters pounded into his shield, but they may as well have been flashlights for all they did to scuff the slab of armor in his hand.

“Sergeant, go!” the Dragoon said. “I’ve got this one.”

I nodded, wiping the blood off my face with my hoof and moving up to where the rest of Revenant were taking cover from the other Gaff’s accurate fire. Ket was taking potshots with his flechette gun while Mardissa reloaded Thumper, glancing out from behind cover to look for an opening.

“Frag out!” Clover threw a grenade, which rolled across the deck towards our adversary’s feet.

The GARG trooper lashed out with an armored boot, kicking the grenade back at us like a hoofball. I gasped in shock as the live frag rolled to a stop next to me. I wrapped it in a tight ball of barrier magic immediately before it exploded. The barrier stopped the fragments, but the concussive blast knocked three of us right on our asses. As I righted myself, the two remaining Karks pounced from one of the massive diesel engines above us, aiming to take me, Clover, and Shooting Star while we were disoriented from the blast. Prima leaped and tackled one of them in mid-air, leaving the other to land right in our midst, swiping at us with its talons and its bladed tail. I did everything in my power to avoid being slashed. One blow left a gouge in my chest protector, but didn’t get down to into my meat. I tackled the creature and wrestled with it, trying my damnedest to pin it down. It had alarming strength in its limbs, aggressively thrashing on the deck and trying to twist and throw me off. Its jaws snapped at me like a wild gator.

“Cook its fucking brain!” I shouted.

Shooting Star hit the thing’s head with her pyrokinesis, its armor starting to glow cherry-red, and then bright orange. As it screeched and struggled, I did everything in my power to avoid burning myself on the hot metal barbecuing the creature’s cranium. A volley of blue plasma bolts slashed past my head. I tucked and rolled behind a fallen tool chest. Prima had just finished stabbing the life out of the last Kark. She moved to cover as well, avoiding the incoming fire from the GARG trooper. A pulse volley grazed Shooting Star’s back, and she screamed and toppled over behind cover. She flailed and ripped the segment of molten armor off her body with her levitation. It took a patch of skin and burnt-smelling fur with it.

“Ghost One,” I said. “Teleport me behind that fucker! Revenant Six, get ready to charge, on my mark!”

“What?” Prima said. “You serious?”

“Now! Do it now!”

A magic field coalesced around me and displaced me over fifteen meters to my front. The sensation of being teleported was unpleasant, to say the least. It felt like someone had stuffed me in a glass jar before uncorking it and depositing me flat on my ass on a cold steel deck. It turned my stomach.

Without hesitating, I surged forward, wrapped my forelegs around the kneeling Gaff’s shoulders, and hit him with a body-seize spell, paralyzing his limbs. “Six, cut him up!”

With a frenzied roar, Hexhead bounded from her hiding place, closing the distance in a matter of seconds, her torch ablaze. She rammed the nozzle of her ad-hoc weapon into the GARG trooper’s chest and began slicing open his power armor while sending gouts of molten metal inside his suit. Sparks flew everywhere, accompanied by the tangy smell of vaporized metal. He tried moving his limbs, but I wouldn’t let him. I could feel him shake in my grip, crying out in pain.

“Should’ve fucking surrendered!” I said.

The Gaff’s agonized screams soon gave way to desperate last words over his radio. “Ma’am, we can’t hold this position! Seal—the Citadel!”

Over my shoulder, I heard the alarms of a blast door closing. I let go of the dying GARG trooper. Prima immediately took my place, teleporting in and nonchalantly stabbing him in his armor’s joints with her levdaggers while he was down. Commodore Cake seemed to have finished up with the other one, right on time. I wasn’t sure exactly what she’d done, but she was holding the other Gaff’s severed head in one of her wingtips, so whatever it was, it was quick and gory. I eyed the fallen GARG trooper’s armor. No yellow stripe. Initiates. Not Officers, yet. They weren’t nearly as heavily augmented or as skilled as the one that had given the Commodore a hard time after the outpost raid, months ago. That was something we could all be thankful for.

“Nice moves, Sergeant,” Prima said.

The door to the cruiser’s central citadel was closing rapidly, its hydraulics whirring and a klaxon sounding. I had no idea what possessed me to do it, but in that moment, I was sure that if I didn’t move immediately, we’d be cut off from ever reaching Wertua before she found some alternate exit. I broke into a gallop, the closing blast door dead in my sights.

“Sergeant!” Prima called after me.

I ignored her, picking up speed. The door, which ordinarily closed vertically, was closing to one side. I kicked off the bulkhead and vaulted through the gap, only to find a sheer drop on the other side. With a fearful wail, I struck out my forelimbs and caught a railing. I was hanging over a black abyss. With a grunt of exertion, I pulled myself up and sat uncomfortably on the rail, my chest rising and falling as I caught my breath. The crew in the ship’s CIC had not fared well. The large, open space, dominated by a central tactical holoprojector, was riddled with mangled corpses. Many of the Landcruiser’s officers had fallen from their seats at their consoles and piled up on what was now the deck, far below me. The splatters of blood, broken limbs, and twisted necks offered a grim warning of what awaited me if I were to lose my footing now.

I steeled myself, shimmying along the railing and towards what looked like the entrance to the officers’ quarters on this deck. It was eerily quiet, except for the far-off alarms and occasional muffled gunfire. A wail of agony pierced the silence. Someone was still alive, a few stories below me, buried under her own fellow officers.

“I’m trapped!” she said, her voice muffled. “Help!”

Not our mark. It wasn’t her voice. Wherever Wertua was, she was well enough to use the cruiser’s intercom, earlier. I couldn’t get down to where the officer in distress was, in any case. She would have to wait for the rescue teams.

“Wertua?” I said. “Come on out. It’s over. You’re done.”

There was no reply. I took a few steps forward, climbing into the lounge. There were some broken bottles of expensive liquor lying around. There was also a windowed cabinet at the bottom of the compartment with a few bottles that were still intact. Sweeping away the broken glass with my hoof, I levitated it open, pulling out a bottle of Ardrian brandy. I bit the stopper, yanked it out, and took several swigs straight from the bottle. My eyes practically rolled back in my head as I swirled the delectable spirit on my tongue. I heaved a long, contented sigh. I’d been feeling parched for the past hour or two, and my shoulder was hurting like a son of a bitch from where I’d been shot. I realized that I’d lost track of my Orbit. It must’ve still been in the engine room or the corridor leading there. I was all alone.

I levitated out my captured 10mm Auto, keying my radio. “Ghost One, status. Why can’t you teleport the rest of us in?”

After a brief pause, the reply came through half-garbled by all the steel between me and her. “Can’t—tele—neuter—blessing. We—cu—through the door, over.”

I quickly gathered the seriousness of the situation. The citadel had neuterized walls. It was impossible to teleport through. It made perfect sense. Some unicorn battlemages had been known to teleport themselves into enemy vehicles and fortifications, emplace some very potent explosive charges, and teleport out. Prima frequently performed a more basic version of this maneuver with her grenades. Realistically, there was little defense against this tactic other than by neutralizing magic. I was cut off from the others, at least until Hexhead had sufficient time to cut through the intervening blast door.

“Dammit!” I was about to throw the bottle of brandy hard enough to smash it open, but I stopped myself. Liquor abuse was against my principles.

I climbed further into the space, making my way inside the officers’ quarters and into a passage leading to what I assumed were Wertua’s retrofitted accommodations. There was a door at the end of the passage. I heard a whimpering voice, low and male, and saw light coming through a crack in the door.

“Hello?” I said.

There was no reply. I inched forward and stuck out a hoof, pushing the door open and climbing into the room. I almost couldn’t comprehend what I was seeing, at first. It was like one of those books full of optical illusions. It took me a moment to gather what had transpired in this compartment, and when I did, my eyes slowly widened in shock, before my face settled into a mask of thermonuclear rage. There was a bed that was now vertical due to the Landcruiser being tipped on its side, and on this bed, a green-coated earth pony stallion was strapped in place, spread-eagle. He was sobbing softly, his lips dry and cracked. The signs were unmistakable. Someone, most likely Wertua herself, had whipped him. If the marks in his coat were any indication, she’d deliberately aimed for his genitals. As best as I could tell, he was about to lose one of his testicles to gangrene. They’d been torturing this poor stallion for days. The sheer depravity of it shocked even me, and I had a strong stomach.

“Hang on! I’m gonna get you out of there!” I made my way over to him and started undoing the straps binding his legs with my levitation.

“Thank you,” he rasped.

When I undid the last of the four straps securing him to the bed, he collapsed onto me, leaning on me with a substantial portion of his weight, sobbing in agony. He nestled his neck into mine, whimpering thank you over and over again. I wrapped my forelegs around him, softly stroking his mane as he shuddered in my embrace.

“We’ll get you medical treatment, buddy,” I said. “You’re going to be okay.”

With a loud crack, a whip lashed around my neck, ripping me away from him. I growled and jerked my whole body to face towards my attacker. Wertua stood in the entryway to the room, eyes ablaze. I bit the slack in the whip and yanked hard, tearing the weapon from her grasp. I briefly considered using it on her, but even I wasn’t that demented. I tossed the whip aside and leveled my pistol at her.

“You piece of shit,” I muttered. “Don’t you get it? You lost this round. Give up.”

There was something wrong with Wertua’s eyes. They were bloodshot and half-crazed. The expression on her face was like some wild animal. She didn’t say anything in her defense. She merely stood there, chuckling like a madwoman.

“Storm,” she hissed through clenched teeth. “Storm, storm, storm. I had you. I had you right in my hands.” She was practically frothing at the mouth and shaking with anger as she made a choking motion with her two outstretched paws. “All I had to do was squeeze.”

“Get down on the fucking floor, hands behind your fucking back,” I said.

“I couldn’t believe it was so easy,” she said. “The answers I’d long sought were staring us in the face all along. I couldn’t believe, in one thousand years, that no one had ever thought to try it.”

Wertua pulled a small tortoiseshell snuff box from her pocket. When she flicked it open, I could see a glittery puff of dust in the air. She placed her nostrils in it and sniffed hard. She tilted her head back, sighing in ecstasy, before her face dipped forward and she opened her eyelids, revealing two glowing, white orbs beneath. Wertua snarled psychotically as the unmistakable glow of magic coalesced around her horns. A vibrating aura of silver energy ensconced her body from head to toe as she adopted a fighting stance.

I lowered my pistol, my heart gripped with dread. “What the fuck?”

The cleomanni woman surged forward with unnatural speed and vitality. I mag-dumped into her with the 10mm Auto. It didn’t even slow her down. The rounds bounced off the coils of magic that twisted around her torso and wrapped around her extremities like a snake. She tackled me to the floor, pounding her fist into my muzzle as she straddled my barrel.

“Who knew?!” she shouted. “Who knew it could be so easy? I’m going to inhale your whole fucking pathetic species!”

The injured stallion lying in the middle of the room let out terrified yelps as he struggled to crawl away from the fight. I had to keep Wertua focused on me. If I let her attention wander, she was liable to kill him just to mess with my head. When it looked like she might go for him, I smashed my hoof into her face like a sledgehammer. Between her augs and the magic hardening her against physical force, all it did was piss her off more.

“Time to correct my mistake.” She wrapped her hands around my neck and squeezed with all her might.

I struck her repeatedly, trying to push her off me, but she did not relent. Darkness crept into the corners of my vision. I hit her with a body-seize spell, trying to paralyze her limbs. All this succeeded in doing was shading portions of the magic field wrapping around her in ugly swirls of black and white. I unleashed my casters on her, point-blank. Though the beams did not penetrate, this knocked her back and loosened her grip a little. I tucked my hind legs under her torso and kicked her off of me, sending her reeling. I quickly rolled upright, fixing my casters on her. Wertua was shaking like she was possessed, her head bobbing atop her neck as if tugged by a puppeteer’s strings.

“Kill you,” she muttered. “I’ll kill you. Vermin. I—we—we’ll exterminate all of your wretched kind, flesh-thing. How d—dare you reject my gift? You pathetic little worm.”

It took me a few moments of dread and confusion before I realized I wasn’t being spoken to by the same person who’d been standing there seconds before. It wasn’t Wertua. It was one of them.

“Arka-Povis.” I curled my lips in rage, baring my teeth. “How?”

“This fool thing practically admitted me into its body, such was her hatred for you,” the Archon spoke using Wertua’s mouth. “The essence this creature consumed provided the substrate. Your own tainted emanations were the catalyst I needed to seize control, however brief it may be.”

“Whatever it takes, I will erase you,” I said. “You can count on that.”

Wertua grinned, her face warping oddly and her muscles twitching as the entity struggled to make her unfamiliar muscles move. “That worked out so well for you, last time, didn’t it? Tell me, how did it feel to be in the grip of an infinitely superior being?”

“Enough, motherfucker!” I roared.

I withdrew all of my stored malice from the brass amulet that Cicatrice gave me, but I didn’t transmute it into magic energy. I reabsorbed it in emotional form. Raw, burning hatred struck my skull like a ball-peen hammer. I propelled myself at Wertua like I was shot out of a cannon, ramming into her midsection with all my might. I smashed her into an upturned wooden dresser which became so many splinters.

I pounded my hooves into her ribcage with furious force. The impact transmitted straight through her ad-hoc barrier, and after a few blows, I managed to snap off one of her ribs and drive it into her spleen. Wertua screeched in agony, releasing a pulse of magic from her horns that sent me flying. I tumbled through the air and smashed into the far wall, collapsing to the floor in a heap with a loud clatter of body armor.

Wertua held her head, doubling over in pain. Her own psyche re-entered the driver seat of her body, the pain having driven the Archon’s influence from her mind. “What’s—happening to me? I can’t—can’t control it!”

Swirling motes of black and white energy wrapped around her horns like a crown before discharging from her head with an otherworldly howl. An arcing, snapping beam of unstable magic tore through a bulkhead, sending sparks and gouts of molten metal flying. Wertua tried twisting her head to direct the unpredictable beam at me, but it slashed towards the helpless stallion lying on the floor. He let out a pitiful wail as the crackling bolts of raw magic set the carpeting on fire and singed his tail. I lunged between the two of them and raised a barrier just in time. I gritted my teeth as Wertua’s chaotic, uncoordinated magic crackled against the sphere of orange light that shielded the stallion and me.

“You won’t kill him,” I said. “I won’t allow it!”

While maintaining my barrier, I formed the matrix of Cicatrice’s counterspell in my head.

Karad, Daggas, Vatorou.

Just as the spell activated, I dropped my barrier. Coils of dark magic slammed into my body, only for their power to be reflected back upon Wertua tenfold in the form of intense thaumatic feedback. The effects were immediate and gruesome. Wertua’s horns exploded in a shower of keratin, blood, and bone. Her screams were bloodcurdling, her hands trembling as she reached up and felt the jagged and bloody stumps atop her head. I let loose a directional pulse of levitation, knocking her flat on her ass. She fumbled with bloodstained hands as she tried retrieving the box of quintessence from her pocket, but I ripped it away from her with my levitation magic. I threw it towards the far corner of the room, where it shattered into a dozen pieces, releasing a puff of Quint that drifted lazily through the air before settling on the floor. I set my jaw as I marched up to her, flipping my pistol around in my levitation so I held it by the muzzle.

“Wertua Naimekhe, you are responsible for the torture, murder, and enslavement of thousands of my kind. My squadmate died at the hooves of those abominations of yours. My sister was murdered in cold blood, all because of you.” I raised the pistol threateningly. “On top of all that, you’ve been harvesting and using Quint, you sick bitch.”

“So what?” she cried. “So fucking what?”

I couldn’t contain my rage any longer. I pistol-whipped her across the jaw. When she fixed her own hate-filled eyes on me, I did it again. And again. And again.

“Say it!” I shouted.

“Say—wha—”

I smacked her in the face again. “Say ‘I’m a sick, demented bitch’.”

Blood dribbled from the corners of her mouth. “Go—f—fuck—”

I took the top mount position and I struck her with my hoof. I kept hitting her. And hitting her. And hitting her. In spite of her augs holding her together, her face looked like a squashed tomato, reddened and streaked with blood. I kicked and growled as a pair of arms hooked under my forelegs and pulled me off of her.

“Sergeant, ma’am, it’s over!” Mar said.

My anger did not subside, nor did the tears that rolled down my cheeks. “Fucking bitch! You cunt! You’ll get what’s coming to you, along with anyone who’s complicit in what you’ve done! You all will! I’ll make fucking sure of it!”

Mardissa gingerly put me down, pulling a cloth from her pocket and wiping the blood off my face. The rest of Revenant stood there, gawking at the ruin I’d visited upon Wertua’s face and her horns. I sniffled and wiped away my tears, just barely managing to avoid a complete breakdown. I had dipped into reserves of energy I didn’t even know I had, and now that the primary objective was complete and my adrenaline high had subsided, I felt like I was on the verge of passing out. I took a few deep breaths, my legs shaking as I struggled to remain standing. My guts hurt. For all I knew, I needed to be operated on again. I watched as Ket slapped zip-ties on Wertua’s wrists. Even as injured as she was, she glared daggers at me, her eyes promising nothing more and nothing less than bloody vengeance for this humiliation.

The rest of the Landcruiser was secured without much incident. There were a few small pockets of resistance, but the majority of the crew surrendered when they heard that Wertua had been captured. Once the wreck was secure, firefighters from Tar Pan moved in and tackled the blaze, rescuing any trapped crew they could find. Twelve hours later, they managed to put out the fire completely. The reports of mortar and artillery fire across the plains slowly dwindled to nothing as the remaining Confederate elements were neutralized or retreated far south.

The Battle of Tar Pan was over. We’d won.

// … // … // … // … // … //

Down in the depths of the salt mine, I lay on my back in a bed in the infirmary, wincing and slowly breathing in and out. I was the kind of exhausted that a single night’s sleep didn’t fix. I stared at the ceiling, trying to take my mind off the pain. Argent had needed to put me under the knife again. I had torn my stitches internally and was running a fever. She’d dug a few more bullet fragments out of my shoulder, as well. I was so tired, I had that strange tension and anxiety in the back of my mind; that sense that if I fell asleep, I might never wake up. I coughed a few more times, shivering with chills. On top of everything else, I had a cold.

Eventually, I drifted off into a blissful sleep. As I slept, my dreams were vague and not lucid at all. I was in a desert that stretched off to the horizon on one side and abruptly fell off into the sea on the other. The land was brighter than the sky, white sands stretching as far as the eye could see. There were no people, no ponies, no living creatures anywhere. Only the howl of the wind and the crashing of waves against the shore. Then, I realized with growing unease that I wasn’t alone after all. I could have sworn that there was a hooded figure standing in the distance, staring out over the sea. A lone seagull squawked and landed in the center of my field of view, its head twisting about as it eyed me expectantly. It ruffled its blindingly white feathers, preening itself and staring at me with one eye, and then twisting its head and fixing its gaze on me with the other. By the time I’d returned my attention to the figure in the distance, they were long gone.

I awoke, and as I did, it felt like I was crawling out from underneath a boulder, or swimming towards the surface from the briny depths. My limbs felt like lead. For a few seconds, I had to fight to open my eyes. My eyelids were practically glued together.

I took in my surroundings, recognition escaping me for a few moments. I frowned. I was still in the infirmary. I felt even worse, if that could be considered possible. I reached for the call button, which was little more than a radio at my bedside on some boxes that had been stacked up to form a makeshift nightstand. I held down the transmit button with the tip of my hoof, my horn aching too much to be of much use.

“Argent.” I coughed a few times, my throat dry and scratchy. “Water.”

“I’ll be right there,” came Argent Tincture’s voice from the other end.

I leaned back and rested my head against the pillow with a sigh. I glanced across the infirmary. The stallion I’d rescued was there, too. My hunch had proven correct. He had bandages wrapped around his groin. Orchiectomy, debridement, the whole works. The infirmary stank of pus and decay, earlier. I would never get those wails of pain out of my head.

Most of the casualties from the battle were being treated at Tar Pan’s actual hospital, which was miraculously still intact. The only reason that the stallion and I were being treated here was because we saw something we shouldn’t have, and we had yet to be debriefed on it. A couple minutes later, Argent showed up with a cup of water held aloft in her levitation magic.

I nodded and shakily took it from her with my forehooves, taking a sip. I had a sore throat and it felt like broken glass going down.

“Feeling better, Sergeant?” she said. “Something wrong with your horn?”

“Near-burnout,” I rasped. “Hurts. Got any orange juice?”

Argent shrugged. “Sure, Sergeant. I’ve got a whole crate of whiskey, cocaine, and vibrators, too, if you’re interested. We can get crossfaded together and masturbate until we pass out.”

I sat up halfway. “We do?!”

Argent gave me a lidded stare. “No.”

I collapsed back in my pillow. “Dammit.”

“Cicatrice wants to speak with you as soon as you’re able, Sergeant.”

I turned and looked over Argent’s shoulder. Cicatrice was arguing with Prima and Commodore Cake in the cavern outside. I was only able to catch bits and pieces of it, but the general gist of it was that the cyborg and the Dragoon were trying to make the argument that I was on death’s door and should be allowed more bed rest before giving him my report, and he wasn’t having any of it.

I sighed. “Send him in.”

Argent stepped out briefly. Not half a minute later, Cicatrice marched up to my bedside.

“I have questions and I need answers, Sergeant,” he said.

I nodded. “Shoot.”

Cicatrice stiffened, his expression one of dismay. “You had a GeFRASE event. You dropped completely out of contact and disappeared from our scopes shortly after leaving the mine with Black Devil. Drone assets saw your machine vanish in a flash of light. Your Charger’s cockpit recorder shows nothing but static for a brief period. Then, the recording resumed and you engaged tanks belonging to the Boarhead Company. You were gone, Charger and all. Vanished from this plane of existence. I want to know how, and why. Where you went, and what you saw.”

“I saw a goddess,” I said.

Cicatrice stared at me unblinkingly. “What?”

“Her. The Martyred Maiden. And it wasn’t the first time, either. Damn Starries were right all along. She’s real, Your Excellency.”

Cicatrice was getting more and more perturbed by the minute. “Do you mean to tell me you spoke with Celestia?”

“I made a deal with her.”

“You moron!” Cicatrice roared. “If a Manticore opened his jaws, would you offer your fucking head? Never make deals with spirits, ever! Not once! They are never what they appear to be! The spirits of the dead long for the sweetness of the life they no longer have, and they will lie and cheat and manipulate the living just to taste of it once more. You don’t know the spirits like I do. You have no idea who, or what, is pretending to be Celestia. You have absolutely no idea what their motives are, or which deceased the spirit actually came from, do you?”

His rebuke stung. It really did. I thought Celestia was trying to be helpful. Now, I wasn’t sure what the hell I’d gotten myself into.

“But, Celestia—”

“Is dead!” he finished. “Dead! Do you understand dead? Do I have to show you a decomposing corpse for you to get the hint? No shortage of those around here!”

“N—no, Your Excellency.”

“Spirits are not people. They don’t function the way we do. Their motivations are completely unknowable. What conditions did it impose? Did it call on you to make a sacrifice? What did you agree to? Answer me, fool!”

“I didn’t—she just—she just told me not to kill anyone who wasn’t actively resisting.”

Cicatrice rolled his eyes. “Oh, great. That’s a perfect fit for a Charger pilot. I’m sure you’ll be able to honor that bargain for a considerable length of time, Sergeant. What did she promise you in exchange?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Nothing bad, I mean. She taught me a blinding light spell that I’ve been using like a flashbang. Gave me a refresher on barrier magic. She sealed my curse so I don’t have to perform the ritual we usually do.”

“What was the price for breaking the pact?”

“If I disobeyed, she’d just take her gifts away, not punish me or anything. At least that was how I understood it.”

Cicatrice’s expression softened. “And? Anything else?”

“Noth—oh, wait. Yes, the locus! The one in my Charger. She upgraded it, somehow.”

“Upgraded?”

“It’s a Universal. You can feed any spectrum of magic into it and you won’t get feedback.”

Cicatrice rubbed his chin. “I was wondering how you used barrier magic to shield your Charger in the recordings. That explains that. Storm, that’s—it’s incredible. You have no idea how significant of a breakthrough this is. We must analyze it!”

I nodded. “I know. Take it. I don’t want the damn thing. Too valuable. You lose me and Black Devil, and you lose it all.”

“Don’t worry, you’ll get it back as soon as we figure out how it ticks. Hold on a minute.” Cicatrice pulled the sheet back and ran his hoof over my abdomen. “There’s something here. I can feel it.”

“My gut?” I raised a brow.

Cicatrice ignored the sarcastic quip and lowered his horn to my belly, hitting me with a spell. It tickled, more than anything else. I would’ve giggled, but that would’ve sent me into coughing fits, and I didn’t want to get the Magister sick. Cicatrice gasped. I looked down at my navel, and I quickly saw what had left him awestruck. There was a symbol of a sun on my abdomen with an eight-pointed corona swirling around it. Cicatrice released his spell and the symbol vanished.

Cicatrice slowly grinned. “It’s real. It’s her. Somehow, it’s her!”

“Is that good or bad?”

“This changes everything. If we had some way to harness this, maybe—no, what am I saying? I was about to propose binding her soul to an Anima core. That’s insane.”

“Cicatrice,” I said. “How do souls think without a brain?”

“They use yours,” he replied without hesitation. “You can’t get around needing a substrate. The brain is like an antenna and receiver set for the soul, and that includes yours. Any time you’re communicating with a spirit, it’s using your brain as the hardware to run itself.”

That matched what Celestia herself had said, about being inside my mind. That still left a few unanswered questions. “Is it superluminal? The communication between a spirit and a brain, I mean. Can it go faster than light?”

“Possibly,” Cicatrice said. “We’re not completely sure about that. The trouble is trying to figure out where a soul actually is. You can’t validate the speed of information transmission if you can’t determine their location. Not with the technology we have, anyhow. You try and get a reading and it seems to be coming from everywhere all at once. You can’t definitively say that a soul is on another planet or right next to you. As best as we can tell, they don’t have an exact location in three-dimensional space. Aetheric Responders work on similar principles. They can exchange data instantly over extremely long distances because they behave like something akin to artificial souls. In summary, from our perspective, souls don’t travel because they’re already everywhere at once.”

“Then why do Greater Archons move slower than light? You said they were incorporeal. Are they physical, or not?”

Cicatrice huffed, as if he were mildly angered that I’d seen through his rhetoric. “Normally, I wouldn’t tell just anyone this, but since you already know too much about these things, and you wouldn’t understand the answer anyway, I’ll humor you. Yes, they are physical, but it involves states of matter that you’d need a physics degree to even begin to understand. We use ‘incorporeal’ as a much-abridged description of the phenomenon. To put it bluntly, if you can see something, it’s physical.”

“Even a drug-induced hallucination?” I said.

“Yes, even a hallucination. What do you think your neurons are doing when you’re high? Having a tea party? No. They’re moving ions in and out. Everything that living beings experience is physical, one way or another.”

“Can souls experience anything if they’re not associated with any physical matter at all?”

“That’s a very good question,” Cicatrice said. “The answer is indeterminate. It was an area of ongoing study in the Conclave.”

“Why do ponies lose their memories when you make their souls into an Anima?”

Cicatrice’s expression was grave; he looked as if hesitant to give me the answer. “We wipe them.”

“What?” I glared at him. “Are you fucking kidding me?”

Cicatrice took a deep breath. “We have to. These are ponies who died, Storm. The soul doesn’t remain fully intact when unbound from a brain. Not without an extraordinarily strong will. Any memories they do have are partial. Fragmented. Just echoes of the living thing they once were. Not to mention, most of their memories involve inhabiting an organic body. If you bring them back without wiping their memories, they go crazy. Instantly. Poof. It’s not pretty. The first question they always ask is why they can’t breathe and why it feels like they’re drowning, and it immediately gets worse from there. Much worse. We don’t do that anymore. Not even experimentally.” Cicatrice knit his brow in contrition. “It’s too cruel even for me.”

“Oh, I see,” I muttered. “That’s still messed up.”

“The Anima is one of our most powerful tools, far more advanced than any mere AI. They are fully self-aware people. The sync system in a Charger does not merely link your neurons with the Anima’s computational substrate through your neural lace. To some extent, it interfaces your soul with that of the Anima. That’s part of how they can read your intentions so quickly. You become two souls sharing a single mechanical body. We were planning on taking it much further than that, but the war put an end to those ambitions. Oh, that reminds me. There are a few things that still don’t add up that I need clarification on. What in the blazes happened with Wertua?”

I took a deep breath and let out a stressed sigh. “Cicatrice, the Confederacy are harvesting quintessence. There were ponies aboard the Landcruiser. In body bags. Their heads had been drilled. Tiamat did the scans herself. Go ask her for the data on that.”

Cicatrice frowned. “What the hell happened in there?”

“Wertua used Quint,” I said. “She insufflated quintessence and it gave her the ability to do magic. Very uncoordinated magic, but magic nonetheless. An Archon briefly possessed her, though I have no idea how. Her horns blew up when I hit her with a counterspell.” I pointed to the green stallion in the bed across from me. “He saw everything.”

“Fucking hell.” Cicatrice started pacing, rubbing his chin with his hoof. “This is bad.”

“No shit,” I said. “The fuckers can snort our brain powder and shoot death rays from their heads. That’s one more reason for them to treat us like a commodity, and it’s invariably fatal for the ponies involved.”

Cicatrice nodded. “Yes, yes. I can see the whole evolution there. Not good. It’s even worse if they figure out how to direct and control magic, or refine the process somehow. I get the feeling that simply using quintessence as a drug is not the most efficient way to coax magic out of it. Imagine if they had bionic implants that ran on Quint.”

I grimaced. “I’d rather fucking not.”

“Was there anything else, Sergeant?”

“How could an Archon speak through her without her being infected?” I said. “That was some freaky shit. It was like she was possessed.”

Cicatrice nodded. “A known side effect of excessive quintessence use. The practice is such an abomination, it attracts and affixes evil spirits to one’s own soul. In time, the alterations to one’s psyche may become permanent, possession or not. You’ve already met someone with a similar affliction.”

I looked Cicatrice in the eye. “The mare with the white mane.”

“Yes, her. She went missing in the past day or so. Damn incompetent militia couldn’t keep watch over our prisoners and defend the base at the same time. Such a missed opportunity. We were planning on analyzing her condition further. If you see her out there, you’re to detain her and bring her back.” Cicatrice frowned and rubbed his head like he had a migraine coming on. “It would be a disaster if Quint usage became widespread in the Confederacy. The Archons would use it as an opportunity to greatly expand their influence.”

Feeling my anxiety spike, I hastily changed the subject. “The crew from the Landcruiser. I told them they’d be well-treated. Most of them had no idea what was going on right under their noses.”

“Yes, Sergeant. We know. They are proving very cooperative, unlike Ordinator Naimekhe and Colonel Ravetaff. We may even be able to convince some of them to defect, provided we can check their background and confirm that there aren’t any troublemakers in their midst. Accepting a Mil-Int plant into our ranks would be a fucking disaster.”

I squinted and rubbed my brow. “Where’s Hekkasten Arboka?”

“Being questioned, with the others.”

I narrowed my eyes at him. “Is she one of the good ones?”

“Nothing unusual came up when we checked her background. To the best of our knowledge, she’s not a spy, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“Any way you could send her in? I wanted to see her. And Bell, too. Please.”

“Agent Bellwether was injured in the fighting.”

That got my attention. I sat bolt upright, eyes wide. “What? What the fuck? How badly?”

“Nothing serious. A couple gunshot wounds.”

“Nothing serious, my ass!”

“He’s fine, Sergeant. I checked on him personally. He’s at the hospital in town. They gave him a small blood transfusion and last I saw, he was awake and alert. No organ damage, just extremities. Like your shoulder, there, see? Nothing to worry about.”

I breathed a sigh of relief and settled back into my pillow. “Dammit, Bell.”

“I’ll send in Engineman Arboka. You get some rest, Sergeant.” Cicatrice smiled. “You’ve more than earned it.”

“Thank you, Your Excellency.” I frowned. “Oh, there was one other thing.”

“Yes, Sergeant?”

I looked him right in the eye, since I knew I’d have to be assertive for this one. “We need better casters than PF-27s. I’m tired of Revenant putting on a fucking disco laser light show and our enemies having no steaming guts to show for it. If you could get us a dozen Ultima Arcanum Mark-fourteens, I promise we’d put them to good use.”

Cicatrice shook his head. “No can do, Sergeant. Trust me, every squad in the ELF wants the same thing. We don’t have the casters to spare. Not at the moment. Dipping into the Stormtroopers’ stash would make me very, very unpopular, I assure you. The Rex is a great caster, sure. Everypony wants one, yes, without a doubt. However, most don’t consider the disadvantages. It’s heavy. A great deal heavier than a Phoenix Fire. It raises your center of gravity and affects your stamina, and we have years upon years of research papers and field-testing reports to prove it.”

“I know. But the things we’re fighting? Regular small-bore casters just bounce. They don’t do anything. It’s very unnerving. Hell, Haybale would probably still be alive if—if he—”

I averted my eyes from the Magister in shame. I felt personally responsible for Haybale’s death. There were so many ways the raid on the fallen Landcruiser could have gone better. We could’ve waited for reinforcements, but we risked having Wertua find some way to escape. I shook my head. I was being too hard on myself. Technically, what we did was insane. We charged headlong into a burning wreck with an unknown number of hostiles inside. We were lucky we sustained as few casualties as we did.

“I’ll make a deal with you, Sergeant,” Cicatrice said. “Persuade Commodore Cake and the Stormtroopers to train you and the rest of Revenant. Have your unit pass the qualification requirements for the upgraded armaments. Then, we’ll issue you the weapons you desire.”

“Yes, Your Excellency.”

“Good.”

Cicatrice stepped out of the infirmary. The coughing fit I’d been suppressing took hold of me right at that moment. I winced, sniffling a great big glob of snot. A little while later, the redheaded engineer walked in.

“Damn, you look like shit, orange,” she said.

I seamlessly switched to speaking Ardun. “Feel like shit.”

“You going to be all right?”

I sniffled hard. “I’ll live. Had worse, trust me.”

Hekkasten smirked. “I find that very hard to believe.” Her expression turned grim and she looked around, as if checking to make sure we were relatively alone; we were, aside from the stallion in the bed across from me. Aside from the occasional groaning from him, he seemed to be fast asleep. “Sergeant, I don’t have the words to express what I’m feeling right now.”

“I take it you spoke with the others?”

“Yes. Dear gods. If I’d known it was like this, I don’t know what I’d have done. Certainly not enlist in the Navy.” She rubbed her temples with her hands. “I feel sick.”

“Common reaction. You’ll get over it. The important thing is deciding what you want to do now that you know. Ponies are people. We have always been people. We’re not biological drones or anything like that. We’re being systematically enslaved, tortured, and consumed by your government. What are you going to do with that information?”

Hekkasten clenched her fists. “I’m going to fight this.” She took a deep breath through her nostrils, waggling her index finger. “Some way, somehow, I’m going to—”

“What? You’re going to what? Keep us alive all by yourself?” I looked her in the eye. “Mardissa thought the same exact thing. You can’t. Not alone. Not by yourself. It’s not possible. Sooner or later, you’ll have to turn your weapon on your own countrymen, and if you don’t have the stomach for that, then you won’t last long.”

“What—what should I do?”

“What you do best,” I said. “We need mechanics to fix things just as much as soldiers to break them. Tell me, have you ever worked on an Assault Walker?”

Hekkasten nodded. “Ifrits? Plenty of times. It’s what I did before transferring to the Crimson Warden.”

“The what?”

“The Bannerman you flipped. That’s its name.”

“Oh, right.” I blushed a little.

“You didn’t see the name? It’s painted right on the side in big block letters.”

“I can speak more than a bit of Ardun, but I can’t read it very well.”

“You should work on that,” the engineer said.

“I know, I know. I’ve been busy with other shit. Maybe I’ll ask Mar to help me out.”

“How did that happen, anyway?” Hekkasten cocked her head quizzically.

“What? How did what happen?”

“You and Mardissa Granthis, of all people.”

“Nude boxing.” I nodded sagely.

Hekkasten blinked a few times, the look of confusion on her face slowly melting into a mirthful grin. “Okay, you got me. No, but seriously. How?”

“Did I fucking stutter, Engineman Arboka?”

Now she was really confused, silently working her jaw open and shut as she deliberated on what to say. “I suppose not.”

“So, you’ve worked on Ifrits.” I smiled. “You ever work on a Charger before?”

Hekkasten smiled back.

// … // … // … // … // … //

Before long, I had a stack of binders piled up around my hospital bed that the Charger techs had brought me. I was showing Hekkasten Arboka the ropes. Nothing classified, and nothing beyond her area of expertise. Just the basics.

“So, no hydraulic lift bearings?” Hekkasten said.

I shook my head. “What? No, they’re magic. The joints generate powerful repulsive levitation fields that provide an essentially frictionless and wear-free bearing surface. They’re only lightly greased to keep them from rubbing when they overload the fields.”

“How do the thrusters work?”

“Magic. The polywell reactor puts out electricity, electro-magic transducers convert from electric to thaumatic, and diagrammatic engines suck in air, compress it, and heat it in stages, and then it expands and provides propulsive force when leaving the exhaust. It’s just like a turbine except there are no moving parts. The efficiency does go up if the inlet is force-fed air, like a ramjet.”

Hekkasten looked surprised. “No fuel?”

“Nope. No fuel. Just air. There’s no actual combustion going on so there’s no need for fuel stoichiometry or any shit like that. It’s all about the mass flow rate. Low-velocity air in, higher velocity air out.”

“If there’s no combustion, then what’s with the light show? They look like a damn rocket engine.”

I shrugged. “Ionization from the inner workings of the pyrojet. That’s why the thruster plume is bluish-purple.”

Hekkasten combed over the files for a few minutes before she frowned, clearly having found some discrepancy. “Where’s the gyro?”

“What?” I said.

“The gyro, to keep it upright.”

I shook my head. “There isn’t any. At least not in Coursers and Rounceys. Maybe in a couple older Destrier models. Our fire control systems have small gyros to take readings and keep the guns steady, but there’s no large-scale gyro for stability or anything like that. Why do you think Chargers move the way they do? If we had a gyro, we wouldn’t be able to change our attitude so quickly. It’s all dynamic gait and posture adjustment. It’s all in the muscles and the thrusters. If we start tipping and the muscles can’t compensate, the thrusters right us automatically.”

Hekkasten stared down at the manuals, mouth agape, like she couldn’t believe what she’d just heard. It flew in the face of everything she knew as an Assault Walker mechanic.

It wasn’t long before she had another question. “What’s a diagrammatic engine?”

“Artificial unicorn. Enchanted holocrystal with the matrix of a single spell permanently burned into it. Thaumatic energy goes in, specific spell comes out. They’re used in everything. In duostrand muscles. In beamcasters. Everything. A beamcaster is actually one of the most straightforward applications, since all it does is take electricity and turn it into a very tightly focused form of the spell known as Arcane Blast. Any unicorn with even the slightest magical training can do the same spell, it just won’t be focused enough to pierce body armor.”

I demonstrated by lowering my head and hitting my water cup with Arcane Blast. A burst of orange magical energy smacked into the plastic cup and left a smoking dent in it, sending it flying several feet away.

I held my head. “Oof, still not quite back to normal. That’s just a fraction of what I can normally do.”

Hekkasten was taken aback by the demonstration. “You can shoot energy beams from your friggin’ head? What do you need the beamcasters for, then?”

“Because not all of us are unicorns, and for combat, casters are better in every way. I don’t usually use Arcane Blast in battle because it’s a waste of energy better spent on other things, and I’m not that good at it to begin with.”

“Not good? I wouldn’t want to get hit with that!”

“Kastie, look,” I said. “I’m a Bronze-rank Arcanist. If I were an actual Unicorn Battlemage—and trust me, you can immediately tell who they are by the gold horseshoes, fancy caparisons, peaked hats, and polished horns and shit—that cup would no longer exist, nor a good chunk of the wall behind it. If Twilight Sparkle let loose with a serious Arcane Blast in here, there would no longer be a mine. All this shit would collapse on our heads. All of it. Every tunnel for a hundred meters in all directions would be gone.”

Hekkasten looked around in astonishment. “No way.”

“Yes, way. Welcome to magic.”

I spent the next three hours answering Engineman Arboka’s various questions about Chargers and their operation. She listened with rapt attention, and it was clear that the subject was an area of intense interest for her. I had a feeling that she’d be a useful addition to the small army of mechanics who worked on Black Devil, as long as I could trust her.

A few hours later, a couple of militia stallions came by to question the pony I’d rescued from Wertua’s clutches. They asked him what had led to him being tortured by Wertua. He didn’t know. He’d been her personal servant and did everything she requested of him. A month ago, she’d seemed relatively normal, but in recent weeks, she’d become more and more deranged, until she snapped completely. Her use of quintessence coupled with her knowledge of my recent victories had precipitated a rapid decline in her mental health, turning her sadistic and nasty, even more so than usual.

I heard somepony weeping outside the infirmary. I craned my neck up to look, and I saw Briarwood and Cookie Crumble sitting on a bench, the latter crying into the former’s lap while my cousin consoled him, rubbing his head. I knew that wail. Cookie had lost someone dear to him. I took a deep, shaking breath, and I silently hoped I had nothing to do with it.

// … // … // … // … // … //

A month had passed since the Battle of Tar Pan. There were excavators, bulldozers, and crane trucks roaming the city, clearing away wreckage and looking for bodies. Construction materials were trucked in daily; flatbeds stacked with bricks and cement trucks with spinning mixers. Captain Garrida was still recovering from her injury. Fortunately, it seemed like she’d pull through, although she was in no shape to lead from the front. After an especially tense meeting, the Oligarchs had come to an agreement with us. They were frightened by the boldness of the Confederacy’s attack and grateful for how we repelled it. Their crews were already hard at work, rebuilding the damaged areas of the city. The Vanhoover cell had established a fabrication lab outside the salt mine where Crookneck, still in disguise, was assembling a team to crank out the second generation of his Palfreys.

One of the larger work details, easily numbering in the hundreds, was combing over the wreck of the Crimson Warden like a swarm of ants. Rumor had it that they were planning on righting the Landcruiser, though I didn’t see how it was possible. Another team was working on a thick concrete wall that would encircle our new base, with gun and missile emplacements made from gear salvaged from Confederate vehicles that were otherwise too damaged to repair and put into service.

The mine shaft was being lined with concrete to turn it into an actual bunker. The fallen hunks of salt from the battle were cleared away and the collapsed tunnels dug out and reopened. Large steel-reinforced concrete hangars and Charger stables were being erected on the western plateau, with lifts to take damaged Chargers down into the mine for more extensive repairs. Significant work was being done with earthmovers to level the terrain, fill in craters from the shelling, and build an airstrip. Over the past few days, I’d seen four Rocs flying personnel and materiel in and out. A small army of ponies in lab coats were escorting various artifacts hidden under tarps.

I was rebuilding myself, too. Beads of sweat dripped from my forehead as I did my twentieth pull-up. “Imrah koh, imrah kolah, imrah kovan, imrah koseh, imrah—” I struggled to pull off the last one, my legs shaking with sheer exertion. “Vakoh!”

I dropped from the bar and onto the floor, panting heavily. I looked down at myself, raising a foreleg and admiring my progress. Layer Cake’s routine actually worked. My chest, abdomen, and legs were getting noticeably cut. Cut wasn’t enough, though. I wanted to get ripped.

After resting for a few minutes and regaining my strength, I positioned myself underneath the weight rack, hunkering down and shouldering the bar. I counted the hundred-kilo plates. Nine to a side, eighteen in all. Two metric tons, including the two hundred kilo bar, which most cleomanni would struggle to lift by itself with no plates at all. I steeled myself, and I began to push. I gritted my teeth. I could feel the bar sag over my back, the sheer mass attached to its ends making it arch noticeably. My legs practically vibrated as they struggled to lift the tremendous mass. Eventually, the ends cleared the rack. I’d done it. Two tons for one rep. I slowly let the bar back down, my muscles burning. When it set down, I let go of it and moved out from under the rack.

Commodore Cake was standing in the corner, reared up against the wall, her forelegs crossed, watching my every move. “Very good. If I saw a performance like that from a pegasus, I’d recommend she submit her genetic stock to our ovum banks.”

“Really?” I said.

“Indeed. Unicorns are capable of growing a bit stronger than the average pegasus, but you fall short of an earth pony. Most unicorns don’t bother lifting with their muscles when they can lift with their minds. A tremendous waste.”

I breathed a sigh. “You’re not still mad at me over Dartwing and Wraithwood, are you?”

Layer Cake winced. “I could stay angry with you and accomplish nothing, watch you go off to your death and probably drag good ponies down with you. Or, I could train you to be less of a fuckwit. Between those two options, which one makes more logical sense?”

I craned my neck down and looked between my forelegs. “Pretty sure my brain isn’t in my legs.”

“Nonsense. You do your best thinking when your body’s in tune. Nothing makes you dumber faster than a sedentary lifestyle.” Commodore Cake flicked her mane. “So, rumor has it that you’ve been looking to upgrade your kit. Rexes for Revenant, or so I hear.”

“That’s correct.”

“If you can get your squad as fit as you are right now, I’ll put you through the training and certification process.”

I smiled and nodded. “Yes, ma’am!”

“Good. Now, keep going.”

I set some weights on my back and started doing push-ups, my face dripping sweat on the floor.

// … // … // … // … // … //

They let Bellwether out of the hospital a couple days later. He was in worse shape than Cicatrice had told me. When I saw him ambling towards the main road to the base after being let out by a Centaur shuttling personnel back and forth, his right foreleg was in a cast. I couldn’t help myself. I ran—not walked, ran—up to him at damn near a full gallop and scooped him up in my forelegs like a foal. I swung him in a circle, hugging him tight and cooing at him.

“Put me down!” he said. “My leg!”

I set him down and nuzzled his cheek. “Dammit, Bell! You had me worried sick! You’re doing better, now, right?”

He ignored the question and looked me up and down, his eyes widening. I was wearing a stretchy nylon training bodysuit that the Commodore had given me, and it was obvious to even the most casual observer that I was getting very buff.

Bell let out a low whistle. “Damn. You’re hard as a rock!”

I grinned, flexing my foreleg. “I thought you liked rocks, Gneiss.”

Bell snorted derisively. “You kidding? I hated the blasting business.”

“Aw, that’s too bad.” I smacked my flank with a hoof, grinning perversely. “I was about to suggest you blast this rock-hard ass of mine.”

Bell winced. “Yeah, no.”

My worry spiked a bit when I saw the uncomfortable look he gave me. “Is something the matter between us?”

“No, nothing,” he said. “Just not in the mood. Leg still hurts. They got in a lucky hit. Broke the bone.”

I pulled him into a hug. “We did it. We fucking made it.”

“That we did, Storm,” Bell said. “That we fucking did. The Confederacy have pulled back for now. You, Sierra, and Night Terror really spooked ‘em. I think they expected to roll right over us without any resistance at all. Now, they can’t even orbital-strike us. Not when we have hundreds of ‘em held hostage. And the cherry on top? Word’s getting around. About what the Confederacy have actually been doing. A lot of the prisoners have defected to us. In other words, our hostages now work for us.”

I let go of him and nodded. “Last I heard, they redeployed near the ruins of Manehattan, clear across the fucking country. Somebody’s scared.”

Bell and I walked together towards the mouth of a cavernous hangar that had gone up in record time. It was longer than a hoofball field, enough to completely enclose a truly giant craft. The concrete had just about set up and they’d already rolled in a ton of heavy equipment I barely recognized.

“We’re still in a very tenuous position,” Bellwether said. “If the Confederacy come in greater numbers and with better air support, we’re screwed. If the Vargr show up, we can kiss our asses goodbye.”

I stopped dead in my tracks. My legs were shaking.

Bellwether turned around. “Storm? Oh no.”

I collapsed to my haunches, shivering. My heart was pounding in my chest. An irrepressible dread was asserting itself over my psyche. My vision narrowed. My ears were ringing. A few seconds longer, and I’d take off at a dead sprint while screaming at the top of my lungs and utterly embarrassing myself.

Bell wrapped his forelegs around me. “I’ve got you.” He rubbed my head gently with his hoof. “You’re okay.”

I carefully controlled my breathing as I practically wilted into his embrace, whimpering softly with shame. Even with as strong as I was, there were some wounds that were too deep to heal by willpower alone. I had scars that would only fade with time, if ever.

“I’m sorry,” I mumbled.

“You have nothing to be sorry about,” Bellwether said. “What did it? What sets it off?”

“Vargr,” I said. “I wasn’t—I wasn’t ready for it.”

“You wanna talk about it?”

I shook my head, slowly rising to my hooves. “Not right now. Later.”

I gazed off into the distance, my jaw slowly dropping as I watched the Bannerman roll up onto the plateau, its clanking tracks leaving deep impressions in the dirt as it approached, seemingly getting larger every minute.

“Are we in the way?” I said. “Should we move?”

Bell and I gave each other a look before we backed away and out of the metal behemoth’s path. The ground quaked beneath our hooves. A couple minutes later, the giant Landcruiser rolled past us and into the hangar that had been prepared for it, its stacks belching black smoke. I could hear its screaming turbochargers winding down, silence reasserting itself. We cautiously made our way over to the hangar. Pony and cleomanni engineers filed out of the Bannerman’s side exit ramps, between its track pods. Work crews were already running out hoses and cabling to the enormous machine. The cables were undoubtedly intended to run the Landcruiser’s lighting and other electrical equipment off the base’s own power while its engines and generators were shut down.

I stopped a passing earth pony mechanic. “What are the hoses for?”

The pink-coated and very grungy-looking mare in overalls grinned back at me with rows of bad teeth. “Gotta pump out all the fuel before we start cuttin’!”

I wished I’d brought popcorn, or at the very least a few beers. The spectacle that ensued was borderline absurd. A few large tank trucks pulled up, and they began pumping the Landcruiser’s fuel into them, but someone screwed up with securing the hose fitting on one of the trucks and a hose blew off and sprayed diesel everywhere. They stopped pumping almost immediately, but not before one mare was half-covered in diesel. She was sitting on her haunches and letting out a keening wail, rubbing her burning eyes madly. Another mare came unstuck on the work crews, letting them have it with a profane tirade. She ushered the unfortunate diesel-covered mare off the scene, admonishing her to rinse her eyes and her coat thoroughly and go see the doctor in case symptoms of poisoning developed.

“Cancer,” Bellwether muttered.

I shot him a glare. “Not if she cleans off thoroughly.”

After an hour or two, a small peanut gallery formed around where Bellwether and I were sitting. Somepony brought a cooler full of beer, as if they’d read my mind. I cracked open a cold one and tossed it back. The cleomanni spectators had an electric ration heater and MREs that looked like mashed potatoes mixed with some kind of nasty processed sausage. They kept daring me to eat one, proffering it eagerly. After I initially refused, they broke into a chant. Eat it, eat it, eat it!

I swallowed hard as I stared down at the packet of meat-potato mush in my hooves. I was hungry, but I wasn’t sure if I was that hungry. Eventually, it became a matter of pride. Then, I had no choice. The cleomanni cheered as I raised the MRE packet to my muzzle and took a bite. Some of them couldn’t believe I was actually eating it. I winced at the flavor. My chewing slowed with each passing second. The mashed potatoes were watery and sludgy and tasted like smushed, soggy potato chips. The meat was greasy and salty.

I think I actually teared up, it was so awful. I couldn’t believe I was eating the flesh of some creature that had once been alive. It wasn’t so much the taboo that got me, but the sheer wrongness and otherworldliness of it. The thought of what was going down my gullet each time I swallowed made me cringe. I was taken by surprise as one cleomanni rolled me onto my back and gave me belly-rubs. He said it was for good luck, whatever the hell that meant. Some of them had taken to calling me Storm the Ironbelly. Apparently, they found their rations disgusting, too.

Somepony had the sense to bring fresh produce from Tar Pan and we all had buttered corncobs. Our cleomanni guests were enthralled, and it was generally agreed that our food was better than theirs. We watched, transfixed, as pegasus work crews began cutting into the Landcruiser’s hull. Teams of unicorns were levitating out various pieces of fire-damaged equipment. They pulled out the entire engine-generator sets through a slot in the hull specifically cut in their shape.

As some of the work crews went to take breaks, I left Bell and the others behind and walked up to one of the project leaders, a unicorn mare in overalls with a lime green coat.

She did a double take when she saw me. “Shit, I thought you were an earth pony for a minute, there!”

I held out a hoof. “Sergeant Desert Storm.”

She gave me a wary look. “Oh, the Charger pilot.” The mechanic shook my hoof. “Specialist Pina Colada. Glad to have you with us, ma’am.”

I gazed up at the hulk of the Landcruiser, watching as engineers carved it up like a school of piranhas. “Okay, we’ve been watching this for the past couple hours, but what the fuck are you guys actually doing?”

“What does it look like? We’re stripping this Landcruiser down. The generator sets are going in the base, as emergency generators.”

“Is that all?”

“Hardly. The cruiser is getting an extreme makeover. Wanna help?”

“Yeah.” Kind of befuddled, I uncrossed my forelegs and moved to assist them. “Well, what are we doing?”

“Just follow the foremare’s instructions.”

The next few hours made the full use of my strength, physical and magical. I worked up one hell of a sweat, moving materials around as ponies in overalls barked instructions at us. I levitated out burned-up junction boxes, empty fire extinguishers, and heaps of scrap metal. Some compartments in the cruiser stank of advanced decomposition.

“What the fuck is that smell?” one stallion shouted.

“There are still bodies on this thing that are unaccounted for,” the foremare said. “We think a few of the crew crawled into ductwork or other recesses to try and escape the flames, and then asphyxiated.”

I cringed visibly. “Oh, fuck me sideways.”

That was one hell of a way to go. Not to mention, we still had to go after the rotting corpses. It wasn’t a duty that I particularly relished, but sooner or later, I found myself doing it. They gave me my own overalls, a hard hat, and a headlamp, and I crawled into a duct that reeked of death.

Several meters in, a turn at the bend, and there he was. Poor cleomanni bastard. He was bloated and blue and his lips were peeled back to reveal his teeth. I wrapped what was left of him in a levitation field and dragged him out, and he left a slug trail of who-the-fuck-knows-what the entire way. We had a cart with five bodies already stacked on it, and six was very nearly one too many.

“Don’t we have a cleanup crew for this shit?” I muttered.

“Yeah,” one mare said. “It’s us. We’re it, ma’am. Not enough bodies to go around. Moving ones, I mean. Plenty of the other kind.”

“So, what the fuck are we doing and what’s the goal here?” I said. “Are we scrapping this thing?”

The brown-coated mare frowned. “Dunno. I don’t think so. We don’t have all the project details yet. It’s kinda hush-hush so far.”

After shaking my head at the noncommittal answer, I made my way out of the partly dismantled cruiser for a drink of water from one of the coolers on the hangar floor. I spied something in the far corner. There were a couple dozen large pieces of machinery covered in tarps, along with what looked like a set of oversized pyrojets. I made my way over to them, pulling back one of the tarps with my levitation magic.

The thing beneath was at least four meters tall, comprised of hoses and cabling and tubular framework and what looked like an immensely powerful EMT reservoir and diagrammatic engine. The crystal was the part that made my jaw drop. It was hemispherical, slightly oblate and larger than I was, polished to an opalescent sheen. The whole assembly was on a rolling cart to keep it from touching the floor and possibly damaging it.

“What the hell is this?” I wondered aloud.

“The future,” Cicatrice said.

I turned towards the Magister, watching as he levitated the tarp back in place. “What is it really, though?”

“Something that the recovered Vargr dropship wreckage and your little spell locus from Celestia finally made possible, after years of false starts,” Cicatrice said. “A real eureka moment. We finally completed the enchantment. The housings and machinery date to an old and unfinished Conclave project. The crystals were just burned in last week. The raw materials were hard to obtain.”

“What does it do?”

He smiled. “You’ll see. It’s a little surprise for our human friends.”

It took conscious effort to steady my breathing. “We barely fended off a half-hearted Confederate assault and now, we’re going to war with the Vargr, too?”

“Yes, that’s correct.”

“What about secrecy? Are you saying that we’re about to brief everyone on SILVER SCALPEL and what they really are?”

“We no longer have a choice.” Cicatrice shook his head, fixing his gaze upon me intently. “Several weeks ago, they took Baltimare. They are operating out in the open, with impunity. It’s not the Linvargr, either. It’s the Hastavargr.”

“What does that mean in practical terms?” I said.

“The ones you contended with near Pur Sang were mere researchers and scouts. This is their military arm we’re talking about. Ponies are asking uncomfortable questions for which we have no satisfactory answers.”

I bit my lip. “I’ve seen the footage. Briarwood gave me a copy. They had something that—I don’t know. It melted ponies.”

Cicatrice nodded. “They deployed offensive nanomachines. Dissolvers. They’re not quite like what Liquefier Karks use. They’re highly contagious and genetically targeted.”

“How contagious?”

Cicatrice’s expression was grave. “It spreads like a virus, in a cough, sneeze, or the slightest physical contact with one of the infected. If even a few of the things get in or on you, you’re as good as dead. It could be days or even weeks before the symptoms of nanosis show. By the time it’s noticeable, it progresses to death in under an hour. The nanites quickly and selectively consume muscles, ligaments, cartilage, skin, and adipose tissue while leaving the internal organs mostly intact. The infected literally come apart at the joints.”

I winced. “Is there an antidote? Some kind of counter-nanotech we can use?”

Cicatrice shook his head. “No. It’s invariably fatal and there is no cure. You may have seen bits and pieces and can probably surmise what’s going on, but I doubt that you realize how dire the situation is. We have ceased infantry operations in Baltimare as of three weeks ago and established a cordon on the outskirts of the city. If anyone attempts to leave, we shoot them on sight. This is not a game. Millions of lives are at stake. If one infected pony makes it to another settlement, thousands will die gruesomely, and it could spread much further from there. The Vargr are consolidating their position and have constructed a command post near the city center, but they haven’t gone on the offensive yet. It’s only a matter of time before they do.”

I shuddered, averting my gaze from the Magister and trying to take my mind off of what he’d just said. I looked up at the Landcruiser, watching as the techs meticulously dismantled every part of the thing that they could get their hooves on. Work scaffolds had already been erected and overhead gantries were moving materials back and forth from the cruiser’s deck. It suddenly clicked what we were doing.

“You’re gonna make it fly,” I said.

“Only about ten to twenty meters off the ground, maximum,” Cicatrice said. “It can’t go very high because it needs a surface to repel from, but it’s orders of magnitude more power-efficient than an electrokinetic repulsor.”

“What the hell are we powering it with?”

“We have a captured Confederate starship fusion reactor that puts out enough juice to run a couple million houses. Fitting the cooling equipment and all the other systems in will be a challenge, but with the ponies we have, I’m confident we can do it in a reasonable time frame.”

“You crazy sons of bitches.” I slowly grinned. “What the hell would you even call such a thing?”

“What we’d always planned on calling them.” Cicatrice nodded. “They’re craft that go aloft on levitation fields, so they ought to be called levitors.”

I scanned the hulk of the Crimson Warden fore and aft. I had this sinking feeling in my gut that we’d just entered a completely new era of ground warfare, free of limitations like basic fucking sanity. Hover-tanks were an entirely different regime from legs, wheels, or tracks. Even though I’d never operated one myself, since we didn’t have any back when I’d served, I envisaged numerous scenarios involving their use. Their speed was limited only by the unevenness of the terrain and by atmospheric drag, and by how much space their pilots or helmsponies afforded themselves to apply reverse thrust and stop. One could cruise right over pressure-activated mines without setting them off. Hovering enabled movement in any direction, rotating and translating at one’s leisure. The Vargr used hovering tanks to the exclusion of any other kind of locomotion technology. I’d seen the footage from Baltimare; many of these tanks did not have turreted main guns, but casemate guns instead. The whole vehicle was, in a sense, a turret, rotating to face targets and present the thickest portion of its armor to them at all times.

It was hard to imagine something the size of a Landcruiser turning quickly enough for all of its weapons to be forward-fixed. In the days that followed, I would be proven correct in my assumptions. I happened to catch sight of a tablet with the Levitor’s blueprints and paged through them. They lined up perfectly with the various markings the engineers were making on the hull where cuts and welds were indicated. I recognized Crookneck Squash’s writing style in the many annotations in the design documents. The thing they intended to build using the Landcruiser as a framework was stunning. Magnificent, even. It wasn’t as simple as making the thing fly. The entire cruiser was being fundamentally resculpted, with stress fractures from the rollover repaired and reinforcement added in key areas so it wouldn’t collapse under its own weight, a completely redesigned and vastly more aerodynamic bow, and a weapon complement that sent chills down my spine. They were going to arm it to the teeth with all manner of missile launchers and turrets.

The cruiser was in bad shape after tangling with us. There were cracked weld seams all throughout the thing. Flipping the cruiser over on its side had really done a number on its structural integrity. Me and the other hastily conscripted workers were given a crash course in hull inspection and confined space entry, some very bright diode headlamps, and rubber boots. Then, we were instructed to crawl through unbolted hatches into pitch-black voids in the hull barely large enough for a pony to fit in. In every spot where we found a crack, we had to report it. The way we did that was by circling each of the damaged areas with a fluorescent yellow paint pen and then marking them off on a sheet on a clipboard with a pencil. The work took hours and hours, and as we went, each compartment we’d just departed was inspected by another team with a gas analyzer and given a gas-free certification. Teams of engineers moved in afterward, cutting holes and emplacing the hydraulic rams that would be used to take the twist out of the hull before welders moved in behind them and patched everything up. The process was efficient and assembly-line-like.

While we were on break, I visited the compartment where a few of the militia ponies had built a small shrine near where Haybale had fallen. His portrait was there, along with other portraits and small, low-power holo-projectors displaying the faces of numerous other ponies who’d died in the defense of Tar Pan. Flowers, lit candles, and personal effects had been left there to honor the dead. One officer had insisted that the candles be put out due to the risk of fire on deck, but it was agreed that the shrine would remain in place and that candles could be lit and replaced for as long as the retrofit project allowed, at which point it would be moved to the base itself. I lit a candle and placed it next to Haybale’s portrait, staring silently at the framed photo. It was from before I joined the Liberation Front, from a time of relative peace. His comrades were hanging their forelegs on his shoulders and they were all smiling.

“Ma’am,” someone behind me spoke.

I turned slowly to face the voice’s source, soon realizing that I was staring into the face of none other than Jury Rig. His neck and shoulders were badly scarred, his expression glum beneath the featureless Argus Panopticon implant that stood in for his eyes. I stood frozen in mild shock as one of the two manipulator arms of his Hecatoncheires implant slowly extended towards my face with a mechanical whirr. He gently flicked my forehead with one of his cold, robotic fingers, smirking all the while.

“Miss me?” he said.

I smiled, resting my hoof on his shoulder. “Welcome back to the land of the living, Private.”

“Glad to be here. Alive, I mean. Shame about Haybale.”

I was choking back tears. Jury Rig was just a kid. A teenage boy. He had his whole life ahead of him, and he didn’t deserve to be brutally maimed like this. I pulled him into a hug, if only so he wouldn’t see me crying over him.

“Ma’am?” he said, clearly confused.

“That was a brave, stupid thing you did.” My voice was shaking, even though I tried to hide it. “Never again. We fight together, or not at all. You understand?”

“Yes, ma’am!”

“Good.” I let go of him and wiped my tears away with the back of a foreleg. “Fall in, Private. We’ve got work to do.”

We had a meeting with the foremare that morning, where we were each assigned our tasks for the day. There were more than a few cleomanni, this time. We’d taken our time questioning them while our crews carefully swept the cruiser for any loose items we could find. We’d established a Lost and Found where the defectors could come retrieve anything that belonged to them. The cleomanni were very surprised that we’d chosen not to loot their things. We wanted their transition into the resistance to be as comfortable as possible, to assure their loyalty.

After the meeting, I insisted on bringing Rig along with me. It wasn’t long before they had us doing more hull inspection work. Jury Rig’s augmentations proved invaluable in engineering tasks. The Panopticon was far more powerful than I gave it credit for. He could see the cruiser’s damaged welds and fittings in pitch-darkness, the single blue light of his implant’s visor tracing back and forth.

“There.” Rig pointed his hoof at a weld seam. “Crack in the weld nine centimeters long.”

I leaned down with my headlamp and took a closer look. It was barely visible. Just slightly disturbed paint and the rippling line of a parted weld in the steel.

“Mark it down,” I said.

While I used a paint pen and my clipboard, Jury Rig rotated and tapped a dial on the side of the Panopticon with his hoof, wirelessly sending the location of the damaged weld through the local datasphere and into the foremare’s databanks. He gave me a thumbs-up with one of his bionic arms. I always found it odd how pegasi made gestures akin to those made by other species’ hands using their wings. As it turned out, the Hecatoncheires system could replicate those gestures with ease.

At the end of our shift, we made our way outside, descending one of the cruiser’s main boarding ramps where techs were milling around and moving materiel in and out. There was a bit of a commotion outside. A crowd gathered to watch as an Imperial Command Shuttle descended from the skies on a column of flame with an earsplitting roar. I stiffened with apprehension at the sight of it. The sleek craft had a purple, white, and gold livery, and possessed distinctive markings that indicated that it belonged to the Imperial Navy’s 1st Fleet. The SSTO gently touched down on a landing pad beside the main runway, its engines spooling down.

A sense of dread came over me. I couldn’t help but shake this feeling that everything in my life was about to change in a fundamental way. The shuttle dropped its ramp, and out walked a white-coated stallion in full dress uniform. Even from this distance, over a hundred meters away, I could have sworn that he turned and regarded me directly, and judging by his body language, he was not happy.

Admiral Star Crusher, the leader of the rebellion, had arrived.

// … end transmission …

Record 24//Trial

//HOL CRY ADV
//CHECKSUM READ
//CHECKSUM GOOD

//DIGISIG

//MSG BEGIN

[07,

I have a candidate. She’s rough around the edges. A loose cannon. Not exactly what we were looking for in terms of suitable pilots for the HEMAWS project, psychologically. Her tactics are unconventional and highly aggressive. She has a tendency to overextend herself and take unnecessary risks in battle. Physically, however, she possesses the right attributes.

Our candidate pool is very limited due to the current parameters of the required augmentations, the aptitude requirements, and so on. However, after reviewing the candidate’s personnel file, her health records, and her combat recordings, I am confident that she’s the one we’re looking for. We should move her to Phase One immediately.

As you know, the program pushes pony physiology to the absolute limit and beyond. There have been washouts and career-ending injuries in the Phase Two inductees already, and that’s just in the test apparatuses. If we had more time, we could refine the testing protocols and their safety profiles and potentially lower the attrition rate.

Time is a luxury we do not have. It is with my deepest regret and utmost shame to say it, but we have already lost this war. An entire Confederate armada is headed towards Equestria. We won’t win this. No simulation gives us a chance of survival greater than three percent. In a matter of a few short weeks, there won’t be an Empire. We have nothing left but to make our enemy’s impending victory as costly and as excruciatingly painful for them as we possibly can.

Under the Continuity of Government plans outlined in the publicly redacted sections of Initiative-94, all Conclave and Oracle assets are to continue the program with any available resources even in the event of total societal collapse.

I entrust this duty to you, and I have full faith that you will carry it out to the best of your ability.

-RT]

// … decoding …

Desert Storm

Without the slightest delay, Admiral Star Crusher marched straight up to me, accompanied by two MPs. The crowd parted for him as he approached. Pony and cleomanni alike were awed by his presence. Not a single thing about his uniform was out of place, nor was a speck of dirt to be seen on it. I reflexively saluted, but it did nothing for his temper. With his overbearing mien looming large, he looked down upon me with magenta eyes filled with the utmost of contempt.

He raised a hoof and pointed it straight at me. “Arrest her.”

The corners of my mouth fell, my jaw going slightly slack. The two stern-faced, helmeted unicorns beside the Admiral sprang into motion, slipping a suppressor cowl over my horn and cuffing me. My lips trembled, my despair ratcheting up with each passing moment, but I did not resist, nor did I make a fuss as I was led away in chains.

When Mardissa saw me, she was beside herself. “Sergeant? Ma’am!”

Ket had to hold her back to keep her from running to my side, lest she also provoke the MPs’ ire. “No, Mar. No.”

I hung my head low with shame as I walked before the crowd, my eyes fixed on the muddy earth. When I looked up, Quill was there, in the crowd, fiddling with her camera. She stepped closer and took a few snaps of me in my wretched state. This pissed off the MPs.

“Civilian, get back from the prisoner!” one shouted.

“I would, but some asshole broke my only telephoto lens,” Quill said. “I’m down to my shorty.”

The unicorn stallion swiftly whipped out a retractable baton, held it sideways in his levitation field, and used it to shove Quill Dipper back with considerable force, sending her right onto her ass.

“I’m a member of the press!” Quill said.

The MP shook his head. “If you approach the prisoner again, I will arrest you. Get. The fuck. Back.”

I followed the two stallions into a hangar where a sea of folding chairs had been set up. Admiral Crusher took a seat behind a card table in front of the empty seating arrangement. It looked about as official as bingo night in Dodge. The MPs brought me to a halt in front of Crusher’s table.

The Admiral leaned back and frowned at me, pausing as he regarded my sorry state. “Do you know who I am, Sergeant?”

“Yes, sir,” I said. “I believe we’ve met before. Five years back, at the parade.”

He stared off into space. “Oh yeah. I suppose we have, haven’t we? But we’re not here to reminisce.”

“I gathered that, sir,” I said.

The Admiral eyed me darkly, steepling his hooves. “Do you have any inkling of what you are being charged with?”

“Detonating a nuclear bomb without authorization, sir?” I said.

“ROE violations. Massacres. Murder. Am I getting through to you, Sergeant?” Crusher clapped his hooves together. “Does any of this ring a bell?”

I swallowed hard, the room turning a few degrees colder. This was not what I’d anticipated at all.

“Ah, there it is,” Crusher continued in a mocking singsong. “The wheels are turning. The gears are grinding in that gormless shit-sack you call a head.”

“But the investigation—"

“—is already concluded.” Crusher rose to his hooves. “I’m afraid it’s not looking good for you, Sergeant.”

The pace of my breathing quickened. The Admiral walked up to me, menace in his every step and genuine hate in his glare. The stallion towered over me, content to let me appreciate our difference in height for a few moments before he leaned down and spoke directly into my ear, his breath a foul wind covered up by cheap cologne. “I will not have criminals in my army. If, during your court-martial, you are found guilty of the charges that you stand accused of, I will see to it that you are promptly shot and thrown in a muddy ditch like the small-town hillbilly unicorn trash that I know you are.”

I had an icy knot of fear in my gut as he studied me with his piercing glare. He meant it. I sniffled softly and was immediately rewarded with a slap to the face by one of Crusher’s shod hooves. It left a welt, and it really hurt.

“I won’t have snivelers, either,” he said. “You will stand up straight and show proper discipline, or so help me, I will beat you into a coma. I hope you all enjoyed acting like hooligans and making fools of us this whole time, because now that I’m here, this anything-goes guerilla nonsense is over. Your days of fraternizing, habitually getting drunk and high, fucking like animals in the hallways, and acting like sloppy little sleazeballs are done. Finished. We are not a gang. Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

He nodded to the MPs. “Take her to her cell. Then, go arrest the others.”

I was escorted out of the hangar and to the landing pad outside. They had me board the Command Shuttle via its main ramp. The interior of the shuttle was sleek and luxurious, spotless white plating and black polyurethane leather everywhere. I was thrown in one of the four cramped cells in the ship’s brig. Damn near a dog kennel. There was barely enough space for me to stand up and turn around. A glowing purple magic energy barrier snapped into existence with a loud hum, blocking my exit. I let out a sigh as I settled down on my haunches, trying to take my mind off my fate.

“Can’t I at least have a fucking smoke?” I muttered.

It wasn’t long before Bellwether and Sierra were caged like I was. Sierra was far more uncooperative than me and Bell, struggling and letting off an unbroken stream of profanity as the MPs shoved her into her own cell and the energy field went up. I groaned at the prospect of having to hear Sierra’s muffled ranting through the bulkhead for hours on end. Once she started, she just couldn’t quit it. I curled up into a ball and sniffled softly as I covered my ears to block out Sierra’s ranting.

So much for being a hero.

// … // … // … // … // … //

Admiral Crusher didn’t want to delay the proceedings in the slightest. We were on borrowed time as it was without wasting any on the lead-up to what was basically a drumhead court-martial. I sat in silence before the court as legalese was read and oaths were made, Bellwether to my left and Sierra to my right. We had an audience consisting of what seemed like half of the ponies from Camp Crazy Horse, including Captain Garrida and the two cleomanni from my squad. Most of them looked bored out of their minds. They’d been sitting around doing absolutely nothing for the past couple hours.

We had been assigned a lawyer by the name of Muffin Top. One, between all three of us. A mousy looking mare with giant spectacles adorning her face. She fidgeted and fiddled with our documents nervously. Aside from mumbling under her breath, she didn’t say much. Damn near mute. Needless to say, I didn’t have much faith in her. Crusher was the judge, alongside a panel of five ponies I didn’t recognize; all were naval officers who leered down at me with hooded eyes like I was some manner of leprous zoo animal.

“Agent Bellwether, Sergeant Desert Storm, and Sergeant Sierra,” the Admiral said. “You are charged with the unauthorized detonation of a nuclear weapon. In addition to this charge, Sergeant Desert Storm in specific is also charged with the murder of civilians on three separate occasions. We will now bring forth the witnesses and record their testimony. The prosecution may cross-examine the witnesses.”

I tiredly rested my head on my hoof, trying to stifle a yawn, until I did a double take when I saw who they brought up to the stand. “No fucking way,” I whispered.

It was the unicorn filly from the Redheart General Hospital. A chill ran down my spine. If the panel heard the testimony of a little tiny kid, they could be emotionally swayed into finding me guilty. This wasn’t fair.

She sat down before a microphone, recited her oath before the judge, and introduced herself. “Your Honor, my name is Castanet. I’m a salvager, or I was. My mom and dad are dead, all because of the Liberation Front. All because of you!” The filly pointed her hoof accusatorily at me.

The prosecutor, a thin, hawk-eyed unicorn stallion named Silver Lining, walked up to the witness stand. “Describe your interactions with the accused.”

“Storm shot my father,” Castanet said. “He was trying to negotiate a price for salvage. Medical equipment that you rebels stole from our claim. She gunned him down in cold blood. As soon as the shooting started, the others shot my mom. I ran out, and I begged them to stop. They wouldn’t stop.” There were tears in the filly’s eyes and her voice was shaking as she recounted what happened from her perspective, but other than that, she was remarkably composed.

“Did the accused show any indication of hostility before the firefight began?” Silver Lining said.

“No. She was invisible. We didn’t even know she was there until the last second. It wasn’t a firefight. She ambushed us. One minute, my mom and dad were alive, and the next, they weren’t.”

The prosecutor set his jaw and glared at me. He looked like he was eyeing me for a coffin. “Describe the second, separate incident in Vanhoover.”

Castanet shifted uneasily in her seat. “The Riggers got us. Them and those—those red-armored kidnapper creeps of theirs. They were gonna cut open our heads and take our Quint.”

“Excuse me, could you repeat that?”

“Quintessence.” Castanet shrugged. “The gangs use it. Powder it up and snort it to get high. And maybe aliens, too. I don’t know. I overheard them saying something about selling it to off-worlders.”

Silver Lining looked very unsettled, as did a good portion of the audience. He adjusted his tie nervously. The quintessence in a unicorn’s brain was the most potent and magical form of the stuff, and that included his own. “Continue.”

“They had us caged up in a building by the docks, and suddenly, everything started exploding. The Liberation Front were shelling us. There were several dozen of us in there, and they blew us up! They buried us!” Castanet broke down crying.

The prosecutor gave her some time before pressing her again for more information. “Describe the relationship between this event and the accused, from your perspective.”

“She was there,” Castanet said, pointing at me. “Storm hit me with some kind of spell. It—it paralyzed me! It felt like my heart was gonna stop. I couldn’t breathe. I was so scared. I thought she was going to kill me to shut me up!”

I shook my head. I hadn’t intended to harm any of them. I made a call, and it was the wrong one, but it was the best I could do with the information I had at the time.

Admiral Crusher allowed Castanet to vacate the stand, before turning back to the audience. “The next witness is a cleomanni civilian. It is highly unorthodox to admit the testimony of a Confederate citizen, but the severity of the charges calls for it. He was very difficult to contact, and under the circumstances, it was equally difficult to assure him of his personal safety. He took a considerable risk coming here.”

The next witness to step forward was a severely maimed cleomanni. The wiry Zinsar man had an eyepatch and horrid burns on his face, and his empty right shirt sleeve billowed as he walked up to the stand with the assistance of a cane. He beheld me with a contemptuous glare. I squeezed my eyes shut. Not this. Not in front of Mar.

“My name is Renhart Rionnard. I am a civilian contractor in the employ of the Confederate Security Force. I am a data analyst, not a soldier. We weren’t even allowed to carry weapons. I was present in Sector Nineteen when the ELF raided our detention camp.” He pointed at me with his left hand. “That—uh, woman? Is that what they’re called?”

“Mare,” Crusher corrected him.

“Yes, that mare is a dangerous psychopath. There was no warning at all. She lined us up against a wall and had her squad open fire on us.” His voice was cracking with emotion. “All I remember was green light. Burning pain in my side. I went down, and others fell on top of me, dead. I must have passed out from the shock. When I woke up, they were gone, and so was most of my arm. I was blinded in one eye. I crawled out from under a pile of corpses. The wound must’ve been cauterized by the beam or something because I wasn’t bleeding that bad. I ripped up someone else’s shirt and used it to tie a tourniquet. I crawled into a janitorial closet and hid under a pile of stuff so they wouldn’t find me. I stayed there for hours, until you rebels moved on. It took a couple days for rescue teams to find me. I subsisted on my—on my dead coworker’s lunches, from a break room fridge.”

“Is that your testimony?”

“Yes, Your Honor.”

I slowly looked over my shoulder at Mardissa. Even from this distance, I could see the trembling lips, the watery eyes threatening to spill tears. Her face told the whole story. She’d known what we’d done, but she didn’t know that I had played such a direct role in it. After a few seconds, she averted her gaze from mine, unable to maintain eye contact.

Sierra cackled madly. “You’re a motherfucking data analyst and you don’t even know what we’re fucking called?”

“I don’t know your language!” Renhart said. “That wasn’t my job. I worked with numbers!”

Crusher smacked his hoof against his desk. “Order! Sergeant Sierra, no more interruptions, or there will be consequences.” The Admiral thumped a stack of papers against his desk to line them up neatly. “We will now hear the defendants’ testimony, starting with Sergeant Desert Storm.”

I rose to my hooves, and I took a deep breath. This was my one chance. My life was hanging in the balance. I had to flip this narrative completely on its head. “Your Honor, Castanet’s parents were brandishing weapons. Confederate PolyBrens. During our ill-fated encounter, they adopted a threatening posture, holding Agent Bellwether at gunpoint while he attempted to negotiate with them. Sensing that negotiations were breaking down and that Agent Bellwether was in mortal danger, I made the call to open fire. At the time, I did not realize that a child was present, but even if I had, I doubt it would have affected my decision. We acted in self-defense.

“At the Dodge City detention camp, we received orders from Captain Garrida that indicated that all personnel at the facility were, and I quote, ‘discretionary targets’. We did not do anything that we were not ordered to do. We are insurgents. No one in the FTU recognizes us as lawful belligerents, and we are not bound by treaty to preserve prisoners alive. Technically speaking, our enemies do not even recognize us as people with personal autonomy. From the perspective of Confederate law, what we did constituted nothing more than a wild animal attack. There is no legal remedy for the plaintiff, unless the Confederacy is now in the habit of charging bears and sharks with a crime when they take bites out of people and I wasn’t informed.”

That got a laugh out of some ponies. Captain Garrida looked absolutely miserable, saying nothing as she sat hunched over her cane. Crusher wasn’t nearly as amused by the disruption, however.

The Admiral banged his hoof against the table. “Order! Sergeant Storm, the Confederacy are not charging you with a crime. We are. Do not introduce irrelevancies in your testimony. Continue.”

I nodded. “Our overall aim is to restore the Empire, and to do that, we must drive the Confederacy out. Damaging and degrading the enemy’s capacity to do harm to our surviving civilian populace is within the scope of our duties. During the war, the Light Scouts were frequently involved in special operations deep in enemy territory. Many of these operations involved saturating a target area with artillery rockets filled with OA-13 nerve agent submunitions. Over the course of my military service, while carrying out the lawful orders of my superior officers, I have personally been responsible for the deaths of thousands upon thousands of scientists, engineers, factory workers, and other key personnel involved in Confederate infrastructure. This circumstance was no different. The target was entirely logical. By executing those enemy personnel, we prevented them from being reassigned to similar administrative duties elsewhere.

“Suffice it to say, if we allow the Confederacy to drag us all off to concentration camps in a systematic and well-organized manner, we won’t have enough ponies to replenish our population. In that scenario, there could be no reestablishment of our government at all, only total submission to the Confederacy, which is an unthinkable horror. We sent a firm message that what they were doing was completely unacceptable. Your Honor, Mr. Rionnard has not been forthright in his testimony. These people were not merely detaining ponies but kidnapping and trafficking us.” I pointed at the cleomanni survivor from Dodge. “That man, right there, stood idly by as ponies were slowly and sadistically butchered by damarkind mercenary scum, and I have the video evidence to prove it. He helped the Confederacy ship thousands of ponies off-world, where they were either sold into slavery or had their organs harvested for sick experiments. Your Honor, ending these people’s lives instantly and painlessly with caster fire was a kindness compared to what they did to us.

“In the incident in Vanhoover, I made the call to attack what appeared to be an enemy command post. Judging by the large numbers of sentries and the presence of advanced communications gear, I believed that the structure we engaged was a hub of enemy activity. Before I gave the order to begin the assault, we swept the area with Orbits and mortar-launched sensors. We did our due diligence to ensure that no civilians came to harm, and yet, due to the fog of war and enemy deception, they regrettably did. As soon as we realized what happened, we moved to render aid as quickly as possible, while under fire from hostiles. Castanet was present, partly pinned under rubble. We rescued her as fast as we could. While I was attempting to render first aid, she became visibly distressed when she recognized me. I partially paralyzed her with a body-seize spell for her own good, to prevent her from aggravating possible spinal injuries. That is all.”

When I sat back down, one could have heard a pin drop in the hangar. The court was in shock. One of the mares on the panel gaped at Admiral Crusher, who had a shell-shocked expression on his face and seemed to be shriveling into his uniform. This wasn’t going at all like he planned.

Bellwether was the next to speak. He rose to his hooves, smirking at me out of the corner of his eye, before he returned his attention to Crusher and the panel. “Your Honor, we did not utilize a nuclear weapon without authorization.”

“Objection!” Silver Lining said. “The activation of an Imperial nuclear weapon requires the authorization of two or more officers exchanging aetherbits with the weapon’s operator and the use of a Secure Communication Interconnect Device, or SCID, to carry out the final arming procedure. We are not even certain how you managed to arm the weapon in the first place.”

Bellwether sat back and crossed his forelegs. “The manner in which I armed it is highly classified, top-secret information. It would compromise our security if I revealed it to this court in precise, technical detail. However, I can elucidate the purpose of it. Near the end of the war, BASKAF granted blanket authorization to our agents to make the executive decision to utilize any component of our nation’s nuclear arsenal as we saw fit. To that end, modifications were surreptitiously made to the arming mechanisms of every nuclear weapon in our stockpile.”

“Under whose authority was this done?” Admiral Crusher’s lips were quivering in disbelief.

“The authorization to do this came from the Twilight Conclave itself, Your Honor,” Bellwether said. “In the event of the Empire’s collapse and the destruction of the quantaetheric mainframes we utilized for encrypted superluminal communication, they feared that many components of our nuclear arsenal would become paperweights, unavailable for use by surviving military and intelligence assets. In the interest of causing as much damage as possible to the Confederacy, they decided that it would be expedient to allow lone agents to arm and detonate any nuclear weapons we could find, at our own personal discretion. Given that no orders for any specific uses of this protocol were delivered before the end of the war, I can only speculate as to their objectives. It was likely their intent that we would smuggle nuclear weapons deep into enemy territory and detonate them in population centers, inflicting millions of casualties and sowing terror.”

“Who would carry this out?” The prosecutor looked completely shocked.

“There are a significant number of BASKAF sleeper cells in Confederate space that were activated the moment they learned of our defeat. Many of these operatives are trained in long-term infiltration and mimicry of alien species. Some use transformation spells and glamors. Some are actual changelings and masters of disguise from birth. You’ll never find them, and neither will Mil-Int. They don’t exist. They appear as ordinary citizens of FTU member races living ordinary little lives. If any one of those operatives managed to secure a nuclear weapon of Imperial manufacture, they could use the same bypass technique that I did. They would then have full authorization from BASKAF and the Conclave to arm and detonate it at their own discretion, just as I did.”

“How many of these operatives are there?” Silver Lining said.

“That’s compartmented information, but based on rumors, I believe it’s somewhere between a hundred and a thousand,” Bellwether said.

Admiral Crusher slumped into his seat, utterly deflated, his eyes wide and filled with unremitting horror. He did not say a word, but I knew exactly what he was thinking. Bellwether had just told him that there were up to a thousand individual BASKAF assets who could not be contacted by any means, whose identities and locations were completely unknown, and who could, on their own accord, detonate a nuclear weapon anywhere, at any time, for any purpose that they deemed suitable. His worst nightmare had just become reality.

The Admiral slowly sat up, adjusting his microphone on his desk and clearing his throat. “We will go into a recess. There are some facts that we need to go over.”

Cicatrice chose that moment to step forth from the shadows, his baleful glare fixed on Crusher. “No, Admiral. These proceedings are over.”

Admiral Crusher sneered at him. “Do not interfere. This is a military matter. You don’t have the right.”

“That’s where you’re wrong, my boy.” Cicatrice walked up to him. “As a Magister of the Twilight Conclave, it is within my power to grant or revoke any rank or noble title. For the disrespect you just showed me, I could have you literally groveling at the hooves of the accused in an instant if I so desired. You lead the Liberation Front because I allow it. Had you convicted any of these three of a crime, you would have been overruled, in any case.”

“How so?”

“This is now an Initiative-94 matter,” Cicatrice said. “These three have been declared protected assets. As such, they have legal immunity according to I-94 Chapter 27, Subsection B. I can provide you with an unredacted copy if you so desire.”

“Initiative-94?” The Admiral leaned back in his chair and huffed derisively. “You mean the continuity of government plans? You mean the one where thousands of teachers, social workers, administrators, and other personnel stranded in Everfree City who were supposed to be in charge of crisis management instead raided the stockpiles of supplies meant for the citizenry and transformed themselves into a gang of crazed, drug-addled cannibals calling themselves the Ninety-Fours?”

“There are components of Initiative-94 that you are not presently aware of, extending to several of the Conclave’s most secretive projects. These projects are in need of specific personnel with specific training, experience, and other attributes which you are not privy to.” Cicatrice walked up and planted his hooves on Admiral Crusher’s desk. “Agent Bellwether, Sergeant Desert Storm, and Sergeant Sierra belong to me. Not you.”

Crusher was getting nervous; he turned his microphone off, but I could still hear him and his half-whisper with how close I was. “Your Excellency, I’m not sure you understand. This is politics. Heads need to roll over that nuke. We’ve had four whole cells desert the resistance because of the Confederacy’s more aggressive posture. Ponies are dying. I need a way to retain soldiers, and you’re leaving me with nothing. If I can’t have these three, then what do I give them?”

Cicatrice scowled at him, deliberately raising his voice so everyone could hear. “You mean to tell me you were looking to sentence three of our best to death over politics?”

Admiral Crusher got really quiet, his jaw working open and shut as he struggled to formulate an excuse. Finding none, he remained silent.

Cicatrice turned and addressed the audience. “With the assistance of Sergeant Storm and Sergeant Sierra, Agent Bellwether, acting according to the dictates of the Conclave, made expedient use of a nuclear weapon to drive off a Confederate assault. Had he not done so, the Confederacy would have crippled our forces, killed or kidnapped thousands of survivors that we’d only just rescued, and denied us highly valuable war materiel.”

“But—” Crusher started to interrupt him.

“I wasn’t finished, Admiral.” The Magister pointed a hoof at me. “Sergeant Desert Storm, one of the most adept and lethal Charger pilots to have ever served in the Corps, is personally responsible not just for inflicting a majority of enemy casualties in the defense of this city, but also for the capture of numerous high-value targets as well as multiple technological artifacts of unimaginable value to the Liberation Front. Sergeant Sierra showed great personal sacrifice, willing to pilot her own Charger in spite of the risk of turning her recent head injuries into chronic, life-changing neurological illness. All three of them are heroes of the Empire, and if the Empress were here right now, she would be pinning medals on their chests.” Cicatrice put both his hooves on the table and leaned down face-to-face with Admiral Crusher. “This farce is over. I will suffer it no longer. I do hope that I have made myself scintillatingly clear.”

The Admiral bowed his head in defeat. “Yes, Your Excellency.”

“Good. Report to me in my quarters. We have much to discuss, and it is urgent.”

Cicatrice turned and billowed his pitch-black caparison, letting it settle out over his withers before he departed with no particular haste. After all, running was for peons. Admiral Star Crusher was practically vibrating with anger. He glared at me unblinkingly for what felt like an eternity, before rising to his hooves and going after Cicatrice.

He paused for a moment, keeping his back turned. “You all heard the Magister. The charges are officially dropped. As you were.”

I let go of the breath I had been holding, leaning back and sagging into my chair. I played with my forehooves idly while thinking of what I’d say to Mar. After half a minute, I worked up the nerve to turn and look at her. She wasn’t there. Her seat was empty. Off to one side, Castanet and Renhart were discussing something with one of the MPs, looks of pure chagrin etched onto their faces. They kept stealing glances at me. Castanet’s face was contorted in rage and disgust.

Bellwether and Sierra headed off to get refreshments, filling cups from a water cooler in the far corner of the hangar. The rest of the audience were filing out of the building. With a heavy sigh, I rose to my hooves and made my way towards the exit.

“So, that’s it?” Castanet shouted after me. “After all this, you’re going to walk?”

Something in me snapped. I saw through the veil. An uncanny sensation of derealization came over me, like I was experiencing something I ought not to be. It was a rare moment of hyper-lucidity in a year dominated by the endless gray, pounding, migraine-like crashing waves of senseless violence I was called upon to create for others, replete in its dullness and inviting me to wallow in it behind the breakwaters. In an instant of profound spiritual awakening, life had rich color again. Things had meaningful descriptions again, other than guttural monosyllables like bash, crash, thud, blood. I could see, in my mind’s eye, innumerable realities set before me. Fractured, glistening. Like shards of glass.

In one of these realities, I marched up to Castanet and I berated her, calling her a pathetic little bum. Renhart charged me with a hidden blade he’d concealed on his person. A utility knife blade, sans handle. Concealed perfectly under a latex flap of false skin. I saw it coming, and I moved first. His elbow snapped like a twig from the forces my body could muster. Screams, shouting. The MPs broke up the fight.

Snapping back to the present, I saw the truth laid bare. We’d all hurt each other in the deepest, most profound way that a sapient being could hurt another. In continuance of the self-serving narrative that I’d presented in my testimony, I could have chosen to respond to their grief with callousness and empty narcissism rather than contrition, but in that moment, I chose something else. I chose a different reality, of my own free will.

I turned around, slowly, facing their dejected countenances with my own. I could see in their eyes the same primal recognition they undoubtedly saw in mine. They lusted after my blood, because they thought it would make them whole. I walked up to them, and against all their expectations, I knelt and prostrated myself before them, face to the floor.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Forgive me. I’m not perfect.”

I slowly rose to make eye contact with their very shocked faces. They were completely stunned into silence. Without waiting for their reply, I turned and made my way towards the hangar door.

“You manipulative bitch,” Castanet called after me. “Saying sorry won’t replace what you took from us!”

I hurried my pace. I didn’t want them, or anyone else, to relish in my tears.

// … // … // … // … // … //

I got back to my quarters in the base, swinging the heavy door shut behind me. All the Charger pilots had our own rooms. No more bunking with the rest of the militia units. I was still getting settled in, and the furnishings were incomplete. All my things were piled up against the far wall, including Lucky. The only thing I had on my nightstand next to the bed, other than a portable diode lantern, was a framed photo of me and my sisters, during happier times. With my back against the door, I took a deep breath, closing my eyes and trying to still my racing heart.

That was when I realized some of the breaths I was hearing were not my own. There was someone else in my quarters. My eyes flashed open and I jerked my head to my left. Mardissa was standing there, in the corner, her hair disheveled and her eyes red from crying.

“Mar, what—” I was shocked.

“Do you—do you care for me at all, Storm?” she said.

The question threw me for a loop. “I don’t—uh—what? Yes. Yes, I think I do.”

“And what of the rest of us? What about Ket? Be honest, ma’am.”

I didn’t know what to say. We were too close of friends for me to reprimand her for being insubordinate. The question touched something deep inside me. Something I’d been bottling up for a very long time. My eyes watered.

“I was afraid,” I said. “Until I met you, I’d always been afraid of your kind.”

Mar crawled over to me. “Are you afraid of me?”

“N—no, I—”

Mardissa did exactly what I expected the least. While kneeling in front of me, she took my face in her hands, and she locked her lips over mine. I gasped through my nostrils, shocked by the sudden and very intimate contact. Her smooth and hairless skin was as white as porcelain and as soft as a peach. It was the weirdest thing ever, in terms of texture. My heart was racing. This wasn’t a just little peck on the lips. She used her tongue, tiny as it was. A minty little spear of flesh, exploring my mouth. I had no idea what came over me, but I gave in. I kissed back. My much larger tongue quickly overpowered hers. Just as she’d given me a taste of her, I reluctantly returned the favor.

We melted together like that for what felt like an interminable length of time, inhaling each other’s scents. It felt strangely right. Neurotransmitters flowed like wine. Her mouth left me in a blissful opiate daze. I didn’t want this to stop, even though I knew it had to. All good things came to an end, eventually.

When we broke off the kiss, I sat there, completely stunned, my eyes blinking rapid-fire. “Holy fucking shit, Mar. Just, holy shit.”

Without a word, she began to undress. As she lifted her shirt, exposing her shockingly white bra, I put a hoof on her shoulder.

“No,” I said.

“Why not?” She looked hurt by my refusal; her features were tense, her lips drawn.

I averted my gaze, unable to maintain eye contact. “You know why.”

“Bell?”

I looked up at her. “Yeah. Plus, I’m your superior. It wouldn’t be appropriate.”

Mardissa’s eyes darted around despairingly. “This was a mistake.”

“No, Mar,” I said. “Nothing’s a mistake, between us.”

I wrapped my forelegs around her and pulled her into a hug as she began to cry. We rested our heads on each other’s shoulders, her soft chest nestling into my unyielding equine sternum. We shared each other’s heartbeats. I gently rubbed her smooth back with my hoof as she sobbed into my shoulder. Her hands felt wonderful running over my ears and down the back of my neck. My mind dredged up an awful memory, comparing and contrasting it with the present. This was so much nicer than running away from her while she tried her best to chop me in half with a sword bigger than my entire body. Mardissa was a fearsome foe. She was also one of the sweetest friends I ever had.

I thought back to my life in Dodge, before I enlisted. All the messy breakups. All the ponies I knew from school and from work who tried to be my friend and then gave up on me. My sisters. My dad. My piece of shit fiancé. They all went away. I was repellent to other ponies, through no fault of my own. Just because of what I was. Just because of how my brain was put together, and the way that outwardly manifested itself. They always found something in my personality that creeped them out or ticked them off. My head was a closet full of fucking skeletons, and I was always trying desperately to nail that closet shut. I was anxious that Gneiss, one day, would come to hate me as well, once he saw the bones slipping out from under that bulging door. It was inevitable.

It took an alien, of a species I’d long despised, to offer me the kind of unconditional love I’d been yearning for, for all the years I’d been alive. Before I knew it, I was crying, too.

Mardissa freed herself from my embrace and hurriedly redressed in her fatigues, rising to her feet. Her gaze refused to meet mine, her teary eyes covered with her arm. She made for the door.

“Sorry!” she blurted out.

“Wait, Mar!” I ran to the doorway and gazed down the dark, concrete hall outside my quarters, but she was already long gone. “Mar. Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck!”

I briefly considered going after her, before slamming the door shut. I leaned my back against the door, running my hoof nervously through my mane. Banged the back of my head against that hard surface in anger. The whole self-destruction routine. All that was missing was a nice big flask of gin to seal the deal.

I immediately set about tidying and squaring away my things. I needed something to distract me from the taste of Mar’s damn tongue in my mouth. I folded my combat uniform neatly and placed it in my footlocker. I made my bed. I ironed my dress uniform and set it aside. I’d be needing it, soon. After I was done organizing, I climbed into bed and pulled the covers over myself.

“Lucky, set an alarm for five hours from now,” I said.

My Orbit beeped in the affirmative as it recognized the voice command. I closed my eyes and drifted off into a dreamless sleep.

// … // … // … // … // … //

What felt like moments of subjective time later, my Orbit was beeping at me, rousing me from my slumber. I yawned while pandiculating.

“Lucky, alarm off.”

I slowly rose to my hooves, stretching my legs. I did the bare minimum to keep my personal hygiene in order. Big brush through my mane, small brush across my teeth. I donned my khaki dress uniform, smoothing out the wrinkles and adjusting my tie. I pulled my bomber jacket out of my footlocker and inspected the holes that Kaussas’s claws had made. There were three slash marks in one shoulder and three in the other. They were almost perfectly symmetrical, with one set slightly higher than the other. One could almost have been fooled into thinking that this was some kind of Canterlot haute couture thing. I shook my head, getting out a sewing kit with some needles, scissors, and thread. All I had was golden-yellow thread, for some reason. It would stand out against the brown of the jacket, but I didn’t care.

I set to work carefully cross-stitching the holes with a needle held in my levitation field. It took me several minutes to sew up each hole. Over the course of about half an hour, I stitched the gaping claw-marks shut. I held up my jacket and took another look at it. There were little golden stitch marks in neat rows of X-marks on the shoulders, now. It looked kinda nice, actually. It was almost as if they were always supposed to have been there, or at least that was what I told myself. Just as I tossed on my jacket and my beret, a voice came through on the base intercom.

“Sergeant Storm to the Magister’s quarters. I repeat, Sergeant Storm to the Magister’s quarters.”

Without hesitation, I made my way out, shutting and code-locking the door to my room. On my way, I passed by a couple other doors to the rooms beside mine. One had a nameplate that read LT. TERROR, and another read SGT. SIERRA. There was a third door that gave me pause. There was something new there that I hadn’t noticed before. A nameplate that read MAJ. SPRINGBLOSSOM.

I frowned. “She’s alive?”

I raised a forehoof and considered knocking on the door, but I had an urgent meeting with Cicatrice. It could wait. I picked up the pace a bit, cantering down the hall, past our new barracks, and out into the underground vaults that were host to over a dozen Minotaur tanks in varying states of repair. Cinderblock, Sagebrush, Placid Gale, and Shooting Star were standing around, shooting the shit.

Sagebrush smiled when he saw me, his eyes unreadable under the brim of his helmet as always. “Dodged the noose again, Storm. Lucky you. Lots of fightin’ left to do. Nopony gets an easy ticket out of it, you least of all.”

“Damn straight,” Shooting Star said.

“No time for chitchat,” I said. “The Magister needs me.”

“Well, drop by on your way back.” Placid idly inspected one of her boot knives. “We’ll be here.”

I passed them on by. The walls of the mine had been sealed over with quick-curing graphenated instacrete. There were many different brands of the stuff, but CompoCrete was the most common, ubiquitous in military usage. The material was so strong on its own, it needed no rebar of any kind when used in general civil engineering, but ours had steel for added strength. Some tunnels and facilities were still under construction, with workers positioning towering robots that did a great deal of the work for them.

First, a decoiling machine spooled out and straightened coils of rebar, cut them to size, laid them out on the tunnel walls, and tied them with wire. A second step applied even layers of instacrete to the rebar through spray nozzles attached to robot arms. There was another machine that followed behind, using a diagrammatic engine generating powerful levitation fields to trowel the walls flat for a nice, smooth finish. With these machines, it was possible to erect large concrete structures and fortifications in mere hours and have them cured and ready to go in a matter of days instead of weeks, without any weird internal stresses or cracking.

At the end of a long, arched tunnel stood the double doors to the Magister’s quarters. As I made my way towards the end of the hall, one of those doors opened and Admiral Crusher stepped out, looking very flustered.

He eyed me darkly as he passed me by. “Sergeant, you had better be grateful that the Magister has your back.”

Without another word, he kept on walking, leaving me to take deep, controlled breaths to try and relieve built-up stress. I raised a hoof, giving one of the large and imposing doors two quick knocks.

“Come in,” Cicatrice spoke through the intercom.

I gently swung open the door, making my way into the dimly lit space beyond. It was definitely a dark magician’s room. Many of the mine’s natural edifices had been left intact, beautiful alcoves of banded salt framed in instacrete and used as shelves. There were lit candles, ritual circles, locus gems, and old tomes stacked up on an even older wooden bureau. I was about to inquire about the rather obvious pony skull when Cicatrice, hunched over his desk, cleared his throat. He was writing something with a quill and inkwell, of all things.

“In case you’re wondering why I do it like this, it’s because it’s good for coordination and stimulates the brain,” he said. “In my old age, I can’t afford to do things the lazy way. I’d be a fucking drooler in a matter of weeks.”

“Really?” I said. “For a minute there, I thought you did it to make an impression on your guests.”

Cicatrice turned around in his chair and smiled. “That too, my dear.” The Magister set down his writing instruments, resting his chin on his hoof and sizing me up. “Do you know why I’ve called you here?”

“Your Excellency, does this have something to do with my court-martial?”

Cicatrice waved a hoof dismissively. “No, not at all. You can put all that business behind you. The Admiral and I had a nice, long talk. You’re not on the hook for anything. I made sure of that.”

I took a deep breath, relaxing my posture. “Thank you.”

The Magister chuckled. “Don’t thank me so soon. You don’t know what I need you for, yet.”

I raised an eyebrow. “What’s this I’m hearing about Initiative-94?”

“A very, very old bill that codifies our Continuity of Government plans and provides ongoing funding for them.” Cicatrice nodded. “Every now and then, new appropriations frameworks used to be appended to it. These were for programs deemed so important to the war effort, it was expected that they would be continued with whatever resources were available to whatever Equestrian rump state remained in the wake of our defeat, all in the interest of causing continued damage to the Confederacy and deterring them from their goal of making our species into chattels. Some of these programs are very hush-hush, such as the Next-Generation Charger Program, or NGCP. You and your Mirage were a part of that program.”

I frowned, my breath hitching in my throat. This was the first I’d heard of this. “What do you mean by that?”

“I mean you were one of a few pilots hoof-selected by the Empress herself, Storm.”

“Hoof-selected for what? How come I was never told?”

“That was just the nature of the program,” Cicatrice said. “It was kept a secret even from the participants. Phase-Ones like you weren’t told a damn thing. Not until you were moved to Phase Two, at least.”

I really, really didn’t like the sound of that. “So, you’re saying we were an experiment?”

“Yes, you were,” Cicatrice said. “As a matter of fact, the Light Scouts were created essentially as a filter. A pool of pilots we could draw from for the NGCP, due to their unique physical and mental makeup. You made the cut.”

“How so?”

Cicatrice sighed. “Storm, you are not normal. No Charger pilot is normal by pony standards, but you? You’re highly abnormal.”

“Tell me something I don’t know,” I said. “So, what the hell were we picked for? What’s the NGCP about?”

“In due time, Sergeant,” Cicatrice said. “It’s not ready, and neither are you.”

I rubbed my face exasperatedly with a hoof. “I don’t get it. I don’t understand any of this. Can you take it from the top, please?”

The elderly stallion leaned forward, shaking his head. “Two decades ago, the Conclave commissioned a Charger simulator, billed as the most realistic to date. It had a full cockpit that simulated a rather standard Lancer-type Rouncey and all of its controls. It even had a sync arm and an enclosed cab mounted on hydraulic struts to simulate the forces, like a fighter craft simulator. We took the engine from that simulator, and we adapted it into a slightly less sophisticated enclosed arcade pod, and we tweaked the graphics a bit. We made it a tad gorier, to reflect reality. If you stepped on a Cleomanni, he’d burst in a shower of blood from fifty tons of armored walker crushing him flat. Sometimes, if you set a vehicle on fire in just the right way, the occupants would leap out while screaming and on fire. All things you’ve seen before, I’m sure.”

“And? So what? I think I played that once. Yeah, pretty sure I did.” I shrugged.

“This ‘game’ was presented as the product of a front company of ours and delivered to a few shopping malls throughout mainland Equestria, in Baltimare, Manehattan, Vanhoover, and Everfree City.” Cicatrice chuckled. “Because of the visuals, there was a minimum age limit. Each machine had an attendant and ponies were instructed to sign waivers before playing. The whole thing was an unannounced and highly unethical psychological experiment.”

“Obviously.”

“We wanted to know why we were having so many problems with recruitment. We spent years observing the players and their reactions. The pods were rigged with vital sign monitors. Pupil constriction, heart rate, blood pressure. We even made players wear an EEG neuromesh helmet, with the excuse that it was used for certain functions in the game, which was true. You could trigger certain functions with your mind, just like a real Charger, but without any of the feedback. However, it also monitored the participants’ brainwaves. Very few read the fine print in the waiver, which also waived certain medical privacy rights. We ran these machines for many, many years. The results were conclusive, Sergeant. Less than one in one hundred ponies has the characteristics to make for an acceptable frontline Charger pilot. Perhaps one in a thousand could become more than decent at it.”

I blinked a few times, slowly grinning. “Wow. So, you’re saying I’m special?”

“Not special,” Cicatrice said. “Deviant. You and all the other Charger pilots. Six out of every ten players are immediately turned off by the imagery they’re presented with. We had full-time janitors to scoop the vomit out of the pods. The other four, those with stronger stomachs, stick with it for a bit to see if it gets any less revolting. Three of them quit halfway through. One in ten played to the end, but many of them were violently ill, either from motion sickness or from the visuals. Many protested loudly. Some tried to cause a scene. We had to pay a lot of bits in hush money to shut up those few who protested the pods’ very existence, or even petitioned the cities that hosted them. Only one percent of all participants were completely unaffected—or even invigorated—by the experience.”

“Oh. Damn.”

“The margins for the Infantry aren’t much better. Why do you think we use Beamcasters instead of firearms? They don’t necessarily perform better than guns. In fact, their armor and barrier penetration can be lacking. That’s not why we use them. We use them because, one, the ergonomics are easier than trying to aim a gun. Guns are long. Receiver, barrel, everything. It’s an irreducible length. If you strap them to your sides, you must turn your whole body to aim, and you’re completely exposed to enemy fire. Only us unicorns can levitate guns however we like. Fire them blind around corners. Steal an enemy’s weapon and turn it on him. Shit like that. You know the drill.

“Beamcasters, with their auto-targeting emitters housed in spherical gimbals, minimize our issues with manual dexterity. This, I’m sure you already know. The other reason, the one not often touched upon, is because at longer ranges, against armored opponents, they leave a smoking hole and not much else. No mist of blood, nothing like that. At close range, against an unarmored target, it’s a different story. They flash-boil the target’s insides and cause these little steam explosions that are incredibly violent. Our doctrine tends to avoid close combat for regular infantry for a good reason. It makes ponies go loopy. Why do you think we only issue boot knives to Stormtroopers?”

I raised a brow. “Are you saying we use casters because they kill clean, and the psychological impact is lessened?”

“That is precisely what I’m saying, Storm. But even then, it isn’t enough. Some of my predecessors took things a step further.” Cicatrice pulled out an infantry commander’s helmet. My own, in fact. The one with the upgraded radio and intel package. “Were you wearing this in Dodge?”

“Yeah, I was.”

“Storm, have you ever noticed how ponies seem to panic when in combat without one?”

“Well, anyone would be creeped out by their head being exposed when flechettes start flying. What’s the deal?”

“Storm, what I’m about to tell you is beyond classified information. It’s compartmented. In order to learn anything about it, you had to be given access to a secure facility with all records kept completely isolated from the datasphere. No copies were allowed to leave the facility, and in fact, they used to confiscate all personal electronic devices when you entered and returned them when you left.”

I wasn’t sure I liked where this was going. I felt a pang of dread deep in my gut. “Go on.”

He rotated the helmet to show me the inside. “There’s a field generator in this thing. It’s hidden in the lining of every infantry helmet, in fact. We’ve been using them for the past few hundred years, in fact, with great success. Transcranial electromagnetic stimulators. They subtly alter the function of your amygdala and prefrontal cortex.”

“What?” My hunch was right. I was thoroughly spooked, now. “What are you—what are you saying?”

“These helmets subtly suppress anxiety and empathy and slightly increase certain kinds of impulsivity. In a normal pony, it basically makes them behave a lot more like the Cleomanni do on the battlefield. It heightens aggression, dampens fear, and boosts self-confidence. It makes a jumpy, hyper-empathetic, herd-dwelling equine into something slightly more like, well, the aliens we face.” He set the helmet down and set his hoof on top of it. “Let me make one thing clear. These were not designed for you, or any other Charger pilot, to wear. Ever. You already have those alien-like structural differences in your brain naturally. This only accentuates them further. It can help make a pony into a soldier, yes, but under circumstances of extreme emotional stress, it can also potentially help make a Charger pilot into a bloodthirsty killer.”

The implications were clear, and I didn’t like them. Not one bit. I glared at him. “Why? Why would you ever?”

He nodded. “I’ll tell you why, and I’ll be one hundred percent honest and forthright with you. Ponies are mentally incapable of carrying out the duties required of us by the rigors of modern interstellar warfare. Physically, we are more than capable of breaking open most other aliens’ heads like a piñata; it’s what’s happening inside our own heads when we do it that’s the problem. As a species, we score higher on empathy and neuroticism than the Cleomanni by three hundred percent, and compared to a damarkind, the difference is an order of fucking magnitude. Our thresholds for psychopathy are different, due to intrinsic differences in our neurochemistry. What we would consider a psychopath among our own kind, a Cleomanni would consider normal. What a Cleomanni would consider a psychopath among theirs, we would regard as a one-in-a-million monster among our own. These thresholds hold true for most other species, except for the Linnaltans, who score much closer to being as prosocial as we do than any other species we know of, but still fall short by half.”

“So, you’re saying that we’re nicer than most species?”

“No. Nature does not care about who or what is nice. It only cares if you have the adaptations necessary to survive adverse pressures. Ponies suffer from hyper-empathy due to our physiology. Our hormones, our magic gestalt, and our inborn neurological makeup all contribute to the problem. I don’t think you understand the implications, so let me drive the point home. Hurting others hurts us back. Killing sentient beings inevitably makes ponies sick. It makes us mentally ill. During the war, our military had the highest rates of mental health crises, psychotropic drug prescriptions, substance abuse, and suicide in the entire galaxy. You are no exception to this. You’re on sertraline and you have debilitating anxiety attacks due to advanced ECAD, but we still put you at the controls of multi-million-bit war equipment because we have no choice.

“You’re one of the lucky ones. Your condition is manageable with medication. Many others either fall into extreme alcoholism and opiate abuse, or they end up taking their own lives. In any case, suppressing it with antidepressants—and, in some cases, antipsychotics—is only a stopgap measure. When a damarkind kills one of us, he does not feel doubt, insecurity, nausea, anxiety, or guilt. He feels no fear of ostracization from his own kind. He feels only one thing, and that’s intense euphoria. The sight of blood and the screams of one’s dying victims are a bane to us, but an elixir to them. I’m sure you can see how that would be a problem for us.”

“Bullshit,” I spat. “I’ve killed them before. I’ve killed them with my bare fucking hooves. It’s not that hard.”

“You don’t even understand why,” Cicatrice said. “You are different from other ponies.” Cicatrice pointed to his head. “If I had lab techs do functional MRI imaging of your brain, and then I did the same for a cleomanni, you would be more similar to each other than the rest of ponykind in terms of which brain regions are more highly activated when exposed to the same stimuli. Every fight is won inside your skull before it is won anywhere else. You can kill them because, for one thing, you know the limits of your own strength. For another, you have no compunctions against killing. Lastly, you have the confidence to unite those two things with lethal results. Sergeant, our physical and magical powers mean nothing unless we can muster up the will to harm other living beings.

“Do you know what happens when the average mare—not a battle-hardened soldier, but the average civilian—encounters a damarkind? They’re two meters of bulging sinew and ripping claws topped off by a mouth with fangs the size of kitchen knives. The mere sight of such a thing makes the average mare either faint dead away or topple onto her ass in fright. Then, if her bladder’s full, she wets herself. This makes everything substantially worse. See, a damarkind’s sense of smell is extremely acute. They can pick up the pheromones in your sweat and other secretions, and it arouses them greatly. I don’t need to tell you the rest. You already know.”

“Yeah, unfortunately, I do.” I cringed visibly, his remarks hitting a little too close to home for my liking.

“Members of our species are magnets for cruelty,” Cicatrice said. “We have far more acute touch sensation than just about any other sapient species we know of. A pony can feel a gnat land on our ass and subconsciously swat it away with our tail in milliseconds. Our fucking skin is as sensitive all over as a Cleomanni is on the tips of their fingers. The rest of their bodies are lidocaine-numb compared to ours. When we feel, we feel more acutely, in every possible way. We feel more pleasure from a massage or from sexual intercourse than practically any other species. When pain is inflicted upon us, it is objectively more painful, and we know this from skin conductance tests to measure nociceptors and their activity. Can you imagine how many ponies are in captivity right now, being exposed to physical abuse or sexual sadism to satisfy their intrinsically psychopathic alien captors and their perverse tastes?”

I took a deep, shuddering breath. I knew of one. “Yeah. I can.”

“The Empress knew this. She’d known for centuries what the terrible price of defeat was. It drove her half-mad.” Cicatrice leaned back and crossed his forelegs. “We have extensive files on Twilight Sparkle, even ones she didn’t know about. Her psychological profile. Celestia’s journals. Her friends’ journals. Everything was meticulously preserved and studied. To hear them tell it, in her youth, she was one of the smartest and kindest ponies in Equestria. What do you suppose drove a pony like that to make your Mirage? Like numerous other Chargers throughout history, Twilight practically designed it all by herself. She was an engineering savant. She came up with the complete initial drafts of the damn CAD drawings, knowing full well that her creation would be used by pilots like you to kill thousands upon thousands of people very, very messily. What would possess her to do that?”

“I don’t know.” I crossed my forelegs. “You tell me.”

“I knew her, personally,” Cicatrice said. “I’ve seen a side of her that the public does not know. When it came time to deliver the worst news imaginable, the lot fell on me. When I told her—”

// … // … // … // … // … //

Cicatrice

The Empress’s penthouse in the Twilight Tower was the very height of opulence. It was rare that I ever visited it. The dark and nearly featureless elevator was whisper-quiet as it came to a stop at the five-hundred-and-fortieth floor, a red monochrome display illuminating with that intimidating number to indicate that I’d arrived. The doors hissed open, and I stepped out into a room lavishly adorned with checkered floor tiles of silvery platinum and pitch-black laminated graphene. There were a pair of polyurethane leather couches and a glass coffee table. I’d entered the foyer to the penthouse level. At the far end of the room sat a desk, behind which sat the Empress’s secretary; a mare named Duality, whose mane had been braided into two buns and dyed such that it was half white on one side, and half black on the other.

As I approached, she nodded to me. “Magister Cicatrice, Your Excellency. You are expected. I’ll buzz you in.”

The two elite Dragoon Star Crosses in gleaming white armor moved their crossed lances aside, unblocking the doorway at the end of the room that led to the penthouse proper. I walked between them without so much as a word. If I’d been a Confederate assassin, I would have been efficiently slain and zipped up in a body bag in milliseconds, before I even had a chance to bleed on the floor properly.

The space beyond was decorated even more decadently. The walls were hoof-carved mahogany inlaid in gold and draped in places with purple silk. The hardwood parquet flooring was of the finest grade. There was a circle of bookcases at the far end of the room, in the middle of which was a broad wooden study desk with a large computer monitor of exquisite quality atop it.

Behind it sat none other than Her. Great Leader. To our foes, she was either referred to by her longstanding Confederate Mil-Int codename of Aubergine, or derogatorily as Cyclops, or that one-eyed bitch. To me, she was—

“Twilight,” I said.

The large, imposing Alicorn looked up from her screen. She had no glamor spells on, and her disfigurement was immediately apparent. One of her eyes was tired and reddened, her lids dark and puffy. Her other eye wasn’t an eye at all. The Oculocycle—a primitive bionic implant from the dawn of cybernetics, as much a product of minotaur artificers as it was of our own scientists—rotated and aligned its visible-spectrum lens with me. She kept chording on her hoofboard without even looking at the screen, typing out letters with quick directional inputs on two large sliding pads. A soft and wary smile crept onto her face.

“Cicatrice,” Twilight spoke. “I hope you have something for me. I’ve been awake for going on thirty-six hours and I’m going cross-eyed here. I can’t make sense of these intel reports. I think the Secretary of Defense has been holding out on me in meetings. So, what is it? What do you have?”

I winced a little, knowing full well what was about to happen. What needed to happen. A reckoning with the truth, as awful as it was. “Your Majesty, I am sorry. We won’t last the month.”

Her smile drooped a little. Confusion crept into her eye. I’d never seen her look so forlorn.

“What?” she half-whispered, enunciating the word in as drawn-out a manner as possible. “What are you saying? We have a naval task force assigned to—”

“Admiral Crusher was not able to turn the tide at New Isfahan. We sustained heavy losses in space. Some ground assets are still resisting enemy occupation, but they’re completely cut off. It’s only a matter of time before the Confederate Navy is on our doorstep. We are pulling back to defensive positions, but we are still heavily outnumbered. The projections are grim.”

The Empress’s lips trembled, her eye unblinking, as if she couldn’t figure out how to respond to that statement. She drew a sharp breath, but then let it go, staring off into space wistfully. I walked up and gingerly dropped an envelope on her desk. Her neck slowly craned down towards it, her lidded eye tracing back and forth. Her expression would have been unreadable to most, but I’d known her long enough to pick up on the subtlest of cues from her. She dreaded to know what was inside. Twilight unsealed it with her magic and levitated out a few sheets of programmable electronic-ink paper, casualty figures dancing in her view as she swiped her hooves across the interactive documents, her expression growing more miserable with each passing moment. Her breathing quickened as she fumbled with a holocrystal card buried under the stack of papers, inserting it into a slot in her desk. The simulation results that flared to life on her monitor told her everything she needed to know. There was no denying it any longer.

Twilight Sparkle planted her hooves on her desk, her lips drawing into a grimace. First disgust, and then rage played across her features. Boundless, unfettered rage.

“Your Majesty, please,” I began. “I know you’re upset, but—”

“Upset?” Twilight spat. “Cicatrice, upset is when you find out the tomato plants in the backyard have wilted. This. Is. Fury!”

“Oh no.” I slowly backed away, eyes wide.

The Alicorn got up out of her chair, her sinews flexing. In her time period, going nude was the norm in pony society. While in the comfort of her own room, she had chosen not to wear any of her usual regalia. Her coat was bare, her hooves unshod, and neither her crown nor her visored officer’s cap were adorning the top of her head. As such, her scarred and well-muscled body was in full evidence. Twilight Sparkle was not a soft-limbed, sedentary jellyfish of a leader. In addition to her prodigious and downright fearsome intellectual and magical might, she was a trained martial artist with centuries of experience.

I watched in open-mouthed horror as she raised her fifty-pound faux-leather office chair into the air with her forelegs. With a roar of incipient rage, she hurled it through her monitor, embedding the casters and the legs all the way into it and sending it toppling off her desk and onto the floor. Twilight teleported before me with a flash of purple magic, causing me to fall flat on my rump with shock. She gripped my collar in her fetlocks and hauled me up in front of her as she reared up. My hind legs were dangling in the air. I was too stunned by the rapidity of her assault to even think of mustering a defense.

“Why did they send you, huh?” Her sneering face was practically pressed against mine. “The rest of the Magisters too pussy? Why are you laying this shit on me right now, you miserable fuck? You walk in here, and you’re all like, ‘Hey Twilight, I know you’ve been wide awake for the past two days doing nothing of any importance at all, but you know that war you’ve been fighting for a millennium? Sorry, you lose. We are all the Confederacy’s property, now.’ What in the world made you think that would be a good idea? Are you stupid? Do you really think this couldn’t have been postponed until I had some fucking sleep?!”

“I drew the short straw!” I said.

That only made her angrier. “Cicatrice, do you understand what those sick motherfuckers are going to do to us?” She dropped me, and I scrambled across the floor, trying to get away from the unhinged mare. She looked out a panoramic window at the glowing lights of Everfree City, hundreds of stories below us, her eye welling with tears. “They don’t know. They don’t know what’s coming. I can’t—we can’t—can’t let them take everything. We can’t let them have us. Please, no. No!”

Twilight was reduced to a sobbing mess as she knelt on the floor. She was sobbing and screaming. The Empress lit her horn and teleported again. This time, beyond the confines of her room.

“Oh shit,” I whispered, swallowing hard and trying to catch my breath. “Oh shit, oh shit.”

She’d handled it far worse than any of us had anticipated. I heard a loud crash somewhere in an adjacent room. I ran back out into the foyer.

“Where is she?” I shouted.

The answer came in the form of animalistic growls and screeches and the clatter of furniture. I ran into a lounge for her guards that sat adjacent to the foyer. The room was a maelstrom of flying chairs, and at the center of it was the Empress. She wasn’t even using her magic. She was picking up and chucking chairs, one after another, with her legs. A hoofful of Palace Security at the end of the room stood mouths-agape, not sure how to even begin to put a stop to our sovereign’s rampage. One enterprising pegasus stallion launched himself at the alicorn, wrapping his limbs around her barrel and trying to restrain her. Big mistake.

“Your Majesty, please!” he said. “Calm down!”

“Little fuck!” Twilight shouted. “You little fuck!”

The Empress had decades of wrestling practice to draw on that he did not. Her forelegs snaked around his neck and she got him in a chokehold, twisting him to the floor. She squeezed like an anaconda and his eyes rolled back into his head. As I stood there, shell-shocked, four Dragoons wearing exosuits charged past me and into the room. After slapping a suppression ring on her horn, each of them seized one of her limbs and tried wrestling her to the floor.

Twilight roared with frenzied rage, trying to shake the augmented pegasi off of her like four little fleas. It was surreal to watch her hurl a fully armored Dragoon across the room with her physical strength alone. The other three, applying a bit of leverage from their power armor, finally managed to subdue her. The Empress squirmed and howled and frothed like a mad dog as two white-garbed medics rushed in. A needle full of phenobarbital went into her neck, and a measured dose was delivered. Her screams turned to whimpers, and her whimpers soon turned to sedated groans.

As they wheeled in a stretcher and lifted her sizable, half-asleep form onto it, I blinked a few times, still in mild shock. “Is this an approved technique?” I said.

As the stretcher was wheeled past me, one of the Dragoons stopped on the way out of the room, eyeing me with her faceless visor. “What do you think? She wrote the protocol herself.”

I adjusted my uniform, nervously watching them cart the Empress off to the nearest aid station, her groans receding down the hall.

// … // … // … // … // … //

Desert Storm

My jaw fell open in shock. “Cicatrice, are you trying to tell me she was completely mental, or what?”

“Twilight was—she is a very complicated pony,” Cicatrice said. “A genius, to be sure. A peerless and tortured intellect. She watched us rise to glory, and she beheld our fall. She is among the last beings alive who remember what Equestria was like before alien influence took hold. A primitive society, yes, but also pure and uncorrupted. A utopian idyll free of crime and pollution and poverty and disease, where magical wonders and universal fraternity abounded. Imagine having lived there, once, and having that paradise stolen from you. Imagine being told that the fate of your species was slavery, dissection, and gruesome death, in spite of all you had done over the course of a thousand years to avert this. How would you feel?”

“Well, I guess I’d be pretty pissed, too.”

Cicatrice paced the room, reminiscing at length. “Twilight Sparkle had no work-life balance. She had no lovers, no friends. Isolated in her darkened ritual chambers and specialized fabrication laboratories, she tried pulling us back from the brink, spending many sleepless nights high on caffeine and amphetamines, her bloodshot eyes locked on one glowing computer monitor, one fizzing flask, and one whiteboard covered in magical formulae after another. In spite of all she personally sacrificed, she failed. Her anger was understandable. And we’re all paying the price, even now. Look at what they do to us, Storm. It’s unbearable.”

I shook my head, furrowing my brow. “These aliens are all sapient. They know right from wrong. They should be able to control their vile urges.”

“Incorrect!” Cicatrice said. “We’re used to talking about morals as if they’re actual things that exist, but they aren’t. They’re a fucking illusion. Concepts like morality and justice are sweet little lies that our emotions tell us about the universe and how it works. Morals are vapid and trivial. Who decides what constitutes rightness and wrongness, anyway? If it can’t be quantified, then what is it? Where does it reside? Inside the brain, or outside of reality? Say you witnessed a stallion pushing a little old grandma off the sidewalk and into traffic. Are you telling me you have a Wrong-O-Meter that you can whip out that will start pinging the moment this happens?”

“I do have one such meter, and it’s called disgust,” I said. “I would be disgusted.”

“No, you wouldn’t.” Cicatrice became very animated and angry, gesticulating with his hooves. I’d clearly hit a sore spot. “You’ve done worse. You’d feel nothing. Feelings are not a barometer for anything. They are completely relative and vacuous. What is not relative nor vacuous is what objectively, logically happens when you come in contact with the enemy. You, alone, are a system. You, plus an enemy, is another, different system. These systems are deterministic. Their components and the workings of those components can be clearly and concisely defined. The answer is always the same. Our neurological and genetic makeup are working against us. Making us into victims. Into meat for these monsters. We need to tip the scales, somehow. Reinvent the wheel.”

“If the universe is reducible to the absurd actions of chemicals, then what are we even fighting for?” I said. “The right to be the chemical on top of the pile? Being safe and secure makes us feel good. Without feelings, without values, there is no reason to do anything.”

“Ah, yes. ‘I want more serotonin and oxytocin, I want it desperately, and I want it now’, says the selfish clump of endorphin-addicted proteins and DNA with the calcium frame inside, blowing her lungs like a bellows to state this ridiculous request, as if the universe should somehow accede to your demand without any effort on your part at all. This, I assure you, is how the Archons see you. It’s how they see all of us. To them, you’re a mistake of nature. A soul trapped in fallible meat. An ugly cancer on the purity of creation. And yet, they need sustenance, too. You’re a weed to them, but a perfectly edible one, like fennel.”

“Why are you telling me this?” I raised my voice.

Cicatrice stamped his hoof angrily, the sound ringing out through the cavernous space. I was taken aback by this, my whole body tensing as I recoiled in shock.

“I’m old, Storm!” he said, his voice quavering. “I won’t always be—I won’t always be there to protect you when you make mistakes. I spent all my life researching how to cheat death, and I’ve found nothing that satisfies. I know what happens to souls when we go, and I’m scared. Celestia preserve me, I’m scared sick. Those things are out there. They’re coming for us. To feast on us. Damn it all. I wasted my life. I accomplished nothing. We’re not safe from them. No one is. It’s not fair. We have civilization. We have culture. What do they have to offer us, except rot and despair? Nothing. They’re so proud and arrogant, and yet, they have not a damn thing to show for it!”

I never expected an outburst of emotion like this from him, especially not after he’d just gone on a rant about how meaningless emotions are. All I knew was that his words chilled me to the bone. He was the last pony I expected to lose his cool.

“We really are up shit creek, aren’t we?” I said.

Cicatrice chuckled softly, wiping away the little tears that threatened to spill from the corners of his eyes. “Indeed, we are, Sergeant.”

“Why would you guys give me a Bulwark suit or any of the rest of these if—if they—”

“They didn’t know,” Cicatrice said. “We never expected Charger pilots to wear them, but in the Liberation Front, pilots have done double-duty as infantry. The side effects are unknown, and possibly severe.”

“Does Crusher know?”

“He does, now.”

“Are you saying he didn’t, before?” I said.

“None of the brass did. It was Conclave-only. Damn near Magisters-only. The companies that made the electronics for these helmets only made bits and pieces. Compartmentalization. We assembled the rest on a fully automated line. Only a few outsiders ever figured it out, in all this time. BASKAF made them disappear.”

I recoiled. “They killed them?”

“Worse. Extraordinary rendition and indefinite detention in solitary confinement for the rest of their natural lifespan.”

“Why’d you do it in the first place? Why tell ponies this now?”

“We wanted something that would enhance aggression without making permanent alterations to pony physiology. We wanted these soldiers to come home and live normal lives after their tours were done. I am revealing this information because I believe it is time for disclosure and reconciliation. Should the Empire rise from the ashes, we should be doing a lot of things very differently. This is going to sound hypocritical coming from me, but manipulating the minds of our soldiers without their consent is something that needs to stop. Everypony should know exactly what they’re signing up for and why.”

“How sweet of you.” My tone was acidic.

“Wrong again,” Cicatrice said. “It had nothing to do with kindness. The default neurological makeup of ponies results in beings who build high-trust societies, are pliant, and are avoidant of unnecessary risk. Making these cognitive alterations permanent was deemed to be too dangerous for social cohesion. It would have undermined the Empress’s ability to maintain order.”

I shook my head slowly, fixing Cicatrice with a glare. “You know, some days, I wonder just what the hell it is that I’ve been fighting to protect all this time. You’re not helping with that.”

“Our species,” Cicatrice said without hesitation. “You’re fighting to protect the future of our species. Yes, we have done unethical things in service of that goal. Yes, we have been hard and cruel, both to our enemies and to our own. I don’t expect you to understand the reasons for every single thing that we did, nor do I expect you to agree with it on a moral, political, or philosophical basis or even be remotely comfortable with any of it.

“As practitioners of dark magic, you and I both know what it means to take away someone’s agency and to twist their very souls in service of our goals. However, magic is not the only way that is accomplished. Propaganda, torture, medicine, and technology have all been pursued as means of manipulating minds throughout galactic history. Not just by us, but by our enemies as well. They use such things casually, even flippantly. Your friend and subordinate, Private Granthis, has a full endocrine suite and can tune her emotions as she likes. Normally, she’s a rather decent person, but with just a little tweak to her augs, she can voluntarily go into a berserker rage. Have you ever considered the societal consequences of such technology seeing widespread use?”

I shrugged. “Well, the Confederacy seem to do just fine.”

Cicatrice gave me a lidded stare. “The Cleomanni Confederacy is an oligarchy made up of a ruling class of cutthroats and racketeers attended to by billions upon billions of corporate serfs. The way they keep their society in check is by calculated deprivation. Upward mobility is a pipe dream for most, and for those rare few who attain some measure of wealth and stature without having inherited it, the process is a litmus test for raw psychopathy. Most of the people who can afford augs are exactly the sort of people who shouldn’t have them, but their wealth also means they have something to lose should they publicly cross the line. Is that what you want for Equestria? Leagues of helpless cattle overseen by paranoid and greedy demigods?”

“Well, when you put it that way, I suppose not.”

Cicatrice nodded towards me. “You look nice, by the way. Did you do that yourself?”

“What?”

“The thing with the shoulders. The stitching on your jacket. I like it. You look like a damn Yak warrior from olden times.”

I looked down at my jacket. “They used to cross-stitch their worn garments?”

“Oh yes. With lighter or darker thread that contrasted with the material, so it would show off.”

“Really?”

“No, I’m just fucking with you.”

As if that wasn’t enough, Cicatrice gave me a damn noogie, levitating my beret off and rubbing his hoof over the top of my head.

“Stop, not my mane!” I said. “Dammit, you’re like a little fucking kid, sometimes.”

“One of the perks of being old,” Cicatrice explained. “You get a second childhood. You’ll figure it out when you get there. Run along now, Sergeant. I heard Tiamat has something important for you to do.”

I nodded. “Right, the spares. She wants us to go for Wolfhound parts so we can fix up the rest.”

“Tall order,” Cicatrice said. “Those don’t grow on trees.”

“It was nice talking, Your Excellency.” I bowed lightly. “Thank you again, by the way.”

“Don’t mention it.”

I made my way out of Cicatrice’s room. I had some buddies to catch up with and some stories to share with them.

// … // … // … // … // … //

Cicatrice

As I closely examined the circuitry in Storm’s helmet using terahertz spectroscopy, one thing immediately became apparent. It was just as I’d suspected. The Aggressor Circuits had been dead for years. Component failure.

Whatever Sergeant Storm did in Dodge that day, that was all her.

I leaned back in my chair with a sigh, putting away my scanner. “Oh, Storm.”

// … end transmission …

Record 25//Dogs of War

Something has gone wrong. We don't seem to have an archived copy of that chapter.

Record 01//Upright

//CON ACK

//SYN ACK

//PROT-1066 Rev. 2

//SNR 44 dB

// … begin transmission …

// … decoding …

2181 SSC

Desert Storm

The sun shone bright upon our faces, dandelion seeds blowing in the gentle breeze that coursed through our manes. He stood before me, grinning hopefully as he presented a small, velvet-covered box. I gingerly opened it with my levitation magic. Inside was a horn ring studded with diamonds. I wrapped my forelegs around him, our muzzles locking together in a kiss that I sorely wished would last forever.

As I withdrew, I opened my eyes. The right half of my love’s face was cracked and charred black. What remained of his eye was dripping out of a steaming socket. The horror in his expression told me everything. I begged him not to go, reaching out to him. At the touch of my hoof, he diffused into a cloud of ash.

In his place were mounds of pony skulls stretching off to the horizon. Their stacking was so precise and their placement so perfectly equidistant that no living thing could have done it in any reasonable amount of time. They gleamed off-white in the raging inferno, the stomach-churning stench of burnt flesh drifting across the land in billowing clouds of black smoke. I wanted to scream, but I couldn’t draw breath. I wanted to cry, but my tears had dried up long ago. I could only silently hang my head in shame.

We thought history was on our side. We thought this was a fight we could win.

We were so wrong.

// … // … // … // … // … //

I awoke upon a cold steel slab, temporarily unable to tell which way was up. From one nightmare straight to the next. Four walls, a ceiling, and a floor lit a dark amber by dim diode lighting slowly resolved themselves in my vision as the spinning sensation stopped. I touched a hoof to my horn. The suppression ring gave me a pounding headache every now and then, and this was one of those times. A staccato buzzing noise that seemed to come from everywhere at once filled my ears.

“Good morning, Subject Two-Two-Five-Seven,” an accented mechanical voice issued from within my head as the alarm cut off. “Feeling well?”

My eyes lazily tracked upward to the CCTV camera and ultrasonic directional speaker mounted in a hemispherical turret on the ceiling. I slumped over, exhausted. The bed was every bit as hard as the floor. I didn’t know why they bothered to equip the cells with them other than to mock us.

“Been better.”

“Today’s a very special day for you. It’s time for your biweekly check-up.”

“Glad to know that someone still cares, Scheherazade,” I said, my voice tinged with more than a bit of sarcasm.

“You are a valuable specimen being retained for study. Preserving your life is my duty. Moreover, it is not within the parameters of my programming to feel the emotion that organic beings describe as care. Will you voluntarily submit yourself to be restrained, or would you prefer to be sedated?”

“Let’s just get this over with,” I hissed indignantly.

I stood and walked to the center of the rectangular cell, placing my hooves on the four small recesses in the floor. I let out a grunt of discomfort as a set of pneumatic clamps locked my legs in place. The inner door to the cell’s airlock retracted, and the squat, bulbous medical drone trundled inside on its arachnoid legs.

The procedure was much the same as the last few dozen times. Manipulator arms palpated my body to check for swelling while the diagnostic imagers in the machine’s spidery head peered inside me. A needle pricked my jugular vein to draw vials of blood. Both my mouth and urogenital area were swabbed. I didn’t squirm. I didn’t cry. I didn’t make a sound. I wouldn’t give them the satisfaction.

The robot gingerly placed the samples in a compartment located in its abdomen before retreating to the airlock. The door thudded shut, and the clamps on my legs released themselves. My knees gave slightly. I realized that I’d been holding my breath the entire time. I drew the stale, metallic-tasting air into my lungs and let it out with a sigh.

“No serious abnormalities detected,” Scheherazade noted. “Slight fatigue, perhaps an inflamed lymph node or two. You’re doing quite well, Two-Two-Five-Seven.”

I allowed myself a smirk. “Yeah, well, when I grow eye stalks on my flanks from all the cosmic radiation, you’ll be the first to know.”

I shuffled back over to the bed and knelt atop it, hoping to get some more shuteye. I cracked open one eye to peer around the room. There was a hole in the floor that counted as a toilet. The camera’s blinking green light reminded me that my captors continuously monitored my every move. There were the restraining sockets. The bed I rested upon. A terminal. That was pretty much it.

We had a duty to protect Equestria, once. Back then, we had names, not numbers. For the past three years, I’d spent every waking moment with the price of our failure weighing heavily on my heart. I was tired. So very, very tired of being reminded of it every time I took in my meager surroundings.

The silence was deafening, punctuated by the occasional far-off hum of machinery, subtle mechanical vibrations transmitted through miles of titanium trusses. I shivered, my ears drooping. This was my life. What was left of it, anyway. Even if I wanted to escape this prison, I’d be a dead mare in half a minute.

There was nothing to breathe outside, only hard vacuum.

// … // … // … // … // … //

The soft grinding of metal on metal and the whine of alarms roused me from my slumber. The conveyor had just finished locking in place, and the external life support systems disconnected themselves. I could feel the tug of acceleration in the pit of my stomach. The cell was in motion. I hugged the bed with my forelegs to keep from falling off, anticipating the feeling of weightlessness as the cell traversed the regions of the station that lacked artificial gravity. Roughly a minute later, the whole compartment shook as it touched down.

The airlock opened, and two armed guards stepped in, leveling their electrolasers. I remembered what my instructors had told me; these weapons functioned by ionizing the air between the gun and the target, creating paths of low resistance that carried an electrical current. The yield could be dialed low enough to interrupt a target’s nervous system or high enough to cook you alive. Some ponies called them lightning guns. It was an apt descriptor.

“Rise and shine, princess.” The lead guard wore a toothy grin under his polycarbonate visor, his helmet’s software translating from his native tongue to mine. “Time for you to stretch those legs. No funny business, or I’ll fry your ass. I’d turn what’s left of you into jerky afterward, but I’m not so sure you things are edible. Nothing that colorful could be fit to eat. Besides, I’m no damarkind. Flaying and eating people alive is a little out there. But the Code says you things aren’t people, anyway, so I guess it doesn’t matter.”

My nostrils flared in anger at his use of princess as an insult. He’d dishonored the memory of our royal caste. I sized up the spindly cleomanni in his composite armor, the two nubbins on his helmet concealing the spiraling horns that sprouted from his forehead, his plated greaves encasing bipedal legs that terminated in cloven hooves, not unlike those of a goat.

I recalled the time on Meadowgleam when I first stood face to face with these mongrels. When a small raiding force crossed the perimeter and filtered into our encampment, I hid behind a tool chest because I was unarmed at the time. All that stood between me and my gear was a poor wretch who had the misfortune to be looking the other way when I jumped him, hefting a wrench in my levitation field.

I walked past them to the airlock as they kept their guns trained on me, exchanging sneers all the while. They could barely tolerate my presence. The feeling was mutual.

“Funny business?” I muttered. “Relax. If I wanted to kill you, you’d be dead before you hit the ground, chump.”

I felt a sharp blow to the base of my neck from the butt of one of their weapons. I grunted in pain and fell flat on my face, covering my head as the sorry bastard continued raining blows on me. I felt a few impacts that would leave welts and bruises, but none hard enough to break anything. Not for lack of trying. He was just weak and unfit for duty.

“Not too bright, are you?” he said. “What kind of soldier gives their back to the enemy?”

“Don’t go overboard, Elgon,” the other guard said. “Stop roughing her up. If she’s hurt too bad to take part in today’s experiments, we’ll never hear the end of it. That should be enough to get the point across.”

“No, it’s not enough. These fucking farm animals butchered my kin!”

“Yeah, that’s right,” I spat, leaning with my back up against the bulkhead. “I probably killed your fifty inbred siblings all by my lonesome and then slept like a newborn foal, you son of a whore.”

The snapping sound of the electrolaser came next. The muscles in my chest spasmed immediately. I gritted my teeth. The pain was unbearable, and despite my efforts to ignore it, I couldn’t help but cry out in agony. After what felt like a century, he let off the trigger, and the crackling stopped. My heart felt like it was on fire. I could see him ratcheting the knob to the next higher power setting.

“Any more backtalk, and I’m putting you down.”

“Go on, do it,” I croaked, still dazed from the electric shock. “Do it, you piece of trash!”

This ritualized humiliation had gone on enough. In that moment of pique, I was quite ready to die. Parts of me were still coming to terms with the idea, doubt and desperation creeping in from the fringes. None of it compared to the rage that clouded my judgment. For a second, I felt like I was back in the cockpit of my war machine. Watching them all burn. Watching from afar as they screamed and choked and gasped their last breaths. I wondered if I would soon join my victims in the abyss.

We stood stock-still like that for several seconds, glaring at each other. After looking me up and down with his beady little eyes while the wheels turned in his head, he stormed out of the cell, only to return a few moments later with a length of transport chain in his hands. He looped it around my neck and pulled it uncomfortably taut, making me gag as it dug into my windpipe. He secured it with a snap hook that I had no hope of undoing without using my magic and dragged me out of the dimly lit cell and into the blinding white diode light of the station’s security paddock.

“It’s high time I taught this bitch some manners.”

“Elgon, wait,” the other guard said. “You’re going to get busted to janitorial duty for this. You’re playing right into her hands. Hooves. Whatever.”

As they led me away, I glanced at the rectangular enclosure behind me, resting on the deck. All the holding cells on the station were containerized and could be relocated using a network of conveyors that ran throughout the facility on overhead tracks painted with caution stripes. This station was no purpose-built prison. It was an orbital supply depot. A patrol base hastily converted to a slightly different specification before deployment. We were the cargo.

There were other, more cooperative mares and stallions in the cavernous security zone, and they turned and watched with undisguised horror as the spectacle unfolded. Hover-drones armed with crowd control weaponry shadowed us from above like ghosts, their rattling contragravitic drives and clinical white paint jobs starkly contrasting the maroons and greens of the endless rows of monolithic containers.

The guard wrapped the other end of the chain around the tow hitch of a motorized cart before leaping aboard and stepping on the accelerator. The chain around my neck jerked me off my hooves, dragging me across the deck. I kicked and flailed, struggling to right myself.

Elgon glanced over his shoulder. “See? This is what you fucking get. This is what happens when you defy your betters.”

I tried saying go to hell, but all that came out of my mouth was a strangled, gurgling noise. I twisted and tumbled across the floor, trying to wrap the chain around my forelegs to ease the pressure on my neck. The cart came to a halt at the end of the row, and I looked up from where I lay prone just in time to feel an armored boot connect with my face as the beating resumed. I raised my hooves to protect my head, only to explosively exhale as he kicked me squarely in the gut.

“Sjegbor! Rentelieu fru hent dostet vak?” I heard a voice call out.

The guard immediately stood at attention and saluted. I looked up to see the lithe form of an approaching cleomanni woman dressed in formal attire that was as crimson as the blood that now trickled from my muzzle. She had piercing blue eyes and dark hair drawn into a bun. I’d seen her before, but never up close—one of the shot-callers. A pair of bodyguards escorted her everywhere she went. Not the two-bit rent-a-cops that handled the prisoners, but honest-to-goodness commandos.

Their power armor was jet black, their faces concealed behind what appeared to be solid plates of metal with no viewports in them with which to see out. They wielded big, bulky pulse rifles with underbarrel rocket launchers, and the deck shook with their heavy footfalls. They sounded like they weighed at least half a metric ton in those suits of theirs. Their presence alone made my skin crawl.

As for the satyr in the lead, her hirsute legs and tail stuck out from under her—what did they call it again? A pencil skirt. I thought she looked ridiculous, but what did I know about fashion? The closest I’d come to haute couture in the past ten years was when I was in full dress uniform.

“My sincerest apologies, ma’am! This filthy little creature was being a nuisance, so I—”

“Nev rutsin,” she spoke bitterly, her lips curling with cold rage. Elgon couldn’t even make eye contact with her, instead electing to stare glumly at the floor while she continued making her vituperative remarks.

“Ooooh, now you’re gonna get it.” I grinned at him as he balled up his fists like a scolded child.

The cleomanni woman touched her jawbone to enable her translator implants, regarding me with every bit as much contempt as her subordinate. “Did I say you could speak that heathen tongue of yours?”

“Mesha asrii, aspare kuka,” I swore aloud, spitting on the deck for emphasis.

The guard was aghast. I could have sworn he’d turned a few shades paler. The lady in red remained unshaken by my vulgarity, the barest trace of a smirk spreading beneath eyes that shone with malevolence. She calmly wrapped her hand around my throat and lifted me into the air with unnatural strength, pressing me up against the corrugated exterior of one of the containers. She raised a wooly knee between my hind legs, jamming it right into my sensitive bits.

This close, her features were plain as day. If you’ve seen one cleomanni, you’ve seen them all. She had an almost feline nose, broad and flat, pointing toward her chin like an inverted chevron. Thick sideburns ran from her pointy ears down to her jawline. Her horns curved back around her temples like a crest. The females of her species exhibited some sexual dimorphism in that last regard; aside from the general differences in build and fat distribution, the horns of female cleomanni protruded rearward rather than forward. Her smile was devilish. She licked her lips like some manner of predatory beast about to devour me whole. At this distance, I could see the seams in her arms and the whirring machinery that danced in her irises.

“Be careful what you wish for, vermin.”

My face reddened with humiliation as she ground her knee into me painfully. A lump formed in my throat. She dropped me right on my hindquarters like a sack of potatoes, the steel deck reverberating in kind. I stood, wincing in pain as I rubbed my flank with my hoof.

“Guardsman, you know these things are not to be let out of their cells without a control collar in place. Do your job properly, or I’ll have you reassigned to an asteroid mine. Are we clear?”

“Yes, ma’am!”

Elgon snapped off another extra-sycophantic salute before doing as instructed, pulling a loop of metal from a leather pouch on his belt and securing it around my throat. I could feel the electrodes against my cervical spine and the tips of two autoinjectors digging into either side of my neck, ready to deliver their payload straight into my carotid arteries at a moment’s notice. One held a sedative. The other? A potent muscle relaxant. Enough to stop ten pony hearts.

My ears drooped. Three years. Three years of this shit, with nothing to look forward to but more of the same. I was tired. So tired. As I was led away by the guards and loaded onto the flatbed of a motorized cart like a slab of meat, I didn’t fight. Didn’t have the strength left in me.

When I first arrived here, I’d tried running. I’d since learned the sheer futility of it. All the doors and access points in the paddock were secured with combination biometric and RFID scanners, and they didn’t recognize hooves. They’d recently implanted us with tracking chips on top of everything else. There was nowhere to hide. The drones would find you, and then you were in for a date with the business end of a guard’s baton, and you’d consider yourself damned lucky if they only hit you with it.

On our way to our destination, we passed the dreaded Blue Door. Lab-coated satyrs who wore surgical masks and toted clipboards were accompanying a mare who was strapped to a gurney as she was casually carted through it. She protested violently, struggling against her binds and screaming her lungs out. Nopony ever returned from that place.

After being driven for hundreds of meters, past dozens of steel stanchions crawling with multicolored wires and thin copper pneumatic lines, we disembarked from the electric cart. The guards unchained me and ushered me into a cramped, darkened interrogation room, seating me behind a table.

I turned and half-heartedly smirked at Elgon’s back as he marched away. I loved getting these freaks in trouble with their bosses; it was the only tangible form of entertainment still available to me. The door slid shut behind me, one guard remaining inside to supervise me in case things got out of hoof. I didn’t see the point. I was separated from today’s interviewer by a wall of mirrored glass that prevented me from seeing their face, and I was pretty sure it was bulletproof. I could feel my left eye and my lips beginning to burn and swell up a little from the savage beating I’d sustained.

“Special visitor here for you today, Two-Two-Five-Seven,” the tinny voice of Scheherazade buzzed from a speaker on the ceiling. “A xenologist interested in studying your species. Be on your best behavior.”

“Oh great, a tourist,” I said.

It was the first time in a while that I’d been allowed to converse with someone non-military. I started wondering whether or not I could capitalize upon my injuries to buy some sympathy. After a short pause, a different voice came through the speaker.

“Hello, can you hear me? Hey, is this thing on?”

He sounded just like my creepy uncle nopony liked. The one who died in that nightclub fire a couple years before I enlisted. I rolled my eyes, sighing with exasperation as I nodded in assent.

“Yes, I can hear you just fine,” I said. “What do you want?”

“Ah, marvelous,” he said, his voice abounding with inappropriate gaiety. “I’m Doctor Alvan Nebliss with the University of Aiche. I have a few questions for you.”

“What do you care what I have to say?”

“Well, quite a lot, actually. It’s my job, you see. Three years have passed since the end of the war, and I think it’s time we put all that messy business behind us and start on the path toward reconciliation.”

“That’s rich,” I said. “Do you see me? Do you see the state I’m in? What sort of place do you think this is?”

“I don’t know.” Some apprehension crept into his voice. “That’s what I’m here to find out.”

I snorted with disbelief. “You monsters took everything from us. We have no rights, no dignity. Nothing. Our worlds lie in ruins. Our culture, our entire way of life, is gone. Our people will soon follow.” I felt a shiver of disgust run through my body. “Are you some kind of voyeur? Do you people like watching us suffer and die?”

The scientist behind the opaque glass ignored my outburst, changing his line of inquiry. “Sergeant Desert Storm, service number five-dash-six-six-eight-two-dash-four-one-three-one.” He scrubbed his finger against his slate, paging through my dossier. “Sub-species unicorn, female, age twenty-seven of your cycles. Height, a hundred and eight centimeters, weight sixty-three kilograms. Is this information correct?”

Been a long time since I’d heard that name.

“You’re looking at her.”

“So, tell me about yourself. Any friends? Relatives?”

My face screwed up in anger. It must’ve been nice. It must have felt good to be chauffeured halfway across the galaxy to look down your nose at some of the last surviving members of a race that your kind drove to the edge of extinction. The filthy, sadistic rat bastard was probably getting his pole polished on the other side of that glass while he grilled me. I shifted in my chair and entertained myself with the mental image of that hard-assed supervisor being the one to do it.

“They’re all pushing up daisies.” I pounded my hooves on the table. “Who the fuck cares?”

“Come on, don’t be that way.”

I let out a soft, shuddering sigh. “My parents were on the evac transports lifting off from Meadowgleam. The Confederate Navy was waiting for them in low orbit. Their charred bones are probably still floating around in the debris field encircling the planet. Nobody’s seen hide or hair of my sisters in years, least of all me, so they’re probably dead, too.

“My Fiancé was in Everfree City when the capital was overrun. We were going to get married after my tour was over. So much for that. All the others from my unit are either dead, in hiding, or imprisoned. Maybe they’re right here on this station, and I just don’t know it. They keep me sequestered from the others, most of the time, ‘cause I’m a bad influence. There, satisfied?”

“Quite. Out of curiosity, what did you do for a living before joining the military?”

“None of your fucking business.”

“Let me guess, something shameful? Drug dealing? Prostitution?”

This motherfucker. I had to tamp my rage back down before I could provide a coherent answer.

“Close enough. I was a cocktail waitress. It was a shit job in a shit town, and nopony tipped for shit because they were all poor drunks just inches from homelessness.”

“Interesting. What was that like? Can you describe your place of employment?”

“The Gridiron, in Dodge City. It was a sports bar-type place. Hoofball-themed paraphernalia everywhere. Pool tables, pinball machines, big vidscreens for the drunks to cheer and holler at. I was waiting tables and saw some shit on the vidscreens about how badly we were getting fucked in the war. I had family out there, in the colonies. I was sick of sitting around and feeling helpless, so I quit my job and enlisted.”

“According to this file, you were once a member of an elite military unit, but it isn’t any more specific than that. According to you, what was your role, exactly?”

“And here I thought you didn’t wanna talk about the war.” I chuckled softly. “Figures. What else would you people drag me out here for?”

“Shall I repeat the question?”

“I was a pilot. Charger Corps. Light Scouts of the Eighth Cavalry Division.”

“Charger Corps?” His voice quavered with more than a bit of trepidation. “So, you mean to tell me you actually rode in the cockpit of one of those Equestrian terror weapons? What was that like?”

“It was a blast.”

“Be more specific, please.” He sounded skeptical.

I leaned back in my chair and crossed my forelegs, fondly recalling memories of what would be our last campaign. “When you’re in an eight-meter-tall battle walker, tanks and infantry look small. And squishy. Oh, and I might add, very flammable.”

“I see. So, as you engaged in the wanton slaughter of my countrymen, how did you feel?”

I smiled. “Absolutely fantastic. It sure was nice having the power to decide which of you satyr pricks went home in an ashtray and which ones got to run off with your tails between your legs. I’m not in the least bit sorry for what I did, if that’s what you’re implying. I’d do it all over again if I had to.”

“And why is that?”

My smirk wore off instantly. “The Confederacy used to take unarmed civilians—mares, stallions, even foals—haul them off in great big transport trucks, herd them into pre-dug trenches, and mow them down with machine gun fire. Entire settlements were wiped out overnight.”

“Wow.” His tone darkened. “There is absolutely nothing in our media or our briefings to suggest anything of the sort. Are you sure?”

“Am I—” I was flabbergasted. “I saw it with my own two eyes! I’ve stood guard while our engineers dug up the mass graves. Every time the Empress called for a ceasefire, she was repaid with more violence for her trouble. So, it was to be an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.”

“So, I take it that’s where you came in.”

“The regular Charger pilots were mostly officers. The nobles paid quite a few bits for their commissions, and they stuck them in some of our heaviest war machines, regardless of their competence on the field or their compatibility with their Charger’s control systems. Their job was to inspire confidence in the troops, defending them from threats they couldn’t handle on their own. Bunch of showboaters, really. Many of these Chargers operated from rear guard units, only coming into contact with the enemy if we were in retreat from a failed assault. It was mostly for the propaganda value.”

“What did your ‘Light Scouts’ do differently?”

“We were a peaceful race once, long before I was born,” I said, staring wistfully off into space. “Even with the atrocities we witnessed on a daily basis during the war, there were still many who endeavored to find a non-violent solution to the conflict. Most of the nobles I knew would turn pale at the sight of blood.”

“Not what they signed up for, eh?”

“Many of them didn’t want to be pilots. They were meant to fill a shortfall in qualified officers and help boost morale with their mere presence. They often put them in machines with command and control equipment in lieu of heavier armaments. It took a special kind of pony to actually agree to strap themselves into an armored killing machine, armed to the teeth, knowing full well that their days would be occupied with ceaseless carnage from that moment onward.”

“So, you volunteered.”

“Yeah, that’s right.” I looked down at the table’s grimy surface. “We were outcasts, hated by friend and foe alike. We were the ones that the Empress sent to do her dirty work when the peace process failed. Nothing more, nothing less. Light Scouts was a deliberate misnomer meant to conceal our true purpose both from the enemy and the general public. Our unit was primarily composed of Army NCOs with exemplary service records on other types of vehicles.

“I was trained and deployed as a tank driver, originally. For a few months, anyway, before I was recalled from the front lines after an action against a network of Confederate pillboxes that earned me and my crew some medals. We could’ve opted out at that stage and redeployed as tankers, but most of us agreed to take on this duty. Then again, most of us didn’t know what we were in for. After receiving a six-month crash course in Charger piloting, we were deployed pretty much the very same week our machines rolled off the production line.

“Our job was to employ cutting-edge Chargers under adverse conditions they couldn’t risk sending the big-shots into. We worked with minimal support, deep behind enemy lines, with no backup plan in case things went haywire. I didn’t realize it at the time, but ultimately, these were suicide missions. We were expendable pilots in state-of-the-art machines, engaged in a final, desperate gambit to reverse the course of the war.”

“It seems so odd to me.” I heard a scratchy noise over the mic as Dr. Nebliss rubbed his chin; my mental image of him now included stubble. “These so-called Chargers seem far too sophisticated to entrust to an enlisted soldier of any rank.”

“Did you not hear a word I just said?” I frowned. “Expendable. Suicide missions. As in, the meat grinders that they refused to throw the nobles into.”

“So, it’s a social status thing bleeding into the military, then? Interesting.”

I shook my head. “Not sure if those are the exact words I’d use to describe it. Look, I don’t have anything against the nobility. We were all in the same boat. Our species was on the brink of annihilation. I can’t just sit here and divide what we did into shit jobs and easy jobs. None of it was easy, and nopony came back from that hell unchanged.”

“It says here that you were involved in certain ‘pacification missions’. Do you mind elaborating on that?”

My eyes widened. “That’s fucking classified, and I’m not going to breathe a word of it to you.”

“I’ve read the reports. I know that the Light Scouts of the Eighth Cavalry Division were responsible for single-handedly—”

As he spoke, I leaped over the table and pressed my hooves against the glass, interrupting him. My blood pressure was so high that I was seeing spots swimming in my vision.

“You just don’t get it, do you? They’ve kept me in solitary confinement for years! With every passing hour, I can feel a little more of my sanity slipping away from me. Do you have any idea how scary it is to lose your mind when it’s all you have left?”

The guard brought his expandable baton up under my neck, making it clear that if I didn’t relent, I was going to be compelled. I didn’t resist as he wrestled me back to the uncomfortable folding chair. I could feel my hindquarters tingling from lack of circulation. The damn thing was barely compatible with my physiology.

“I’m sorry, but that’s well outside my field of expertise,” Dr. Nebliss said. “My work may involve alien psycho-social behaviors, but I’m not a psychiatrist. Besides, you don’t seem mentally incompetent to me. More aggressive than most members of your species, certainly. With a background such as yours, that’s to be expected.”

“You’re a xenologist or something, right?” I said. “Why are you asking me these kinds of questions to begin with? Are they making you do this?”

“I’d hoped that I cou—never mind. My opinions are not germane to this interview. Even if I did feel some measure of sympathy for your species, I’m not sure I would extend it to you, personally.”

I could feel a cold rage brimming within me, and my speech was reduced to a monotone. “Section four, Article thirty-one of the Stellar Code states that—”

A hint of anger crept into his voice. “I know what it says, and no, it does not absolve you of your crimes against my people.”

“According to one interpretation popular with your species, it says that quadrupeds are not afforded the same rights as other sapients, regardless of intelligence,” I continued, my voice cracking. “I’ve been held incommunicado, denied access to legal counsel, and subjected to various unethical tests and medical procedures without my consent. I am not alone. Thousands of us on this station are undergoing the same experience this very minute.”

“All former Equestrian military.” The scientist’s tone was dismissive. “There’s an ongoing investigation into possible war crimes committed by you and your compatriots. It only makes sense to hold you here until that work can be completed.”

“No, there isn’t! There is no investigation! That’s a cover story that they’re feeding you people, and you’re too gullible to realize it. You’re in denial. You don’t want to believe that civilized people could ever do this to another sapient race. We’re warehoused here and treated worse than lab animals.

“Look at the wording in the files. Subject this, subject that. Never prisoner. We’re not even dignified with that title. If they classified us as criminals, at least we’d have access to the judicial system and the possibility to establish a legal defense. The way things are going, I’m going to die in here having never seen the inside of a courtroom, being beaten and stuck with needles!”

There was a pause. Heavy breathing from the other side of the faceless glass pane. He seemed as if too shocked for words, but I couldn’t tell for sure. If he really assumed that Confederate Security’s intentions in running a facility like this were noble and entirely aboveboard, he was more gullible than I’d expected an academic of his caliber to be.

“Is that true?” He seemed to be addressing someone on the other side of the glass.

There was another long pause, during which I was fairly certain I heard muffled voices in the room beyond. When the response finally came, it was from Scheherazade, the station’s AI.

“This interview is now terminated. Please escort Two-Two-Five-Seven to Deck Three, Activity Chamber.”

“This isn’t over,” I said. “Do you hear me?”

I was seized roughly by the withers and muscled out of the room, where another guard joined us. I knew I could have easily overpowered both of them if I wanted to, but I refrained. The last time one of us turned on our captors, the repercussions were felt by all. Restricted rations. More beatings. Then, of course, there was the matter of the collar. At the touch of a button, my life could be snuffed out. Not a pleasant thought by any stretch of the imagination.

For a fleeting moment, I wondered what it’d be like if the tables were turned. Would I have been stuck guarding a place like this? Would we have done the same to them?

We boarded one of the inter-deck lifts headed for the upper levels. The platform came to a grinding halt at deck three. We stepped off into a wide corridor bathed in a sickly orange by the low-power overhead lighting, the silence punctuated by the clicking of the guards’ boots and my concomitant hoofbeats against the deckplates. The heavy blast doors at the end of the passageway took exactly fourteen seconds to retract, by my count. I filed that information away neatly in the recesses of my mind, with all the other useless trivia. Light from the vast space beyond poured in through the opening. I raised a foreleg to cover my eyes. The activity chamber was an artificial habitat with a vaulted atrium topped with a glass dome over a hundred and fifty meters across. Blindingly bright light from our world’s star flooded through the dome.

The perimeter of the space was ringed with balconies and observation rooms that occupied four decks above ours. There were approximately five acres of uneven terrain covered in inedible synthetic turf and other artificial vegetation, with various obstacles scattered about the place. There were hurdles, balance beams, climbing nets, and trenches wreathed in barbed wire. Concrete barriers and rubber tire walls delineated the edges of the course. The blast doors closed behind me, the guards taking up positions at the exit. There were already nineteen other collared ponies in the activity chamber. Unicorns and earth ponies only. I was the twentieth and last one to join them.

“Today, we’ll be doing a little mobility test,” the tinny voice of the station’s AI echoed through the cavernous room. “This will be a good chance to stretch those legs of yours, so please try and follow experimental procedure and avoid accruing unnecessary injuries.”

“Love you too, Mom,” one stallion deadpanned, eliciting snickers from the rest.

I’d been in this chamber dozens of times, but I’d never seen any of these ponies before. As I approached, I received uneasy stares from the group.

A stallion nearly twice my height with a dark red coat stepped forward and said, “You know the drill. Name, rank, and division.”

“Sergeant Storm, Eighth Cavalry,” I replied truthfully.

“Eighth Cav?” He frowned, rolling his eyes for a couple seconds as he sifted through his walnut-sized brain, his face slowly taking on a haunted expression. “Oh, you’re one of those psychos.”

“Don’t give me that,” I spat. “We’re all soldiers here.”

“Yeah, but unlike you scumbags, none of us were champing at the bit for the opportunity to massacre civilians.”

“Civilians?” I grinned mirthlessly, pointing a hoof at one of the observation decks above us. “You mean like those fucking two-legged cunts up there?”

One mare recoiled in disgust while the others gave me a wide berth. No one said a word.

“Your instructional packets will arrive shortly,” the station’s AI said, cutting through the uneasy silence.

Contragrav drones buzzed overhead and dropped sheaves of paperwork in front of each of us, conveniently printed in our native tongue on reusable meta-paper. The flexible, laminated cards featured countless microscopic ink capsules that could be reprogrammed like the pixels of a computer display. I briefly scanned the ten or so pages and concluded that it was primarily gratuitous jargon and legalese straight out of a barrister’s wet dreams. Occupational health and safety, that sort of thing. The standard don’t run with scissors routine you’d get from any employer, except we weren’t getting paid to do this.

“Do I have to sign a waiver?” I said, eliciting a chuckle from one dull-looking mare, which was hushed by a hoof to the head from the pony standing next to her.

After several minutes had passed, there was a short siren, followed by the voice of Scheherazade. “Form up at the start of the course.”

We formed two neat rows behind the white starting line as instructed. I was near the middle of the herd.

“Here are the conditions,” Scheherazade began. “This is not a race. The ones in front set the pace for the ones behind. You are only allowed to pass if the subject in front of you is immobilized for more than ten seconds. You are encouraged to assist them if necessary. At the starting tone, you will all run the course and then return to the line. Get ready.”

The buzzer sounded, and we were off. We made good time through the steeplechase section until one mare tripped over a hurdle. She held the rest of us up for a few moments as she lay there groaning, nursing an injured knee. Next, we went across the balance beams. Most of the other ponies took their sweet time. As a pilot, I was used to having my sense of equilibrium thrown for a loop by high-gee maneuvers; I galloped straight across them without pause.

On the other hoof, the climbing nets were a grueling challenge for any pony, myself included. As I ascended, I had to loop my legs around each hole in the net. It was by no means a natural motion for a pony’s body to undertake, and by the time I got to the top, drops of sweat were beading up on my coat. The only way back down was to leap from the platform and cling to either of a pair of slide poles, using one’s legs to control the rate of descent. When I reached the bottom, I heard a wail and a sickening crunch to my left as a stallion with a dusky coat slipped, fell several meters, and landed headfirst in the tightly packed soil. I winced. That guy was going to be out cold for a while.

We dove into the trenches, crawling under the barbed wire. I could feel my mane stand on end as a pair of eyes drilled into my back. It dawned on me that this was the only part of the course where line-of-sight from the observation rooms was partially obscured. I turned just in time to see a hoof connect with my jaw, and then he was on me. The big earth pony pinned me down, forcing his hooves into the control collar in an effort to restrict my breathing. The others running the course didn’t even look as they passed us by, ignoring the rules. I gagged, struggling to draw air into my lungs. He was choking me to death with my own collar.

“Why couldn’t you murdering fucks all just burn in those metal coffins of yours?”

When he said that, I knew right then what he hated me for. As darkness started to creep into the edges of my vision, I heard a rattling noise and looked up just in time to see a drone looming overhead, its sensors zeroing in on the scene of the disturbance. The former soldier turned, releasing his grip on me, before convulsing as his collar started shocking him. He rolled off of me, quivering on the ground as his muscles involuntarily contracted. I held a hoof to my chest and sharply inhaled a few ragged breaths. We lay perfectly still, panting from exertion after our brief and violent encounter.

“We lost,” he whined. “All the blood we spilled, all the people we sacrificed. All in vain. Now I’m trapped in here with monsters like you. What the hell was it all for?”

“My unit didn’t hunt down deserters because we liked it,” I said. “We did it because it was our duty.”

“My brother was no traitor.” He scowled, glaring at me out of the corner of his eye. “Just a pony who knew better than to throw his life away helping freaks like you butcher innocent people. What would you know about family? You volunteer pilots are all the same. No pedigree or nothing. Bloodthirsty savages. What hole did you lot scamper from, huh? Are you even ponies at all, or fucking changelings? What the fuck killed you and crawled under your skin?”

“We all swore an oath to Her Majesty, the Empress. We were proud to serve her with honor. Orders are orders. You do not question them. You only obey.”

“Yeah. They say jump, you say how high, like you’re some kinda frickin’ machine.”

“You’re damned right I did,” I rasped, pausing for a moment to catch my breath. “So, who the hell are you supposed to be, anyway?”

“Driving Band. Lieutenant.”

“An officer?” I said, taken aback. “Fuck’s sake. No wonder why we lost.”

He gritted his teeth in response, fuming at my disrespect for his rank. I raised a hoof and saluted nonetheless, but it actually seemed to make him angrier. I could smell the staff officer on him. Pogue motherfuckers were the same all over the galaxy. Most of the desertions we did have were the gun-shy logistics personnel we relied on to truck us fuel, ammo, and spare parts for our Chargers. We depended on them for everything, and they all too often turned their backs on us in our hour of need, especially when they got wind of what our operations entailed. It didn’t surprise me in the least that this bozo was related to an absconder.

“Well then,” I said, righting myself before continuing to navigate the obstacle. “I have a course to complete, sir, so if you’d mind not getting us lethally injected, cremated, and tossed out the nearest airlock, that would be great.”

I could hear his curses recede beneath the low din of the other test subjects galloping around the course, their huffing and puffing united in a chorus. I wasn’t in the best of shape, either. Our little altercation had placed us at the back of the herd. Not that it mattered. Like Scheherazade said, this wasn’t a race. It was a test of our ability to follow clear and concise instructions as a collective, and we had already failed. They were toying with us. Analyzing pony psychology. Trying to figure out what made us tick. Trying to see if we could survive being separated, isolated, and re-integrated into basic social units. One could call it a hunch. Or maybe I was just getting paranoid.

They never bothered to analyze or reverse engineer our magic, surprisingly enough. It might’ve been that it was beyond their means to do so, or perhaps the station lacked the proper facilities to do so while keeping us contained. Generally speaking, it was also the case that magic and magic-based technologies were illegal in the Free Trade Union, with few exemptions. Our captors had good reason to fear our powers. If someone removed a unicorn’s suppression ring, said unicorn could quickly teleport their collar off of their neck and then teleport themselves to literally anywhere on the station. The satyrs were probably too shit-scared of a breach to even think of trying it.

The drones circled lazily overhead, like vultures spying carrion. I knew from previous tests and some chatter I’d overheard that the cleomanni eggheads were hard at work cataloging our every move and neatly filing it away on a server somewhere near the heart of the station. As a prerequisite for eligibility to serve, all Charger pilots understood the basic principles of kinematics. After all, Chargers were walking machines that employed the same complex motions as living beings. This, of course, had implications for how pilots might be expected to control them and how our mechanics would maintain them.

I had taken part in studies of gait and posture before, except they had been administered by members of my own race, undertaking vital medical research meant to benefit all of pony-kind. Things like next-generation prosthetic limbs for veterans who’d lost theirs. It was certainly possible that these tests were something of a similar nature. I couldn’t even begin to imagine what use the Confederacy would get out of this data. I mulled over the idea in silence. Why are they continuing to study us? Haven’t they already won? Aren’t we sufficiently beaten?

Panting and near the point of exhaustion, I galloped back to the starting line. A good fifteen of the other ponies—the ones who had passed the course without serious injuries—were already standing around waiting for the slowpokes in the rear. Some of the others had seen my scuffle with the Lieutenant. They afforded me a menagerie of angry sneers and fearful glances.

A drone came to a hover in front of my face, and the station’s AI spoke through it. “A disappointing performance, Two-Two-Five-Seven,” Scheherazade crooned with more than a hint of sarcasm. “I expected more from one of the Empire’s notorious mech pilots.”

“First of all, go fuck yourself,” I said, hating being put on the spot like that. “Secondly, you saw what happened.”

“Indeed. Assaulted by one of your own kind. A startling lack of discipline exhibited by what are ostensibly trained military personnel. I suppose that is part of the reason why you are down here in this chamber and not up in the observation room.”

I shook in anger. As much as I hated to admit it, the damnable AI was right. The vast majority of ponies just weren’t meant for war. Not like the kinds of battles the Confederacy fought on a regular basis. We had the bodies for it but not the minds. I’d seen it too many times. Ponies who were so burnt out from spending a few months on the front lines that they couldn’t even remember their own names.

By the war’s end, most of the grizzled vets were with Celestia in the great beyond. The Imperial Army was shoving beamcasters onto the withers of any pony who expressed a willingness to fight. Still, we couldn’t replace experienced soldiers and vehicle crews fast enough, and we were hemorrhaging irreplaceable war materiel.

The cleomanni were the exact opposite. Despite their imposing statures, they were frail compared to us, but foolhardy to a fault. Borderline delusional. Where a pony would exercise caution, a satyr would throw themselves in harm’s way without thinking twice. Not only did they never tire of war, but their elite troops also had the advantage of cortical implants that regulated their stress responses and prevented them from experiencing fear or psychological trauma the way our soldiers did.

We put up one hell of a fight, for what it was worth. Most of it happened long before I was born. Lucky were those few who died with dreams of victory in their hearts instead of living to see what had become of our people.

Now, all that remained of us were cowards, traitors, and shell-shocked husks. These ponies were among those who surrendered when Everfree City was bombed into dust. I hadn’t. I’d been fighting right up until the last minute, when the captain of my unit’s transport ship called upon me to temporarily replace a gunner who’d been found in his bunk with his brains blown out and his sidearm on his chest. The kid had finally realized the tin cans he was bringing the ship’s arsenal to bear upon contained people, of a kind, and he just couldn’t handle it.

I was no space jockey, but I’d gotten the hang of the transport ship’s turret controls pretty quick. Wasn’t much different from a Charger’s autocannon, except you had to rely on the computer to get a firing solution before pulling the trigger, or you wouldn’t hit jack shit. I even bagged a few Confederate gunships that got a little too close for their own good.

The last thing I remembered before waking up in a holding cell surrounded by armed Confederate goons was being knocked senseless by an explosion on the bridge and drifting in and out of consciousness as somepony shoved me into an escape pod. My body still bore the scars of that wretched day. I ran a hoof over my saffron coat, glancing at the ragged marks in my flesh. I wished I’d been on the ground, in the cockpit of my Mirage. That machine meant the world to me. Now, I could only assume that it was so much debris in orbit—an ignoble end for a Charger that had served me and the Empire loyally for years.

I was jolted from my idle reminisces by Driving Band rudely barging through me as he trotted on by.

“Excuse you,” I said, with more than a hint of annoyance.

He fixed me with a death glare for a moment before proceeding onward. I didn’t care if he was a superior officer at one time. I wasn’t gonna take his shit lying down. I had ways of making his death look like an accident, if it ever came to that. I looked back at my cutie mark and smiled. A cactus and a pair of palm trees standing beside a shimmering oasis, with the wall of an approaching haboob threatening to engulf the idyllic scene. Stealth was my specialty.

I’d planned to break out of this place since the moment I first set hoof on this station. All the major airlocks were very tightly guarded, and I wasn’t about to stow away aboard a patrol vessel and risk being discovered. That would blow over really well. Not.

I needed my own transport, and soon. I had a sneaking suspicion that our days here were numbered. Eventually, they’d have no use for us anymore, and then, the culling would begin. Experiments scrapped. Subjects terminated. One way or another, I’d be leaving this place, either whole or in a small vial filled with my ashes. All I needed was for an opportunity to present itself. So far, it hadn’t happened.

I had to take the initiative, before the initiative took me.

// … // … // … // … // … //

After the test procedure was complete, we were lined up and our scores tabulated. They wouldn’t tell us how well we did. Only Scheherazade and the scientists were privy to that information. We were allowed a brief visit to the cafeteria to sample the bland, unappetizing slop that passed for food in this place, where I spent most of the time glancing over my shoulder to ensure I didn’t run into Driving Band again. Once we finished choking down our bowls of mulched soybean slurry, armed guards escorted our group back to the security paddock. Once we arrived, they removed our control collars and ushered us back into our cells like bulk goods.

As I knelt in the center of the cell, I could feel the metallic creaking and banging of the overhead conveyor’s spreader latching onto the exterior of the container and hoisting it up. I couldn’t visually confirm any part of the process. No viewports were included in the cell’s construction. There was a hunk of metal that passed for a bed, limited sanitation facilities, and a voice-activated terminal with very highly restricted access to the station intranet—mostly rules and regs and endless reams of data filled to bursting with cleomanni history and propaganda—but that was it. There was nothing that could be used to facilitate an escape attempt.

Without consulting the terminal yet, I took a moment to review what I knew from my history classes about the enemy we faced to see if I still possessed most of my marbles. The Cleomanni Confederacy spanned over a thousand worlds, each a state unto itself. Their form of government was democratic. Each of their planets had its own governor and its own electors responsible for selecting the ministers who would venture to their capital world of Ard Doch and serve in the Grand Hall.

The Planetary Governors oversaw the domestic affairs of their respective planets, whereas the Ministers voted on matters of the legislature, representing their worlds to the central government. Their supreme leader was called a President, and their term limit was ten years. Every decade, the Confederacy descended into a media frenzy as the parties fought to place their candidate in office. The arrangement was not a direct democracy. Each world had one Elector for each Guild regardless of their population. As the votes from the people were tallied up, the majority vote would decide which Electors’ votes counted, both for the ministerial and presidential elections, which were situated five years apart. No planet had any more influence on the results than any other.

Their corporations belonged to the Guilds, which, in turn, acted like political parties, representing their companies to the Hall and openly petitioning on their behalf for things like military aid to protect vital infrastructure. Newly founded Confederate colonies could declare guild affiliation or be claimed as free worlds, but their governors were often hand-picked guild puppets regardless. Much of their nation’s colonial infrastructure was a product of private industry, and the corporations frequently treated the worlds they colonized as their own fiefdoms.

The Confederacy was one of the founding members of the Tripartite Alliance, later known as the Free Trade Union. It accounted for the greatest number of votes in the Grand Assembly, the influence of the other members—the nemrin and the xicares—having waned over millennia. Like ponies, they had races and castes, but the physiological differences between them were minimal.

The two major cleomanni ethnic groups were the Zinsar and Dochnast. The ruddy, reddish Zinsar descended from nomadic space tribes that colonized the furthest reaches of cleomanni space, and they were among the first we warred with. They were cowardly but cunning. The pale-skinned, jet-haired Dochnast ruled over the Confederacy’s core worlds and provided the bulk of the elite troops that ground our advance to a standstill during the war’s latter stages. They were wealthy, decadent, and haughty beyond compare.

As a whole, the cleomanni were obsessed with profit and the means of obtaining it, venerating economic prosperity above all else. Their chief rationale for waging war upon us was a simple one. We occupied territory and consumed natural resources to which they believed we had no valid claim. Seeing as we were not part of their oh-so-special two-legged fuckhead club, they saw no reason to negotiate on peaceful terms.

“Terminal Request,” I said, and in response, the small kiosk between the bed and the door came to life with a beep that confirmed it was ready for voice input. “Stellar Code, Section four, Article three-one.”

There it was, auto-translated into my native Equestrian. The protections of the Code shall be extended to all law-abiding and upright people of the galaxy, capable of a degree of conscious thought and neurolinguistic capability necessary to read and understand the Code.

Upright. Though most other FTU member races understood this as figurative moral uprightness, The Confederacy literally took that passage to mean walks on two legs. Due to the military power and socioeconomic clout of the cleomanni, the other two member species of the Free Trade Union let them get away with this unspeakably childish reading of galactic law. We weren’t the only intelligent species that the cleomanni had screwed over this way, and most of the galaxy didn’t give two shits. Most successful sapients were bipeds, with their forelimbs freed up to use the very tools that they needed to rise up and take their place as spacefaring races, to begin with.

Compared to them, we were like an entire race of cripples. No matter what we accomplished collectively as a species or our gains and losses in our battles against the cleomanni, that was how the galaxy saw us. Enfeebled. Infirm. They couldn’t decide whether to fear or pity us, so they settled for murdering us instead. They hadn’t expected us to be ready, able, and willing to return the favor.

However, that wasn’t the only reason the Confederacy made war against us. Differences in physiology could be overlooked, in time. Oppressive laws, rewritten. No, our one unforgivable sin was our essential nature as magical beings. Ponies lived and breathed magic. It was intrinsic to our very nature. Our technology ran on it. We unicorns used it for mundane things, like opening doors and carrying drinking vessels. Magic—or Paraphysicalism, as the cleomanni called it—was highly illegal in the Confederacy, as well as the FTU as a whole, to some extent. The nemrin were the sole exception to this. They were legally allowed to practice their own species’ magic, but only because they’d specialized in the art of magic nullification.

Over the past centuries, there were many occasions where this hypocrisy’s invocation formed the basis of a temporary truce. Nevertheless, there always came the counter-charge that we ponies used magic flippantly for everything, unlike the tightly controlled and regulated practices of the nemrin. We’d never joined with the FTU in any way, and we’d never ratified a treaty with them forbidding the use of our magic. We were not subject to their laws. Therefore, any trade we’d previously conducted with FTU client races was of a decidedly gray-market variety.

At its peak, the Equestrian Empire had spanned over ninety worlds. Our mode of government was simple. We had one supreme ruler, the Empress, whose will was absolute and whose reign was eternal. We also had a landed aristocracy that occasionally petitioned the crown, but whose authority in anything of any real import was minuscule. All foreign and domestic policy matters were the purview of the Empress and her closest advisors: the twelve Magisters of the Conclave. Aside from their roles in government, the Magisters frequently taught at the most prestigious educational and military institutions and oversaw cutting-edge research and development teams. This included the groups responsible for many of the Empire’s numerous top-secret black projects.

Except for our homeworld, every one of our planets—when they had still been ours, anyhow—had been governed by a Military Junta overseen by a General or Admiral, or several, with various noble houses vying to put their own officers in charge of as many worlds as possible for the sake of their family and its prestige. Our nation existed in a perpetual state of emergency from its very inception. Almost all of our planetary resources went toward the war effort, aside from the bare minimum necessary to guarantee their inhabitants a basic standard of living. Those who lived on Equestria or one of our major colony worlds enjoyed more sumptuous luxuries than the populations of the outer colonies, who lived under martial law and endured constant raids and purges conducted by the Confederacy.

The cleomanni would slip smaller patrol vessels through the naval cordon, usually in conjunction with a skirmishing action meant to draw our heavies out and keep them occupied. Those vessels would enter a planet’s atmosphere and seek out the less-populous areas, never biting off more than they could chew. Rural frontier settlements. Places where there were perhaps a few hundred ponies in all, living in prefabs out on the very edges of our civilization. Confederate soldiers would come in the dead of night, round up hundreds of us, dig trenches, and have innocent stallions, mares, and even foals stand on the edges of said trenches while they hosed us down with machine gun fire. They wanted to make an example out of us. Scare us away from our land claims.

The Empress ordered reprisals. Charger operations were often a substantial part of that. The things my unit did would turn any right-minded pony as pale as a ghost. The Imperial Army deliberately violated several galactic laws against the production and use of certain forbidden weapons of mass destruction. In the big scheme of things, it didn’t really matter since the FTU had chosen to exclude our species long before that. If outlawry was our lot, then a few nukes and chemical weapons certainly wouldn’t make things any worse. It didn’t help with our nation’s reputation, however. In its heyday, the Empire hovered somewhere between that shady, warlike, high-tech, totalitarian, isolationist hellhole with the weird horse people and that banana republic full of nudists that ironically exports lots of textiles and trinkets. The recollection of all this, when contrasted with our people’s current condition, made me shiver with discomfort. To take my mind off the matter, I turned my attention to my artificial and limited environs.

I knew quite a lot about the construction of the cells, from looking them over whenever I got the chance and by eavesdropping on guards and maintenance workers, though I knew precious little of their language. The containerized cells had external ports where the air, water, and sewage lines were connected once they’d reached their destinations in the cell blocks. Like the other parts of the station that lay outside the rotating hab rings, they had artificial gravity generators. They were equipped with their own life support and scrubbers, which were good for a few minutes of air during transfer operations. They were radiation-shielded to the extent that the occupant was in no danger of exposure to cosmic rays. However, they were thin-walled enough that an oxyacetylene torch or laser cutter only took a few seconds to put a hole in one. How they accomplished that feat without magic, I had no idea.

Since security on the station was mainly managed and directed by Scheherazade’s subroutines, the organic component—the station’s living, non-mechanical personnel—had grown complacent. Lackadaisical. How soon they’d forgotten what my species was capable of, so shortly after the war’s conclusion. Nevertheless, I had yet to find an opening to exploit. There was still that insurmountable problem: what to do when I’d wended my way past the station’s security. All things considered, I was still in space, and I still needed a ride.

I had that thought in the forefront of my mind when the conveyor came to a grinding halt, klaxons sounded, and emergency strobes on the ceiling began to flash. I panicked, feeling my heart leap into my throat. The whole cell shook from what felt like an explosion in a distant sector of the station, the shockwave propagating through the mass of the entire structure.

Then, the inner and outer airlock doors hissed open. Before I could even comprehend what was happening, I was sucked outside, along with the cell’s atmosphere, into total vacuum. My eyes stung; I reflexively clenched them shut. The air was violently ripped from my lungs. I cracked open my eyes to see thousands of other doomed prisoners floating from their cells in exactly the same manner. Kicking and flailing. Screaming soundlessly.

Ten seconds.

The containers were nestled along the station’s exterior like heads of asparagus. Since the containers and most of the station’s interior compartments lacked viewports of any kind, this was the first time I’d seen the full extent of the station’s exterior in the three years I’d been held here. A massive hunk of debris was coming toward me. Unlike everything else, which seemed to be floating away into the depths of space, this object’s path intersected both me and the station. I braced for impact as the heavy girders collided with me, still trailing bits of glittering metal from where they had been severed by what were probably military-grade explosives. My muzzle burned.

Twenty seconds.

Though it was relatively slow-moving, the girder’s substantial mass enabled it to shear right through the conveyor’s monorail, sending containerized cells flying every which way. It tumbled end over end as I clung to it for dear life before the end opposite my own rammed into the station. The section I’d wrapped my legs around tilted lazily in the zero-gee environment as its momentum continued to carry it onward and upward. Desperate to survive, I crawled down the girder’s cross-braced structural members and toward an airlock. By some miracle, the impact had knocked the outer airlock door ajar.

Thirty seconds.

Air rushed out of the hole, pushing me back. I wrestled into the gap, moving forward by sheer willpower alone. Eventually, the small compartment beyond decompressed completely. I stood up in the airlock. There was an emergency door control under a small breakable glass cover. I had no idea what the labels said because I couldn’t read the cleomanni gibberish, and my eyesight was failing me anyhow.

Forty seconds.

I punched my forehoof through it and manipulated the lever with my teeth. Wrong direction. The outer door opened the rest of the way, releasing the girder that had brought me here by dumb luck. I turned the control the other way, shutting the outer door as far as it could go with the severe damage it had sustained. There was an identical-looking lever on the opposite side of the airlock. With the last of my remaining strength, I smashed the glass covering the second lever and turned it.

Fifty seconds.

The inner door opened, the atmosphere beyond racing through the gap in the damaged outer door. I crawled into the darkness of the station, smacking the switch beside the airlock to shut it behind me. The compartment beyond returned to normal pressure automatically. I gasped for breath, immediately feeling ill. Every muscle in my body ached. My vision was blurred. I gazed into my upturned forehooves for a few moments before burying my head in them, sobbing pathetically. I clicked my ears a few times, voluntarily opening my auditory tubes to equalize the pressure. Nearly a minute of direct exposure to space. I had no idea how I could have remained conscious and active for so long. It defied everything I knew about the effects of vacuum. I should’ve been blinded and half-dead by now.

I slowly ambled down the pitch-black passageway beyond, perking my ears up and listening for any signs of activity. Sirens were going off throughout the station, making it impossible to hear even my own hoofbeats. I stumbled and fell to my knees, descending into a coughing and hacking fit that resolved almost as soon as it started. I threaded my way down stairwell after stairwell, past compartment after compartment. There wasn’t a soul in sight.

“What the hell is happening?” I croaked.

The answer came sooner than I expected. I rounded a corner and almost tripped over a pony’s prone form. I looked them over in the dim red emergency lighting, prodding them with my hoof. No response. They were lying face-down, and a pool of blood was spreading outward from their helmet’s faceplate.

“A spacesuit?”

I turned the pony upright, immediately recoiling in disgust as I took in the extent of the damage. The lens of her helmet had been smashed. The face underneath had been reduced to the consistency of tomato paste by severe penetrating trauma. Whatever had been done to this poor unicorn mare, it’d been done pretty damn thoroughly. I glanced at her horn. No suppression ring. The suit was a standard Imperial EVA kit, white with purple stripes and gold fringe and all. She wasn’t from here, that much was certain.

“Sorry about this,” I said, my tone low and grim, before going about the process of relieving her of the bloodstained suit.

I cracked open the seals around her midsection, trying to figure out if I could remember the proper sequence of steps involved in donning and removing one. We’d trained in donning space suits for emergencies; all military personnel in the Empire were qualified to wear them in case of shipboard disasters, but we ground-pounders weren’t trained or qualified for spacewalk duty. When I finally got it disconnected, I hopped back reflexively when about a gallon of bright red ichor spilled from the gap.

“Oh, for the love of fuck.” I winced.

After pulling the halves of the suit from her body, I shook the last of the blood out of it and snaked my way inside, bracing myself against the bulkhead to ease the process along. My hind legs and tail went into the rear section first, then I lowered the forward section of the suit over my shoulders and connected the seal, joining the two halves at my midsection. The inside of the suit was slick and smelled overwhelmingly metallic. I had to stifle the urge to dry heave. I unlatched the ruined helmet and tossed it aside.

“Junk,” I muttered. “I’ll have to find another one.”

I heard garbled static coming out of the headset she wore. It was linked to a frequency-hopping radio built into the suit’s saddlebags. Not civilian gear by any means. I pried the headset from the shattered, fleshy remains of her skull and set it atop my head, rotating the dial on the side until the static cleared up and the Trottingham-accented voice of the stallion on the other end came through loud and clear.

“Skrsshh—fucked! We dicked the dog, big time!” There was a pause, as if he were listening to someone speaking in the same room. “They’re all fucking dead! We’ve got to go, now!”

“Hold up,” I said, breaking my silence. Before I could continue, he cut me off.

“Peach? Is that you? You were supposed to override the security, not cycle all the airlocks!”

I turned to look at the mangled corpse that, just minutes ago, had been a living, breathing pony, wearing the space suit I now wore. There was a small portable terminal of Equestrian make sitting in the corner, its screen glowing in the darkness. A deckplate had been pried up, and the terminal was spliced into a fiber-optic line. The hacker didn’t have the deaths of the prisoners on her conscience for very long.

“If Peach is the mare I got this radio from, then I’m afraid not. She’s KIA, over.”

“Dammit. Well, who the fuck is this, then?”

“One of the prisoners she spaced.”

“Did you kill her?” he spoke menacingly.

“Negative, but if she’d been alive when I found her, I might’ve given her a piece of my mind.”

“Look, that was a mistake.” His voice took on an apologetic tone. “We didn’t expect the cells to get vented. How did you survive that?”

“Caught a ride on a piece of debris from the station.”

“That would be a part of the main transmitter tower. We thought we could knock out their comms in one go, but it looks like they had a backup, or several. Bloody hell, here it comes.”

“Ahriman Kzed ke unalt verein uin hentet,” Scheherazade spoke over the station’s PA system. “Soz grippen vere Ekkestreun anzala han zoksh! Fard heurbolg skipadz ahn rekedven-plaz Alfe accadein.”

I took a few deep breaths. Even though I wasn’t all that familiar with the cleomanni writing system, I knew enough spoken Ardun to realize that every Confederate ship in the sector was now aware of the attack and was vectoring in on our position. My window of opportunity had just narrowed to minutes. On top of that, these moronic interlopers had almost gotten me killed. I didn’t know if I was ready to put my life in their hooves, but it seemed like I didn’t have a choice.

“I’m going to see if I can link up with you guys,” I said. “What’s your location?”

“If you’re at Peach Cobbler’s last known position, that would put you on the other end of the station from us.”

I didn’t know the first thing about hacking, but I disconnected the fiber-optic line and packed up the portable terminal in my saddlebags anyway. I never left good hardware behind. I then ran to the nearest viewport and gazed outside, putting my forehooves over my head to shield my eyes from the glare. Ahriman Station had been built with a series of enormous ring-shaped sections rotating around a central shaft that bathed the rest of the facility in its shadow, like the axle and wheels of an immense wagon. Motes of blue light glowed from the gaps between the towering protrusions that studded the central structure’s surface.

On the other end of the ring I now stood in, the interlopers had docked a commandeered cleomanni patrol boat to one of the station’s umbilicals. It was small enough for me to block out its visage with the tip of an outstretched hoof. At least a kilometer away. I let my temper get the better of me, stamping my hooves against the deck while cursing loudly.

“You’ve got ten minutes,” he said. “Double-time it, soldier girl.”

“I copy. Ten minutes. Out.”

// … end transmission …

Record 08//Detour

//HOL CRY SWT
//CHECKSUM READ

// … error - unknown error …

//RES DAT SRM

Desert Storm

I slowly opened my eyes, blinking away sleep. There were three things that immediately came to the forefront of my mind. One was that my back hurt like hell and my limbs felt like lead weights. Another was that I’d awoken in what would have been a halfway-decent bed were it not matted with blood and filth, sans armor or beamcaster, or any other equipment. My captured flechette gun was gone. I was in a dusty apartment showing signs of abandonment, what with the broken windows and graffiti and all. The third was that I had a needle in my neck with a tube leading to a red-tinged IV bag that had been tied to the headboard.

My ears perked up and my eyes widened. I took note of the fact, with rising apprehension, that I was in the midst of a firefight, if the chattering gunfire right outside my room and out in the street was any indication. Without forewarning, a heavy boot kicked down my door and an armored cleomanni soldier rushed inside, brandishing a flechette gun. I had very little time to react. Seeing as he was wearing nothing on his cranium but a tactical visor with a display eyepiece, I seized a table lamp with a missing shade in a levitation field and swung it like a cudgel at his head, shattering the bulb into a million pieces. He went down hard, bloody shards of glass embedded in his face.

I took up his flechette gun in a levitation field and cloaked both it and myself. Two more soldiers rushed inside, presumably looking for their squadmate I’d just dropped. Two quick double-taps and they were history. By this time, they’d gotten wise. The next thing to pass through the door was a fragmentation grenade. I discarded the gun, ripped the needle out of my neck and leapt out of bed, screaming obscenities as I hurled myself through the nearest window, shattering the glass and the muntin bars and sending bits of them flying. There was a deafening bang a couple seconds later. I’d been spared a gruesome death by virtue of having landed on the fire escape outside, the thick brick walls of the apartment shielding me from the fragments.

My back was a spiderwebbing nexus of agony. The stitches made my skin feel tight. Even the slightest movement was the worst pain ever, to say nothing of the cuts I’d sustained from throwing myself through glass. I was leaking blood. I just sat there and whimpered for a couple seconds, feeling my muzzle and my forelegs dripping red. My newest injuries seared my nerve endings in the way that only fresh ones did. My back felt like a bunch of burly construction workers had merrily jackhammered a hole in it and then taken turns fucking said hole raw with their thick, pounding stallionhoods. I dreamed of neural shunts. Endless morphine drips. Synthetic opioid pills. Anything.

I bit my lip and ignored the pain. I cloaked myself so the assholes that breached and cleared my room wouldn’t get wise and come looking for me. I needed to clear my head and think rationally about this. I was in a moving rail car last night, and then I ended up here, somehow. I had been transported while unconscious, clearly. Placid was reciting some unbearable fauxlosophical Starrie bullshit, and I blacked out. Probably had a blood transfusion, if the medical supplies in the room were any indication. I felt cold. And weak. Like a good half of the fight had been ripped out of me.

“Placid! Bell!” I shouted. “Where the hell are you guys?”

The only response was a burst of gunfire from across the street, pinging against the wrought iron bars of the fire escape. I groaned and whimpered as I hauled myself across the grating. I rolled over into a hole that dropped me a good three meters straight down, into a conveniently placed garbage bin. Unfortunately, there was no garbage in it to soften my fall, so every hostile in the vicinity heard a clipped wail followed by the loud thump of me landing ass-first in an empty, rusty dumpster, which was, in turn, topped off with equally-loud profanity in Equestrian.

“Hurridnek esdonaki ut melludnissar kuk! Nek miestmal!”

Fuck a dog’s bleeding cunt. Fuck everything.

I used a pulse of levitation magic on the dumpster, knocking it over onto its side so I could escape. Unfortunately, this disrupted my invisibility spell. I could hear flechettes ricocheting off the pavement in the alleyway as I bolted across puddles of standing water for the nearest cover I could find, which was the corner of a building exposed to an intersection. I had no idea which direction the cleomanni were assaulting the block from. It seemed like they were everywhere. I felt exposed, in more ways than one.

A flechette pinged off the brick wall next to my head, raining dust down on my mane. I threw myself behind a car, crawling underneath it as more gunfire pelted my position. The supersonic cracks of flechettes whipped past my ears and ripped through sheet metal like tinfoil.

“Fuck me,” I whispered to myself. “Can’t I have a break?”

A pair of tactical-gloved hands seized my hind legs and dragged me out from under the car while I kicked and screamed. I lashed out with a vicious buck, my hoof connecting with a satyr’s shin. I heard his tibia snap in two. Saw a leg bend in a direction that it shouldn’t. He collapsed to the ground, screaming.

I seized the car in my levitation’s iron grip, tipping the vehicle nose-up and rolling it backwards onto its roof. I was rewarded with the shriek of bent metal, the tinkling of broken glass, the whine of a car alarm, and the short, strangled scream of a freshly squashed cleomanni bastard.

I collapsed to my haunches, panting with exhaustion. Some drunken stallion with a light coat and a backwards-turned ball cap poked his head out of an upper-story window in the tenements beside me.

“Hey, that’s my car, you fuckin’ bitch!” He hurled a mostly empty bottle of vodka at me, which shattered against the pavement and sprayed me with glass fragments. “It might be the fuckin’ apocalypse, but that doesn’t mean you can touch my shit!”

“These Confederate sons of bitches are trying to kill me, you asshole!” I shouted up at him.

“Oh yeah? Well, if you’re still there by the time I get down there, I’m gonna fuckin’ choke you to death with my dick and leave you behind a trash can!”

Now I was pissed. “I’m a soldier, you dumb fuck. I’m with the ELF! Try it! Fucking try me, asshole! I had to knock a satyr’s lights out with a fucking table lamp when I got out of bed this morning. I’m not in the mood for your shit, you fucking ambulatory penis!”

His whole demeanor changed for the worse. “You’re with the Liberation Front? Oh, you’re fuckin’ dead, now! Hey guys, look! Dead cunt! Dead fuckin’ ELF cunt!”

The stallion whistled for his compatriots. A griffon packing a flechette gun, wearing the puffer jacket and ball cap that I was told was the standard array of a vandal, walked up to the ledge, sighting me in. A pegasus mare with long, dyed hair and a devil-may-care look on her face peeked out the window, her eyes bloodshot as she snorted a line of some unknown powdery substance off the back of her hoof.

A couple rough-looking earth pony mares in blue winter coats and beanies filtered out of the side streets, baseball bats and machetes in their mouths, tapping their weapons against the street in a threatening manner. Then, a few hulking stallions similarly armed and attired showed up. Then several more.

“Okay,” I said. “I understand this is your turf, right? I’ll just turn around, walk the other way, and find my own way out of this shit, okay?”

The mare with the baseball bat giggled. It was then that I noticed, much to my chagrin, that her wooden bat had the word CUNTFUCKER messily engraved on it, and it appeared, even from this distance, to be soiled with more than just blood.

“You heard the boss,” she said. “Let’s rape this little bitch’s mouth until she drowns in dick!”

“Oh shit!” I turned and broke into a sprint.

I heard the pounding of hooves and howling, sadistic laughter as the vandals galloped after me. I ran back the way I came, towards the apartments and the sounds of the ongoing firefight. I could see streaks of beamcaster fire coming from the rooftop.

I shouted up to them. “Bellwether! Placid! Fuckin’—Sage! You up there?”

Bellwether peeked over the edge. “Get your ass up here, Storm! That’s an order!”

The old stallion took a glancing flechette hit in the chest armor, flinching and growling in pain from having most likely sustained a broken rib, before returning fire with green needles of raw arcane power from the ball-turrets on his shoulders.

I dared angle my head over my shoulder, only to see that the vandals were still right on my ass. I ran into the back alley, to the apartment building’s service entrance, and pounded the door right off its hinges with a two-legged buck. I was in a corridor not far from what I presumed was the lobby. I ducked into the communal laundromat, avoiding a group of cleomanni patrolling the halls with their guns at the ready. I had to assume that the lower floors were teeming with the cocksuckers. I popped open a dryer as quietly as I could and climbed inside, shutting the lid behind me. I cloaked myself for good measure, too.

This was a stupid hiding place, and I felt stupid for even trying it. The vandals filtered into the lower levels of the building. I could tell by the muffled sounds of fighting. The gunfire. The screams. The snarls and grunts of exertion as hooligans armed with clubs fearlessly leapt over the corpses of their fallen comrades and beat the cleomanni troops to a pulp. Within moments, they were inside the same room as I.

“Little fuckin’ cunt probably hid in one of these,” one cruel-sounding stallion muttered. “Let’s start ‘em all up! You guys got any coins? Ahh, shit, I’m getting hard. I call first dibs on her pussy-meat!”

“Eat shit, Knives!” another stallion growled. “I’m gonna fuck her first. I’m gonna lay pipe to that ELF whore until she fucking pops.”

My blood ran cold. They intended to flush me out. I could hear the other machines whirr to life, one after another, until the laundry room was filled with the roar of a dozen dryers and several washing machines. A few bits clinked into the coin chute on the dryer in which I resided. It was go time. I slammed the lid open and hurled my invisible mass into the face of the stallion above me, barging right through him, clambering to my hooves and galloping out the doorway.

“Unicorn invisibitch!” the mare with the crudely decorated nail bat screamed. “She’s the one that was with those ELF cocksuckers who took out one of our western checkpoints a few weeks ago! Bitch killed my brother! Do you hear me, bitch? I’m going to give you a very intimate introduction to the business end of ol’ Cuntfucker here until you’re rid of every drop of blood in your body! I’m going to hold you down and fuck you to death!”

“No thanks, I don’t—” I snickered. “I don’t swing that way.”

I felt around ahead of myself with soft pulses of magic, bounding up a stairwell as quickly as I could. When I neared the top, I could hear a whole lot of heavy breathing. My limbs froze. On the next flight of stairs, I could feel one, two, three, five, eight, no, at least a dozen cleomanni troops. Possibly more. The one at the top was trying to breach through a fire door with some sort of handheld battering ram, but eventually, he gave up and started emplacing breaching charges. The ones at the bottom of the flight had their guns trained on their six, waiting for any signs of obvious hostile contacts. If the breacher succeeded, they’d swarm out onto the roof and engage the surviving rebels, and they’d probably win. I couldn’t let that happen.

I ducked around a corner and decloaked, weighing my options. I had an epiphany. My face split with a mischievous grin. I peeked at the wooden stairway, considering how it had all their weight resting on it. It wouldn’t take very much at all. The spell matrix of a bog-standard levitation field coalesced in my mind’s eye. I surreptitiously gripped onto one of the support members holding up the old-fashioned hardwood staircase’s middle landing, and I gave it a tug, a twist, and a yank. The stairwell yawned and sagged, the men atop it screaming and panicking as it finally gave, collapsing in a spectacular cascading failure.

“I am a fucking combat genius!” I hooted. “That’s what you get, motherfuckers! That’s what you fucking get when you tangle with the best!”

The vandals flooded onto the floor below, seeing only a collapsed staircase and a bunch of writhing, injured cleomanni troops. To my horror, they immediately set about stabbing the life out of the survivors and pulping them with their hooves. If I didn’t keep moving, I was next. I needed to find an alternate route to the roof, immediately. I ran down the hall towards one of the marked exits, one of the side stairwells.

Something shoulder-checked me into a wall, and we both rolled to a stop on the floor. I rolled upright and crossed my hooves in front of myself just in time to block a knife aimed at my face. A cleomanni soldier had emerged from one of the rooms and tackled me. He straddled my midsection, limiting my range of movement and options for a counterattack. He tried using his upper-body mass and both of his hands to drive the knife downward into my neck, while I desperately fought to push him away. I was too exhausted by my ordeal to put up as much of a fight as I could’ve if I were fresh and uninjured.

“Motherfucker!” My limbs felt like lead weights sinking in quicksand; I was struggling, and I was losing. “Mother! Fucker!”

One of his hands slipped past my guard and wrapped around my neck with surprising strength. The buck-toothed, bespectacled, pointy-eared freak was choking the life out of me. Wait, glasses? I wrapped his eyewear in an orange field of levitation magic and ripped them from his head, crushing them and flinging their remains down the hall. He lost his composure for a moment, squinting and flailing and shouting something in Ardun. It was all I needed.

I brought a hind leg up between his thighs and into his groin with crushing force. He collapsed to the floor, dropping his knife and wailing in agony as he clutched his bruised jewels. I wasn’t about to wait around and let him recover. I promptly hauled him up by his shoulders and rammed him face-first into a wall, hard enough to cave in the wainscoting. The rest of his body sagged, his head still stuck in the hardwood, his convulsing, seizing hand just inches from his discarded blade.

I checked his weapons, but quickly discarded them, cursing my luck. They were all out of ammo from the prolonged firefight. It was why he didn’t simply shoot me in the back while he had the chance. I could hear the pounding of hooves as the vandals swarmed the rooms below. I broke into a gallop and entered the stairwell at the end of the hall, only to find myself face-to-face with one of them, watching her grin like a madmare around the length of rusty pipe in her mouth.

“Fuck off, sideshow freak!” I hollered.

I slammed the pipe with a pulse of levitation magic while kicking her in the chest with both of my forehooves. She went tumbling down the stairs, stacking up the vandals behind her like dominoes. I ran upstairs as quickly as I could until I reached the exit to the roof. I tried the handle. Locked. Reinforced stainless fittings with a hint of enchantment. Too tough to simply break it down. I reared up and struck the window at the fire door’s apex repeatedly with a forehoof, watching as spiderwebbing cracks propagated through it. Eventually, I smashed a small hole through the window, pulling back a bloody hoof.

“Bellwether!” I screamed through the hole. “Open the fucking door and let me outta here! Hurry!”

I could see movement on the roof through the gap, but it was too late. A pair of hooves came to a rest on my shoulders, whipping me around and forcing me down to my haunches. It was the bitch with the nail bat, and she’d brought friends. Much to my chagrin, a couple of the stallions were snickering and stroking their glistening erections, but they could not hold a candle to the sadistic beast of a mare in front of me, laughing and exhaling her foul, rotten-egg-smelling breath in my face.

The psychotic mare spat the bat into her hooves and slapped her weapon threateningly against my belly like a giant wooden phallus, thrusting it suggestively against my chin. I felt my gorge rise. The filth-encrusted bat had rusty roofing nail heads sticking out of it, scraping against my coat and pinching my skin, nearly drawing blood. The fearsome thing smelled like blood, putrescence, and excrement, with the faint waft of terror-stricken sex. I felt like I needed a tetanus shot just looking at the thing.

“Toldja I’d fuck you!” She grinned, showing off her rows of crooked and stained teeth, her canines filed to razor-sharp points. “I’ll be nice and give you half a minute to get your pussy nice and wet! Better start rubbin’, or this is gonna hurt even more!”

I broke out in a cold sweat. This was going in a direction that I found very, very unpleasant. I was a soldier. I was always aware of the possibility of being captured. Being tortured. And, yes, that. The dreaded R-word. Never once did I imagine that I’d be held captive by the cleomanni for years, only for them not to lay a finger on me, and then find that my own species had allowed ourselves to descend to such depths of depravity as these.

I’d always feared that some horny alien mercenaries looking for a warm hole to fuck would drag me from the wreck of my machine, beaten and bloodied, and have their way with me right there, atop the pile of smoking detritus, before putting one of their pistols in my mouth in a lethal parody of irrumatio and giving me a bullet instead of their seed. This exact scenario I now faced had never occurred to me. Not even once. Her pussy was shredded like grated cheese by some junkie’s nail bat and she bled to death. It was not even close to being the sort of thing I wanted on my tombstone.

“How?” I muttered.

“How what, bitch?”

I looked down. “How the fuck can you hold that disgusting fucking thing in your mouth?”

The fire door opened outward and I fell flat on my back. While one militia mare hauled me backwards onto the roof, Bellwether unleashed a burst of beamcaster fire that turned the vandal’s head into a steaming crater. He chucked a frag down the stairwell and slammed the door shut. One scream and a muffled thump later, the three of us backed away from the door, panting heavily. Bellwether maintained a ready posture, waiting for another vandal to emerge, but none dared. Bellwether’s helmet was conspicuously missing, showing that his silvery mane was a little thin and scraggly on top.

“What the hell is going on, Bell?” I whimpered, still thoroughly shaken. “Where the fuck is everypony? Why did you guys leave me behind?”

Bellwether frowned. “You were unconscious and going into shock. We didn’t think you’d pull through. I had everypony regroup on the rooftop while Confederate troops overran the lower floors.”

“You assholes fucking left me to die,” I growled. “I guess that’s par for the fucking course in this outfit.”

“You’re still alive, aren’t you?”

“Yeah,” I muttered, my expression dark. “After fighting my way through a couple squads of cleomanni and a pack of crazy cannibal rapists, with no weapons and no armor, I’m still alive. It’s a fucking miracle, ain’t it? Speaking of which, you wouldn’t happen to have a spare beamcaster and some protection, would you?”

Bellwether drew his lips into a flat line and wordlessly gestured to a dead ELF mare whose brains had been blown all over the place by a sniper. Her helmet was sitting in ruins a few yards away with tufts of cream-colored synthetic fibers bulging outward from where both sides had been penetrated.

“Fucking nice.” I rolled my eyes.

There was a supersonic crack that whizzed past my ears and Bellwether tackled me to the floor.

“Get down, Storm! That sniper’s still out there!”

“Shit. Shit, shit, shit!”

We huddled close by the ledge, well out of view. For a moment, we sat there, panting heavily. The sniper had ceased fire for the time being.

Bellwether sighed, turning towards me. “Now, I bet you’re wondering, where the fuck is the Commodore? Where are our Chargers? Where the hell are we? Well, the Commodore’s keeping enemy air support at bay. The Chargers are holding the line against enemy ground forces, but their guns have run dry and they’re down to beamcasters and magic. There are multiple Confederate tank platoons closing in from the south. Conquerors and Myrmidons.

“There was a unit of mortar carriers backed up by Rakshasas, too, but I ordered Terror and Sierra to treat those as a top-priority target and neutralize them, else you would’ve found bits of me scattered all over this fuckin’ roof. As for where we are, we’re in the southern tip of the Everfree Urban Zone.”

I took a look around me, scanning the horizon through the nest of ruined buildings around us. I could see the Twilight Tower and Harmony Plaza from here.

“This is vandal territory, isn’t it?” I murmured.

“Yeah, no shit. You almost got yourself fucked and eaten by those animals.”

“Where is the train? My Charger parts.” I pinched my brow with my fetlock. “Is this all going to be for nothing? How many of us are left?”

Bellwether shook his head. “The loco’s fine. We stopped in a tunnel and Osprey and Magpie are holding out down there with makeshift anti-personnel mines covering their asses. Eagle’s got four left, including myself. There are three on Raven, fifteen on Osprey, and six on Magpie. The squad leaders are still in action. Most of us are wounded.”

Sixty ELF militia mares and stallions left Camp Crazy Horse on what should’ve been a cakewalk where we rolled over a local enemy garrison with nerve gas and stole what we needed. Instead, we were ambushed, and over half of us were now dead or missing. Me and the rest of the survivors were limping into vandal territory while being pursued by armored columns and gunships, GARG troopers, and even the damn Confederate president’s own daughter. The Pursuer 6x6 had probably been recaptured by the enemy, and the Bull Runner was a pile of burning wreckage.

I shivered. To top it all off, I felt like death warmed over. I couldn’t stop shaking, thinking about what would’ve happened to me if all the resistance fighters on the roof had been dead already. My last, humiliating moments on this mortal coil would have been spent in gut-wrenching agony.

I shook my head. “This was a total disaster.”

“A very, ah, insightful assessment, there, Sergeant,” Bellwether said. “Now tell me somethin’ I don’t know.”

“What are we gonna do about this fucking sniper?”

“Placid’s on it.” Bell tapped a hoof to his radio, before cracking a grin scant moments later. “Ah, and that was it right there. Sniper-spotter team, neutralized.”

“Damn, she works fast.” I peeked over the ledge but didn’t see or hear any obvious signs of a struggle anywhere.

“She and the other two survivors from Raven have been itching for some payback after last night,” Bellwether said.

“Why the fuck didn’t we just stay with the loco?” I said.

“There’s a clinic down the street, run by Edmara ‘Crazy Ed’ Vinhark. We didn’t have the equipment to take blood donations from any of the other surviving militia, so she sold us the blood packs we needed to keep you alive. Only two hundred gold bits. You’ve run up quite the tab, Sergeant.”

I frowned. “Vin—hark—what the fuck, is that a cleomanni name? You bought medical supplies from a fucking satyr and then put them in my fucking body?”

Bell shook his head. “Not cleomanni. Linnaltan.”

I knew of them. One of the minor races of the galaxy. Avian, like Griffons, but bipedal and slender, and with plumage they could erect to puff themselves up and look bigger. They weren’t direct members of the Free Trade Union. Their government was a protectorate under the thumb of the bug-like xicares.

Many linnaltans were Equestrian sympathizers who protested against the Confederacy’s policy of genocidal war against us. Others were opportunists, like their xicarean masters, following after Confederate invasions and sifting through the rubble of our worlds for the choicest Equestrian trinkets, all in the name of conservation.

Such scavenging operations tended to be quite blatantly illegal, as the Confederacy had placed a moratorium on the importation of certain Equestrian goods, especially those of a magical nature whose properties they could not predict or classify as intrinsically safe.

“A fucking alien vulture, picking over our civilization’s bones.” My scowl deepened. “That’s even worse.”

“You’ve got her all wrong.” Bellwether shook his head. “She’s not just some run-of-the-mill scavver looking for pony artifacts to smuggle off-world and sell. She’s a good street doc. If there’s any foreigner who knows anything about pony anatomy and about keeping us healthy, it’s her.”

I shifted gears. “What’s our plan, Bell?” I gathered the dead mare’s armor and weapon, minus the ruined helmet, and slung them over my withers, clipping the chest protector in place. I winced at the dull ache in my croup. If I moved wrong, that ache turned to a debilitating, sharp pain. I locked the beamcaster in place, activating the backup magic holo-sight. A little targeting square with crosshairs in the middle of it shimmered into view right before my muzzle, following my head movements as I turned.

With a beamcaster, all you had to do to shoot someone who lacked a friendly IFF signal was lock onto the red diamond centered on their torso and fire. The overlapped square and diamond indicated the current locked target, and the crosshairs showed where the actual beamcaster ball-turrets were pointed. There was always a momentary lag between lock and acquisition that had to be taken into account. The lock-on was effective out to six hundred meters. Beyond that, it was difficult for the system to accurately keep track of life signs.

“Survive,” Bellwether said. “And no more running off on your own. This is smack-dab in the middle of vandal territory. You ought to know about the different gangs, so here goes. Out here, in the Southern Quadrant, in the residential blocks, the Ninety-Fours rule the roost. Mostly hardcore junkies and nutcases. Desperate, under-fed and under-supplied. The Riggers crawl all over the eastern expansion, and they’ve got repurposed construction equipment and armored buses festooned with captured Confederate weapons. We try not to fuck with them.

“The Janissaries are a mixed group of Equestrian and Confederate deserters, criminals and rejects, and they hold the north of the city, by the spaceport. In the west, you’ve got the Bombshells, and those mares are as lovely as they are deadly. The Aces control the Harmony District. Real badass sons of bitches. They’ll tear ass out of an alleyway, real quiet-like, and gut you with those hoof-forged longswords of theirs. You won’t even see it coming. Oh, and one other thing. Placid gave me her report on your condition.”

I’d been dreading this. “And?”

“One of your kidneys is straight-up fucking gone. The other one is questionable. You need to go on dialysis as soon as possible. Every day that you don’t, urea and other toxins will keep accumulating in your bloodstream. Don’t run off. Don’t get lost. Don’t try to be a hero. You. Will. Die. Am I clear?” He paused. “How are you feeling right now?”

I smirked, trying to hide my pain and the obvious tremors in my limbs. “Like shit, fresh from the asshole.”

“Storm, you’re fucked up worse than you think.” Bellwether smirked and shook his head. “Before we made for the roof, I had Placid give you a combat stim to try and wake you up and get you on your hooves, because we couldn’t hold the area. If that shit wears off, you’re probably going to pass out again.”

Now that he mentioned it, I noticed that my heart rate was highly elevated, even when I was at rest. It felt like I’d downed ten cups of coffee, with a touch of invincibility bordering on foolhardiness. My face was hot and flushed. To put it bluntly, I was jittery as shit.

“What the fuck is ‘combat stim’ a euphemism for?” I cocked a brow.

Bellwether sighed. “Primary active ingredient? Methamphetamine, intravenous. Just a little, not a lot.”

My earlier behavior—taunting a gang member and shouting boastfully of my skill at killing to anyone in earshot who would listen—started to make more sense in this new and disturbing context. It wasn’t just my injuries making my head swim. I was high as a fucking kite and didn’t even notice because of how panicked I was.

I was irritated that Bell and Placid would jeopardize my health to such a degree, but the alternative was worse. “Fuck it,” I said. “It was either that, or those fuckers drag me off.”

“Right you are, Sergeant. This area’s secure for the moment. We need to move. Stick close.”

I formed up behind Bell and the three other survivors, who glanced back at me resentfully as if I was somehow responsible for this mission going tits-up. I stared at my hooves sheepishly for a moment as I walked. I’d fucked up. I should have stuck to the rest of Magpie like glue when we raided the outpost. Instead, I’d nearly gotten killed. I’d wasted valuable time. Possibly even gotten a few of the militia killed. This mission wouldn’t even have been planned and executed were it not for the fact that Dust Devil desperately needed replacement parts. Were it not for me, our comrades would still be alive.

I put my creeping self-loathing aside with a much-needed dose of rationality. This wasn’t the only doomed operation that the ELF had carried out in recent months. There were plenty of others that had just as many casualties, and they had nothing to do with me. If a good thirty militia members hadn’t been rendered MIA or KIA on this mission, they would’ve kicked the bucket on the next one, or the one after that. One way or another, those lives would have been spent. It was inevitable that we’d have to pay a terrible price in blood for our freedom.

So why do I feel so rotten about all this? I wondered to myself.

Outside the apartment building, moving along the sidewalk, the five of us proceeded north, deeper into the city. There were far-off sounds of a firefight; the crackle of machine guns along with the deeper booms of tank cannon fire.

Bellwether touched a hoof to his headset. “Say again, Commodore?” After a brief pause, he turned to me and the rest of the squad. “The Chargers have engaged the enemy tanks. Enemy close air support has bugged out. We splashed a couple of the fuckers. Layer says she’s spotted the abandoned Redheart General Hospital ten blocks to the north of us. We’re moving up. Crazy Ed gave us a tip that there may still be some good salvage to recover, and we’ve got a lot of wounded who need medical supplies, or they’re not gonna last much longer. That includes you.”

I nodded, biting my lip to stifle the ache in my flanks. My eyes teared up a little. The drugs and the adrenaline rush were starting to wear off, and all that was left was an unreasonable amount of pain.

“Hey Bell, does Gale have any morphine left?” I wasn’t sure how functional I would be without it.

“No, we’re all out. Keep moving. Keep an eye on your surroundings and your mind off of what you’re feeling.”

I put one hoof in front of another, gritting my teeth, trying to ignore the pain that came on in waves. This went on for another six blocks, my fur increasingly matted with sweat, until my legs collapsed under me. “Bell, I don’t feel so good.”

Without breaking his stride, he scooped me up and rested my foreleg over his withers, allowing me to use him as a crutch. We continued for another two blocks before gunfire rang out.

“Contact, front!” Bellwether shouted. “Return fire!”

With a groan, I willed my body into concealment while flechettes whizzed overhead. I peeked around the rear end of a ruined old ’55 Mongoose with busted out windows and let loose with a volley of hot, green death, the twin ball-turrets on my shoulders tracking my head movements as I swept the middle floors of the building in front of us. I ducked behind the vehicle as the return fire swiftly came, peppering the car with flechettes which punched straight through both sides of the car’s trunk, opening up blossoms of torn sheet metal right beside my head.

The trouble with beamcasters was that you had to expose a great deal of your body to use them effectively. I wished I still had a flechette gun on me. For all the drawbacks—the weight, recoil, and relative fragility of their optics—they had a lot of advantages, like being able to shoot at targets while remaining completely concealed. They also had superior barrier penetration capabilities. A typical beamcaster emission might stop in the very first layer of building material it encountered, while a flechette could pass through both sides of a stick-frame house without even slowing down.

Beamcasters were clean, neat, recoil-free death-scalpels, for eliminating exposed targets under six hundred yards away. Flechette guns were brutish implements of oppression, capable of killing you dead at twice the distance, right through a wall. Our tactics and doctrine differed greatly from the Confederate Army’s, as a result. Equestrian tactics emphasized close combat and lightning raids over fighting from entrenched positions, maximizing our strengths and minimizing our weaknesses.

This was, of course, why our ambushers were quickly silenced by the three remaining Raven Team pegasi, who were providing overwatch. They darted down the face of the structure and tossed in grenades. A few loud bangs and some anguished cries later, Placid and her team made entry and presumably finished them off with their knives. I heard a distant, gurgling scream that seemed to pause every now and then from the brutal stabbing its owner was receiving. I dared a peek, but just like before, I couldn’t see a damn thing.

“Is this how it is for the infantry all the time?” I said.

“What do you mean?” one of the militia stallions muttered.

“More than half the time, it feels like we’re shooting at nothing. Muzzle flashes.”

He rolled his eyes. “Well, gee, if I had as many sensors strapped to my body as one of your Chargers, then I bet I’d know where the satyrs keep their porn stash and their fuckin’ lotions.”

“Quiet down!” Bellwether said, slowly standing up from cover. “Clear! Move up!”

We stalked along the eerily empty streets for another few blocks. Soon, I found myself using Bellwether as a crutch again. There were craters from kinetic strike weapons that had turned into stagnant lakes full of rainwater. Every building had dozens of flechette holes and beamcaster burns, and it only got worse the further in you went.

You also had the typical assortment of apocalyptic graffiti scrawled everywhere, with paint pens, rattle-cans, stencils, and whatever else ponies could dig up. No hope. The 94s. Somepony got particularly artsy and rendered the Empress in exquisite, airbrushed detail. She had a demonic grin and blood-dripping fangs and was riding cowgirl-style on the dick of a deceased stallion who had his eyes crossed out, his tongue lolling out of his mouth and flies buzzing around his maggot-ridden head. Above it, they’d painted an old-timey ribbon banner reading You screwed us all, Twilight Sparkle!

“The fuck?” I pointed an outstretched hoof at the mural. “A little on the nose, don’t you think?”

“That’s the Janissaries.” Bellwether nodded. “They have the most skilled artists, and that pyramid-thing there in the corner is their symbol. I’m more concerned that they’re doing pieces like that this far south. Smells like imminent gang war.”

Everfree City occupied the whole valley. We stood amidst hundreds of square kilometers of dense, virtually abandoned urban sprawl. There were towering high-rises with not a soul in or around them, save perhaps for a couple scavengers or a gang of vandals having a pow-wow by the light of a burning barrel. The capital was a ghost town. Row after endless row of steel-and-glass grave markers.

Off to the far north, Old Canterlot loomed in the distance, surrounded by kilometer-high skyscrapers that ringed the foot of the mountain like a fence of swords. Halfway between us and Canterlot was the Twilight Tower, standing a stunning two and a half kilometers high, the crown jewel of the Imperial Palace Complex. To the far west stood the crumpled wrecks of ground-based anti-orbital defense batteries, the barrels of their immense railguns forming dark and jagged silhouettes on the horizon.

If I closed my eyes and concentrated, my horn lit in the gloom, I could feel it. Reverberating currents in the thaumatic field resonance. Death. Death was all around me. Old death. New death. The screams of the dead and the dying blew in on an ill wind. The indignant screeches, resentful babbling, and moans of mourning agony rose to a cacophonous chorus. I was drowning in a sea of souls. My eyes snapped open, my muzzle curling with hatred and disgust.

“Where did everypony go?” I said.

“Who?” Bellwether said.

“The city’s, y’know, the whole population.”

“The Confederacy tried occupying the city and establishing interim governance, but food shortages turned to rioting and chaos. They ended up busing hundreds of thousands of us out of the city, redistributing the population among the smaller towns. The ones who wouldn’t go? They formed an insurgent network and started shooting up Confederate convoys and mining the roads with IEDs. The Confederacy laid siege to the capital, blocking relief efforts. Eventually, some of the rebels turned to cannibalism to survive. That’s where you get the Vandals.”

I suppressed a shudder. The ponies and other creatures who made up the vandals were once a nascent resistance group, proud and honorable. Now, they were little more than carrion-feeders. Starving our capital was yet another crime that the Confederacy had to answer for.

After a few short minutes that felt like hours, we were at the Redheart General Hospital. I’d been here, once, between deployments. Me and Barley were having drinks at the pub and scarfing down unhealthy pub food, and somepony had made my hay burger with a touch of bacteria from unwashed hooves. Having my boyfriend rush me to the hospital in a panic while I’m desperately clenching my muscles to avoid squirting from both ends all over the interior of his car was pretty far removed from what anypony would call a romantic date.

I giggled at the recollection. My illness may have killed the mood, but somehow, me and Barley still found time to fuck afterward. A few hours of fluid support in the form of a saline drip, a couple more visits to the toilet, and I felt pretty much fine. It was well past midnight when we finally got back to his apartment. He protested, saying I should rest, but I wasn’t about to let a little thing like food poisoning get in the way of my libido.

Before I knew it, I’d locked lips with him. Our tongues hungrily explored each other’s muzzles. A sweet strawberry haze descended over our tired and frayed consciousnesses as we melted into a puddle of sex. I always loved Barley’s dick. Even now, I craved to feel his rippling muscles under me as I straddled him. I remembered how we’d roll over and over on the carpet, pecking each other on the neck, inhaling each other’s scents, sighing with satisfaction and giggling delightedly at our shared sensations. We didn’t need drugs; were each other’s drugs.

The sweet memory dissolved with a choked gasp from my throat, my eyes brimming with tears at the cold, empty, bombed-out streets of a dead civilization that stretched before me. The dusty faces of abandoned commercial buildings leered back at me like a salamander reclining on a rock, silently mocking me with its flickering tongue. Every now and then, a gust would pick up a cloud of dust and cast it into our faces. The air tasted like an old ashtray.

“Barleywine, where the fuck are you?” I whispered to myself. “Please don’t be dead. Don’t be another one of their victims.”

When we were in the Army, we took heat-suppressing hormones when that time of year rolled around. Altrenogest, oral. Came in liquid form in a little bottle. You could either down a small spoonful of it if you were brave and could stand the incredibly shitty taste, or you could dump it in an MRE and down it with your hay and mashed potatoes.

All the mares were required to take it once a week towards the middle of the year, even me, even after I became sterile. It wasn’t for regulating fertility alone, but the behaviors associated with it. That irrepressible urge to jump any stallion’s bones, to the point where it threatened to break down unit cohesion. I hated it. I hated what it did to our bodies. Instead of feeling warm and giddy like with a typical heat, I felt like hammered shit.

It took a shake from Bellwether to snap me out of the daze I was in. I finally registered the scene before me. It looked like every other window in the hospital’s lower floors had been shot out. The parking garage had been fortified with sheets of scrap metal and razor wire. Probably the work of vandals.

“We’re going in,” Bellwether said. “Raven will hold the rooftop and keep an eye out for any incoming hostiles. Keep an eye on those upper floors as you advance. Watch out for booby traps when we’re inside.”

Our approach to the front doors was met with no resistance. As we moved into the hospital’s darkened interior, we switched on the lights on our beamcasters. The ball-turrets tracked our heads, illuminating the pitch-black corridors strewn with dust and trash with a faint greenish glow. There was a skeleton slumped over the front desk in the ER reception area, surrounded by flechette holes and dried blood so old that it’d turned black.

“Check your corners,” Bellwether said. “Stick together. Keep an eye out for tripwires, pressure plates, motion sensors on the door frames, things like that.”

I pushed open the door to one of the exam rooms. Nothing. Looted. They even took the bed cushions. I swung open another, and there was a loud click that raised the hairs on the back of my neck. I froze in place, my limbs stiff as a board. Bellwether tackled me to the side right before the door exploded outwards with a flash and a shower of splinters.

My ears were ringing; I coughed a few times from inhaling dust. “Fuck!”

“You dumb cunt,” Bellwether growled. “Do you have a death wish? If you lock up like that again, I’m not even going to try to save you. We’ll just have to get another pilot. In fact, I’ll give Dust Devil to Sierra and let her bastardize it like that piece of shit Rouncey of hers.”

I bristled at the insult but was otherwise glad to have all my limbs still attached to my body. Bellwether let go of me and I slowly, shakily stood up. Then, my legs unceremoniously gave out and I collapsed to the floor.

“Bell, I’m fucked up,” I said.

“You hit?” There was some mild concern in his voice.

“No, from last night. I’m fucked up.”

“Can you move?”

“N—no, I don’t think so.”

“Shit.” Bellwether retrieved a small bottle of something from his vest and put a little of whatever it was on his hoof, before proffering it towards my face. “Here, put your nose on this and sniff. Hard.”

“Is that fucking coke?” I frowned.

“Yeah.”

“Where did you get that?”

Bellwether grinned. “I’m a BASKAF agent, remember? We practically ran the coca and poppy fields for light years in all directions.”

“This is some really messed up first aid, I tell ya’.” I shook my head.

I did as my superior instructed and snorted the blow. All of it. My muzzle went numb like I’d rubbed menthol all over it, and in a couple short minutes, the lucid sharpness and feelings of invincibility returned, though they were of a slightly different character than before. I breathed in deep and exhaled all the tension in my body as I rose to my hooves. I felt like a fucking rock star. Like a goddess. It was all about me. Me, me, me. Who needed an Empress to raise and lower the sun, when you had me?

“Alright.” My voice sounded so dopey. “Uh-huh. ‘Kay. I’m up. Thanks, Bell.”

I may not have agreed with his methods, but I was on my hooves again, and that had to count for something. It felt like I was treading a thin, dangerous line. Like I was in limbo. A state of undeath. The darkness at the edges of my vision threatened to swallow me whole at any moment, but for now, I was up and on my hooves. If there was one thing I hated, it was conscious, intentional breathing, and I was doing an upsetting amount of it.

“You know, with my reduced renal function, you really shouldn’t be feeding me all these damn stimulants.” I couldn’t explain why I used the scientific term for things relating to the kidneys or made that connection in my head in the first place; my brain was running a million miles a minute, pulling up half-remembered fragments of my biology classes.

“Shit, you sound like Placid,” Bellwether laughed. “It’s the coke. Don’t worry, you’ll be back to normal dumbass Storm in no time.”

“What makes you think we’re gonna find anything? It’s been three years.”

“What we’re looking for is something heavy and useless to most ponies. They’ll probably have left one behind.”

One of the militia mares kicked down a door to yet another of the hospital’s rooms. “Hey, Bell, I think we’ve got something in here.”

We made our way inside, sweeping our beamcasters’ lanterns over the space, and though the room was missing a large portion of the supplies you’d expect a hospital room to have, there was a dusty, abandoned piece of medical equipment sitting in the corner.

“Gale, gonna need you to ID this thing for me,” Bell spoke into his mouthpiece. “We’re on the first floor, north side.”

A couple seconds later, the pegasus in question kicked in the plate glass window, sending shards all over the room.

“Yeah, that’s a dialysis machine,” Gale said. “I don’t know how to use it. It’s outside the scope of my medical training. Besides, this building has no power.”

“Let’s pack it up and take it back to Vinhark’s place. She might know how to use it, or if she doesn’t, she might know someone who does.”

Sergeant Gale wrapped up the machine’s cabling and hoses and bungee-corded the whole thing to her armor. She exited through the ruined window, jumped a hedge and trotted off down the street, seemingly unencumbered by its bulk despite her willowy build.

My eyes practically bugged out of my head. “That mare must be the strongest pegasus I’ve ever seen!”

“Alright, we’re regrouping back at Crazy Ed’s,” Bellwether said. “Right back the way we came.”

As we headed back towards the entrance, Bellwether motioned for us to hold position. We could hear chatter and hoofbeats back in the lobby.

“More vandals?” I whispered.

Bellwether shushed me and hazarded a peek around the corner. I joined him. Pacing in the lobby while having a heated argument were a mare and a stallion, unicorns both. They appeared to be armed with Confederate handguns, which they floated in the air beside them in the grip of their levitation magic. Without warning, they trained the pistols on our position.

“Who’s there?” the stallion said.

I cloaked myself and rolled low to the floor, slowly crawling forward until I had the pair in my sights. I wasn’t about to ice both of them if I didn’t have to, but I was ready to do the deed regardless, if it proved necessary. The pair didn’t look like vandals. They had load-bearing gear and heavy packs on. They had to be scavengers.

“We’re with the Liberation Front,” Bellwether called out. “Put your weapons down. We’re not hostile.”

“How do we know you’re not with the vandals?” the mare spoke.

Bellwether deactivated his beamcaster, its ball-turrets rotating into the stowage position with the lenses covered. He then stepped out into the open.

“Do I look like a vandal to you?” Bellwether smirked.

“That proves nothing,” the mare said. “You could’ve stolen that armor off a dead soldier.”

“If I were one of the Ninety-Fours, I’d be drugged to the gills and running your ass down with a nail bat in my mouth, not trying to negotiate peaceably.” Bellwether said. “What’s your business, here?”

“We could ask you the same,” the stallion piped up. “What are you doing on our claim?”

“Oh, so that’s what this is?” Bellwether nodded. “You think you’ve got exclusive salvage rights on this building?”

“The whole block,” the mare corrected. “It’s ours. We saw one of your goons run off with some medical equipment. You owe us.”

“How much?”

“Fifteen hundred bits, and that includes the damage to our window.”

Bellwether let out a big, hearty laugh. “Do you think I go into combat with that much loose change jingling around in my saddlebags?”

The stallion was getting pissed, waving his pistol in our direction. “Either you fuckin’ pay us, or I’ll—”

I’d had enough. I pulled the internal triggers on my beamcaster with my levitation magic. The twin green beams converged on a single point right between the stallion’s eyes. The steam explosion took the top of his head off, sending what was left of his brain rocketing into the ceiling.

“Darling!” the mare shouted, aghast.

Before she could react and turn and shoot us, the other members of Eagle advanced around the corner and put a few beams into her, center-mass, with practiced, martial ease. She collapsed face-first, screaming. A small form darted into our field of view. My beamcasters immediately started tracking the new target. With but a single telekinetic squeeze of those triggers, I could’ve ended the life of whatever or whoever it was.

“Hold your fucking fire!” Bellwether bellowed.

“Mommy, daddy!” A small filly bravely threw herself into our line of fire, interposing herself between us and her mortally wounded mother. “Don’t kill my mom, please! Please! Dad? Oh my gosh, no!”

I slowly stood, releasing my invisibility magic. My lips were trembling as the adrenaline started to wear off and the reality began to sink in. I’d fucked up.

“Sergeant Storm, did I order you to open fire?” Bellwether said, his voice low and dangerous.

“I—he was gonna shoot you, Bell!”

Bellwether turned towards me, his eyes like fiery coals. “Gimme your beamcaster.”

“How is this my fault?” I said. “I’m injured, I’m high, I’m practically delirious.”

“All reasons why you shouldn’t be armed, Storm. You’re right. The mistake was mine, for not having done something about this sooner. Now, are you going to surrender your weapon, or am I going to have to put you in a headlock and take it off your unconscious body?”

I unclipped the beamcaster from my armor and hoofed it over to him, feeling somehow naked being deprived of firepower in a combat zone.

One of the surviving members of Eagle looped his foreleg around my neck and gave me an unfriendly noogie, ruffling my mane. “Strike two, pilot. Let’s see if you can go three for three.”

The disrespect for my rank would’ve angered me, but it was the last thing on my mind at the moment. My eyes began to tear up as I ambled over to the center of the lobby while the other members of Eagle filed out through the main entrance. I reached a hoof out to the filly, who was sobbing and draping her body over her parents’ cooling corpses. “Kid, I’m sorry, I don’t—I thought—”

The child sat up and turned towards me, rage in her teary eyes. “How am I s’posed to go this alone? They were my whole world, and you took them from me, just like that! You—you exploded my dad’s head!” Her voice was high and reedy and full of hatred as she opened her father’s saddlebag and proffered it in my direction out of spite. “Here, why don’t you rifle through their pockets before you go? Thieves! Murderers! You rebels are no better than the vandals!” Powerful sobs shook her tiny body. “Don’t leave me all alone. Please. I’m so tired. I’m so tired of walking. I wanna go home. Mom. Dad.” The filly’s words dissolved into incoherent sobbing and babbling.

I felt nauseous. I couldn’t take it. I stumbled outside, propped myself up against a wall in the alleyway and started dry heaving. Nothing in my stomach. Nothing to show for it. I almost wished I had something to throw up, because I couldn’t stop heaving. My guts were starting to cramp painfully by the time Bellwether looped a leg around me and guided me away from the hospital. My back ached like hell.

The other members of Eagle team passed some of the medical supplies they’d scavenged to the other two remaining members of Raven team, and they beat their wings and took off towards the south to make a quick delivery to the locomotive.

There were a few moments of silence between us until I finally spoke up. “I don’t like this, Bell. I don’t like this face-to-face ground-pounder bullshit. I want my fucking Charger.”

“You’re in no shape to fight, Sergeant. It’s not just your injuries. Three years in captivity seem to have robbed you of a lot of discipline. Don’t worry. We’ll beat it back into you, as soon as you’re healthy again.”

“Will I ever be healthy after this? Am I gonna get a transplant and be stuck taking anti-rejection pills?”

“No. Word’s already got back to command about your little predicament. They’re probably going to see about sourcing a bionic replacement. No need to worry about transplant rejection that way, and they’re just as good as organic kidneys, if not better.”

As if my day could get any worse. “Great, so on top of feeding me so much blow that I’ve got manticore blood and Celestia DNA, you’re also planning on turning me into a damn cyborg. I know how this story ends, and I don’t like it, Bell.”

Bellwether grinned and shook his head. “Nopony’s gonna turn you into the Million-Bit Mare, Storm. We just need a pilot and a Charger that ain’t broken. Kinda hard for things to stay in one piece, out here. People, especially. Speaking of which, how are you holding up?”

“Fucking hell, dude.” I wondered if I looked as haunted as I felt. “Fucking hell, I shot some little kid’s father dead right in front of her!”

“I thought you were supposed to be a hardass pilot, launching chemical weapons during the war and shit,” one of the surviving Eagle team mares said. “Heard you executed some vandals a while back, too. Didn’t even hesitate. Just popped them.”

“This is different. That kid needs her parents or somepony to look out for her if she's going to survive out here in this shit. How can you all be so calm about this?”

The one surviving Eagle team stallion other than Bellwether chuckled darkly at my outburst. “You get used to it.”

I blinked and lost time.

I’d passed out on the sidewalk, only to snap awake lying in a bed with some giant toucan poking and prodding me with various metal instruments.

“What the fuck?” I screamed, flailing my limbs. “What the fuck!?”

It felt like I had an ice pick wound in my head, but it was probably just the come-down from the substances that had raged through my body a few hours before. My back seared with pain.

“Shh, it’s okay, pony.” The giant, biped bird ran a feathered hand over my head. “Relax. Mama Vinhark’s got you. I take it you’ve had a difficult time.”

The avian alien spoke perfect—if strangely-accented—Equestrian. Bellwether was sitting across from me. He had some explaining to do.

“Bell,” I said. “What happened?”

“You blacked out. We had to carry you here. The fighting’s died down, so we’re clear to move the loco. Defense teams are pulling up stakes now.”

I leaned up and looked at the reddish tubes running between me and the dialysis machine next to me. I was lying there, catheterized, useless. The room had all the accoutrements you’d expect from some shady street doc’s clinic, with spindly robotic medical devices hanging in the dark corners of the space like spiders suspended from a strand of silk. I collapsed in bed, breathing heavily. I coughed a few times. My lungs burned. I ached all over and I was running a fever.

“So, that’s it, then,” I muttered. “I’m going to live, I guess.”

I winced. Ponies tended to have a lowered life expectancy after acute kidney failure, even with therapy and bionic organ replacements. I briefly wondered how many years being hit by those fragments had shaved off my life, but quickly dismissed those concerns. In our line of work, none of us would have to worry about living to a ripe old age, anyway.

A deep breath sent shooting pains through my whole diaphragm. I snarled in anger. I wondered how many more of my organs the cleomanni would deny me the use and enjoyment of. Womb, kidneys, lung. They should’ve put one between my eyes. My brain was their real enemy, after all, and it kept getting madder with them each and every day.

“We’re not out of the woods, yet,” Bellwether said. “We still need to get that salvage back to base. We sent a burst transmission back with a salvage manifest. Our Charger technicians are already devising a system integration plan. They’ll be putting it into practice literally the very same moment those parts roll through the hangar door.”

“Good.” I sighed. “I’m sorry about earlier, Bell. I’m such a fucking idiot.”

“Nah, he might’ve shot me. It was a risk I was willing to take, but what’s done is done. No amount of moping is gonna bring that kid’s parents back from the dead. I know you’re out of your element. You belong in the cockpit, you do. Just try to stop fucking up. You’re lucky it’s me running this operation and not Captain Garrida, because if you were this insubordinate to her, she would eat you alive.”

I swallowed a lump that had formed in my throat. I’d never met Garrida, but apparently, she was the actual leader of the Crazy Horse cell, and she’d placed Bellwether in charge in her absence as a stopgap measure while running high-risk salvage operations in the North with her own select troops.

The other surviving Eagle Team stallion tapped his earpiece. “We gotta move, Sir.”

“Not yet, we don’t.” Bellwether frowned. “This stuff the Sergeant’s attached to isn’t exactly portable, and her treatment ain’t finished.”

“Sergeant Gale says she saw four Confederate transports touch down in a clearing eight klicks to the southeast.” His voice was tinged with nervousness. “They deployed between fifty and sixty Karks and two squads of Gaffs.”

Bellwether’s eyes widened. “Oh fuck.”

“Karks? Gaffs?” There was a sinking feeling in my chest. “Oh, shit, you don’t mean…”

“Yes, it means exactly what you think it means, Storm. Edmara?”

“Yes, sweetie?” she said.

“I suggest you get in your panic room, pronto. We’re packing up and heading out. Thanks for all the help.”

“But, miss Storm’s dialysis isn’t done. If you cut the process short, her health may be in jeopardy.”

Bellwether got up in Dr. Vinhark’s face as best he could as a quadruped who barely came up to her chest. “The cleomanni just dropped several dozen cybernetically-enhanced living bioweapons based on pony DNA, and they’re headed in this direction. They are accompanied by two full squads of Gafalze Arresgrippen handlers who are no doubt armed to the teeth. If we don’t leave, they’re going to kill us. If you don’t bunker down, they’ll kill you, too.”

A look of horror spread across Edmara’s face. “They may call me crazy, but I’m not suicidal.” She went about the process of putting my juices back in me, shutting the machine off and unhooking my catheters before taping the ends to my chest. “Leave those in. Don’t let them get yanked, or you’ll make a mess all over the place and probably die. Don’t let the caps get damaged, or you might get an air embolism. Keep the catheter site where it pierces the skin as clean as you can. If you see any redness or swelling, that probably means it’s infected and you need antibiotics.”

“Oh, goodie.” I rolled my eyes.

Dr. Vinhark turned to Bellwether. “Remember, Star Crusher owes me the usual fee.”

“You’ll get your money, Ed, don’t worry.”

The linnaltan nodded, waving back at us as she ran to what was presumably her preferred hiding place. “Good luck, ponies.”

The alien street doc punched a combination into a keypad and a section of the wall whirred to life, sliding over on tracks in the floor and shutting with a heavy clank like the door to a missile silo, completely blocking off the hall she’d entered.

I let out a low whistle. “Nice security. Hey, why can’t we just hide back there with her and wait it out?”

Bellwether snickered. “One, Layer has been kicking the shit out of their surveillance drones for hours. They probably know we’re here and will burn the whole clinic down unless they see us leave. Two, the loco can’t hold off a force like that on their own.”

“Fair enough.”

I tried standing, but I didn’t have the strength to move. After a few paces, my legs gave out. My weakness filled me with dread. If those freaks and their little pets had been right on top of our position, I would have been less than useless against them, unable to do so much as flee under my own power.

“A little help, guys?” I mumbled.

Placid groaned with exasperation and tossed me on her back like a filly. “Hold on tight, Storm, and for Celestia’s sake, don’t fall off.”

The eight of us departed Vinhark’s ramshackle clinic in a hurry, galloping hard for the outskirts.

“Why are we going south?” I said, fear creeping into my voice. “That’s where they deployed the Karks, right?”

“The train tunnel entrance is on the edge of town,” Gale said. “We have to get there before they do, or we’re all fucked.”

“Where are the Chargers?” I said. “They should be able to interdict the incoming hostiles, right?”

“The Charger Lance returned to base ages ago,” Bellwether spoke between strained panting. “Falcon team successfully neutralized the enemy tanks, but they need an ammo resupply. They won’t be back for hours.”

“Wonderful,” I groaned. “Fuck.”

The unlit storefronts passed me in an unrecognizable blur. It was strange to feel somepony running in a full gallop while riding on their back. I could feel every muscle in Placid’s shoulders and haunches pumping in a steady rhythm while my own legs hung limp at her sides. It almost reminded me of ol’ Barley. I used to playfully ride on his back while he cantered along, sometimes.

I blushed at the strange feelings I had for this mare. She was damaged. A basket case, a bigot, and devoutly religious to boot. I wouldn’t dare divulge a word of my growing and hopefully platonic affection, but for the time being, I enjoyed her warmth under me. I felt strangely safe and comfortable around Placid, even after she’d held a knife to my neck the night before.

She reminded me of my older sister, Hoodoo. She liked to paint landscapes. My little sister, Windy Mesa, wanted to be a meteorologist. I never saw them much after moving out of home. I wondered what they’d think of me now. Waitress turned pilot turned killer.

There was something wet in my eye.

“Contact!” Bellwether shouted.

The telltale whip-crack of flechette fire pinging off the street barred our passage to the south. It was soon joined by waves of massed pulse rifle fire, blue streams of energy lancing through the air and towards our position. We turned east and darted into an alleyway filled with trash and rubble. The squalling and squawking of the Karkadann echoed through the empty city blocks, alternating between rhythmic hyena laughs and trilling mechanical birdsong.

“No, no, no, shit!” one of the remaining Eagle fireteam militia mares shrieked.

I looked over my shoulder and sorely wished I hadn’t. I saw the glowing orange eyes of two Karkadann as they darted into the alleyway behind us, hot on our hooves. Two became five. Five became eight. Eight became a numberless mob. The way they moved was deeply unnatural. Uncanny, even. Jerky and spasmodic, like puppets of flesh and metal. They chirped and trilled to each other in incomprehensible digital data bursts that seemed to synchronize the movements and intentions of the entire pack.

Two of the surviving members of Eagle squad seized a dumpster in their hooves and strained and grunted as they rolled it in front of the charging pack of Karkadann. This was a mistake. The lead Kark’s armored body punched through the thin sheet metal of the empty dumpster like a missile, its horn impaling one of the hapless militia mares in the throat. She went down screaming and gagging on her own blood as the creature tore the hole in the dumpster even larger before squeezing its entire mass through. It pounced on her, stamping the life out of her with its hooves and dipping its head low to rip great bloody chunks from her helpless body in a frenzy of carnivorism.

The stallion fared worse. Much worse. One of the bigger ones leapt over the obstacle, reared up and slammed him into a brick wall with enough force to leave a pony-shaped indentation. There was something between its legs, where a stallion’s cock ought to be. It was shaped like a bee stinger and colored the hard, reflective chrome of the rest of the creature’s body. In some dark mockery of the primordial instinct, the creature thrust its hips forward and punched the sharp implement into the stallion’s abdomen.

The stallion screamed and foamed at the mouth as he was injected with an orange liquid. His features sagged and collapsed. His flesh rapidly liquefied from his steaming bones. A few of the other Karkadann, seeming tuckered out after their sprint, homed in on the oily, bloody puddle of goo that used to be one of our comrades. They extended ribbed tubes from their muzzles like proboscises and started drinking him. The remainder continued to give chase. The only thing that dampened the horror of what I’d just witnessed was the fact that the ghoulish scene was receding quickly into the distance while the pegasus carrying me on her back fled as quickly as her legs could propel her.

“What the fuck.” My whole body shook with fear. “What the fuck?!”

Bellwether slapped a few pounds of plastic explosive against the brick wall of the alley as he ran, trailing a spool of wire from under his cloak. He bit down on the detonator and there was a flash of light and an eardrum-shattering blast that buried half a dozen of the disgusting creatures in rubble and blocked the path of the rest.

The other surviving militia mare was the first to exit the alley. She came apart in a hail of blue pulse rifle discharges, her body twisting and pirouetting in a gory last dance. We came to an immediate halt and altered course. Bellwether stomped the handle of a service exit door off, stuffing a lump of moldable plastic explosive inside the hole before retreating a short distance and blasting the lock mechanism into slag. With a mighty grunt of exertion, he bucked the door as hard as he could. It caved inward without resistance.

We rushed into the darkened structure, knocking over racks of old clothes and pony mannequins that were in our way.

“Commodore!” Bellwether practically screamed into his radio. “We’ve been engaged. We need smoke at our location!” He hastily fed her a series of grid coordinates.

About thirty seconds later, the street outside the clothing store was enveloped in clouds of thick, gray obscurant smoke from where the heavily armored pegasus had dive-bombed the area with smoke grenades.

Bell and Placid sprinted outside. I coughed violently. The air was thick with small particles of metallic chaff designed to confuse multi-spectral sensors. Ordinary smoke wasn’t enough to hide you from a GARG trooper’s helmet and the battery of sophisticated personnel-detecting devices it contained, which included infrared and terahertz cameras. We crossed the street and made for a series of concrete stairs that took us down an embankment to where the opening to the train tunnel resided, its unlit maw beckoning the foolhardy. We charged into the inky black of the tunnel, towards the pinpoint lights of the other Liberation Front members’ combat harnesses, about a hundred meters ahead.

Placid hoofed me over to one of the other surviving militia members hiding out in the freight car, before hauling herself up into the car and helping Bellwether do the same. The earth pony lookouts and the other two remaining pegasi from Raven zipped in through the open side door, quickly sliding it shut behind them. They looked like they’d both seen ghosts.

“Get this fucker moving, Cinder! Into the tunnel!” Bellwether radioed.

With a soft rumble, the train started rolling, hopefully away from the horrors that pursued us. Placid collapsed to her haunches, panting hard, muttering hateful profanity under her breath. She was on edge, fidgeting and shaking her head. Seeing the Karkadann had her spooked.

“What the fuck was that, Bell?” I spoke, my voice raspy. “What did I see back there?”

“That depends,” Bellwether’s eyes were downcast. “What did you see?”

“One of those things just—it—it dicked one of our guys and turned him into soup! And then they drank it!” Just thinking about it made me sick to my stomach.

Bellwether looked up at me, a hard, angry expression on his face. “They call it nectar. Those things’ brains are always in an excitotoxic state because of the stimulants they constantly pump those fuckers up with and because of their crazy metabolisms.”

“What the hell does that mean, Bell?”

“It means that if they didn’t periodically turn ponies into nutrient sauce with a nanite injection and drink the amino acid and neurotransmitter-rich slurry, their nerves would fry. They’d be palsied up. It’s a form of pre-digestion that increases the bioavailability of specific neuroprotective organic compounds. Or, at least that’s how Crookneck explained it to me with his brand of gobbledygook. Believe me, I had just about the same reaction you did the first time I saw it.”

“The fuck?” I blinked, uncomprehending. “Please, in Equestrian.”

Bellwether sighed. “Karks need to turn us into soup to get the most out of us, or else they’d fall apart.”

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.” The pace of my breathing quickened by an uncomfortable degree.

“No. No, I’m not.”

I shook my head, shuddering softly. “This is fucked. This is so fucked!” I felt the catheter on my chest with my hoof, and with a rush of emotion, the sadness I’d been holding back came gushing out of me like a broken water main. My body heaved with each sob that tore its way out of my throat, my vision blurring with tears. “What if they got my Barley the same way? Or my sisters? What if they fucking juiced them, or worse?” I was hyperventilating, the horror of what Confederate scientists had done to Placid taking on new and terrible dimensions as I considered the implications it might have had for my own family. “My sisters—oh fuck. This is—I can’t—”

Bellwether pulled me into a hug. “Easy, Storm. I know. It’s bad.”

I bawled like a foal into the older stallion’s shoulder, losing myself in his warm embrace. “We’ve got to stop them, Bell! It’s not right!” I felt so tired. So weak. Remaining conscious was a challenge.

Placid Gale slid one of the freight car doors open and peeked outside, into the darkness of the unlit tunnel. “Boss, we got a problem!” she shouted over the roar of wind howling past the open sliding door.

Bellwether and I joined her, following her gaze up towards the overhead, where, judging by the swarm of glowing orange eyes, a dozen Celestia-fucking Karkadann were clinging to the ceiling of the tunnel with their talon-like spurs while keeping pace with the train in a dead sprint. My stomach felt like it dropped through the floor.

“Fuck my life!” I said.

“Quit your bitching, Storm,” Placid said. “I have no idea if one of these fuckers is one of my own kids, and we gotta kill ‘em all or they’ll kill us. Do you see me complaining?”

“We have to collapse the tunnel,” Bellwether said. “It’s the only way. Sergeant Gale!”

“Yeah?” she said.

Bellwether tossed her a brick of plastic explosive. “You and the rest of Raven Gather up as much boom as you can from Osprey. Move to the tunnel exit and set the charges to bring the whole fuckin’ thing down. We’re going to have to time this just right.”

The Raven team pegasi swept through the rail car, collecting bricks of plastic explosive from the other team members in a big duffel bag, before zipping out the side door and flying ahead of the train, into pitch-black darkness.

Bellwether was sweating right through his coat. Nothing about this situation was ideal. “Osprey one, come in.”

“Go ahead, Eagle,” Cinderblock’s voice crackled over the air.

“Speed up the train. On my mark, set off the barrel bombs.”

The swarm of orange eyes receded into the darkness as we accelerated into the tunnel, their chitters growing to a crescendo of angry, inequine protests over their escaping quarry.

“Mark!” Bellwether shouted. “Blow ‘em!”

That was when the four 55-gallon drums that Osprey team had welded to the rearmost car and filled with explosive material, diesel fuel, screws, nuts, bolts and unwanted diesel engine parts were set off with a command detonation signal. There was an earthshaking boom and a shotgun blast of shrapnel accompanied by a roiling fireball that shredded or incinerated everything in the tunnel aft of the train. Half of the Karkadann were blasted to bits or cooked alive right through their armor. That still left at least a couple dozen that were able and willing to continue their relentless pursuit.

One leapt onto the rearmost rail car, chittering and squawking angrily. I could hear its footfalls on the roof of the car from a few cars up-train.

“Not good,” Bellwether said. “Not good!”

“We see it!” Cinderblock radioed. “Decoupling!”

The last ruined, empty car was severed from the rest of the train with another, smaller charge, where it drifted lazily into the tunnel behind us before being swallowed by the darkness.

Bellwether hazarded a peek. “Dammit, it’s still up there! Fucker jumped to the next car before it could decouple!”

Without a moment’s hesitation or fear, Bellwether mounted the ladder to the roof of the rail car, climbed up and faced the beast and the whipping tailwinds head-on.

“Yeah, that’s it, motherfucker!” Bellwether roared. “Come on! Take me if you can, bitch!”

I heard a muffled explosion and a few beamcaster discharges, followed by shouted profanity and grunts of exertion and pain, along with the gruesome noises of sharp objects sinking into flesh, but I couldn’t see what, precisely, happened. When Bellwether climbed back down the ladder and stumbled into view, he was covered from head to hoof in red ichor.

“Bell, you’re bleeding!” I said, sitting up in a half-panic.

He shook his head. “It’s not my blood.”

I just sat there, blinking in shock.

“Raven to Eagle one, charges are set!” Placid’s voice came in over the radio.

“Hold position a safe distance outside the tunnel and wait until the last car clears the exit, then blow ‘em!” Bellwether said.

The Excelsior-type locomotive and its dwindling train exited the gloom of the tunnel and burst into the light of day.

The next few moments seemed to pass in slow motion. The first few Karks neared the exit of the tunnel, and then, a giant flash and a fireball consumed the whole hillside. I was temporarily deafened by the whip-crack of the blast. The rail cars were pelted with rocks, clinking off the roof of the car like hailstones. When the dust cleared, the tunnel exit wasn’t even recognizable anymore. A sunken, smoking crater was all that stood in its place.

Bellwether gazed out of the side of the rail car, his jaw slightly agape. I swore if he stared any longer, he’d pop a demolitions-related boner.

I laughed, breaking down into a coughing fit from my injured lung. “Ya think we used enough dynamite there, Bell?”

// … // … // … // … // … //

The train’s traction motors whirred as we blazed across the countryside.

Bellwether turned to the rest of the ponies huddled in the car. “Okay, assholes. Listen up. We’re reorganizing into two teams. Osprey joins Eagle, we’re the defense team. Magpie joins Raven. They’re the assault team. Storm, you’re on Raven, but take it easy. Formation, everypony!”

Sagebrush’s helmet was missing, and he had a bandage on his head. Shooting Star’s muzzle was caked with dried blood and her dazed, lidded eyes refused to focus on anything. Cinderblock and his fellow engineers weren’t present. They were up in the loco, driving the train. Half of the unit looked too injured to stand. Only Placid had even an ounce of that razor-sharpness we’d all possessed when we set out on this doomed operation. Nevertheless, we formed up as ordered over a chorus of yessir.

I had an exhausted limp. I felt like death warmed over. Bellwether tossed me a beamcaster rig, which I clipped to my armor without a single word of protest, but he gave me a stern look that indicated that if I disobeyed his orders, there would be repercussions. Placid gave me another little shot of meth to top me off. I felt like I was breathing fire at that point, rocking back and forth on my hooves. I had to still the shakes consciously.

“You’d better be listening close, because I’m only going to say this once,” Bellwether said. “Commodore Cake and Sergeant Storm have given us intel on Confederate plans to move hundreds of Equestrian prisoners by train. This train, as a matter of fact. CSF Outpost 17 was a part of their plan. It served as a supply depot with equipment to secure the prisoners. We’ve already thrown a monkey wrench in their shit, just by stealing this loco, but why stop there?”

Bellwether pounded his hoof against the wall of the freight car. “Forty klicks east of here lies Dodge City. The Confederacy have a prison camp there, with thousands of ponies being watched over by some of the worst scum ever shat out by this savage galaxy of ours. With each passing day, more of those prisoners succumb to the brutality of their captors. We have a rare opportunity to put a stop to this.

“I know we’re tired. I know we’ve got wounded. That’s why I’m calling for reinforcements. Some of the best fighters we’ve got. We’re going to ram this train so far up the Confederacy’s ass, they’re going to shit it out their cowardly cunt mouths. Then, we’re gonna walk right out of there with those prisoners, and anything that gets in our way is going to be put in the fucking dirt with extreme fucking prejudice. We’re the sons and daughters of Equestria, and we cannot be stopped!”

A cheer went up. More like a roar in the cramped space. I could tell that not everypony’s heart was in it. We were over-extending ourselves. We were exhausted, hungry, thirsty, and many of us were wounded.

I flexed my hooves, shaking my head. My heart was gripped with equal parts fear and resignation. After all these years, I was finally going home.

// … end transmission …

Record 20//The Devil You Don't

//RCV STRM
//TST CODEC
//DCD OK
//MODE R13

070 078 081 032 071 066 032 070 078 076 032 086 071 070 032 066 073 082 069 032 065 066 074 032 085 082 069 082 032 080 066 090 082 032 071 085 082 032 085 072 065 070 032 067 086 080 088 032 078 032 070 086 081 082 032 067 086 080 088 032 078 032 070 067 066 071 032 085 082 069 082 032 080 066 090 082 032 085 082 069 082 032 080 066 090 082 032 069 066 090 082 032 067 089 066 074 070 032 069 066 090 082 032 067 089 066 074 070 032 069 066 090 082 032 067 089 066 074 070 032 069 066 090 082 032 067 089 066 074 070 032 069 066 090 082 032 067 089 066 074 070 032 069 066 090 082 032 067 089 066 074 070 032 069 066 090 082 032 067 089 066 074 070 032 069 066 090 082 032 067 089 066 074 070

[09,

Your Excellency, I have prepared an after-action report, attached to this digimail. I am speechless. I’d heard the rumors, but I thought they were just that. Rumors.

Where did you find someone like this? What pit of Tartarus did you pull her from, and are there more down there that we can still use?

Respectfully,

-PR]

// … decoding …

Mardissa Granthis

Their vanguard was here. My people. My brethren. Maddened by our loss at Pur Sang Peak, they had come to exact vengeance on the Liberation Front. As I listened through an open viewport, gunfire and far-off screams could be heard in the city center as the first wave of enemy troops and personnel carriers flooded in, uninhibited.

We had no armored vehicles to spare on offense and were stuck defending the mine as a result. We’d pulled back to the dark, craggy, gravel-strewn hilltop above the mine, firing sensor mortars as fast as we could to try and track Confederate ground movements within Tar Pan. The mortar thumped over and over on the roof of the Centaur, right above our heads, the noise almost enough to give one a minor concussion.

“Mast, up!” Secunda deployed the Centaur’s antenna boom, wiping sweat from her brow, her expression tense and anxious in the glow of her monitors.

Prima and the rest of Revenant—all except for the gravely wounded Jury Rig, who was still convalescing—sat beside me, their faces showing clear signs of fear and tiredness. We’d hardly had a chance to rest after the last engagement. Ket was manning the Centaur’s gun, panning the turret around to scan for hostiles.

“Gonna be hard, shootin’ our own people,” Ketros said. He didn’t bother to turn his head to check my reaction.

“Fuck them.” My eyes brimmed with tears. “Fuck all of this. The Equestrians just want to live.”

Ket rubbed his nose. “Yeah, well, so do these kids. Besides, think about what you thought you knew about ponies a few months ago. That’s all they know.”

I stared at the floor of the APC, eyes wide. A few months ago, all I knew about ponies was that they were dangerous sub-sapients with savant-like automatism and paranormal abilities. This was a blatant, bald-faced lie. The tonnanen were fully sapient beings with rich personalities who happened to be trapped in quadruped bodies that limited their manual dexterity and stratified their society into a caste system dependent on whether they had wings or a horn or neither. The ponies at my sides had despondent looks on their faces like they knew they were going to die, but that was nothing new. There was always a moroseness and grim resignation about them. We had hurt them so badly, and for so long, we’d warped their species into shadows of their former selves and robbed them of their innocence.

What we’d done to them was beyond atrocious. It was an abomination before the Gods. If we had any sense, we’d fall down on our knees before the Equestrians and beg their forgiveness.

I clasped my hands together and bowed my head. “I pray to Father Ogios, that he may bless our arms and fill our souls with his holy light. I pray to Tirantia that her law be just and her judgment of our undertakings fair. I pray to Garamsaram that his sweet spices and incenses make us forget our hunger and ease our pain. I pray to Cuichmanu that he may stumble our enemies and make their path rough and filled with rocks and boulders.”

“Cuichmanu?” Ket said. “You prayed to The Highwayman? Oh, I bet your dad would love that.”

“The occasion calls for it,” I said.

Cuichmanu, or Chuchmanush, was the patron of thieves and tradesmen alike, who made supplication to him for protection when traveling, to block the way of one’s pursuers with landslides and the like. His worship was very nearly banned and his name struck from the pantheon numerous times because of how unseemly his sash-wearing, roguish worshipers were. Cuichmanu cults had made the roads unsafe for the citizenry out in the colonies since ancient times.

I gazed out one of the Centaur’s viewports as the militia towed a strange contraption on wheels to the top of the hill, the one in the lead harnessed to the thing in the manner of a draft animal. They pulled a tarp off of it, revealing a hemispherical and squat-looking thing studded with what appeared to be caster emitters on all sides.

“What’s that?” I pointed at the odd device.

Corporal Shooting Star gave me a lidded stare, and then peeked out the viewport. Her lips slowly pulled into a grin. “I’ll be damned. A Puckwudgie!”

“A what?” Ket said.

“Puckwudgie C-RAM.” Shooting Star nodded. “Counter Rocket, Artillery and Mortar. Shoots down enemy shells in mid-air and can handle dozens at a time. Didn’t even know we had one! That’ll make the artillery boys’ day.”

“Garrida’s pulled out all the stops,” Cloverleaf said. “Now, where’s our boss?”

// … // … // … // … // … //

Desert Storm

“What the fuck?” I lifted the checklist in my magic, finding I had it upside down, before turning it right-side-up. “What the fuck is this?”

“Your new FCS was salvaged from a downed Ifrit, reprogrammed, and wired into the main PLC,” Black Devil said. “It’s actually higher-spec than the Imperial one, with algorithmic stabilization and acquisition that’s better than anything we’ve ever made.”

“I find that very hard to believe.” I frowned. “Confederate stuff is junk.”

“It’s capable of levels of accuracy down to zero-point-zero-one milliradians,” BD said. “You can almost shoot the wings off a fly from a hundred meters away.”

I perked a brow. “Whoa, really? That’s an order of magnitude better than ours. No wonder they’re so dead-on with those plasma pulsecannons of theirs.”

“It’s not the electronics that are the problem with the Ifrit. It’s the actuators and the traverse rate of the whole platform. They can’t keep up with fast-moving targets. We can.”

I looked up at the salvaged Confederate Goliath’s Marbo ShootRite gun director, shoehorned into a slot lining the overhead of my Charger’s cockpit. It had lettering in Ardun, much of which had been hastily pasted over with adhesive labels in Equestrian, underlining the purpose of each toggle switch and indicator light. The thing’s scuffed cyan paint job visibly clashed with everything else in the cockpit. I went over the checklist one more time before I started flicking the toggles one by one, all except for the main arming switch. I didn’t want to collapse the mine on all our heads by accident.

“Huh, it’s almost the inverse of the arming procedure for my old one,” I said. “Check the fuses first, and then power on.”

“It’s easy to overload one of these and blow it up if there’s excessive surge power,” BD said. “The techs installed a power conditioner in-line with it. Kinda fragile.”

I looked over the indicator lights on the thing, blinking away happily. “Seems to be in good shape.”

I gave the rest of my displays a once-over. Everything was humming along smoothly. Reactor was running steady, all EMTs were in the green. Ammo load was complete. They’d even had time to strap some artillery rocket boxes to my hips. Unitary HE, not cluster munitions, thank goodness. I wasn’t sure if I was ready, emotionally speaking, to get straight back to gassing people. Besides, that attracted the wrong kind of attention.

“Are we cleared to fucking go, or what?” I said.

“Wait one,” Black Devil said. “Okay, you’ve got the green light from command.”

I keyed the radio. “Revenant One to Command, my callsign is EIDOLON. We have completed our checks and are ready to unleash hell.”

After a brief pause, I received a reply from Captain Garrida. “Affirmative, Revenant One. We have enemy fast-movers incoming. You are to exit the mine and engage the hostile contacts. Give ‘em all you’ve got, Sergeant!”

I took a deep breath. “Here we fucking go.”

// … // … // … // … // … //

Mardissa Granthis

The Equestrian Chimera SPAAGs on the hill atop the mine rotated their turrets and tilted their guns skyward, first launching their mid-range surface-to-air missiles, and then firing their 40mm CT cannons as their targets got closer. The racket was unbelievable. Their weapons’ cyclic rate was so high, it was like a solid sheet of noise that assaulted my senses even through the hull of the Centaur. Tracers arced towards the sky, proximity-fused cannon rounds exploding in the air in long strings of bright flashes like fireworks. The Manticore 155mm SPGs opened up on the far-off enemy formations, adding their bass to the chorus. It was only a matter of time before counter-battery fire started sailing in.

As predicted, the Confederacy’s response arrived mere minutes later, heralded by the chilling cries of air raid sirens emplaced around the perimeter of the mine. The Puckwudgie, the Equestrians’ towable disco ball of death, immediately went into action, its radar tracking the incoming shells with millimeter precision. It began blasting enemy artillery shells and rockets out of the air with seconds to spare, long columns of green caster fire lancing skyward in a light show that was as blinding as it was seizure-inducing. The explosions in the sky made Haybale shake nervously. Poor guy was on the verge of cracking. I could see it in his eyes. He didn’t mind infantry combat, but he didn’t like sitting in a metal coffin with shells incoming and nothing to do. None of us did.

“Where the hell is the Sergeant?” I said.

“Incoming!” Secunda shouted.

I opened one of the Centaur’s top hatches and climbed halfway out, raising my binoculars to my eyes. I could see them out on the horizon. Two Corvus SSTO Fighter-Bombers, coming in fast and low, but staying under our guns. The Chimeras desperately repositioned, finding they couldn’t depress their turrets far enough to engage the threat. The way they were flying, it had to be the Blackbird Squadron. The best of the best. The fighter-bombers’ weapon bays opened and they each let loose a fifteen-ton Damocles bunker-buster, the munitions large enough for me to see them from this far away, in Tar Pan’s perpetual twilight. The Puckwudgie opened fire, but the hardened earth-penetrating tip of the bomb deflected the medium caster pulses with ease. I clenched my eyes shut. It was all over.

The howl of pyrojets and the tooth-chattering slam of thirty-seven tons of Charger landing in the muddy earth before us made my eyes flash open. I looked up, and Black Devil towered over us, its back to us as it faced the threat, its pyrojets flaring like a messenger of the gods themselves. I grinned wide.

Storm was here.

// … // … // … // … // … //

Desert Storm

“BD, give me a firing solution on the incoming bombs!” I yelled. “Arm the forties, gated proximity mode!”

“Working on it!”

The radome in my charger’s head began tracking the incoming ordnance. It was a small target, a little bit larger than a cruise missile. With this new FCS, it was almost trivial to get a lock. As the optical and gyro-stabilization system sighted in the guns, the beeping of the radar resolved into a solid tone.

“We’ve got lock,” BD said.

“Firing!” I gripped the triggers in the hoofcups and squeezed.

A long burst of forty-millimeter rounds arced skyward, the shells giving off bright flashes as they burst high in the air, tracing their way towards the target. I adjusted my aim, walking my fire onto the bomb. The first of the two bunker-busters exploded, the blast nearly blinding me as it completely filled my display. The other one was already too close for guns, coming in hot. I shifted position, standing directly in its path.

“BD, I need your help!”

“Oh, fuck no,” Black Devil said. The Anima knew a small measure of my thoughts and intentions through the link. “We can’t use the rear maneuvering jets! The SSMs, remember?”

“No time to argue!” I braced myself. “We’re doing this!”

All living beings were limited in our decision-making capabilities and our ability to react to our environment by the speed of our natural reflexes. For an unaugmented pony, those reflexes were on the order of a tenth of a second, at the absolute best, limited by the rate of our nerve impulses and the chemical reactions in our muscle tissue. I had to be faster than that. I had to give myself over completely to Black Devil and let her do most of the work on this.

“Tell me when,” I said, crouching my Charger low to the ground and winding up.

A few tense moments passed as the bomb grew closer, its guidance fins resolving in my display as they twisted back and forth, nosing it towards the GPS coordinate it had been programmed with. One hit was all it would’ve taken to collapse the salt mine and kill everyone inside. I had to do this. I had no other choice.

“Now!” BD said.

I performed a duostrand-assisted leap and jump-jetted a hundred meters straight into the air with my boosters, the acceleration forcing me down into my saddle. Time seemed to slow to a crawl as the bomb sailed straight towards me, its midnight-black casing growing in my viewscreen. As I ascended, I fired the shoulder-mounted pyrojet thrusters in opposite directions and spun clockwise to build up momentum, the bomb briefly leaving my field of vision as I rotated through three hundred and sixty degrees. I extended my hoof, my thoughts melding with those of my Anima. Pony and AI combined as one, in absolute symbiosis. Ion channels in my nerves spiked. My muscles burned with exertion, adenosine triphosphate breaking loose its chemical bonds. As the bomb came back into view, mere meters from my cockpit, my Charger’s left foreleg began to extend, my machine’s armored hoof stretching out to meet the tail of the Damocles bunker-buster right in front of my face.

My pyrojet-assisted kick landed dead-on, smashing the tail of the bomb and sending it twirling end over end. The heavy bunker-buster struck the hilltop sideways, bounced off the crest of the hill, and sailed over the top of the salt mine, landing in a muddy field hundreds of meters away. Then, its time delay fuse went off, the shockwave from the blast rattling my skull. As I descended, I fired my pyrojet boosters to come to a soft landing. Small rocks and chunks of dirt landed on top of my hull, ringing it like a gong.

I heard hooting and cheering over the radio, the cacophony soon resolving into a rhythmic chant. “Sergeant Storm, Sergeant Storm, Sergeant Storm!”

“Knock it off!” Garrida’s voice crackled over the radio. “Clear the fucking channel!”

I gazed out over the horizon. Off towards the southeast, there were a good six full-blown tornadoes meandering back and forth, their giant funnels drooping from cloud formations that were anything but natural, all thanks to Cicatrice and the Airborne Pegasus Commandos. Lightning and thunder lashed the far plains. On my scopes, I could see the Confederacy trying to use recovery vehicles to drag their tanks out of the muck, only for a tornado to come along and assail the combat engineers as they ran for their lives. It would’ve almost been comical if the situation weren’t so dire. Rounds from our Manticore SPGs landed in the enemy’s midst, our guns launching deadly MRSI assaults by gradually altering their trajectory and charges. The Confederacy hadn’t even reached our lines, and they were already having a bad day.

I licked my lips, eager to hunt my prey. “Just like old times, eh, BD?”

“Just like old times,” she said.

This was it. This was what I’d waited for, during all these long months of misery and powerlessness. I would repay the suffering a hundred-fold.

I brought up the map, pulling in the latest enemy troop movements through the datasphere. Revenant had done a good job with the unattended sensors. I could see at least sixty percent of the enemy force on my map. The rest were further south and had yet to come into range. Night Terror and his Selene were already engaging the enemy from the eastern flank. I would take the west. One of the westernmost mechanized infantry groups broke off from the main force and tried crossing the open ground, closing the distance as quickly as they could. They wanted the cover of the buildings and the hard pavement under their tracks so they could escape the artificial inclement weather, even if it meant that they’d lose the advantage of strength in numbers. I was going to punish them for this mistake.

I pulled up the feed from one of the unattended sensors, watching the formation of approaching IFVs with a keen eye. If they were allowed to disgorge their troops in the city, that would cause major problems for us. The lead vehicle struck a mine that blew one of its tracks off, bringing the formation to a halt. Our engineers had emplaced anti-tank mines earlier to slow their advance. In response, they moved up a strange-looking combat engineering vehicle with an erector-launcher of some sort. I’d seen these before. A mine-clearing line charge system. The picture-in-picture display on my viewscreen flared orange briefly as the missile on the erector-launcher ignited and took off over the minefield, dragging a long rope of plastic explosives behind it. The line charge landed in the field, looking like a giant garden snake. Then, there was a huge, linear string of explosions along its length, one that destroyed our mines and opened a corridor. The IFVs started moving again. I grinned. They’d just choked themselves into a narrow single file.

I sheathed my Charger in an invisibility spell, my powers channeled through my machine’s Illusion locus. The outside world turned dark as all electromagnetic radiation passed straight through my Charger, the paths of the photons bent and redirected out the other side. Since I’d cloaked my antennas, this included radio waves, temporarily limiting my communications to teleported aetherbits. I fired up the pinger and began surveying my surroundings with magic echolocation, sending off subtle waves of kinetic energy that bounced off the buildings and the terrain all around me. The acoustic receivers converted it to point cloud data, the image in my viewscreen resolving into an eerie amber monochrome due to the lack of satellite feeds to color-correct it. I broke into a gallop and advanced towards the enemy lines, searching for an ideal firing position. I found it in a public park a kilometer south of the mine.

“BD, I want projections on the movements of those units in the grids directly south of me,” I said. “Get the latest updates over aetheric, if you have to.”

“Working on it,” Black Devil said. “No good. I’m not getting it on aetheric.”

I begrudgingly uncloaked my Charger’s antennas briefly to increase the bandwidth. Slowly, the enemy’s position began to resolve in my display, as well as their projected future locations based on their rate of travel and the flight time of my Mark-76 surface-to-surface missiles. I painted an evenly spaced grid over the enemy formation, focusing on the enemy tracked vehicle support units. The Invader IFVs had turrets with 25mm automatic cannons and anti-tank guided missile launchers. They could carry a good half-dozen troops into battle with moderate protection. They hadn’t dismounted yet. The mechanized infantry planned to move into the city, dismount, and dig into the buildings, likely with ATGM squads. I narrowed my eyes. Their intentions were as plain as day. They planned to hunt down and neutralize what little armor we had. I wouldn’t give them that opportunity.

I turned the arming key, opening the safety cover. Then, I depressed the launch button. With eight thumps that shook my chest, eight Mark-76 SSMs rocketed away from the disposable box launchers pinned to my Courser’s hips, arcing skyward on columns of white rocket exhaust. Their payloads expended, the launchers automatically jettisoned, exposing the thrusters on my machine’s hindquarters and improving its balance. This was standard operating procedure with a Charger like mine. Find a firing position. Expend the artillery missiles. Jettison the launchers and move into knife-fighting range. The Charger was an all-spectrum combatant. Artillery, direct fire support, anti-aircraft. We performed all of these tasks and more. Though mine was a Courser and not as well-armed as some Chargers were, my Mirage was no exception.

I moved out of the firing position and broke into a gallop down a side street, soon achieving a bounding gait, my pyrojet boosters driving me back into my saddle and accelerating me to over three hundred kilometers an hour in a matter of seconds. I watched on my forward viewscreen as the projections of the missiles’ course showed them descending towards the enemy formation on the augmented-reality view, leaving white dotted lines behind them. I didn’t have to see the missiles on my visible-spectrum cameras or receive any tracking signals from them in order to see where they were. My machine’s electronics did all of that automatically, tracking the missiles’ estimated positions based on the trajectory and time since their launch and automatically generating a computer model of their flight paths.

The Mark-76 SSMs streaked down from the heavens and detonated right in the enemy’s midst, sowing chaos and confusion. According to my sensor feed, armored vehicles in the rear of the formation were bunching up against the destroyed tracks in front of them. They were caught in the midst of the minefield, with nowhere to go but in reverse. I veered off course slightly, intending to circle around behind them and hit them from the rear. The mines wouldn’t affect me; they had smart coded IFF features and could not be triggered by any Equestrian vehicle. After maintaining my bounding gait for another kilometer, I pulled into a hoofstand turn, twirling on my machine’s forehooves and braking myself to a stop by applying the boosters. I uncloaked and took in the devastation I’d wrought. My missiles had dug deep craters in the muddy, tornado-beaten plains south of Tar Pan. A couple dozen burning vehicles were blocking the enemy formation’s advance. A good fifty Invader IFVs were stoppered up behind them, their dazed troops dismounting to see what the matter was. None of them were pointing their turrets this way. Some of the enemy soldiers saw me and began pointing and panicking. Turrets began to swing ‘round. It was already too late.

I squeezed my triggers and raked the enemy formations with my 40mm CT guns, putting short, disciplined five-round bursts into their rear armor. I pressed my lips into a thin line. The dismounted troops didn’t even have a chance. When the HEMP rounds detonated near them, the blast and fragmentation were sufficient to tear their heads and limbs from their bodies. Before the Invaders even had a chance to bring their guns around, I’d already smoked ten more of the tracked armored fighting vehicles. They opened fire on me with their autocannons and ATGMs, trying desperately to fend me off. Their vicious combined salvo tore into my LAMIBLESS armor, ripping into my Charger’s hull and turning my machine into a flaming wreck. Or rather, that was what they believed they saw happen. Of course, it wasn’t actually me. It was a decoy forged by my magic. In reality, I had already repositioned to the front of their formation, at their backs again.

“BD, arm and extend HBCs,” I said.

“Affirmative,” Black Devil said. The heavy beamcasters clanked as their erector arms extended and they elevated and traversed ever-so-slightly to track my targets. “HBCs extended and armed.”

I hit a toggle that reduced my autocannons’ rate of fire and put staccato bursts from the forties into the enemy armored fighting vehicles, also letting loose with the heavy beamcasters. Breakers closed, capacitors discharged, and purple columns of light flared bright on my forward viewscreen. Eight more Invaders were flaming wrecks from receiving the gentle caress of my forties. The pair that were struck by my HBCs were basically vaporized, their tracks blowing outwards and their turrets lofting a good thirty meters into the air. No tank could survive such firepower.

Again, they swung their turrets ‘round. Again, they engaged a decoy crafted by my magic, one that reacted realistically to being shot. Again, I cloaked, repositioned myself, and struck their formation from another angle, hosing them down at point-blank range. My mind games had them in a panic. I had destroyed three dozen of the surviving IFVs in total by the time the enemy Ifrits a few klicks to the south noticed what was happening and peeled off to engage me. Heavy plasma pulsecannon fire streaked past me as I boosted away from them, pulling into a high-gee evasive slide. My first two magazines had run empty. I cloaked and circled around the enemy formation yet again.

“BD, reload the forties!” I shouted.

The empty 40mm CT magazines cycled into their stowage positions and a pair of fresh drums snapped into place with a resounding clank, their feed mechanisms letting out a hydraulic whine as they reconnected and cycled the rounds through the linkless feed system until they were indexed in the guns. I let loose a few bursts on the surviving IFVs, decimating what remained. Too depleted in numbers to carry out their mission, the remainder began reversing from their doomed position and they retreated back towards the rest of the division. That was my cue to leave, too. I’d successfully blunted their little offensive, but I was badly overextended. The longer I remained, the more vulnerable I’d be. Soon, they’d start shelling this position. With half a dozen Ifrits in tow, I pulled back towards the mine, picking up speed as I retraced my vector. I made a sharp turn off the street and set an ambush for them halfway back, lying in wait as the lance of Goliaths moved closer.

When they proceeded past my hiding place, their footfalls shaking the buildings around me, I uncloaked and surged out of concealment, letting out a maddened cry as I tackled one of the enemy walkers with my machine’s forehooves, pouring on the boosters. The Ifrit struggled to escape my grasp, its feet sliding across the pavement. I rammed the enemy mech straight through a brick building. The outer wall of the structure imploded with a great plume of dust that obscured my sensors. The building collapsed inward, completely burying the enemy walker in rubble, loose bricks pinging off my hull. I’d lost count of how many Ifrits I’d given an urban burial like that over the years. It had to be dozens by now. I pulled the triggers, the breakers closed the firing circuits, and I blasted the downed Ifrit point-blank with my HBCs, ripping through its armor and sending gouts of molten metal into the air. He wouldn’t be getting back up. The others were just beginning to turn, realizing that I’d engaged and destroyed the rearmost unit in their formation. Too slow. Too late. They never could keep up. Not now, nor years ago, when I’d faced them last. They shouldn’t have closed the distance. Smart Ifrit pilots remained at the rear and employed skillful fire support to harass us from a distance. Stupid ones moved into close-quarters combat with a Charger in an urban environment. Experienced pilots could’ve managed their inertia, coordinated their formation, and attempted to fan out and surround me. For these greenhorns, it was practically a death sentence.

One of them had just barely managed to get a lock, but I boosted sideways at several gees, the plasma pulsecannon shot going wild and blasting chunks of molten concrete out of a building next to where I’d been standing a split-second before. I was a blur of motion to them, my dark and indistinct form marked only by the bright purplish-blue fingers of pyrojet exhaust that blasted from my machine’s hips and shoulders. The sound of my booster ignitions echoed through the city streets like gunshots. Finding myself directly behind one of the Ifrits, I wrapped my Charger’s forelegs around the ungainly machine, dragging it in front of me as it flailed around helplessly.

The one with a good firing position hesitated to shoot, what with me using his comrade as a shield. I extended my HBCs and fired them over the top of my impromptu shield, blasting the other fucker dead-center in the chest. The Ifrit toppled like timber, collapsing face-first into the street, flame billowing from the machine’s cockpit. In the narrow space between the rows of mid-level apartment buildings, there was no room for the enemy to evade. I lined my struggling captive up with another one of the assault walkers, boosting forward with enough momentum to send us both sliding across the street. I released the Ifrit at the last second, turning and bucking it with both of my Charger’s hind legs. The two Ifrits slammed into each other and both went down, one collapsing atop the other. I put an HBC pulse into the back of the uppermost mech in the pile, aiming for their internal mortar ammo stores. The Confederate walker exploded, showering the area with bits of armor and debris. Both Ifrits were obliterated in a single shot.

After witnessing the very demoralizing sight of four Goliaths being downed in less than a minute, the other two tried to make a run for it, turning and trying to circle around the block and head back to their lines. It was much too late for that. They were already in too deep. I built up momentum and jump-jetted into the air, putting a good thirty 40mm rounds into the back of one of them before my hooves even touched the ground. The mixture of HEMP and APDS rounds to the thinnest part of their armor staggered the Ifrit, making them trip and sending them skidding through the sodden earth. I boost-jumped and landed directly on their back, crushing them flat into the ground, squashing the cockpit and the very unlucky cleomanni inside. The last surviving Ifrit in the lance broke into a desperate sprint, pushing his actuators to the limit.

The frequency interdictor picked up and decrypted his comm chatter. “Oh gods! Help me, help me!”

I tuned in to his freq and set the digital encoder. “If you were afraid to die, you should’ve thought about that before invading my country!” Whilst perched atop the crushed wreckage of the first runner, I put a pair of HBC beams right into the back of the last one, coring him out like an apple. As he fell, I could see right through the molten, dripping holes I put through both sides of him.

My radio and electronic warfare gear intercepted yet more of their frantic communiques. “Quad-demon! Enemy Charger in the AO!” For having a voice like an iron rasp, the individual on the other end was clearly panicked. “It’s a little one but watch your back. This freak can cloak. Stay at range and don’t let them get close. They have to be low on ammo by now. I want close air support lined up on that thing, right this minute.”

Another was eager to protest. “What the fuck? Sir, that thing just lit up the western quadrant and—and it killed three hundred of my fucking men! I’m getting reports from the east that there’s another one ripping through our armored divisions like tissue paper!”

“Don’t bellyache, just stay in formation and do as you’re told,” his superior replied. “Lieutenant, tell the commander of the air wing that I want the gunships back here, now!”

That had to be Colonel Ravetaff. I slowly drew my lips into a grin, tapping a few buttons and isolating his frequency. “Auramin Rafettafe. Biduakine ut wen tonnai, kartare ut Harredo, ia karta sendes asrii ut cule. Asrii bidu aspare, maldes niskatharc hemekenna!”

Aurman Ravetaff. Murderer of my people, tormentor of the Great Herd, and pain in my ass. I will kill you, you miserable, honorless bastard!

“Sir, they’ve compromised our command frequencies!” The radio picked up someone’s voice in the background in whatever passed for their command post. “Permission to scramble the codes?”

“Silence.” Colonel Ravetaff reprimanded his subordinate, before addressing me after a brief delay. “What do you know of honor, savage? You’ve even turned the president’s daughter against us with your foul witchcraft.”

I gazed out over the field of battle, contemplating the lives I’d just taken. That lie, again. Always the same lie. Mardissa would never be allowed any agency for her choice. Her people would never allow it. The president’s daughter, a traitor? Unthinkable. She had to be brainwashed. It was the only thing that made sense to them. The alternative was that she’d made the choice to defect on her own, and that, in turn, tugged on a thread that threatened to unravel the whole Confederacy. After all, if one of them could do it, so could others.

“We did nothing of the sort,” I said. “She joined our cause willingly, once she realized the depravities your kind had visited upon mine.” I turned my Charger’s head and watched, tears in my eyes, as Confederate artillery blasted an apartment block to rubble a kilometer to the west of my position. “You’re killing us, and for what? So you can sell us. Like toy dolls. You are on the wrong side of history. Generations yet unborn will cry out for justice because of what you’ve done to us.”

“The delusional ravings of a misbegotten, four-legged beast. It’s galling to imagine that you have thoughts in those tiny brains of yours beyond deciding when next to eat grass and fertilize the fields with your bare, naked arse.”

“I’ll tell you what’s delusional, you silly prick,” I said. “What’s delusional is this idea that you seem to have that I won’t find out where you’re hiding, tear your head from your fucking shoulders, taxidermize it, and use it as a hoofball!”

I cut the comms before he had a chance to reply, turning and heading back to the salt mine. When I arrived a couple minutes later, the AA gun and artillery crews greeted me with cheers and waves. I’d had our side patched in and they’d overheard everything. I gave as good as I got. As I descended into the darkness of the first level of the mine, I encountered a hastily erected Charger refit station in the cavern. A pair of robot arms and a pile of ordnance sat at either side of me. As I knelt down, the technicians immediately got to work.

“Welcome to Pony Joe’s,” one of the Charger techs said over the radio. “Would you like the old fashioned or some sprinkles?”

“Old fashioned,” I said. “Unitary HE, no frag bomblets and sure as fuck no gas. Collateral damage is a concern. Also, four new mags for the forties, if you please.”

The armorer shook his head. “Damn if you don’t go through it right quick.”

“They’re sending gunships,” I said. “I’m gonna need the anti-air firepower.”

“All HEMP or fifty-fifty HEMP and APDS?”

“The mix. I could still encounter light or medium tracks along the way.”

“Same load as before. You got it, Sergeant.”

The robot arms exchanged my empty 40mm drums, loading me up with fresh ones. Eight more Mark-76 SSM box launchers were installed at my Charger’s hindquarters. Within two minutes, I was ready to rejoin the battle.

“Good hunting, ma’am!” the Charger tech said.

I departed the mine with a fresh load of ammo, only to be immediately confronted by a pair of Conqueror tanks that had run right over our outer fence and were lobbing 140mm shells into our sandbagged defensive positions. I saw a pony fly sky-high, or what was left of him. His gun nest was completely obliterated. I promptly put a beam from my HBCs into each of the main battle tanks, blowing their turrets clean off.

“Where the fuck are the Minotaurs?” I radioed. “We’ve got enemy armor breaching the perimeter!”

“We’re doing the best we can,” Sergeant Sagebrush replied over the radio. “Not all of us get to play the game with pieces like yours.”

I switched the channel. “Shut up, Sage,” I muttered under my breath. “Raven One, I need a scouting report of the grid three klicks west of my position. Sending nav points now.”

“On it,” Sergeant Placid Gale said. “We’ll fly over and take a look.”

“Watch out for enemy air,” I said. “They’re sending gunships.”

“They’ll never get a bead on us, Sergeant.”

I sighed, pinching the bridge of my nose in my fetlock. “That’s what they always say. Next thing you know, there’s a screaming pegasus who’s short a couple wings.”

“What’s that?” Placid said. “Didn’t quite get that.”

“Never mind.” I clicked to the next channel. “Osprey One, Cinder! You read me?”

“Go ahead, Revenant One,” the big unicorn stallion replied over the radio.

“Ghost Two should be patching the feed from her console into the local datasphere. I want the enemy comms decrypted. Run it by Tiamat. I want updates on troop and vehicle movements. Everything you’ve got.”

“I copy. Analyzing the feed.”

“Ghost Two, I need some more sensor mortars out there,” I said. “I want to know if they’re trying to slip around from the northwest.”

“On it,” Secunda said.

Though I wanted to advance south again and hit their artillery division from behind, I didn’t want to get encircled and cut off, and I didn’t want the enemy to overwhelm the base in the meantime, something they were threatening to do. My decision to attack or defend would hinge on the scout reports and the sensor readings. There was no point in bothering to reposition to fire my surface-to-surface missiles. The entire enemy force was well within range.

I picked out one formation that was breaking off from the pack and moving north towards the city. I marked them for death, feeding their coordinates into my missile fire control computer. I released the safety cover and depressed the pushbutton with my magic. Eight missile ignitions shook my Charger’s hull as they propelled themselves from their canisters and towards the heavens. Eight sets of explosive bolts fired as those launchers once again self-jettisoned, leaving me more agile. Though a few red dots on my map winked out minutes later, there was no way for me to know if I had good effects downrange without having someone sweep the area.

As I watched my scope with a keen eye while Secunda’s sensor mortars set down and booted up, I spotted a few transient contacts to the northwest. The red dots representing enemy movement kept fading in and out. They were headed this way, trying to outflank us. Probably trying to defang our triple-A.

“The fuck?” I keyed my radio. “Revenant One to Command. Unknown contact, two klicks northwest. Moving to recon the area.”

“Affirmative, Revenant One,” Captain Garrida replied. “Use caution. Our support assets won’t be able to cover you very well in that location.”

I picked up speed, crossing the hilltop and avoiding stepping on our Centaur and its deployed mast. I descended the opposite slope, firing my thrusters as I went to avoid slipping down the gravel. The dirt access road on the western side of the mine led into a narrow defile studded with gnarled and dead trees. One of my armored hooves came down upon one of them, crunching it flat. I turned my cameras skyward, watching as two Confederate Vulture dropships with yellow-striped livery ascended from a clearing deeper in the dead forest.

My muzzle drew into a snarl. “Gafalze Arresgrippen. They think they can pull a fast one on us.”

Sure enough. Seconds later, a quartet of Rakshasa battlesuits burst from the woods, laying into me with cannon and guided missile fire. Their autocannons were little more than a nuisance, chipping away bits of LAMIBLESS. The ATGMs were a substantially bigger threat. I boosted rearward at a few gees, putting space between me and my attackers and giving my automated caster-based active protection system enough time to track the incoming missiles and zap them out of the air, blowing their nosecones off and sending them pirouetting out of control.

Something burst from the trees and rammed into my side. I exhaled sharply as the wind was knocked out of me by the sudden acceleration. I rolled across the ground, using my boosters to stabilize my Charger’s spin and rise to my hooves. I turned to face the threat as I slid across the dirt, eventually coming to a stop with me and my attacker squaring off in an empty, flat clearing.

I quickly sized up the enemy assault walker, studying it with an eye honed by years of combat. The mech was a headless biped with a broad, armored torso, like most Goliaths. When I scanned the area, the Raks were nowhere to be seen. They’d withdrawn, wary of my inevitable counterattack. It was just me and this thing, whatever the hell it was. It was big and wide. A couple meters taller than an Ifrit and sturdily proportioned, with well-armored and flexible legs. It had a pair of circular openings in both sides of its torso that could only have been the muzzles of weapons of some kind, its shoulders fitted with recessed short-range rocket launchers. In its right manipulator hand, it held a twin plasma pulsecannon of unknown make, and in its left, a short and agile-looking plasma cutlass. The way it towered over me, it had to have weighed at least as much as a heavy Rouncey, or a light Destrier.

“What the hell is it, BD?” I said.

“I—don’t know. No database match. Never seen one of these before.”

This was something entirely new, and that meant it was impossible to assess the threat it posed without seeing what it could do, first. That gave the enemy an intrinsic advantage. The unidentified Confederate mech pointed its plasma cutlass at me threateningly, as if to taunt me, before suddenly rotating its torso to face me. Only my quick reflexes and a sideways evasive boost from my pyrojets kept me from being sundered by a pair of bright orange energy beams that turned a row of dead trees behind me into matchsticks.

“What the fuck?!” I yelled.

“Thaumatic signature detected,” Black Devil said. “Those things in its chest are heavy beamcasters!”

I was so shocked by this revelation, I almost failed to react in time when the enemy Goliath boosted towards me with its own pyrojets, aiming to cut me down with an overhand slash from its sword. I ducked away from the swing, only for the enemy machine to reverse its swing and attempt a horizontal sweep. I raised a pair of armored hooves to intercept the thing’s arm. LAMIBLESS and metal armor slammed together in a brutal clash, my actuators and pyrojets straining to keep the much larger mech from overpowering me.

The Confederate machine reared back and kicked my Charger in the midsection, sending me hurtling away and tumbling end over end. I cried out in fear and nausea from the sense of acceleration and the differential in centripetal force between my head and my hooves, bracing myself for the inevitable impact. Black Devil slammed into a cliff with enough force to trigger a small landslide, jerking me against my sync arm and nearly knocking the wind out of me. I quickly re-oriented myself, regained control, and leapt out of that mess before it buried me.

“Pyrojets and duostrand, too,” I said. “That thing’s no ordinary Goliath. It’s got reverse-engineered Charger tech in it!”

“Highly illegal,” Black Devil said. “The laws of the Confederacy and the FTU specifically forbid the manufacture and dissemination of magtech.”

“No, really?” I deadpanned. “I thought the satyrs put that shit in all their children’s toys.”

“Is that sarcasm I detect?”

“Please. I’d never stoop so low.” I pushed the stirrups forward, picking up speed. “I’ll never be beaten by a fucking imitation!”

I ripped off a thunderous rapid-fire salvo of 40mm rounds from my autocannons, tearing chunks of the thing’s armored bracers off its arm as it shielded its face to protect its sensors. The enemy mech responded with a salvo of its own; a deadly barrage of 70mm folding-fin rockets from the launchers in its shoulders. I fired my boosters and went evasive, just barely hurling myself out of the rockets’ path as they streaked into the ground where I’d been standing moments before and dug craters in the earth.

I fired my boosters into the dry, cracked ground, the bluish-purple fingers of my pyrojets’ exhaust kicking up dust that obscured my position. I lit my horn and focused my magic through my Charger’s Illusion locus, letting loose a magical decoy and sending it sprinting straight towards the enemy mech. I split off and circled around behind the target. As the enemy pilot unleashed multiple plasma pulsecannon shots against the decoy to no effect, they quickly realized they’d been had. I fired my boosters, pouring on the throttle and outstretching my forehooves, intending to pounce on them from behind.

The pilot at the controls of the Confederate prototype was no fool. They wouldn’t fall for a simple trick like that. Just before my hooves could land on their target, the enemy mech delivered a savage turning kick towards the rear, driving their foot straight into my Charger’s front glacis. My ass-end kept going, pivoting beneath the blow until I landed flat on my back. The worst position for a Charger to be in.

The enemy mech drove its foot downward, pinning me, before raising their pulsecannon and aiming it straight at my machine’s exposed neck. I was completely helpless. I drew in a sharp breath, anticipating the end. Instead, we held that posture for several seconds that felt like an eternity.

“Give her back,” the enemy mech’s PA speakers sounded, the voice female and stern.

“Give who back?” I replied.

“My little sister, you alien filth.”

The wheels turned in my head for a few moments until the answer came with a flash of dawning awareness. “You’re Mardissa’s sister?”

“Her name is not for your tongue, creature. You brainwashed her. You alienated her from our father. I want her back.” She pressed the muzzle of her pulsecannon harder against my Charger’s neck. “Inferior beings like you are meant to serve us. You would all be treated with fairness and dignity, if only you learned the value of submission. Instead, you continue to endanger the unity of my people with your stubborn resistance.”

I let out a mad chuckle, long and low. “Is that what they told you? Have you seen the camps? Have you seen what they’re doing to us?”

“You mind-control sapients with your twisted supernatural powers! My sister isn’t a traitor. She would never betray her nation, her family, for a bunch of pathetic, furry little runts like you! I can’t believe Veightnoch wants a stable breeding population of you things. You’re demons in the shape of little horses. You planted thoughts of treason in my sister’s head. I just know it!”

“I showed her,” I said. “I showed her the truth. I didn’t do a fucking thing to her head.”

“You lie!”

“Why don’t you ask her yourself?” I punched a few keys on my radio panel, patching my PA system into the feed from the Centaur. “Revenant Seven, I got someone here claiming to be your sister. She’s got a gun pointed at my neck. You mind saying hi?”

After a moment’s delay, Mardissa’s voice came in through from the other end, verging on the mildly frantic. “Silassa? How—how did—why? Why are you here?”

“Mardi!” The enemy mech slackened slightly. “It’s me. I heard from father what happened. He’s very disappointed in you. We all are. Come home to us. Please. You’re breaking my heart.”

“I’ve made my decision,” Mardissa said. “My place is here, with them.”

“Why? What did they ever do for you? Did the ponies hold you and rock you to sleep? Did they tell you stories before bedtime?” Silassa’s voice was cracking. “What could they possibly have to offer you that compares to my love for you?”

“Nothing,” Mardissa said. “They have nothing to spare. They have nothing left. We already robbed them of everything they had to give, and now, as they beg and plead for us to stop, we’ve come for their lives. Their bodies. The only thing they haven’t relinquished yet. Sila, you have eyes. Can’t you see this is wrong?”

“I—”

I saw an opening. I didn’t let Silassa finish her reply. I batted her weapon aside with one of my Charger’s forehooves and fired my boosters. My Charger’s Mithrium glacis emblazoned with the sword-in-horseshoe of the Imperial Army slammed into the enemy mech’s torso, punching a hole in their cockpit.

I was beyond mad.

As I rose to a standing position, Silassa thrust with her cutlass, but I stepped into the blow, reared up, and boost-kicked the outstretched arm, severing it at the elbow and leaving a sparking hole in its place. She brought up her pulsecannon to try and deliver a shot center-mass, but I placed my charger’s hoof atop it and rammed its muzzle into the ground. Using the taller mech’s outstretched arm and grounded weapon as a ramp, I pivoted and bucked her dead-center in the torso, liberating the pulsecannon from her grasp and sending her staggering backwards.

“Die, pony filth!” Silassa roared, letting loose an alpha strike from both of her machine’s beamcasters and the remainder of her rockets.

I was too close. I was in her dead zone, my Charger’s hull narrower than the gap between her weapons. Both the caster beams and the rocket barrage flew right past either side of me to no effect.

I’d had enough.

“Fuck you!” I boost-slammed both my forehooves into her mech’s torso, sending her reeling.

My machine’s duostrand muscles strained against hers as we grappled in the forest clearing, our melee impacts echoing through the woods. We fired our pyrojets, each trying to overpower the other, our thrusters kicking up long rooster-tails of dust and dirt behind us.

“Your sister is still alive,” I said. “We’ve treated her like a fucking princess. How dare you? How fucking dare you whine about family? My family’s gone, all because of you motherfuckers!”

Our boosters vectored downward and we both took flight, skirmishing in mid-air. Silassa aimed a kick at my midsection that was answered by a boost-driven hoof to the torso, crumpling her mech’s chest plating. Hand met hoof over and over again as our machines’ limbs crashed into each other’s armor. I’d never met a Goliath that was my equal on the battlefield. This was different from anything I’d ever experienced before. It was violent and raw. Our pyrojets on the verge of overheating, we both touched down some tens of meters away from each other. No more games. I precision-fired my HBCs such that they converged upon a single point, blowing apart one of her mech’s legs at the knee and sending it toppling to the ground.

“No!” Silassa shrieked. “No, damn you! You animal!”

She propped her mech up with its remaining right arm, firing her HBCs. The twin orange beams struck me dead-on in the Mithrium glacis, the toughest part of any Charger. The power behind those paired lances of energy was enough to blow the glacis plate clean off of my Courser’s chest and throw me backwards a good ten meters.

I slowly stood, my ears ringing and my vision dim. I coughed a few times. There was smoke inside my cockpit. Through my cracked viewscreen’s feed, I saw my glacis plate sitting face-up several meters away. Between me and Silassa, the symbol of my nation’s army lay scorched and indented by the savage force of my enemy’s weaponry. Such was the strength of Mithrium, enchanted personally by Twilight Sparkle herself, that the armor plate would rather tear free from its foundation than be penetrated.

I squeezed the triggers in my hoofcups, unleashing a several-second burst from my forties that tore into my fallen foe. I let out an adrenaline-laced scream as I held down the trigger, hosing my enemy down with every last bit of firepower I had left in my magazines. I showered Silassa’s mech with 40mm HEMP and APDS rounds, taking chunks out of her armor and kicking up big plumes of dust. When my magazines clicked on empty and the dust began to clear, I was still holding down the triggers, panting heavily.

“Ease off, Sergeant,” Black Devil said. “The target is neutralized.”

As I stared at the fallen enemy mech, hardly believing that the battle was over, I slowly began to realize what I’d done. If I killed Silassa, I would never hear the end of it. There were still the Raks out there to worry about, too.

I pounded a hoof into my machine’s console. “Shit. Dammit! How the fuck did they make something like that?”

“My guess is, expensively,” Black Devil said. “Oof, dammit. That hurt. Just kidding. I can’t feel pain like y’all.”

I ambled over to the fallen Confederate mech. There was a hole in the cockpit. I hoped one of the 40mm shells didn’t find its way inside. My acoustic receivers picked up the sound of coughing. Wounded and bleeding, Silassa climbed through the hole and staggered out of her machine. She was taller than her sister. Tall and attractively proportioned. Her right arm hung limply at her side. It was broken and frag-wounded so badly, the bone was showing. She slumped against her mech’s armor, coughing over and over.

“BD, open the lower cockpit hatch and bring us down,” I said.

“But, boss, the area’s still crawling with hostiles.”

“Just do it!” I shouted.

“Your wish is my command.”

I grunted in pain as I unlatched my syncsuit from the sync arm in a crash-desync that lit my nerve endings on fire. Alarms started going off in the cockpit, warning me of sync loss. I hit the silence alarm button a few times to shut them up, grabbed my bomber jacket and threw it on over my syncsuit, and then picked up one of the aid bags under my saddle with my magic.

I descended through the lower cockpit hatch vestibule and dropped into the dirt, running up to where Silassa lay. When the satyr saw me, she drew her pistol and cocked the hammer without hesitation, even though her aim was shaky and imprecise with her uninjured left hand. There was blood leaking from her right ear where the 40mm autocannon warheads had ruptured one of her eardrums.

“Get away from me, beast!” she cried out. “Alien devil! You won’t warp my mind and pollute my soul, too!”

I stared at her, my unblinking and furious eyes locked with hers. “Shut up. Just shut the fuck up. You sound just like Mar on a bad day, you stupid drama queen fuck. I have an aid kit, here. I’m going to patch you up, so long as you call off those fuckers in the forest over there. And put that damn gun down, or I’ll make you put it down.”

I nodded to the dim marker lights of the spec-ops Rakshasas hiding in cover a couple hundred meters to the north. Silassa waved them off, and I watched as they cautiously retreated deeper into the woods. The wounded enemy pilot reluctantly holstered her weapon and clipped the the strap over the back of the grip.

When I got closer, I could see she was in a bad way. She was dazed and concussed, her mouth and nose bloodied. I pulled out some supplies, using my levitation to tear open a few packages. I ran a disinfectant pad over her wounds, using Hemogel and a bandage roll on the worst of them. I carefully splinted her arm, like Gauze Patch had shown me, once. When I was done, I let out a deep sigh and collapsed to my rump with exhaustion, still facing my wounded foe.

Silassa inspected her arm, biting her lip. “A wasted effort. They probably won’t bother saving it. They’ll just replace it with chrome. Easier than regenerative therapy, these days.”

“Yeah, well, at least you won’t bleed to death. Mar would wring my fucking neck.” I looked up at the hulk of her ruined mech, taking in its unique features. “What the hell is that thing supposed to be?”

Silassa grinned. “The Djinn. The first of the new-generation Goliaths. Once we have enough, there will be nowhere left for you creatures to hide.”

“That thing has magic in it. Isn’t that against the law?”

The Cleomanni woman’s smile eroded right off her face. “What do you mean? This is the finest technology our engineers could come up with! It doesn’t have any of your filthy alien witchcraft incorporated into any part of its construction!”

I pointed a hoof at the loose fibers hanging from the ruined mech’s left elbow, blowing like spiderwebs in the wind. “That’s duostrand, or a Confederate copy of it. Your torso guns are casters. They have a thaumatic signature. My Anima picked it up right away, through her sensor suite. Your thrusters are pyrojets. Where the fuck do you think the fuel comes from? The fucking aether? Oh, right. It doesn’t need any.” I stepped closer and climbed into the hole in the cockpit. “What else is this thing hiding?”

“Hey!” Silassa yelled. “You can’t go in there! It’s top-secret!”

I gave her the side-eye. “Now ask me if I give a fuck.”

I took a quick look around the smoking, battle-damaged cockpit, covering my nose to shield my nostrils from the acrid stink of burnt electronics. Not much different from a Charger. The seating was optimized for cleomanni physiology, and they used that awful bright cyan paint of theirs, supposedly to improve pilot alertness. That was about it. The layout was basically the same, otherwise. A clear copy. I was just about to leave, when I stepped in a strange, squishy substance.

My eyes traced upward, to a shattered metal casing sitting behind the main console. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

After the shock subsided, an eerie calm descended over my nerves. I picked up the ruined piece of equipment in my levitation and dragged it through the hole in the cockpit as I crawled back out. When I released it from my magic’s grip and plopped it in the dirt next to Silassa Granthis, she recoiled with horror.

“What in the blazing hells is that?!” Silassa said.

“The finest technology that Confederate engineers could come up with,” I said.

Silassa tentatively stuck her hand in the reddish slop from where the thing had cracked open like a coconut, cringing at the texture. “Oh, eww! Is that—is that brain? Where did you get that?”

“Not just any brain.” I turned the smashed, dripping device over in my magic and showed her the spiraling horn sticking out of it. “You guys figured out a way to manufacture a decent enough Charger facsimile, but you didn’t have a way to control it, or regulate the magic circuits. We have unicorns enchant all that shit. You unbelievably sick freaks stuffed an actual unicorn’s brain and horn in there, quintessence and all.”

“No!” Silassa shook her head in denial. “No!”

“Who was he? Or was it a she? Yeah, probably a she. I wonder, did she beg when the sedatives went into her veins? Did she cry when the bone saw spun up to a shrill whine?” With tears in my eyes, I scooped a hoofful of bloody gray matter out of the destroyed cyberbrain and rubbed it across Silassa’s shaking forehead. “There. There’s your fucking fairness and dignity. There it is, all over you, you fuckin’ liar.”

I’d broken her. Silassa couldn’t even blink. She stared straight ahead at nothing, her eyes wide, her lips trembling, gore dripping down her face.

I shook my head. “You know, the veneer of civilization over your fucking Confederacy is so paper-thin, I’m amazed that so few of you see through it. It’s not like you have to look under every rock and every tree to find something heinous. It’s right under your nose. Blatant fucking evil.”

“I’m—I’m not—I wasn’t—”

“I used to think you people knew, and you just went along with it. But you don’t. Evil isn’t a deliberate lifestyle choice for you. It’s background noise. I’m amazed. You can actually rationalize all this shit away and live a relatively normal life where you presume that you’re a decent enough person, and it’s all because you’re a delusional fuckwit living in a genocidal death cult pretending to be a legitimate government, like all the other delusional fuckwits I killed today.”

I took the cyberbrain and wrapped it up in a roll of canvas cloth from my Charger’s supplies, taking it with me. As I wiped my syncsuit’s boots off in the dirt a few times before I climbed into BD’s open cockpit hatch, I paused and looked back at my defeated foe.

“Mardissa made her choice,” I said. “You make yours.”

“Wait!” Silassa reached a shaking hand out towards me. “Who—who are you?”

I smiled. “Just another little alien devil.”

I left the bewildered elder Granthis sister slumped against the destroyed Djinn as I sealed the cockpit hatch behind me. I tossed the brain into one of the storage bins at the rear of the cockpit. “Book ‘em, Blacko.”

“What?” BD said.

“Nothing. Never mind.”

I stowed my jacket and mounted back up in the saddle, hissing in pain as the sync arm latched into place over my spine, my nerves melding with my charger’s systems. Fearing an ambush, I immediately cloaked, my Charger completely fading from sight. The enemy contacts receded further into the woods, wisely deciding that they didn’t want a piece of me. That was a good thing, too, because I wasn’t sure how well I could handle a front hit at the moment.

“Ma’am, you didn’t kill her, did you?” Mardissa’s voice came in over the radio.

I waved a hoof dismissively. “Pfft, you should’ve seen it. Blood and brains pasted everywhere.”

“Sergeant!” Mardissa’s voice was laced with anger and fear.

“Relax, Mar. They weren’t hers. I’ll tell you everything when this is over.” I switched the channel. “Command, this is Revenant One.”

“Go ahead, Sergeant,” Garrida replied.

“Enemy Goliath engaged and neutralized. We’ve got Raks and who knows what else lurking out here to the northwest, though. Could be Gaffs or Karks. Patch me through to the technicians.”

After a few moments of static, I heard the voice of the chief armorer on the other end. “Yes, Sergeant?”

“I’ve thrown my fucking glacis plate.”

“We don’t have another one of those, but we do have something else I think you’ll like. Mark it for retrieval and head on back. You’re vulnerable without your front armor.”

I let out a deep, stressed sigh as I marked the location of my fallen armor plate for later pickup by the recovery crews. I also marked the wreckage of the Djinn. If the Confederacy were smart, they’d scuttle that thing before we had a chance to take a look at the pieces. If they weren’t smart, they’d evacuate and leave it behind. I hoped they’d take the stupid option. My brows creased in a deep frown. I’d barely been able to hold that monster off, and it was obviously just a pre-production prototype. If they started cranking them out by the dozens, we were in big fucking trouble. Not to mention, they would need ponies to convert into cyberbrains for their little pet project. That meant more kidnappings, more concentration camps, more shipping ponies off-world.

“Over my dead body,” I muttered.

The techs didn’t understand how important that salvage was. We needed it. All of it.

I switched to the Magister’s frequency and keyed my radio. “Cicatrice, Your Excellency.”

“Yes, Sergeant?” He sounded a little annoyed. “What seems to be the problem?”

“I’ve engaged and destroyed a new type of enemy Goliath. They call it a Djinn. Silassa Granthis was piloting it. She’s still alive. I’ve marked the valuable salvage and the POW in the datasphere and I’m sending over the coordinates right now.” I punched a few more keys with my magic. “There are Raks and Gaffs in the area. I thought you might want to send over a detachment of Stormtroopers to secure that salvage and capture a POW.”

“You thought correctly!” He was ecstatic. “You have no idea how badly I’ve wanted the specifications on the Djinn. It’s blacker than black. Not a hint of intel on any of it, other than that it’s a thing that exists. What can you tell me about it? Briefly, if you please. We’re both quite busy.”

“It has pyrojets and duostrand. For weapons, it carries a twin-pulsecannon and a plasma knife, with a torso fitted with two HBCs and two seventy-millimeter rocket launchers. Moderate armor. Better than an Ifrit, but still a little thin. Less firepower than a Destrier. Looks overweight for the loadout.”

“How in the hell did they make the diagrammatic engines?” Cicatrice sounded perturbed.

“It doesn’t use any. I’m also sending you Black Devil’s recording of the fight and all the telemetry data from my sensors.” I typed a sequence on one of the keypads to the right of the console with my levitation. A picture-in-picture view of the Djinn’s silhouette appeared in my viewscreen, with the sources of magic highlighted. “Look at the thaumatic overlay. No distributed diagrammatic engines. The hot spot is right in the center of the cockpit.”

“What the hell is it?”

“A captive pony cyberbrain drives all the systems.”

There was a brief pause as Cicatrice went through the same moment of shock that I did. “Bastards. Bastards!”

“No shit.”

“Do you have it?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Got it in a storage bin on my rig.”

“It was wise of you to bring this to my attention. This information is absolutely vital to the resistance. A tactical, scientific, and propaganda victory in one. Well done, Sergeant. You are to be commended for this.”

“Thank you, Your Excellency.”

“I have work to do. We’ll discuss this later.” Cicatrice signed off.

The entrance to the mine was looking a little worse for wear. Our fixed defenses had been engaged in the last couple assaults, and this one was no exception. Small arms fire steadily poured forth from the buildings downhill of the mine, flechettes and bullets slamming into sandbagged fortifications. I saw a lot of wounded and dying ponies on the ground. When one of the militia ponies running a belt-fed machine gun got shot, another one would quickly take their place, while others dragged their comrade away from the gun nest for the medics to take care of them.

I saw one sandbagged gun nest with a recoilless 105mm gun get blown sky-high by a salvo of FFARs from a pair of Black Mambas. I swapped my 40mm magazines, the heavy drums clanking into place, and then I turned and dropped my cloak, sighting them in.

“Fuck the fuck off!” I shouted.

With a couple short bursts, the enemy gyrodynes were reduced to a pair of flaming streaks that nosedived into the ground. I descended into the mine once more, positioning myself in the refit station, between the giant robot arms. Ponies took up positions at the operating consoles for the station.

I keyed my radio. “Lay it on me. What have you got?”

“Chameleon applique kit and some extra drums,” the chief armorer said. “I’d love to give you sixteen drums, but I can’t with the HBCs on there. Eight’s the best I can do.”

“Fuck yes. Let’s do it.”

The robot arms strained as they lifted the heavy reactive armor frontal plating segments and connected them to my machine’s forelegs and torso with explosive bolts. My duostrand load indicators blared a warning alarm as the heavy chest plate and frontal ballistic shields were installed, one that only got louder and more insistent as four additional 40mm drums—a double load—were added to my reserves in external ammo pods. I depressed the alarm silence pushbutton a few times to quiet it down.

“Aw, no,” Black Devil said. “We’re going Chameleon? Really? It’s no substitute for Mithrium, you know. This stuff’s ordinary reactive armor.”

“I know, but I’m not going out there without something to keep the cockpit from getting frontally penetrated.”

“Got it, boss,” BD said, her voice dripping with sarcasm. “No cockpit penetration. No cocks penetrating pits. No pit o’ penetrating cocks.”

“You know, for an AI, your mind is always in the damn gutter,” I said.

“Hey, we’re like, melded together,” she said. “I can feel what’s on your mind, you know. So, who’s the lucky stallion?”

I blushed furiously. “None of your business, BD.”

“Must’ve been good, whatever you two got up to. Your sync rate is ninety-seven percent.”

My jaw dropped at the sheer audacity of it. “Are you trying to imply that I should procure some dick before every mission?”

“There seem to be no downsides to it that I can recognize, Sergeant.”

“You have nerve.”

BD’s hologram flared up in the tank, looking a mite peeved, the little devil-pony crossing her forelegs in consternation. “I don’t. I literally don’t. Nope. Not a single nerve in my body. Which you’re trashing. Again. I guess that leaves living vicariously through you, since you never take me anywhere fun.”

“Bitch, bitch, bitch. All you ever do is bitch.”

“I’m scared!” Black Devil’s voice cracked with emotion.

I was briefly taken aback by this statement. The natural impulse was to think of an Anima as a piece of equipment, but they weren’t equipment. They were people, of a kind. A soul from a living being, bonded to a computational substrate by powerful necromantic magic. In a moment of grim clarity, the hypocrisy of it all was laid bare. We bottled up minds to make our machines, too. Volunteers, death row convicts, the terminally ill. All they had to do was sign on the dotted line, and when they passed from this world, the Conclave would make them into things, like Tiamat and BD. All for the promise, no matter how disingenuous, of some form of continued existence beyond death.

I’d heard about this, sometimes. On long campaigns, occasionally, vital maintenance would get put off, and someone’s Anima would snap and express some combination of hostility towards a pilot and resentment for being trapped in a giant metal coffin with them. Our Anima cores went in for servicing every now and then, performed by the experts at the Conclave. They did something to them, to drug the fear out of them electronically. A little tweak to the personality matrix here and there. BD hadn’t undergone such servicing in years.

I bit my lip, very nearly hard enough to draw blood. “I am, too.”

“I’ve never known love, boss. Not like you have. I don’t have anyone except you. We need to take better care of each other. I don’t remember what it was like to die, but I’m not keen on experiencing it again any time soon. The glacis plate is gone; there’s just that applique and a few millimeters of frayed composite between us and oblivion.”

“Shit. Way to inspire confidence.”

“I’m not kidding. One bad hit, and you and I are going to burn to death. We’ve done good so far. Splashed a couple helos, downed several goliaths, and shot up dozens of medium tracks. We also kept the base from being bombed. There’s no need for you to do everything yourself, Sergeant. Use every asset at your disposal.”

“What assets?” I waved my hoof at the front viewscreen. “A tiny little artillery battery and a couple of tanks ain’t assets. They’re liabilities. I wanna go out and hit those fuckers, hard, but I’m stuck defending this fucking hill!”

“Hey, they’re coming!” somepony shouted over the radio.

“Command to Revenant One, have you finished rearming?” Garrida’s voice came crackling over the line.

“Yes, sir!”

“Then fucking deploy! Big wave of gunships coming in. They’re trying to take out our artillery and self-propelled AA. Bring them down!”

“Yes, sir.” I pushed the hoofcups forward, letting out a grunt of frustration as my machine struggled to attain even a small fraction of its previous speed. “Been a while since I’ve used a Chameleon kit, hasn’t it?”

The thermal tiles integrated into the Chameleon applique system used a grid of electric heating elements to produce whatever thermal image the control computer decided would reduce our signature and make us difficult to detect and lock onto. The thing took our camera, terahertz, and millimeter-wave feeds and passed them through a custom algo filter to accomplish this. The bulky armor plating mounted over the streamlined LAMIBLESS gave my rig a chunky and square appearance, like some damn Rouncey. Made it weigh as much as a heavy one, too. The system put stress on the frame and greatly reduced our mobility for some extra protection and firepower.

As we slowly ascended out of the mine, we were confronted by the horrifying reality of what was happening to us. Entire city blocks were vanishing in columns of fire, smoke, and dust that reached high into the air. Long strings of tracers from the Chimeras crisscrossed the skies. Through the enhanced sensory input of the neural link to my Charger’s systems, I could hear the screams of the dying all around me.

From the south, a wing of enemy gunships appeared on my scope as white dots silhouetted against the sky on thermals, like a string of angry gnats. From this distance, a couple kilometers away, one could just barely make out the Black Mambas’ rotors slicing the night air. Products of Guild Marbo. Mardissa’s clan. Marbo. MOREBO. Monsanto, Remington, and Bosch.

There was a sinister human hand behind the Confederacy and their entire existence. I didn’t know much about humans—who they were, what they did for a living, how they amused themselves—and yet, I couldn’t help but feel that the cleomanni were less their usurpers and more their unwitting protégés. Their mercantile culture, their conquering way of life, they owed it all to their former masters. They’d tainted us with it, too. We had all been cursed with humanity. Perhaps it was my own madness spilling over, but I suddenly felt like I knew the truth of this world, for once. The Concord were the architects of it all, for better or for worse, and the Vargr were their shadow.

In that moment, I wanted nothing more than to tear this despicable evil out by the root.

I would test the much-vaunted accuracy of the Marbo ShootRite against their other products. I turned my guns to the skies, I squeezed the triggers, and I let loose with a long, sweeping burst. At two thousand rounds per minute, the forties let out a steady roar, the sound of each report blending into the next. Seconds later, the gated proximity rounds sprayed the enemy helos with fragments, tearing their rotors to shreds. Over a dozen fireballs plummeted towards the ground. There was no gallantry in any of it. It was war, in all its cold and clinical brutality. They didn’t even have a chance. From their end, I’d looked like a Centaur on thermals, because that was the image my Chameleon plating was displaying. Hardly a worthy target, or so they’d thought.

Colonel Ravetaff was a moron, sending rotary-wing craft to deal with a Mirage, a Charger specifically designed with a brigade anti-air role in mind. There was no hiding from me, or the radome in my mech’s head, or the feeds from the rest of our aerial search radars on the SPAAGs that were fed directly into Black Devil’s computer through the local datasphere, the separate readings networked and fused together automatically by AI algorithms.

“Enemy Goliaths, directly east!” came Placid Gale’s report over the radio. “I repeat, enemy assault walkers are headed our way!”

My breath hitched in my throat. I hoped there weren’t any more Djinn. I needed mobility to fight one of those, and Chameleon gear was the opposite of mobile. I was relieved when a pack of Ifrits poured single file from the avenue to the east of the mine. I had them all lined up perfectly. It was, as a carnivore might say, a total turkey shoot. And yet, from the front, my forty-millimeter ammo would be wasted against their amor. To deploy my HBCs, I’d have to shed the Chameleon gear.

There was a third option. One the Chameleon kit’s engineers had never imagined in their wildest dreams. It was a tactic I’d employed before, at great risk to myself and my Charger.

“Undo the limiters, BD,” I said.

“Oh fuck. You’re pulling a New Isfahan, aren’t you, boss?”

“That’s the idea.”

“Canceling load limiters on the actuators. I hope you know what you’re doing.”

As long as I avoided excess lateral loads and moved in a straight line, this maneuver wouldn’t destroy my legs. I poured on the boosters, slowly pushing the stirrups all the way forward. I watched the speedometer as I built up momentum, crossing eighty kilometers an hour, then ninety, and then a hundred, the enemy lance of six Ifrits growing in my field of vision. Through their thermals, none of them could explain why a Centaur APC was coming sideways at them through the dark. None of them realized what was happening until it was too late.

I braced myself as my ballistic shields and sixty tons of armor smashed into the torso of the lead Ifrit, bowling him over backwards and sending him hurtling into the one behind him, and the second into the third. Three Confederate Assault Walkers went down like dominoes from my mad charge, their collapse sending up plumes of concrete dust and shaking the very earth. I fired my boosters and pounced on them, one after another, crushing their cockpits under my mass. The others quickly came to their senses and recognized the threat right in front of them. I took a plasma pulsecannon round straight to the chest, the heavy reactive Chameleon plating blowing outward to neutralize it, chunks of my armor ablating as I took hit after hit to the front without even slowing down. Sparks and motes of glowing metal dust filled the air.

With a grunt of exertion, my cockpit shaking from the forceful impacts of the enemy fire, I squeezed my triggers and unleashed long bursts of 40mm rounds right into their legs. I cut the fourth one off at the knees and he went down, his actuators failing to keep him upright. The fifth and sixth began to retreat, predictably enough, though they kept facing their front armor towards me as they slowly backpedaled away. The incoming fire got to be too thick, even for me. I was losing plating faster than I would’ve liked, leaving me poorly balanced.

My drums ran dry. “BD, reload!”

As my autoloaders cycled the drums, I popped smoke, filling the area with obscuring gray clouds. I boosted around the block, hitting them from the flank. I rammed one into a brick building, boost-kicking the enemy machine in the front torso over and over again, watching as their armor crumpled inward from the savage impacts of my applique-clad titanium hooves. The Ifrit collapsed face-down, its pilot crushed to death.

Just as the other brought his weapon to bear, I boosted backwards. Slowly, with the weight of my armor, but just fast enough for his pulsecannon to miss my machine’s head by a hair. I ripped into his side armor with a long burst from the forty. His ammo load exploded, rattling my jaw and pelting me with a spray of fragments that tinkled like raindrops against my hull.

“Fuckin’—there you go!” I wasn’t even sure what the hell I was saying, between the adrenaline and everything else. “You wanted it, you fuck!”

My millimeter-wave detectors blared a warning, but it was too late. An enemy ATGM slammed into me from the side, ripping chunks out of my actual LAMIBLESS. The engagement range had been too short for the APS to acquire it and shoot it down. It must have been launched by an ATGM squad in the building across the street. The cockpit of my Mirage flared red with warnings, alarms blaring in my ears. I was practically bowled over onto my side.

“Fuck! Fuck!”

“HBCs are going critical!” BD said. “That one hit the regulators! Jettison, jettison!”

I punched a few buttons in sequence, firing the explosive bolts for my heavy beamcasters. Powerful chemical rockets lofted them skyward at over ten gees, sending them hurtling away from my Charger. And just in time, too. A damaged HBC wasn’t a gun. It was a bomb.

The air sizzled with the whine of arcane energies beyond containing, the entire city block bathed a purple hue. With a ripping shriek of magic, the jettisoned casters and their capacitors exploded, producing a shockwave that flattened sidewalk trees for a hundred yards around and sent parked cars hurtling end over end.

A formation of Confederate Conqueror tanks decided to take advantage of my sudden lack of anti-armor firepower, surging out from a public park, their 140mm shells blasting huge chunks out of my Chameleon gear. The HESH rounds did not penetrate, but they sent spall flying around my cockpit, damaging my electronics. I caught frag in the side, right through my syncsuit. I shrieked in pain, whimpering at the burning sensation that crept into my guts. I was half-concussed, my ears ringing so loudly I couldn’t hear a damn thing.

“Oh fuck, I’m bleeding!” I said.

“Pull back, your vitals are all over the place!” Black Devil said.

I fired my boosters and pulled into a hard retreat, taking care to keep most of my frontal applique armor facing the enemy the entire time as I jump-jetted in several backwards hops that left me dazed from the fierce impacts of my Charger’s augmented mass. Each time I landed, I let off a burst from the forties to deter my foes. Once I was satisfied that I was in relative concealment, I stifled a whine as I undid the sync arm, shakily rising from my saddle and making a beeline towards the rear of the cockpit. As I let out little yelps of pain, I opened one of the bins and hastily dug through my medical supplies with a bloody hoof, sending some of my gauze and disinfectant scattering onto the deck.

I slowly undid my syncsuit, pulling it down to check the damage. My heart hammered in my chest. There was a gaping hole in my side. It was practically a full-blown gunshot wound. I was so shocked at the sight of it, my blood ran cold and my ears pinned themselves against my head. My hooves quickly grew red and slick from handling the wound, moving faster and faster in a rising panic. My juices were visibly pooling on the deck under me.

“Oh shit! Oh shit, no! No, no, no!”

Yes, a baritone voice in my head whispered. Yes, yes, yes. That’s the way, little one. That’s the way closer. Closer to your new abode and your new owners. We’ll be close together for a long, long time. Closer than you could possibly imagine. The closeness will overwhelm you.

I could practically feel the Archon’s breath on my neck as I levitated out the Hemogel and pushed the applicator tip into the wound. I squeezed the whole damn thing in there. It hurt. A lot. When I was done, the wound was packed with fast-hardening clotting agents. I was lightheaded from blood loss, but at least I wouldn’t bleed out. The applicator clattered to the deck as I released it from my magic.

“I did the ritual,” I wheezed. “I did the fucking ritual. Why can I still hear them?”

A dark chuckle filled my mind, low and long. You think that your begging and your meager incantations can keep us away from the sweet taste of all this death? For a lump of proteinaceous sludge, fully aware of your nature as such, the evidence of it leaking all over your stumpy little appendages, you are hopelessly naïve. Go on, animal. Kill.

“Why? Why are you doing this to us?”

“Who are you talking to?” Black Devil said.

“Shut up, BD. I mean it.”

Ah, a common question with a simple answer. What seem to you to be unspeakable acts of cruelty are mere necessities to us. Without tending our garden—guiding and shaping the world of mortals towards violence and tyranny and despair—there would be nothing for us to eat. I could draw an analogy from your primitive mind. Imagine if your dairy cattle and chickens wandered off from the farm. Where would you get your milk and eggs? How would you bake a cake? You see? All it takes is allowing the disease of utopianism to spread just a little, and our meal is spoiled.

I shivered, feeling cold deep inside. “That’s all we are to you? Food?”

Most baryonics, yes. You, however, are different. I sense that you are an artisan of death and mayhem. Rare, for an herbivore. You have my grudging respect. Do not squander it.

“Who are you?”

Kreuss-Korvass, the Chronicler. You act, I document. I like what I see. Do more animal things, if you please. It excites me.

“You want death?” I gritted my teeth in rage, throwing the medical supplies back in the bin before mounting back up on my saddle. “I’ll give you a buffet of death. I’ll make you choke on it!”

Once I’d reestablished my sync with Black Devil, I reloaded the forties with the last of the extra drums, the feed system clanking as it slotted them in place at the rear of my Charger’s head. Two pairs remained. The standard load. I flipped a sequence of toggles and mashed a big red pushbutton. The ruined Chameleon kit’s explosive bolts popped one after another. The applique armor blew off, revealing my battle-damaged hull underneath. The readings on my status panel weren’t looking good. My front torso armor was gone, and thirty percent of the hull was exposed. I punched a few more buttons that bypassed my damaged electronics and put me on the backup circuits. A couple relays remained red on my monitor, but they were non-essential.

“Sergeant, you should pull back,” BD said. “Please.”

“Fuck it!” I shouted. “I’m gonna send these fuckers packing if it’s the last thing I do!”

“You need some support, Storm?” Sagebrush spoke over the radio.

The four Minotaur MBTs that rolled past me looked like little tiny toys from my vantage point, but I knew from my experience as a tank driver that they were anything but.

“We got Conquerors, directly east,” I said. “I’ve lost my HBCs and need heavy support. Back me up, I’m moving to engage.”

I cloaked myself, my Mirage shimmering out of sight. Cicatrice was right. Thanks to the curse, my dark magic affinity was much stronger than before. With my spell locus aiding me, I felt only a small portion of the strain I usually would by this point. The price I’d paid for this boon was dear indeed.

I waited for the Minotaurs to get into position, moving up the street and taking up firing positions near the park. 140mm shells sailed in from the Conqueror tanks on the other side of the block, but I’d positioned myself such that my APS had a clear shot at the incoming rounds. My casters automatically blasted three of them out of the air with streams of scintillating magic. The enemy was just beyond the tree line at the edge of the park, but I couldn’t get an exact fix on them.

“Drones, up!” I hit the toggle to release a pair of Parasprite XKS recon Orbits, powered remotely by specialized sub-locuses in my Charger’s head.

Soon, I was receiving a full-color feed of my surroundings, even while cloaked, with just the tips of my antennas exposed. With a swipe of a hoof, I could cycle through thermal and terahertz readings, too. There was movement inside the buildings on the other end of the park. No way to tell if it was enemy or civilian. That was the problem with relying too much on through-wall sensor readings when a direct visual was impossible. High-resolution terahertz imagers like the ones on my drones had another neat trick, however. They were excellent spectrometers.

With a few more sweeps of my hoof, I filtered the sensor feed to just those readings that were in close proximity to large quantities of gunpowder and explosives. My mech’s sensor fusion systems automatically overlaid an augmented-reality representation of the results on my main viewscreen.

There were obvious openings that had been recently made in the marked structures by breaching charges, and within those openings, there were four ATGM nests with operators frantically exchanging the ammo tubes on tripod-mounted Pilum launchers. I ranged the outer wall of the structures on that block, and then set the fuses on my forties to a few meters beyond that. I put bursts into each of the ATGM nests, one after another. Over my audio receivers, I could hear the frightened cries of ponies downrange, but they were in adjacent apartment units and thus unharmed. They were merely startled by the noise as dozens of 40mm shells exploded a couple rooms away from them.

One set of screams was bloodcurdling in pitch, however. A Confederate soldier stumbled towards one of the openings, clad in the blue armor of the Confederate Security Forces, the auxiliaries in this fight. His forearms were stumps, the fragments from my autocannon shells having severed both his hands at the wrist. His neck was hanging by a string of muscle and nerve, his head practically draped backwards over his shoulder. He was gurgling and choking on blood. I had no idea how he was still conscious. It must’ve been a side effect of the combat stimulants they often used. He took a few stumbling steps towards the hole in the side of the building, not seeing where he was going, and then, he tripped and fell several stories. His cries were silenced with the wet thud of sixty kilos of meat wrapped in another twenty kilos of body armor striking the concrete as he landed in the street far below.

I took in a deep breath through my nostrils. “Damn.”

“That’s life,” BD said. “Pretty fragile, all things considered. Entropy always wins in the end.”

I ignored Black Devil. I had recently found myself regarding cleomanni as actual people, and I was having a hard time keeping my emotions in check.

“Enemy ATGM squads are neutralized,” I spoke into the radio. “Your turn, Sage!”

“Unleashing one can of whoop-ass,” he said. “Hang tough.”

Two of the Minotaurs—Four Legs Good, Two Legs Bad and I Had Another Nightmare Last Night—mounted the curb, their Mark-84 launchers elevating and tracking. They unleashed a volley of 70mm folding-fin rockets, sailing across the park and overwhelming the Conqueror tanks’ active protection systems, peppering them with blasts that damaged their APS, optics, and communications gear. Their ammunition empty, the launchers auto-jettisoned, leaving the Minotaurs’ turrets free to rotate 360 degrees as normal.

Sage’s tank lined up on the first Conqueror. Ba-bang. The Minotaur’s twin 120mm Pyroguns propelled a pair of sabot rounds downrange at extreme velocities, punching neat holes in the Conqueror’s turret. Pyroguns used powerful pyrokinesis magic instead of conventional primers to ignite their gunpowder, yielding enhanced cartridge pressure and a velocity that occupied a middle ground between a conventional ignition gun and a coilgun or railgun, without any of the unnecessary complexity or maintenance requirements of the latter two. The Conqueror stopped moving, its crew either dead or too wounded to continue. The second Conqueror’s crew tried firing while reversing, but they were quickly caught in a pincer as the two Minotaurs encircled and defeated them with several direct hits. The last round must’ve hit their ammo stores, because the Conqueror’s shells immediately started cooking off, one after another. A gout of flame roared from the tank’s crew hatch. Without a doubt, the crew had been cooked alive.

My threat sensors blared a warning. When I looked up, a pair of Black Mamba gyrodynes had pulled into a hover above the park. A salvo of FFARs streaked down towards our tanks, the Minotaurs’ active protection systems just barely managing to shoot them all down. I put a couple bursts from my autocannons into each of the gunships, watching them crash into the rooftops below.

I surged out from cover, remaining cloaked as I crossed the open ground. On the next block over, there were four Invader IFVs and several dozen troops following them in a loose formation. I squeezed my triggers without hesitation. My fire control computer beeped a few times as my ammo counter ran down to twenty, then ten, then nothing. One sweep from the forties, and the entire enemy platoon was immediately reduced to fish food, their vehicles burning in the night. I quickly put the wounded out of their misery with a few more bursts from my head-mounted medium beamcasters.

“Last drums!” BD said.

I nodded. “Give ‘em to me!”

The final set of 40mm drums locked into place with a resounding clank, the motors and hydraulics whining as the first rounds were indexed. As I ran down the street, building up speed, my boosters pushing me over two hundred kilometers an hour, my cloak began to fade. I struggled to keep it up, but with the pain and exhaustion, I just couldn’t do it.

An Ifrit leapt in front of me from behind a building, firing their plasma pulsecannon at me. I jump-jetted into the air, narrowly avoiding the blue stream of energy, twisting and flipping and expertly firing my thrusters such that I ended up landing behind my opponent and facing backwards, throttling up my boosters to slow my rearward slide. I put a few bursts into their back, ripping their spine out and sending the enemy Goliath tumbling to the ground. I was panting, my heart rate more than twice the norm. BD was saying something, but it sounded like it came from underwater, whatever it was. My ears were ringing from the noise, the sound of my autocannons and the acrid stink of gunpowder creeping through the cracks in my hull.

A wing of gyrodynes fired their anti-tank air-to-ground missiles at me, strafing me with their cannons. I kept up the pace to throw off their lock, their missile and cannon fire going wide and striking the buildings around me, sending chunks of rubble into the street. I turned my machine’s head to the side as I ran, getting a lock on them with my radome as they moved to keep a lock on me in turn. I sent a couple long bursts skyward, my ammo counter beeping. Thirty, twenty, ten. My last remaining magazines went dry. The gyrodynes went down in flames, all except for one; the big guy in the back. The massive intermeshing-rotor Taipan heavy gunship tracked me as I ran, trying to lead me with its rockets. I was only briefly visible to them in the gaps between the buildings.

Directly ahead of me was the tallest tower in Tar Pan. The 57-story Flimflam Building. The crown jewel of the Flimflam Corporation’s mining and agricultural equipment empire. I poured on the boosters, my speedometer hitting 300 kilometers an hour.

“What the hell, boss?” BD said. “Dead end!”

“Up! We’re going up!”

I fired my boosters and jump-jetted at an ascending angle, my Charger’s armored hooves connecting with the outer wall of the building, scrambling for purchase as concrete and glass shattered beneath my machine’s hooves. I throttled up my boosters. The pyrojets adhered me to the side of the structure while negating the effects of gravity. My sprint straight up the vertical surface of the skyscraper’s exterior was no more difficult than traversing a horizontal plane. The number in my altimeter began to climb, the pinnacle of the structure growing closer with each passing moment as the excess heat in my pyrojets began to push the limits of their engineering.

The Confederate Taipan circled around the structure while slewing sideways, less than seventy meters above me. They opened fire with their automatic cannon, pockmarking the building’s exterior. I was too fast for them, their weapon fire blowing chunks out of the tower’s exterior beneath me, but never quite hitting its mark. My lips curled into a sneer. I had them exactly where I wanted them. In a matter of moments, I’d passed them and continued skyward by a matter of another twenty stories. Just before I reached the top, I crouched to gather energy and then leapt off the side of the structure.

There was a sense of weightlessness as I fell like a skydiver past the dim gray hulk of a low-lying cloud. The Confederate heavy gunship rapidly grew on my main viewscreen. With an adrenalized cry, I drove my machine’s right forehoof downward, straight through the Taipan’s rotors. In the first few moments of contact, there was a great crunch of torn metal and composites as the blades slapped into my hoof one after another. The rotors exploded into a shower of confetti, their stumps bent and hanging at odd angles, utterly incapable of flight. The moment after that, my hoof connected with the cockpit, crushing the canopy and the gunner instantly.

The gyrodyne twirled out of control, slamming into a building before falling like a stone. I fell right beside them, pulsing my thrusters to bring me over an ideal landing zone. The pilot fired their ejection seat, just barely managing to get clear of the thing before it slammed into the ground. I fired my nearly overheated pyrojets at the last moment, slowing my descent, but it wasn’t enough for a soft landing. I braced myself, the impact practically crushing me into my saddle and jarring my brains. My cockpit briefly went dark and the G-protection system’s indicator light came on while its alarm blared. When the Mirage’s systems rebooted, the first thing I saw on the main viewscreen was that my hooves had left craters in the street, concrete dust rising into the air.

“That was fucking crazy,” Black Devil said.

I shrugged, wincing in pain from my wound. “Sometimes, you have to improvise.”

It had started to rain, making a pitter-patter on the roof of my Charger’s hull. On my external cameras, raindrops flashed to steam as they struck my cannons and my overheated pyrojets. The pilot of the Taipan was sitting twenty meters away, trying desperately to disentangle himself from his parachute.

“BD, arm the casters,” I said. “Stream mode.”

As I marched up to him, his image resolved more clearly in my front viewscreen. He was an older cleomanni. Not elderly, but whatever passed for middle-aged with their ridiculously long lifespans. Grizzled and mustachioed. On his flight suit, he wore the insignia of the Ogiad with two pips beneath it, signifying the rank of Colonel. My eyes widened when I realized who I was looking at.

“Colonel Ravetaff!” I shouted through my mech’s PA system. “Don’t you fucking move, or I’ll burn every scrap of meat off your bones!”

Slowly and reluctantly, he knelt down and put both of his hands behind his head. He’d been either incredibly brave or incredibly stupid to confront me directly, in a fucking Taipan of all things. Even with all my ammo gone, all I had to do was bait him into range of my hooves, and that was all she wrote.

I keyed my radio. “Sage, move up the tanks. I’ve got a prisoner for you.”

// … // … // … // … // … //

I sat on top of my kneeling Charger’s back, wearing my bomber jacket over my syncsuit to stave off the cold. I was back atop the hill above the mine, next to the Centaur and the Chimeras. I sniffed at the air a few times. Clouds of smoke that carried a sickly-sweet charred smell with them were wafting from the south. Revenant Team stood below me, staring off solemnly in that direction. I could see the look on Mardissa’s face. I could tell she was deeply worried about Silassa, though she said nothing about the matter.

I heard that Night Terror had just finished mopping up a good portion of the enemy’s rearguard after they’d been thrown into disarray by Colonel Ravetaff’s capture. The majority of their forces were in full retreat, broken and demoralized. There were at least a couple enemy artillery batteries further south that were still going at it. Whatever happened on the southern plain, it was brutal. Far more intense than my skirmishes with the forces that had made their way into the city.

The smell was unmistakable. Flesh. Burning flesh. Lots of it. It smelled like Griffons barbecuing in the backyard. I was inhaling particles of ash that used to be cleomanni servicemen, cooked alive in the wreckage of their armored vehicles. With a shaking hoof, I reached in my jacket pocket and pulled out one of the packs of cigs that Mardissa had given me and a spare Hippo lighter that Bellwether had gifted to me, and I lit one up. If I was to breathe smoke, it’d be the smoke of my own choice.

There was a crowd gathering at the entrance to the mine. A great throng of beaten and battered civilians, some of them grievously wounded. Many of them bore cuts and bruises from being struck by debris. Collateral damage from the fighting. They were undoubtedly seeking shelter from the sporadic shelling that continued throughout the night.

I reached back and picked up the cloth-wrapped object sitting behind me, turning it over in my hooves. I set my jaw, my brows curling into a hard frown. These ponies deserved the truth. The full truth, and nothing less.

I dismounted from my Charger’s back, sliding down onto the loose gravel of the hill above the mine, making my way down towards the assembled crowd.

“Someone’s coming!” a mare towards the front of the herd said.

Her head had been bandaged all the way ‘round, with blood soaking through the bandages where one of her eyes used to be. Destroyed by shrapnel, without a doubt. The crowd came to a halt as I stood tall before them. None of them said a word. Some of these ponies may have counted themselves among the numbers of the very same ones who were protesting our presence mere hours ago. The ones who’d physically assaulted me as I tried entering the base. Now, they had looks of desperation on their faces.

“Ma’am, I have—I have a daughter,” the mare with the missing eye said. “Please, please. They’re going to keep coming. For Celestia’s sake, end this insanity. Call for a truce. Something. Anything!”

There was a pregnant pause. None of us breathed or moved a muscle. I merely stared her down with a tired, disapproving scowl etched onto my face. I pulled the cloth off of the cyberbrain, and I hoisted it high into the air. Some in the crowd gasped, others silently shaking in fright, their faces working through the various stages of fear, disgust, and then anger.

“You see this?” I said. “You see this thing? It came from one of their mechs. A cutting edge, state-of-the-art war machine. The Confederacy’s latest and greatest. Only, their engineers weren’t good enough. They needed a little extra kick. A little secret sauce. This is what they intend for your sons. This is what they intend for your daughters.” I turned to the one-eyed mare, whose lips were trembling in horror. “This could have been your fucking child. This will be your children, if you don’t help us! What’s it going to take, to make you understand? When the second-to-last one of us is taken, and this planet is left a barren husk, will the last free mare or stallion alive weep for what they could have done, if only they had the will to act? Will they?”

The mare at the head of the crowd was breaking down in tears. “Ma’am, I—I don’t—”

“What’s it going to be?” I roared. “Choose! Freedom, or death!”

One tired-looking stallion with a reddish coat stepped forward, sidling up next to me and facing the crowd. He raised a hoof. “Freedom!”

One by one, they crossed that threshold, facing back towards the crowd, adding their voices to the chorus. The few that abstained looked guiltier and guiltier, until they, too, took my side. Their voices rose higher by the minute.

“Freedom, freedom, freedom!”

// … end transmission …